“Couldn’t we go back to Four and then reenter through the Houlihan gate?” Ari said.
“That could present fatal problems if Storm Blue’s waiting. We cannot just shoot our way through. On the other hand, if we could determine that the gate’s not being watched—let me just run this by the liaison captain.”
“In any event,” Hendriks put in, “we’d have to wait for another world-walker to become available.”
“Javert’s is here, surely?” Ari said.
“He is, but there are regulations,” Hendriks said. “He can’t possibly leave Javert unattended. Bringing his tank with us would be impossible.”
Spare14 took a digital tablet, some brand called a Dasher5, out of his trans-dimensional drawer. I noticed that he left the drawer open and wondered if he had some kind of world-transversing router in it. I figured it would be rude to ask. When he finished, he locked the tablet into that particular drawer, then unlocked the drawer below. He took out two sleek squares of black plastic, about two inches on a side and maybe half an inch thick. On one
side sat two rows of tiny buttons; on the other, a screen area.
“Hendriks, I assume you have yours,” Spare14 said. “O’Grady, Nathan, these are how we at TWIXT keep in touch.”
As Spare14 explained how the communicators worked, I realized that linking up with TWIXT would bring the Agency benefits far beyond police support. They had technology to offer as well as information.
“One last thing,” Spare14 handed Ari something that looked like a leather card case. “Some proper ID, though of course it’s not for TWIXT itself. The California Bureau of Investigation issues these to our agents. I had one made for you because I know I can trust you to use it judiciously. It’s valid on several world levels.”
Once we left the office, Ari took up the rear guard while Hendriks walked a few steps ahead of Spare14 and me. He set a pace slow enough for our two gunmen to keep an eye on everything that was happening around us.
We walked down the alley to Grant Avenue, where I received a genuine shock. Chinatown did not exist in this SanFran. Grant continued downhill as an ordinary street, narrow, dirty, cluttered with brick buildings and the occasional wooden flat-front house. Here and there as we walked along I saw a business run by persons of Chinese descent—an herbal medicine store, a restaurant—but these commercial ventures were few and housed in ordinary architecture, not the wonderful Asian styles and bright colors I knew from my home world. Spare14 noticed my surprise.
“The main wave of Chinese immigration never happened here,” he told me. “The disaster that created Interchange caused horrific loss of life in Asia. They say that the death rate reached ninety percent.”
Even back in those days, that figure meant millions of deaths. For a moment I felt so sick that I could barely speak. “That’s really terrible! What caused the disaster, anyway?”
“No one’s sure. The scientists on One do know that an enormous burst of radiation was responsible. It stripped off part of the ozone layer and ionized the atmosphere by
something called an electromagnetic pulse. Do you know what that is?”
“Only kind of.” I remembered my vision, which matched this explanation. “But a nuclear war would produce that kind of pulse, right? Which is probably why the people here think there was a war.”
“Exactly. There would have been enormous lightning bolts, all sorts of magnetic disturbances, and a rise in the level of background radiation.”
“But what caused the original burst of radiation, I mean the thing behind the pulse?”
“No one knows, though of course there are theories. The current best hypothesis is an abnormally large solar flare, although, if I understand this correctly, such a natural phenomenon should have happened on all the closely-bound levels, not just the one.” Spare14 shrugged. “Well, TWIXT has a research team working on the problem. I certainly don’t have the scientific education to understand it.”
We left Grant and turned down Sackamenna. On the corner of that street and Joice stood a coffeehouse, where Hendriks and Spare14 decided to wait. The Salvation Army workers might get suspicious, Spare14 feared, if Ari and I arrived with an escort. Our destination stood right across Sackamenna, close enough for Hendriks to keep a watch on it through the shop’s front window.
Major Grace’s mission turned out to be headquartered in the building I knew as the Donaldina Cameron House. At home, it functioned as a museum and tribute to its founder, the formidable Presbyterian reformer who had rescued young Chinese girls from lives of forced prostitution. Back at the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese immigration was strictly limited by travesties of justice called the “exclusion laws,” but pimps and other dealers in human misery always know the angles. Apparently, Cameron’s doppelgänger had rescued girls from the same situation here on Terra Three, at least up until the disaster, because a bronze plaque on the front door commemorated her work.
