Bruce Springsteen

  Paul J. McAuley

  Jackaroo series

  First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, edited January 2012 by Sheila Williams.

  “I like your philosophers,” the alien said. “Most were unintentional comedians, but a few were on to something. Baudrillard, for instance.”

  I said that I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Baudrillard’s work.

  “His speculations about things standing for things that do not exist were relatively sophisticated. Perhaps you will resurrect him one day. He and I would talk about where his ideas fit in the spectrum of simulacrum theory.”

  I said it sounded interesting.

  “You are being polite because part of your profession is to listen to the confessions of strangers. But you do not know what I am talking about, do you? It does not matter. I am mostly talking nonsense. I am free-associating. An effect of this interesting drink.”

  “Are you ready for another?”

  “This one is still working on me,” the alien said.

  A shot glass of neat Seagram’s was balanced on top of his tank. Somehow, elements of the whisky were making their way out of the glass and into whatever was inside. According to the alien, a teeny-tiny demon was influencing space-time, inflating the usual, vanishingly small chance that certain molecules would be somewhere outside the glass. Not molecules of alcohol, but what he called congeners. He was getting a buzz on the complex chemicals that gave the whisky its unique taste.

  The alien was a !Cha, of course. They’d made themselves known to the human race some five years ago: the second species we’d met since the Jackaroo had given us a gateway to the stars. One moment, there were no aliens on First Foot apart from a few Jackaroo ambassadors; the next, !Cha were tick-tocking all over the place, asking questions, paying people to tell them stories, telling fantastic and improbable stories about long-dead species that had preceded us, of empires, and wars, and alien versions of the Rapture.

  This one had stalked into the Deadwood Gulch Roadhouse and Casino like it wasn’t anything unusual and headed straight past the slots and video poker machines and the tables. Four in the afternoon, the place pretty much dead apart from the regulars at the slot machines and a couple of truckers playing blackjack. Hardly anyone paid attention as the alien went past, his squat black cylinder raised up on three skeletal legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine, heading to the Last Roundup bar at the back of the roadhouse’s dim barn, where I was working on my own. The day manager, Li Hui, came over and told the !Cha that drinks were on the house, gave me a look that told me it was my problem, and left me to it.

  I’d seen plenty of !Cha around Mammoth Lakes, but this was the first I’d talked to. It called itself Useless Beauty, claimed that it was a collector of human foolishness. Whatever that meant.

  Saying now in its mellow baritone, “My favorites of your philosophers are Dr. Seuss and Samuel Beckett. Both are very good on the absurdity of life.”

  “I know Dr. Seuss.”

  “Seuss is very funny, but Beckett is even funnier. Especially his piece about two dispossessed waiting for the person who stands for their release or redemption. The person who never arrives. Who represents the things they can never have. Very funny.” The !Cha turned on its stool, and with a curiously human gesture flapped the terminal joint of one of its legs. “One of your customers is ‘smoking.’ An interesting transgression.”

  “Give me a second while I tell her to put it out,” I said, and went and did just that, before Li Hui came over to give me trouble.

  She was blond and tanned, somewhere between thirty and fifty, dressed in a dark blue skirtsuit, the blouse under it just the decent side of translucent. She’d definitely had some work done around her mouth and eyes, and I was pretty sure her breasts weren’t original. She’d come in a little after the !Cha had settled at the bar, ordered a vodka gimlet and asked if she could run up a tab, shrugged and paid cash when I explained that we didn’t do that on the wild frontier.

  Now, when I asked her if she could put out her cigarette, she immediately stubbed it on the side of the packet and smiled and said, “I’ve been sitting here trying to work out how to get you away from that thing.”

  “It worked, ma’am. But don’t try it again. You’ll get us both into trouble.”

  There was a moment of distraction, then, as the !Cha unfolded itself from its stool and stalked off. Sunlight flashed for a moment as it went through the doors; then the roadhouse was plunged back into its perpetual twilight.

