THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

 seen about her in the holo's -- your typical homicide, open and shut.  I don't know why I pursued the case.  No phone calls.  No retainer.  My legs just took me there, I guess.

"Look," I says, "first off, you're pleading guilty, no arguments.  That's the only way you're gonna get out of this with your blood above sea level.  Say no to that and I'm out of here."  You got to come on strong.  That I know.  First off, if you passed the bar by the back door, like I done, with Cerebral Data Insertions and a strong dose of chutzpah, they think you're some ambulance chaser, and they put on airs, even the moon scum.  Second, I don't wear no cologne.

And third, chrono-cells make me grouchy.  This dame is being held between 8:10 and 8:13 am, January 22, 2023 at the Beulah County clinker.  She's been there for over a week now, stacked in that three-minute slot between a double-dip street walker and some Venusian swamp land Real Estate grifter who is about to leave a stench so bad you can smell it clear back to 7:30.

She moves the kind of slow that comes from no breakfast -- make that lunch and dinner too.  She just fixes those blue-grey weepers on the time grates along the concrete floor and fingers her zirconium ID tag.  "I'll do whatever you want, Mr. Arnby."  I doubt that.

She sighs -- something between veltschmerz and nooky.  Then she looks up at the ceiling, mournful, lifting her chin away for a second, and I grab the necklace.  "Let's have a feel of that tag."

She pulls away, yanking it out of my hand, but as soon as my thumb hits the zirconium, I know the whole sad story.  I've got to hear her tell it though.  "OK," she says, "for the twentieth time . . . "

 

udy was down (she says, fingering that tag) real down, real gone.  He was a wildcat during the first chrono-mining rush; he'd hit it big and then he was always sore because he could never make it like that again.  He was in his teens back then, a street kid in New New York, and it was so cheap to backdoor a time chasm, he was out there all the time, centuries backwards and forwards before he was sixteen.

You know how at that time there was a sleaze on every corner selling a ride into some sinkhole that had opened up in a basement wall or a lost river that resurfaced in prehistory a jillion miles away.  Well, Rudy was a big damn customer, and he always made it pay by coming up with little stitches that somebody or other would bankroll.

He liked to go down in an open hurry, no clocksuit, no policy.  He'd been been down so many times, there were cracks in the nose of his hurry, and we'd get this seepage, moments slipping in from the civil war or the Pleistocene or some timeplace you never heard of, but you better be ready to fake it.  Rudy would scoot down one of the causal ravines that hadn't been fully charted -- That's where the money is -- shooting out time dye to trace the causal lines.

He'd hope for a clean one, one that didn't have many branches.  Then he'd go in there and try to see some profit in it.  Maybe a wee tug this way or that would give some fat cat down the line a smaller nose or a better investment portfolio.  Usually not.  But it only takes one good find to pay for a lot of dives.  That's the hook.

Well, real early on, my Rudy found a big one.  He used to crow about it in bed.  "Picture this," he'd say, "I'm what? fourteen years old, a real jerk, a virgin, a hot shot from Krypton, rolling the suits for tough cash and dodging cops all night.  I'm just carnying in the time shafts then, see?  What do I care?  If I get a draft of crowd smell from a London mob or a dinosaur fin dents the hurry, it's just a lark as far as I'm concerned.  This pal of mine shows me what's supposed to be good.  'Look for a thread,' he says to me.  He's got a pocket hypostat scanner he lifted off some citizen, see.  He shines it on the wall down there, about six centuries back -- That was deep then -- and shows me those causal lines, like forks in cracked glass.

"Well, wouldn't you know it, right off, I see a clean, straight run, thin as an aphid's poop, all the way up to Time Present, honey, and not a jag off it.  The lights go out.  Hey, what's this?  Pretty soon, I get the picture.  My pal is trying to shove me out of the hurry and stake my claim.

"Well, he's dead, and I ain't.  That little line ran straight into the election of '048, and there's a lot of meat eaters willing to pay me the big bucks to keep things the way they were, and a lot of them thinking they'd like to change it.  When the bidding was over, I was fifteen years old, and I owned one of the moons of Jupiter."

 

hat an asshole!" I says.  I don't wear no cologne.  "So he buys a moon, and then he goes broke trying to develop it."

"That's the story," she says.

"I knew a lot of guys like that.  But what about the time cops . . . what do you call 'em?"