The cubical brick building must have had a fierce karma of its own to attract Major Grace and her unit. It looked like a fortress, painted a stone gray, with small windows
covered on the lower floors with iron grates. At the front door a tall, muscled young man with a shaved head and a maroon-and-black military-style uniform looked us over.
“Major Grace asked me to bring her down.” Ari jerked a thumb in my direction. “She’s been sick.”
“Okay. The doctor’s set up right at the end of this hall.” The guard gave us a genuine smile. “You’re in luck. He just opened up, and there’s no line yet. Welcome to Mission House.”
“Welcome” set the tone of the pale dusty-rose foyer. A floral display of oddly misshapen irises and ferns sat on a small table just inside the door. As we walked on down the long corridor, we saw framed colored prints of what I thought at first were standard religious paintings—Abraham and Isaac, Jesus healing the blind man, the parting of the Red Sea, Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount.
At the end of the hall, on the wall beside a staircase up, a four-foot-high oval print, matted in pale green, displayed a woman with strong features and wavy black hair. She wore long robes, elaborately embroidered in bright colors, and a necklace of silver coins. A white glow streamed out from behind her head. The caption called her, “Jesus’ sister, Sophia, the Light of the Earth.” I whistled under my breath in surprise.
“I wonder if these people come from this world level.” I kept my voice soft. “Terra Three should have the same beliefs that our Four does. The two didn’t separate till 1919, according to that printout you gave me, anyway.”
“This poster indicates a different belief, certainly,” Ari said. “Even I know that your Jesus didn’t have a sister.”
“Not one that counted for anything, anyway. These people must be Gnostics.”
The doctor’s office turned out to be a plain square room, painted pale blue and furnished with two chairs, a rickety-looking oblong table, and a wooden dresser. On top of the dresser the doctor had spread a blue-and-white-checked dish towel and set out various supplies: bandages, swabs, and an old-fashioned apparatus for taking blood pressure with a rubber bulb and a metal dial. I saw no digital anything anywhere. He was a youngish white guy with blond
hair and a thick mustache. On his white coat he wore a hand-lettered name tag that said only Dr. Dave.
“So,” Dr. Dave said to me. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know if anything is,” I said. “Major Grace wanted me to see you. She saw me when I was coming down from some crap a john put in my drink.”
“Here. Sit down.” He became all business.
I took one chair; he pulled up the other and sat close. Ari leaned against the wall by the door and watched with his arms folded over his chest. The doctor stared into my eyes.
“No more dilation,” he said. “Do you have any idea what the drug was?”
My memories of Sean’s wild teenage years returned to help me fashion a good lie. “It made my heart beat real fast, and I heard this roaring in my ears. I kept seeing weird stuff, but it wasn’t glory seeds. I didn’t puke or nothing.”
“Okay, some kind of hallucinogen laced with strychnine. What was he trying to do, get out of paying you?”
“Just that, yeah. Didn’t work, though. I wasn’t that stoned.”
“Good.” He scowled. “Men like that—” He looked Ari’s way. “Next time check out the customer better, will you?”
“I shall, yes.” Ari peeled himself off the wall and managed to look guilt stricken. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t work him over.”
“That wouldn’t have solved—well, I take that back,” Dr. Dave said. “It would have made him think before he pulled this stunt again.” He considered Ari for a moment. “You must be from Jamaica.”
“Yes. Kingston, actually.”
Dr. Dave nodded, then turned back to me. “Let me take your vital signs. You’ll be okay, but for crying out loud, maybe you could think of another way to earn your living?”
“I dunno, and what does it matter? I’ll be dead soon enough.”
“You can’t know that.” Dave smiled at me. “You might be one of the lifers. They’re getting more and more common. What if you had thirty years ahead of you? What then?”
I arranged an idiot stare: eyes narrow, mouth half-open. “Never thought of that,” I said. “I dunno.”
“One last question. Why the bronze stuff all over you?”
“Some johns like it darker, that’s all.”
“Okay.” He shrugged as if to say “whatever.” “Let’s see how your heart’s doing now.”
