White and Other Tales of Ruin (52 page)

He wondered whether this place would become famous, just as Pudding Lane had in London. That’s where the Baker had taken his name from. He’d said that he would be responsible for initiating a new Great Fire, but this one would be a conflagration of love.

Tom ran through the park, noticing that the Chinaman was still entertaining. There were fewer people watching him now but he seemed not to notice, so intent was he upon his little play. The finger puppets bobbed and weaved and stared. Tom wished he had time to stop, but danger loomed large and dark behind him, an almost palpable force that drove him on into the city.

He stopped running after a mile because he was drawing attention. Glancing around constantly, he was certain that he was not being followed. Enraged and bloodied, pride dented, Hot Chocolate Bob would certainly not be silent in his pursuit.

The midday lull was almost over and now the streets were buzzing again. Cars vied for space and ground against each other, coughing out exhaust fumes at pedestrians. Street performers were counting their lunchtime takings, many of them looking sad and despondent as they pocketed a few measly coins. Nobody looked at Tom. Nobody could know what he had in his rucksack.

He felt like a murderer. Honey may well be dead in there, a coiled, folded mess, a smashed egg with no hope of reconstruction. Each time he caught someone’s eye he looked away guiltily, blushing with the obviousness of what he had done. Surely they could see it on his face? Surely they could discern the shape of her bulging the rucksack, smell her scent as Tom took her towards salvation or death?

But the streets stank of rot and smog and fast food. And anyone who did look at Tom seemed to look away just as quickly as he.

It had always been a city full of secrets.

The sense of threat behind him drove him on. He would have to go back to his flat for a while — Honey’s state now made things much more complicated — but he didn’t want to stay there for long. Hot Chocolate Bob could know anyone, and it would be easy to snatch Tom’s image from the street cameras outside the whorehouse, download a privileged search programme from the net — police maybe, or military, depending on who he knew — and trace Tom.

He’d have ten minutes to collect some things, and that was it. He’d be leaving. Fleeing the city if he could, perhaps making it into the mountains where, rumour had it, there were still regions of wilderness to get lost in for those with the courage or need.

He’d been here all his life, and yet he had no regrets at all about leaving. There were no ties here anymore.

Passing by a shop Tom glanced in the window and saw himself reflected back. He didn’t recognise the face for a moment and he spun around to see who was behind him. But then he walked on, knowing that he was already changing. Love, fear and desperation had left their mark on his face.

He reached his flat a few minutes later. He remained at the end of the street for a while, trying to spot whether there was anyone waiting for him. All seemed normal. His backpack weighed him down. And the longer he delayed, the less chance there would be of Honey coming back as fit and functional as she had been just an hour before. So Tom strode down the street, palmed the doorlock and went inside.

The place was just as he had left it. It no longer felt like home, because he had slaughtered safety and comfort in the couple of hours he’d been away. But its familiarity was comforting. Tom realised that he was absolutely exhausted. He could do with a charge right now. He looked longingly at the connection port and he even accessed the net briefly, before shaking his head and breaking the link. What right had he to sit and recharge while Honey lay crumpled and twisted in the rucksack like that? Besides which, Hot Chocolate Bob and his cronies may be here at any minute.

No, he had to leave now. If it weren’t for his foolish lack of planning he wouldn’t have been forced to return here at all, but he needed credit, clothes and something to help him get out of the city. An official pass would have been good, but failing that, there was always money.

He placed the rucksack gently on his bed — how he’d love to be holding Honey there right now, explaining his love and feeling her explanations in return — but it would be crazy to try to revive her here. Memory would have to sustain him for now. In the meantime, he needed a safe place and the time to bring her back.

A safe place …

Perhaps he’d known all along where he would go. He hadn’t been there since the old man had died almost fifteen years before, but he sincerely hoped that the Baker’s labs were still functional and equipped. Waiting for the right person to come and use them again.

Safety. If anywhere in this hope-forsaken city was safe, it would be the place where the Baker had lived, thought, composed, created and died.

The place where, for Tom, love had been born.

It was crazy what time could do to memory, even that of an artificial. It was as if the years could twist streets, the passing of seconds alter perceptions, smells and memories, take the truth and turn it into distorted ideas of what was and had been.

Either that, or he’d consciously tried to forget.

He’d found the estate easily enough. Twenty acres of industrial and business units, half of them flooded by the swollen river and stinking effluent, was not difficult to locate, even in the city. But once there, distance and direction became skewed echoes of what he remembered. He took the third turning right, the second left and found the unit … but it made net casters, and there were several chopped Draggers hanging around outside, eyes red with menace and blood.

Tom backtracked and started again, trying to make out where he had gone wrong. Wading through a foot of shitty water was not the highlight of his day, but knowing that the Baker’s hidden lab was beyond made it almost possible to ignore the stink and the things bumping against his legs. The sun sank in the west. It bled through the polluted atmosphere and cast pink reflections and violet shadows across the buildings, making them almost beautiful. Tom laughed out loud when he found the unit, then frowned when he realised that it was the wrong one again.

Every passing minute his fear grew. The sense that he was being watched — created by his own internal terrors, surely, not by any external presence — grew and grew, twisting him around every few seconds to search for the watcher. He saw a tramp and a few gang members, individual buzzed artificials wandering around awaiting death, a pack of dogs looking for the dead.

Eventually, desperate and exhausted and fearful that the dark would steal his last hope of finding the place that night, Tom sank down against a wall and felt tears brewing. The rucksack weighed heavily on his shoulders and in his heart.

And then the Baker found
him
.