"Monitors.  Chrono-monitors.  Sure.  That's the whole thing, Mr. Arnby.  But they didn't have them back then.  That only came later, after Mercury."

"Sure.  Right.  They wouldn't have needed them so much before that Anomaly business."

"The Second Orbital Anomaly.  I was in college then."

"You went to actual college?"  Suddenly, I hated her guts.

"Yeah.  There was still a little rock and roll money in my family from my great great grandmother.  I was in college when the news came, so I got all sides of it.  Einstein was wrong -- it was a big deal.  Who'd have guessed that an aberration in the orbit of Mercury was really some nerve cell in a creature living two million years ago mostly on Betelgeuse?"

"This stuff I do not follow real well."

"Nobody does.  That's how come the monitors," -- She almost looks up at me then, but quashes it with a soap opera sigh -- "and even they make mistakes.

"The Anomaly got tagged by some temp drifter, ex-astronomer gone on the bum -- Actually, Rudy knew the guy, used to drink wood alcohol strained through stale bread.  This drifter caught the connection between the spike in Mercury's orbit and some jazz that stuck to his hurry when he carommed off a galactic-formation-period timewall, way down in; he saw those two things were parts of the same buzzard.

"Once you knew what to look for, they were everywhere.  You never knew if the gum you were chewing was an alien critter's spinal fluid or a vagrant wish in some future trouper's daydream.  The monitors could tell though.  That was their business."

"Most of the time, you mean.  They could tell most of the time."

"Yeah.  Most of the time.  Even they had to ID you sometimes . . . and there were slip-ups."

"That's the story, isn't it?"

She starts to cry, then catches it and bites her lip.  She never looks up.  The seconds and minutes we've been spending together have already recycled and are steaming back in through the time grates.  There are little echos eddying up from the floor, 4-D echos, and you have to concentrate to hold your Now.  Like I said, chrono-cells make me grouchy.  Also, I am getting a tick in my leg, and I am not the kind of guy who likes to tap dance.

"Yeah, Mr. Arnby, that's where the story is."

"You tell me."

 

udy never wore ID down there (she went on).  Oh, he had it.  You had to have it to go down, especially if you'd surfaced with a big salable like Rudy'd done, but he wouldn't wear it.  He was a real man, Mr. Arnby.  He'd wear it everywhere outside the mines, because he was that proud of being a chrono-miner, and it would give him an excuse to brag about his moon.  But down in the time tubes, forget it.  Because you had to.  Rudy took orders from nobody.

He'd get mad at me for holding onto my tag the way I did . . . do.  It's like seat belts on a slowship, the way I see it.  It's just common sense.  But no, not for Rudy.

You can't imagine how much I loved him, Mr. Arnby.  I get the shivers just thinking about the hair between his pecs where the tag would dangle when he wore it to a party or something.  Do you think I'm being bad?  The first time I met him face to face -- he crashed a frat party at my college -- I stuttered and drooled.  I mean it.  I'm not ashamed of how I loved Rudy.  He took me down in his hurry to the beginning of the protogalaxy and we made love before the stars were there.

But he was already in trouble then.  He was hocked up to his ears.  That moon of his had mortgages on its mortgages, and Interplan was on his tail for some messy tinkerings in the nineteenth century, trying to deposit small amounts for the big compound interest and so on -- the old, dumb scams.

"Come on," he says.  "I got this big thing going.  One more and I'm home free.  This is my last jaunt," he says.  "I got a jillion dollar line scoped out, but it's in deep, and I gotta have somebody who can document but good or them two-bit spoilers'll be all over my ass."  So what do you think I said?

Pretty stupid, huh?  He wanted to go back before molecules.  He said he'd seen a straight hair with no runoffs, a causal line pouring straight into some Rockefeller's hip pocket.  The kind of yarn you hear from chasm vets in the drying wards, but I swallowed it.  When he revved up the hurry and pluperfed into the sinkhole, he pushed his tag into the palm of my hand, like always.  And this time he said, "Toss it.  This is my last run."  I threw it into the stream and watched it bob forward into God knows what redshift a jillion years from now.  Then he said, "Yours too."

 

ut that, you wouldn't do."

"Look at me, Mr. Arnby."  She isn't looking at me.  "I've got two arms, two legs, a head, a belly . . . "  Et cetera . . . "Do I look like a transcat to you?"

"A transcategorical?  No, ma'am.  You ain't that."