He did a pretty thorough job of checking me over with the limited equipment he had available, listening to my heart rate and lungs with a stethoscope, taking my blood pressure. He’d just finished when a skinny young Black girl, dressed in a baggy maroon tunic, appeared in the doorway of the office.
“Major Grace wants to see you guys,” she said to Ari through a wad of chewing gum.
“She does? Where is she?”
“Upstairs.” The girl blew a gum bubble, then retracted it. “The office door is open.”
She turned and trotted out again. The doctor watched her go, then glanced my way.
“One of the mission’s orphans,” he said in a quiet voice. “She’s not going to live to grow up, poor kid. Blood cancer.”
My stomach clenched, but I put on a show of indifference. “Too bad, yeah,” was all I said about it. “Say, thanks, Doc. Okay?”
“Okay. Send in the next people on your way out, will you?”
Sure enough, when we walked out we saw more patients, all of them dirt poor, judging by their much-mended clothes, most of them mothers with children. The line stretched all the way out to the foyer. Some of the mothers looked no more than fifteen or sixteen. One pregnant girl looked even younger than that. I did notice several grown men: a young guy, painfully thin, with red hair and a horrible cough, and a guy of maybe thirty, tall, potbellied, wearing a blue-and-white shirt but no jacket.
We climbed the stairs. On the landing Ari paused.
“Did you see that guy?” I murmured.
“Oh, yes. Same one. His being here might explain why he was in the neighborhood earlier.”
“Might.”
Ari smiled with a quick flick of his mouth. “Yes. Might.”
We continued up. We had no trouble spotting Major Grace’s office, which was only a few short steps from the head of the staircase. The door stood open, and I could see the Major herself, sitting at a big oak desk in the middle of a small yellow room. She was writing something by hand in a black book, ledger-sized, with a fountain pen. She glanced up, saw us, and smiled.
“Come in,” she said. “And shut the door.”
We did. She gestured to the pair of wooden captain’s chairs in front of the desk, and we sat down.
“Are you all right now?” she said to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “The doctor said there was strychnine in the crap the john gave me. Couldn’t have been much. It didn’t kill me.”
“And thank God for that.” She leaned back in her chair and considered us over tented fingers. “May I ask your name?”
“Rose. Just Rose. I don’t have no last name.”
“I assumed that.” She glanced at Ari. “And you?”
He hesitated for just the right interval before saying, “Eric Spare.”
“You’re both new here in SanFran, aren’t you?”
“What makes you think so?” Ari leaned forward in his chair.
“I saw the way Rose kept looking around her as you crossed Market.” Major Grace smiled at him. “Gawking, I think we may call it. You were carrying a suitcase. Nothing more unusual than that. And of course, there’s your Jamaican accent. It’s none of my business, but I’m curious why you came.”
“I’m looking for my brother,” I said. “Everyone says he ran away from home, but I think someone kidnapped him. He’s a super-handsome guy, black hair, big blue eyes. He’s not real smart, and he gets into trouble all the time, trusting people.”
“I see.” Major Grace sat up a little straighter and turned a little grimmer. “What makes you think he would have come to SanFran?”
“Where else was he gonna go? Ain’t nothing much else around once you leave Sackamenna.”
“That, unfortunately, is quite true. Huh.” She picked up the black ledger and put it into a drawer of her desk. From another drawer she took a red ledger, then retrieved her fountain pen and twisted off the cap. “Let me write this down. His name? Age? Last seen?”
“Sean, and he disappeared just a couple days ago. He’s like in his twenties, but he don’t act grown up.” I was allowing for the effect of the StopCollar. “He acts like he’s still a kid or maybe drunk, but he don’t drink. He’s just not real smart.”
She thumbed through the red ledger, then opened it and flipped through. I could see that the pages had other names and descriptions on them. She started a fresh page with Sean’s name and wrote down what I’d told her. I could pick up the last words even though they were upside down, “probably retarded.”
“Oh, dear!” She looked up. “Well, I won’t lie to you, Rose. This doesn’t sound very hopeful. But let me see what I can find out. You never know. Our regulars hear things.”
“Thanks.” The quaver in my voice was real. “I really—I mean, thanks. I’m kinda surprised, that you’d help someone like me.”
She smiled. “You’re older than sixteen, aren’t you?”