Something inside his head clicked on. He’d never felt it before, had never even been aware of this part of his consciousness, but its sudden appearance opened up whole new vistas of knowledge for him. There was a brief surge of power that made his vision dim and his balance waver, but then he knew so much more than before that he almost cried out in fear, shock and relief. He stood, shucked the rucksack higher on his shoulders and walked around two corners to the Baker’s old unit.

It was deserted. The windows were smashed, the door graffiti-strewn and smeared a shiny silver where someone had tried to crowbar it open, the walls crumbled and lined black with flood tide-marks. And Tom smiled, because he knew that no one would have ever been able to find the Baker’s place.

No one but him.

Here was safety and refuge. Here, in the twist of a handle and the muttering of a special word, was a place where his love had been born and where, ironically, he could save it. Tom unslung the rucksack and slipped two fingers under the flap, feeling the silk of Honey’s hair and the oily coolness of her deflated skin.

“
I’ll save you now,” he said.

Tom reached out, twisted the door handle and muttered, “Pudding Lane.”

The ground parted and carried him six feet under.

The inner door opened and Tom walked through. The laboratory was just as he remembered. It looked more like the room of a dark-ages alchemist, with arcane machinery arrayed around the walls, sheafs of yellowed paper piled high and haphazard on the huge oaken desk at the far end, dusty skylights letting in a faded, filtered light from somewhere outside. The whole end wall was taken up with a huge pinboard and there were drawings, sketches, formulae, potions, text-book extracts and personal memo’s pinned there by the hundred, a collage of idea and potential that stunned Tom now as much as it had fifteen years before.

The place even smelled the same — spilled chemicals, old experiments, stale thought. It was as if the Baker were still here, ruminating in the comfortable back room instead of being dead. Tom shook his head. An artificial’s thoughts were supposed to be his own, but memory was powerful. Here was the Baker bashing a clay pot with a hammer, determined to get at whatever was inside before it was spoiled. He looked up and swore at Tom … and then he was relaxing in an easy-chair, recounting tales of his earlier years as Honorary Professor of Sentience at the university … and then here, pouring a sticky, clear gunge over the back of a dead frog and screaming in delight as its legs spasmed. Memories everywhere. It had been the most amazing time of Tom’s life.

“
You’re as good as human,” the Baker had told him, “and better than most.”

Among the mess of apparatus were pieces of equipment that Tom recognised from many of the Baker’s experiments. He didn’t necessarily understand them — not back then, and still not now — but they provided him with a strange sense of peace. To know that the Baker had been busy in this world was a comforting thought. And to know for sure that his influence was still felt — through Tom, and probably elsewhere as well — went so far as to give hope.

There was a noise at the edge of the room, a rattle of cogs and the lazy squeal of something long-dormant coming to life. Tom stepped back and prepared to utter the exit phrase. He wouldn’t put it past the old scientist to have left some sort of guard in this place, a booby trap to bring the roof down should anyone enter after his death. After all, as he’d once told Tom, there were things in here best forgotten. But then Tom felt himself being spied upon, scanned, a horribly invasive sensation that raised his hackles and drew his balls up into his body. A sheen of light passed over him from head to foot and it seemed to reach inside as well, lighting his internal make-up and delving into his head. He felt a brief flush of abandonment as the scan ended — for a moment he’d sensed the Baker’s attention upon him — but then the discordant rattle and hum of machinery took on an orchestrated rhythm. Some lights flickered on, a coffin-shaped upright cabinet to his left began to shiver slightly as something inside turned over, and several of the Baker’s gophers darted out from beneath the workbench along the wall.

Tom smiled in sheer delight as the little robotic transports hurried about the floor. The scientist had made these things one day when the effort of walking back and forth across the laboratory, searching through cupboards and sifting files had become too tiresome. His casual genius was apparent in their perfection. He could speak his requirements and the next gopher in line would search the lab until it found exactly what the Baker was after. They were remarkable, but their uses were too simple, too convenient for the Baker to be over-excited by them. His efforts had always been directed more left of centre.

No instructions were spoken now, yet still these little wheeled creations busied themselves with some secretive business. And as Tom watched for a couple of minutes the pattern became obvious — everything they searched for and found was taken to the cabinet. They’d disappear beneath the desk beside the cabinet and come out again empty-clawed. There were clicks and clunks and soft sighs from in there. The sounds of construction, and creation.

But Tom felt safe. The Baker, though long dead, would never do anything to bring him harm. Tom had been the nearest thing he’d ever had to a child.

“
Baker,” Tom said. “It worked. It worked just like you said it would!” He slipped the rucksack from his shoulder and placed it on a work bench, realising as he undid the clasps just how pathetic it all looked. The Baker had sent him into the world to find love, and here he was returning to the old man’s labs for the first time with a deflated whore over his shoulder and a mad pimp on his tail. “I know it looks a bit strange,” Tom said, carefully opening the drawstring and taking Honey out. She was so light, so
reduced
. “But you should see her, Baker. Really, wait until you see her when she’s whole again. She’s beautiful. And her mind … she really has a mind, it’s true! Her own mind, her own thoughts, her own sense of herself. She likes finger puppets and dancing and being held.” He frowned. “She’ll have to teach me to dance.”

The cabinet rattled and hissed at the edge of the room, gophers flitting on their unknown missions. One of them jumped onto the bench next to Tom and grabbed a lightning-quick snip of his hair. Tom jerked back and watched it return to the shivering machine, his lock held high in its claws.

He looked down at Honey, a wrinkled mask of herself. He would resurrect her now, and for a while they’d be safe. For a while. But he wanted them to live, to go out together, think together, be together forever. He’d already resigned himself to having to leave the city.