The Place of Dead Roads Read online

  "Filthy fruits!"

  The Colonel raises his sword. Artillery opens up, blowing the gate off its hinges. With wild yipes, the regiment charges. As the Colonel sweeps through the gate, horses rear and whinny, eyes wild. There is a reek of death. Crumpled bodies are strewn about the courtyard. From a gallows dangle effigies of Colonel Greenfield, Old Man Bickford, and Mr. Hart. From the crotch of each effigy juts an enormous wooden cock with a spring inside jiggling up and down as the dummies swing in the afternoon wind.

  "They're all dead, sir."

  "Are you sure?"

  The Sergeant claps a handkerchief over his face in answer.

  Colonel Greenfield points to the gallows.

  "Get that down from there!"

  A cloud of dust is rapidly approaching...

  "It's the press, sir!"

  The reporters ride in yelping like cossacks. Some even swing down from balloons as they swarm over the fort, snapping pictures.

  "I forbid..."

  Too late, Colonel...The story was front-page round the world with pictures of the dead outlaws...(Hart and Bickford managed to kill the gallows pictures.) Seems the Wild Fruits had died from a poison potion, the principal ingredient of which was aconite. A week later the whole thing was forgotten. More than forgotten...excised...erased...Mr. Hart saw to that. The effigies had accomplished the purpose for which they had been designed.

  Rumors persisted... soldiers had found an escape tunnel .. . the bodies found were not Kim and his followers but migrant Mexican workers who had died in a flash flood...

  From time to time over the years stories bobbed up in Sunday supplements:

  MASS SUICIDE OR MASSIVE HOAX?

  The outlaws had disbanded and scattered. Colonel Greenfield, unable to accomplish his mission, faked the whole suicide story and buried fifty mannikins...Kim, Boy, and Marbles keep turning up from Siberia to Timbuktu.

  HIS FATHER'S PICTURES

  1

  Cloning was in an experimental stage at the time of the Big Jump, when the fifty original Wild Fruits committed suicide at Fort Johnson. We had actual biologic cuttings stored in refrigerated vaults. Pending the solution of residual technical problems, we set out to match voice and genital patterns with existing replicas. Everyone has not one but many approximate doubles. It is simply a matter of implanted voice and genital prints. Then the subject is slowly led to remember the former life of his guest and the two beings merge into one.

  Kim Carsons, age twenty, was one of ten clones derived from Kim Carsons the Founder. Since he was in contact with approximate replicas of himself and with other clone families like the Graywoods, the Dahlfars, the Wentworths, the Summervilles, the Gysins, the Joneses, the Little Rivers, the Yen Lees and the Henriques, he was under no pressure to maintain the perimeters of a defensive ego and this left him free to think. He was stationed in New York, such assignments being arranged informally at the family gatherings.

  To say Kim Carsons still lives is to pose the question: what does this mean? His thought patterns live in a number of different brains and nervous systems, his speech and genital patterns, all of which are distinctive. No two people have the same voice or the same cock. The clones exist in a communal mind in which the bodies are at the disposal of all the others, like rotating quarters.

  As the guests arrive and are met at the train by the driver, we see how varied the Carsons Family actually is. There are blonds and redheads and oriental-looking youths and blacks and Indians resulting from various recombinant techniques.

  Their part is easy to play. They are the guests, down from the north or up from the Deep South or in from the West, millionaires who own the county the sheriff and the townspeople. There is Kim with his father mother and younger brother getting off the train with an unmistakable air of wealth and quiet self-possession. Porters stagger under their luggage. Kim gives them each a bright new dime. They snarl after him.

  "Little prick. Wait till he has to play porter."

  For the roles rotate. You can be fih de famille today and busboy tomorrow—son cosas de la vida. Besides it's more interesting that way. Kim loves to play the acne-scarred blackmailing chauffeur or the insolent bellhop tipped back in a chair, his face flushed from drinking the bottle of champagne he has delivered.

  "What is the meaning of this?" Tom snaps...The boy rubs his crotch and smiles and insolently squirts Tom in the crotch with a soda siphon.