  The woman leaned close, giving me a good view of her cleavage and enveloping me in her perfume. She read my name off my staff tag, said, “I’m Rachel. Tell me about your idea of trouble, and I’ll tell you mine.”

  Inside of ten minutes, I’d told Rachel that I’d come up to First Foot two years ago, that I’d kicked around Port of Plenty doing odd jobs, window washer, shrimper, security guard, and ended up at Mammoth Lakes, working at the Deadwood Gulch Roadhouse and Casino. It was a low point in my life. The roadhouse was way out at the edge of town, your first chance to lose some cash on the way into Mammoth Lakes, your last chance to make that final life-changing wager on your way out. Most people went right on by. The owner was waiting to sell the site and his license to one of the big operators; half the staff were drunks and burnouts; the rest, like me, were trying to stretch minimum wage and tips into a stake that would buy their way into a job with one of the casinos on the Strip.

  Rachel finished her vodka gimlet. When I asked if she wanted another she pushed a five-yuan bill into the well. There was a number written on it in lipstick. “That’s my room,” she said. “I’m at the Stardust Motel. When do you get off ?”

  And that was that.

  I can’t say I was ever in love with her, but there’d been a spark between us from the first. A connection. It wasn’t just the weirdness of having an alien turn up at the bar and ask for a shot of Canadian whisky. Well, that was part of it, but the plain fact of the matter was that Rachel was very definitely my type. Older than me by five or ten years, easy with what she was. Someone who’d lived a little and taken some hard knocks, but knew how to look after herself. Someone, I thought, who was passing through. A change from the waitresses and kitchen staff.

  We spent all night in her room. Sex, talking, more sex. Pizza, most of a bottle of vodka. Somewhere in there I fell asleep, woke with sunlight falling through the blinds and striping my chest, and knew that I wasn’t going into work that day. It was a good feeling. Rachel was next to me in the bed, propped on one elbow. She had green eyes. Green as the most expensive lawn grass back on Earth: contacts.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  I realized I didn’t know much about her but her name, and the deep jones she had for Bruce Springsteen. We shared the last of the vodka cut with warm orange juice, and over this breakfast of champions we got to know each other a little better.

  It wasn’t just that she liked Springsteen’s music and fancied the pants off of him, Rachel said: his songs had helped her understand America when she’d moved there. Although her accent sounded half Californian, half Australian, she was a Brit who’d spent ten years in New York, working in the antiques trade, before she’d won the lottery, come up, and made it big, not once but twice.

  First time, she’d used her contacts in New York and London to set up a very profitable export business dealing in alien artifacts, but then she’d made the mistake of getting married, and her husband and her accountant had conspired to rip her off, and they’d squandered everything they’d stolen on dumb land deals. So she’d started over, prospecting out in the City of the Dead, the hundreds of square miles of ancient tombs down south, in the American zone. She’d made decent money, mostly in those little touchy-feely artifacts you found all over, smooth little sculptures that gave you odd, pleasurable feelings when you held them. She’d parlayed that into a dealership, which she lost when her partner skipped out with cash made on a big deal, one of those unique finds that have the potential to kick-start new industries, like the bound pairs of electrons at the heart of the q-phone system.

  “And that’s how I ended up here with you, in a motel room at the wrong end of the Strip. We’re like two characters out of one of Springsteen’s songs. We both came here looking for new lives and found we couldn’t escape what we are.”

  “What are we?”

  “You’re a handsome drifter. I’m a woman who’s good at business but bad at love,” Rachel said, and laughed when I said I thought she was pretty good in all the areas we’d tried so far. She had a nice, rough laugh. Saying, “This is sex, darling, not love. But I think you and I can get something done together. Are you up for a little adventure?”

  She told me about the Henry Wu Memorial Museum, said that its security was ridiculously weak because as far as most people were concerned it didn’t have anything worth stealing.