"To you I'm not.  But a womporf might take me for three or four nations and try to negotiate separately with each one.  Or he might think my childhood was some goo in his hair and scrape it to shreds with a flea comb -- where would that leave me?  There are a lot of womporfs down in the holes, and some of them are monitors.  And womporfs aren't the wildest by a long shot -- their lives don't bounce back and forth across Minkowski space like a dookil's or a froob's.

"Look, to us, womporfs and dookils are transcats.  To them, that's what we are.  There's no absolute in the holes.  That's why they set up ID tags -- so a monitor will know where you start and stop, and what to look for when they're looking for you."

"Very sensible."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

It always comes to this.  Maybe it's a lapse in my moral training.  I was a street kid too, you know.  My clients always reach a point where they think I'm on somebody else's side.  They start to get bilious.  Maybe I should wear cologne.

"Why do I get the feeling, Mr. Arnby, that you already know all about chrono-mines and ID tags?  Why do I get the feeling that you already know a lot of things?"

"Forget it," I says.  "It's my job to be a wise-ass.  You'll be grateful for it when we go to trial.  So you toss Rudy's tag, but you hold onto yours, am I right?"

"You're dead right, Arnby."

"Dead right -- real good.  So why don't you give me the falling action?"

"Nobody goes back past molecular," she goes on, "not even nowadays, not even the R & D boys in the big cartels.  Too damn risky.  The farther back you go, the narrower the squeeze.  You know what an event horizon is, Mr. Arnby?  It's what makes timeshipping possible.  You flow down the spacetime between events that are too far apart to affect one another; that's what the causal ravines are.  But the farther back you go, the harder it is to maneuver without getting mixed up in some causal sequence.  Suddenly, you're knocked out of the stands and you're running bases.  Your Now is compromised.  Your hurry's a vapor.  You're a jillion years from home, and nobody knows your name.

"Rudy piled down into hot particles, whooping like a kid on a roller coaster.  I begged him to slow down, honest, Mr. Arnby!  But I saw the line he was talking about.  It was like a thread of pure gold in a vacuum sheath; there were a couple of events running off it here and there, but they all pinched out after a couple of thousand years and none was more than half a light-year in influence."

"Of course, that don't interest you anyways, am I right?"

"What?"

"College girl.  Hereditary wealth.  You're along for the ride, not the dough, nessy pahz?"

"Oui, c'est ca.  I loved Rudy, Mr. Arnby."

"Right."  I have to massage my leg, it wants to jump that bad.  Maybe a sliver of the double-dipper ho in the previous minute is tormenting my kneecap, I figure.  The timewalls in them cribs are not from Krypton.

"It was no wonder nobody had logged that causal line.  It was fairly branchless, but it was gnarled and deep.  To get decent hypostats, we had to spin and weave at next-to-impossible angles, but it was the only way to stake a credible claim."

"Your department."

"Yes, Mr. Arnby, my department."

"Rudy was just a street kid, right?"

"That's right."

"Did I mention, I was a street kid too?"

"I think you did."

"Sorry.  Go on.  You're in hot particles.  You're statting the line.  What's next?"

She starts to cry.  I am not partial to this kind of action.  I am not your type that's quick on the hanky.  I tend to sit back and wait till the rain stops.  Pitter patter.

"We hit something."

"What?  What did you hit?"

"Something!  I don't know!  Suddenly we were everywhere at once.  I was screaming.  I mean now, I mean this century, I'm screaming, but my eyes are smeared all over the hot post-Bang with nothing but hydrogen and helium and shakes."

"Shakes?"

"Some kind of trembling.  It's hard to describe."

"Try."

"No.  Rudy's gone.  I'm gone."

"An accident."

"Yes, of course!  An accident!"  She is shrieking and sobbing, getting hysterical.  I feel this is inappropriate.

"But you're lucky.  A monitor cruises by."

"What?  Lucky?  I see the monitor approaching.  I see his time shielding, so bright against the black vacuum, I feel it searing into my mind as if it were my own body.  His clocksuit is swelling toward me, the tag beams rotating, scanning . . . Then I see Rudy.  He's lost an arm.  It's spinning next to his hip like a bloody pinwheel.  He's just floating through the chasm, holding onto a fragment of the hurry's chassis.  But he's got no tag!  The monitor doesn't know what's in front of him."

"Except for you, am I right?"

"Yes, damn it, except for me."

"Because you've got your ID tag."

"What are you, some kind of idiot?  Or do you just like to make people suffer?"