  "Oh sir, you've had an accident." He bustles around, loosening Tom's belt and trying to shove his pants down.

  "What the bloody hell are you doing?"

  "Just changing your didies, sir."

  Or maybe Tom is coming on and Kim the bellboy is playing it cool.

  "Oh sir, I couldn't sit down at the table with you. I knows me place, sir, if you'll pardon the expression, sir."

  This system of rotating parts operates on the basis of a complex lottery...Some people achieved a lottery-exempt status for a time but for most it was maybe a month, often less, before they got the dread call. Turn in your tycoon suit and report to casting.

  The Johnson Family is a cooperative structure. There isn't any boss man. People know what they are supposed to do and they do it. We're all actors and we change roles. Today's millionaire may be tomorrow's busboy. There's none of that ruling-class old school tie..."Hey boy, manicure my toenails and look sharp about it...and you, boy, don't slack at the ceiling fan, I'm sweating my bloody balls off...saddle my horse, nigger..."

  We are showing that an organization and a very effective organization can run without boss-man dog-eat-dog fear.

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

  William Seward Hall...he was a corridor, a hall, leading to many doors. He remembered the long fugitive years after the fall of Waghdas, the knowledge inside him like a sickness. The migrations, the danger, the constant alertness...the furtive encounters with others who had some piece of the knowledge, the vast picture puzzle slowly falling into place.

  Time to be up and gone. You are not paid off to be quiet about what you know; you are paid not to find it out. And in his case it was too late. If he lived long enough he couldn't help finding it out, because that was the purpose of his life...a guardian of the knowledge and of those who could use it. And a guardian must be ruthless in defense of what he guards.

  And he developed new ways of imparting the knowledge to others. The old method of handing it down by word of mouth, from master to initiate, is now much too slow and too precarious (Death reduces the College). So he concealed and revealed the knowledge in fictional form. Only those for whom the knowledge is intended will find it.

  William Seward Hall, the man of many faces and many pen names, of many times and places...how dull it is to pause, to make a rest, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use...pilgrim of adversity and danger, shame and sorrow. The Traveler, the Scribe, most hunted and fugitive of men, since the knowledge unfolding in his being spells ruin to our enemies. He will soon be in a position to play the deadliest trick of them all...The Piper Pulled Down the Sky. His hand will not hesitate.

  He has known capture and torture, abject fear and shame, and humiliations that burn like acid. His hand will not hesitate to use the sword he is forging, an antimagnetic artifact that cuts word and image to fragments...the Council of Transmigrants in Waghdas had attained such skill in the art of prophecy that they were able to chart a life from birth to death, and so can he unplot, and unwrite. Oh, it may take a few hundred years before some people find out they have been unwritten and unplotted into random chaos...

  Meanwhile, he has every contract on the planet out on him. The slow, grinding contract of age, and emptiness...the sharp vicious contract of spiteful hate...heavy corporate contracts..."The most dangerous man in the world."

  And to what extent did he succeed? Even to envisage success on this scale is a victory. A victory from which others may envision further.

  There is not a breathing of the common wind

  that will forget thee;<
br />
  Thy friends are exaltations, agonies and love,

  and man's inconquerable mind.

  Hall's face and body were not what one expects in a sedentary middle-aged man. The face was alert and youthful, accustomed to danger and at the same time tired. The danger has gone on so long it has become routine. Yet his actual life was comparatively uneventful. The scene of battle was within, a continual desperate war for territorial advantage, with long periods of stalemate...a war played out on the chessboard of his writings, as bulletins came back from the front lines, which constantly altered position and intensity. Yesterday's position desperately held is today's laundromat and supermarket. Time and banality hit the hardest blows.

  The absence of any immediate danger masks the deadliest attack. "It is always war," Hall had been told by a lady disciple of Sri Aurobindo, whose last words were: "It is all over." She meant quite simply that Planet Earth is by its nature and function a battlefield. Happiness is a by-product of function in a battle context: hence the fatal error of Utopians.