  “But there’s one thing that means a lot to me. Something I dug up early in my prospecting career. Something that could lead us to a fortune.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why not?

  Rachel walked her fingers down my stomach and smiled when I responded, and we rolled together.

  Well, you know I said yes. Not just because I was dumb enough to think we were in love. But because she’d brought something rising to the surface. A hunger and a hopefulness I hadn’t felt since I learned I’d won a lottery ticket off Earth, and every kind of new possibility had opened up.

  Besides, I thought it would be easy.

  It wasn’t, of course. We broke into the museum at midnight. Two hours later, we were speeding out of town along the coast highway. We’d passed the checkpoint into American territory, a routine stop that terrified me much less than I’d thought it would. We had left two dead men behind us and Rachel was cradling the thing she wanted so badly while I drove as fast as I dared in her rented car and Bruce Springsteen played on the iPod plugged into the stereo, a compilation of all his big loud tracks.

  Dawn was coming up, the sun huge and orange and pitted with spots around its equator. It was a lot smaller than Earth’s sun, I’d read somewhere. An old, old red dwarf star. But it was much cooler than the sun, too, so that the Goldilocks zone in which First Foot orbited was close in, and from the surface its little red-dwarf sun looked eight times as big as Earth’s.

  The light woke Rachel out of her daze. She asked me if I was okay, driving. I said I was. It helped me to not think about what had happened.

  “What happened, happened. We have to deal with it,” she said. As if she was talking about a minor inconvenience, like a snapped heel on her shoe.

  She switched off the music, fiddled with the radio, pulled in some breakfast show. Eventually the news came around. Right at the end there was a two-sentence item about the break-in at the Henry Wu Museum, that persons unknown had killed two security guards.

  “I guess the cops don’t know who we are,” I said. “Maybe our luck is changing.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Rachel said.

  She didn’t say anything else. Sitting there, stroking the damn stone we’d killed two men for. It was black and smooth and oval. Sooner or later she’d tell me where we were going, and what we’d find when we got there. Meanwhile, I was happy to be driving. As long as I could do that, nothing else much mattered. Not even our two little murders. We were putting those behind us, mile after mile after mile. And ahead of us was only the road, aimed at the continent’s empty heart. Human beings had barely scratched the edge of this world. There were plenty of places we could hide, on or off the map. With one decision, I’d opened up my life to endless possibilities.

  Signs for a rest stop appeared. Rachel said she needed to freshen up, told me to pull over. The lot was empty apart from a pickup parked near a picnic bench, where a young couple was eating breakfast. Furniture and cardboard boxes stacked in its load bed, a German Shepherd lying under the grin of its chromed bull bars, sitting up as I followed Rachel toward the couple, a cold feeling growing inside me. The man stood when she pulled out her gun and the dog stalked toward her wolflike and growling, and she shot it.

  I found a roll of parcel tape in the pickup’s glove box and we used that to tie up the young man and woman. I had to whack the man on the head when he refused to hold out his wrists; after that they didn’t give us any trouble. We dumped them among the boxes and furniture and set fire to the rental car and drove off in the pickup. Rachel took the wheel. She drove faster than I would have dared, those strange trees that grow along the highway there, like mushrooms grafted onto barrel cacti, whipping past on either side.

  After a few miles, Rachel turned off the highway, followed a dirt track between trees and rocks to a rise where microwave masts clustered inside a corral of wire mesh fencing. We left the man and woman there, with a couple of bottles of water. The man was still mostly out of it; the woman was making noises behind her tape gag. We got back to the highway and drove on. Shadows shrinking as the sun climbed the dark blue sky where a few day stars shone. Cool air pouring through the open windows. Springsteen on the stereo.

  I’d seen him once. Springsteen. One of his last concerts, at the end of a tour to raise funds to support research into climate change. Before the war, before the Jackaroo came and shrinking glaciers and homeless polar bears became irrelevant.

  It was in Milwaukee. My hometown. My dad took me. It was a year after he’d finally split with my mom. I was twelve.