"Why don't you just tell your story?"

"Yes, why don't I?  The monitor doesn't even know there's a sentient being there.  He plows into Rudy's legs and takes them both off at a swipe.  I'm shouting, 'Stop it!  Stop it!  Can't you see him?  That's his arm, his jaw, his eyes, his memory, his love for me . . . !'  Too late.  All gone.  Rudy's gone."

"But not you."

"What the hell do you want, anyway?"

"For starters, lady, you can look me in the eye.  Gimme at least that little courtesy."

But she won't.  It's starting to stink in there.  The Venusian guy in the next minute is starting to leak back into our time slot.  I figure it's the guards' way of letting you know your visit time is coming to a close.  She's licking tears off her lip, but she's snarling too.  She doesn't seem to appreciate my social style.

"That's not your ID," I says.

"What?"

"I knew Rudy.  I didn't know I knew him till you gave me a feel of that tag -- his tag.  Yeah, I been down there, honey.  You was right.  I was stringing you along.  I know all about the timeshaft racket.  I was the guy that taught Rudy everything.  I was the guy he thought he'd offed in the mines, only it wasn't me turned out the lights; it was Rudy.  He bounced me out of that hurry into a nineteenth century bordello, honey.  And I had three separate VD's before I found my way back, hitching a ride on some lonesome prospector's clockship.

"Hey, I give him his moon.  Who cares?  It's only money.  I'd rather have a profession, you understand?  Like what I got here.  I ain't vengeful.  But you.  You take the cake.  You done to him what he done to me, and here I am to call you on it."

"You're supposed to defend me."

"I will defend you, lady.  I'm gonna keep your ass off the chopping block too, because I'm good at this.  I'm real good.  Now talk."

"I loved him, Mr. Arnby.  I loved Rudy."

"Don't give me that crap.  You took his goddamned tag off him and left him out there to get mauled to quarks.  How the hell long did you think you could fool people?  Why did you hold onto that thing?"

"It's mine."

"Get off that bullshit or we're quits."

"I'm telling you, the tag is mine."

"I know that tag is Rudy's."

"Who said it wasn't?"

"Huh?"

Then, for the first time, she looks up at me -- with Rudy's eyes.  She commences to talk at me, but her mouth ain't moving.  I feel like I'm remembering what she says from a couple of minutes ago, which she didn't.  I feel like she is shaking my bones and pumping my blood.  I feel all kind of things I do not particularly care to talk about.  "We're the beast with two backs, Mr. Arnby."

"A fuggin transcat!"

"Rudy is my other half."

"Was, you mean."

"No!  Don't say that!  We can heal.  I'm sure of it."

"Sure you can, baby.  You can heal."  At this point the willies is making a summer home in my spine.  I am looking for any way out.

"I've just got to stay very still, very quiet, for a long time."

"We'll get you a life sentence.  No sweat.  It'll be just like this all the time."

"There's more."

"Huh?"  The methane boy, the Venusian grift artist confined in the same cell, next minute, is stinking through real bad now.

"Smell that?  That's my brain stem, Mr. Arnby."

"The Venusian?"

"No, only his smell."

"You gonna retain me to represent him?  I'll make sure you get adjoining cells at the longterm."

"That's not all, Mr. Arnby."

"What?"  My leg start bouncing so bad, my knee is beating against my forehead.  And now I am reciting poetry, me that only knows old rock lyrics and lavatory rhymes.  I am doing Blake and Andrew Marvell and guys I never heard of except for some fill-in-the-blanks on the Equivalency preps.  All of a sudden, it stops.

"You."

"Me what?  What the hell was that?"

"You're in this too, Mr. Arnby."  I don't say a word.  "You're a part of my tail."

"Look, it's been a long day."  I start to call the guard.  The Venusian is practically visible now, walking through my skin, chewing my gum, shuffling my feet.  I am feeling extremely grouchy.

"I'll let you go now.  I didn't mean for you to know, Mr. Arnby.  It makes things difficult, doesn't it?  But you'll be back soon."

"I will?"

"Yes, very soon."

 

his is not my favorite case, let me make that clear.  You can bet I'll get that dame exactly what she wants -- I keep coming back to her, and it's not like I have a lot to say about it.  My legs just kind of take me there.  Bit by bit -- says she -- Rudy's growing back.  What the hell!  We have what you might call a working relationship.  And don't you put on no airs, Buster, because who knows whose hiney you might turn out to be?