  (I didn't ask for this fight, Kim reflects, or maybe I did. Just like Hassan i Sabbah asked for the expeditions sent out against him just because he wanted to occupy a mountain and train a few adepts. There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.)

  At a house outside Boulder, Old Man Bickford confers with his Director of Security, Mike Chase...

  "They is knockin' the wops down like ducks in a shooting gallery. What is wrong, Mike...?"

  Mike shrugs..."Well, the wops are not all that good...seems like all the old-time shootists is gone."

  "So where does Carsons get his talent? I'll tell you. He trains them." Old Man Bickford smiles. "You know what, Mike, I think maybe you and Kim is going to shoot it out Old Western-style..." He guffaws loudly and Mike joins him, not liking it at all, feeling the cold clutch of fear in his guts.

  Old Man Bickford there, smelling his fear and smiling. They both know that Mike will have a training program laid out and ready for Bickford's approval 8:00 a.m. the following day.

  "How about a few hands of poker, Mike?" he drawls with narrowed eyes. His smile widens.

  This is a sanction imposed by the Old Man on a subordinate the night before he has to give a report at a very crucial meeting. The Old Man keeps the young man up till five in the morning, filling his glass (the Old Man seems to have some constitutional immunity to the effects of bourbon) and winning from him a sum exactly proportional to the trespass. "There Is No Excuse for Failure" is the Bickford motto.

  Five hours later, his head spinning, $20,000 poorer, Mike stumbles off to bed. Sharp smell of weeds...Old Man Bickford smiles and claps Mr. Hart on the back. Mr. Hart hates being slapped on the back. He turns angrily, but Bickford says, "You know what, Bill?"

  Mr. Hart's glare goes dim and timorous as he sees the horse and takes in Bickford's guns.

  "For the first time in a thousand years we got an all-out range war on our hands. Time to saddle up, Billy."

  Mr. Hart hates being called "Billy."

  "Ka, Egyptians called it...soul, whatever. Well I got news for Ka. It isn't invulnerable and it isn't immortal." Bickford draws his gun, and fondles it. "It's a magnetic field...it can be dispersed. POOF, no more Billy."

  Mr. Hart's lips tighten in waspish irritation.

  The Bickford guns agree to a truce. Fights are getting too deadly. Many of them are glad enough to get out from under Bickford's horrible smile, his all-night poker games, his cruel and evil presence.

  Bickford is losing his grip. He is going security-mad. Every day it's some new electrical device or some outstandingly vicious breed of guard dog.

  2

  Kim sees his life as a legend and it is very much Moses in the bullrushes, the Prince deprived of his birthright and therefore hated and feared by the usurpers.

  I shall be off with the wild geese in the stale smell of morning.

  Time to be up and be gone. Time to settle his account with Mike Chase.

  Kim breaks camp and rides into El Rito. He knows that Mike is in Santa Fe and he sends along a message through his Mexican contacts.

  to confirm appointment for september 17, 4:30 p.m. at

  the cemetery, boulder, colorado.

  kim carsons, m.d.

  Kim knows that Mike will not meet him on equal footing. Well two can play at that.

  (More than two.)

  Raton Pass: This must be, Kim decided, one of the more desolate spots on the globe. A cold wind whistles around the station. No one lives there except railroad personnel and their families, all of whom have a slightly demented look and walk about with scarves tied over their faces.

  Why would anyone choose to live in such a place? Chance seems to have tossed them here like driftwood.

  Black Hawk: The hotel was full and Kim had to stay overnight in a miners' boardinghouse that reeked of stale sweat and corned beef and cabbage. Kim thought Black Hawk a vile place. A sepia haze of gaseous gold covers the town, farted up from the bowels of the earth, and you expect at any moment to plummet down into a mineshaft.

  Kim stopped into a saloon, half hoping that someone would start trouble, but nobody did. There was an aura of menace and death about him palpable as a haze. The miners made way for him at the bar and Kim was as always scrupulously polite and well behaved. Back in his horrible room he took a morphine injection and set his mind to wake up at 5:00 a.m. the following morning to take the train for Denver.