  My dad was an accountant. Was? I bet he still is, if he’s still alive, even though he went through the usual kind of midlife crisis involving an affair with a younger colleague, buying a motorcycle and an expensive leather jacket, staying up at nights drinking high-end scotch, and listening to his old CDs on headphones. Nodding along, rapping fractured beats on the arms of the chair, singing off-key snatches of lyrics. I felt sad for him rather than angry. And after he moved out, I found that I kind of liked hanging out with him in his downtown bachelor apartment, mainly because it meant hanging out with his girlfriend, too. I guess I was getting my first hormonal jolt.

  Anyway, the concert. There I was, watching my dad bop in his seat in his good Italian leather jacket and his brand-new boot-cut Nudie jeans, one arm around his girl’s shoulders, as Springsteen and the E-Street Band did their thing up on the big stage under fans of lights. Which wasn’t my thing. If anyone asked at school I said I was into trancehop, but I wasn’t really into any kind of music at all at back then. Still, the spectacle and the energy, the sheer industrial volume of noise and light, did get to me. It was like being caught in a flood. You had to go with it. And at the center of it all was this wiry old geezer standing rigid at the mike, sweating hard as he sang and slashed chords from his guitar. Sweat gleaming on his face. Sweat spraying in a halo and catching in the lights when he shook his head.

  I don’t remember the songs, but I remember the rasp in his voice, the way he’d yell out hyuh! and the drums would come down and his band would swing in behind him. I remember the shine in my dad’s eye, his stupid happy smile. But that was about all I knew about Springsteen until Rachel enlightened me, told me that he stood for the America that was all around you but which you didn’t see or hear properly because it had been drowned out by Clear Channel and ten thousand cable channels with nothing on. That he articulated the hopes and fears of people caught in the traps of their lives. That he sang about small and personal rebellions that blew up or went bad, about how people had to live their lives in the wreckage of failed dreams, of how to survive in a country where the fantasy of winning is the first, last, and only prize …

  Talking on and on as she drove down the four-lane highway that wound out of the mountains and straightened out across a great desert plain. Making little sense that I could tell.

  Rachel was crazy, I knew, but I was crazy too. Something had broken inside me. I was out of the trap of the Deadwood Gulch Roadhouse and Casino. Out and free in an alien world under an alien sun. On the run with my woman beside me, and the strange prize she nursed in her lap. I had no idea if it was valuable or not, whether or not it would lead us to some kind of mysterious alien treasure. I didn’t care. That we had it was what counted. Although I couldn’t forget how we’d taken it, and what it had cost. Maybe that was what Rachel was trying to tell me, when she was talking about what Springsteen meant to her. I hope so. She didn’t express any other kind of regret about what we did.

  We’d broken into the museum at midnight. It wasn’t hard. It had been a vanity project of the man who’d built it, an upside-down wedding cake of a building stuffed with alien artifacts. None of them were worth much. Henry Wu had lost his casino to maneuverings by officials in the pockets of one of the Chinese gangs who really ran Mammoth Lakes, the best of his collection had been stripped out, and the rest had been left to gather dust in that white elephant of a building. It was closed to tourists and marked for demolition because it occupied a prime spot on the Strip, but it was caught up in complex legal wrangles between the Chinese authorities and Wu’s family. Like the roadhouse, it was stuck in limbo while Mammoth Lakes grew and changed around it.

  We came in through one of the loading docks, where the big sliding doors were fastened with ordinary padlocks, and waited until a guard came to switch off the alarm. An old guy who, when we showed him our guns, sensibly put up his hands and said he didn’t want trouble. But there was a second guard, young and keen, and he shot at Rachel as we came down the curve of the main ramp, and she shot back and nailed him in the leg, and followed the blood trail he left as he crawled toward the alarm box and shot him dead right in front of a big cylinder of armored Perspex glass that held in murky water an armature of carved bone taken from the floor of one of the lakes.

 

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