  Denver: Kim owned a rooming house in Denver but it could be staked out, so he checked into the Palace Hotel. He studied the well-dressed patrons with voices full of money. How, he asked himself, could he ever have been impressed by the self-confidence of the rich? It was simply based on their limitations. All they can think about is money money and more money. They are no better than animals.

  He saw them as shadows parading through conservatories, drawing rooms, and formal gardens and marble arcades frozen in the studied postures of old photos. They are already dead and preserved in money. He noticed how the very rich have an embalmed look and remembered that in ancient Egypt only the rich were considered immortal because they could afford to mummify themselves.

  Kim retired to his room and studied a number of photos of Mike Chase and Joe Kaposi in the Polish slums of Chicago's West Side...Joe had come a long way. Kim noted the petulant, discontented look. Anyone with that look is sure to get rich. Money will simply accrete itself around him. It was a strong face, high cheekbones, brown eyes well apart, full lips, and slightly protruding teeth. Yes, a face that could even be president if he played his cards right.

  He knew Old Man Bickford was grooming Mike for a career in politics...

  "Ah well, the best laid plans of lice and men gang aft agley..."

  September 16, 1899...Kim took the stage to Boulder...Overlook Hotel...uneasy deja vu...flash of resentment on a whispering south wind...BANG!

  Phantom gun...empty grab...too heavy...too fast...too easy...Three witnesses ejaculating, Kim took the stage back to Denver...Back to the rod-riding, hop-smoking underworld...back to the rooming houses and pawnshops...the hobo jungles and opium dens...back to the Johnson Family.

  Kim bought a thin gold pocket watch. Coming out of the jewelry store he ran into the Sanctimonious Kid, who was casing the store in a halfhearted way.

  "Don't try it," Kim told him.

  "Wasn't going to..."

  Kim noted the frayed cuffs, the cracked shoes. "It gets harder all the time."

  The Kid was always soft-spoken and sententious, known for his tiresome aphorisms.

  "It's a crooked game, Kid, but you have to think straight."

  "Be as positive yourself as you like but no positive clothes."

  The Kid was considered tops as a second-story cat burglar and he had made some good smash-and-grabs. Kim sensed something basically wrong about the Kid and never wanted anything to do with him. Under pressure he could blow up and perpetrate some totally mindless and stupid act. Now in the afternoon sunl
ight Kim could see it plain as day: hemp marks around the Kid's neck.

  The Sanctimonious Kid was later hanged for the murder of a police constable in Australia. It gave Kim a terrible desolate feeling when he heard about it years later...the bleak courtroom...the gallows...the coffin. "See you at the Silver Dollar."

  Kim took a carriage to the outskirts of town. He got out and strolled by his rooming house, very debonair, with his sword cane, the flexible Toledo blade razor-sharp on both edges for slash or thrust, his Colt 38 nestled in a tailor-made shoulder holster, a backup five-shot 22 revolver with a one-inch barrel in a leather-lined vest pocket. He couldn't spot a stakeout. Maybe they fell for the diversion ticket to Albuquerque he had bought, making sure the clerk would remember. But sooner or later they would pick up his trail. Old Man Bickford had five of Pinker-ton's best on Kim's ass around the clock.

  Kim was headed for Salt Chunk Mary's place down by the tracks...solid red brick two-story house, slate roof, lead gutters...Train whistles cross a distant sky.

  Salt Chunk Mary, mother of the Johnson Family. She keeps a pot of pork and beans and a blue porcelain coffee pot always on the stove. You eat first, then you talk business, rings and watches slopped out on the kitchen table. She names a price. She doesn't name another. Mary could say "no" quicker than any woman Kim ever knew and none of her no's ever meant yes. She kept the money in a cookie jar but nobody thought about that. Her cold gray eyes would have seen the thought and maybe something goes wrong on the next lay. John Law just happens by or John Citizen comes up with a load of double-oughts into your soft and tenders.