the space of two heartbeats, everything stopped. Then a tiny tear dropped out of the eye, splashing on the White House roof.
And then another, falling like a light fleck of snow.
These were corpses, these two—human corpses, followed by more in a shower which grew heavier by the moment, some crashing now through the roof, some rolling to land in the drive, bouncing to hit the lawn, bursting to paint the porticoes. And then the eye began gushing.
Everywhere the eyes were gushing. With a strange, continuous, multiphonic squall, the ragged dead rained from the sky.
Sixty-eight forgotten pensioners buried in a mass grave in 1995 were dumped over the Chicago social services. Hundreds of blacks murdered in police cells hit the roof of Scotland Yard. Thousands of slaughtered East Timorese were dumped over the Assembly buildings in Jakarta. Thousands killed in the test bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki began raining over the Pentagon. Thousands tortured to death showered Abuja.
Thousands of Sudanese slaves were dumped over Khartoum. The border-dwelling Khmer Rouge found themselves cemented into a mile-high gut slurry of three million Cambodians. Thousands of hill tribesmen were dropped over the Bangladeshi parliament and the World Bank, the latter now swamped irretrievably under corpses of every hue.
Berlin was almost instantly clotted, its streets packed wall to wall with victims. Beijing was swamped with tank fodder and girl babies.
The Pentagon well filled quickly to overflowing, blowing the building outward as surely as a terrorist bomb. Pearl Harbor dupes fell on Tokyo and Washington in equal share. The streets of America flooded with Japanese, Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians, Dominicans, Libyans, Timorese, Central Americans and Americans, all beclouded in a pink mist of Dresden blood.
London was a flowing sewer—then the bodies started falling. Parliament splintered like a matchstick model. In the Strand the living ran from a rolling wall of the dead. A king tide of hole-eyed German, Indian, African, Irish and English civilians surged over and against buildings which boomed flat under the pressure. Cars were batted along, flipped and submerged. The Thames flooded its banks, displaced by cadavers.
No longer preserved by denial, they started to sludge. Carpet-bombing gore spattered the suburbs, followed by human slurry tumbling down the streets like lava. Cheap human fallout from pain ignored and war extended for profit. The first wave. So far only sixty years’ worth—yet, tilling like bulldozed trash, it spread across the map like red inkblots destined to touch and merge.
Skychum had taken the 8.20 Amtrak north from Grand Central—it had a policy of not stopping for bodies. Grim, he viewed the raining horizon—dust motes in a shaft of light—and presently, quietly, he spoke.
“Many happy returns.”
THE SIRI GUN
“What were you doing in Washington, Atom?”
“Visiting my rights.”
“Wiseguy, eh?”
“Where were you on June 16?” asked the second cop.
“Hiding a pod in the basement.”
“Wiseguy,” muttered the first, nodding.
Nice day—sunny outside and I hadn’t bled much. I was sat in a yelling cell as a bullet lost its flavor in my leg. The two stooges had me jacked to a polygraph. I’d breezed the Wittgenstein controls and we were fronting off to beat the band.
“I get a phonecall? Need to send a singing telegram to my rabbi.”
“You keep northin’ us Chief Blince’ll tear you a new asshole.”
“I need a new asshole—how soon can he get here?”
“You got a gun called a Glory Hand, Atom?”
I rolled a nicotine patch and lit it up. “Okay fellas, you got me. I’ll tell it like it happened. Now let’s see.”
And I spun the following, beginning with my habitation of an office on Saints Street and nothing doing. People think my business is all swapping the clever with rich clients bathchair-bound in a hothouse of flycatchers and septic orchids. Missing daughters and like that. In fact, I was just sat in contemplation when the phone rang. Siri Moonmute sounding wired.
Siri explained that she was now wanted for everything. She had never been into the perfect crime as she didn’t go for Gautier’s principle of virtue in correctness of form. I knew a girl could be perfect because of her flaws. The whole thing was subjective.
Siri was into purity—this it was possible to quantify. A pure crime is like a diamond in which no facet or depth is clouded by legality. It’s criminally saturated, every move from start to finish creating a breach in legislation. This was a headcrime Siri had pondered increasingly of late and with laws entering the statute books at a rate of thousands per year, it was getting easier all the time. So she’d done it, packing as many offenses as possible into each second. Her name smeared the copnet like a rash.
Siri started in on how the difficulties of evading detection were no longer an inducement and she’d been hurting for a new challenge, at which I remarked if she wasn’t careful she’d be sat cod-eyed in a bodyvan. Siri spoke in awe of the particle-science phenomenon of the singularity; a point at which all known laws broke down. If a substance was supposed to expand, in a singularity it contracted. If light was meant to bend, in a singularity it was stiff as a board. Where laws were created to explain behavior these squirls occurred every few months; but where laws were created to prevent behavior—like among people—they happened many times per second. The latter laws were patently inaccurate, and a pure crime was a statement of unmixed truth.
“Siri,” I stated, “don’t you understand that the cops will stick it in and break it off at a speed which will surprise everyone? Such pristine behavior as you display is the sole preserve of a mutant in a belfry.”
Siri remarked that I had failed to gauge the full extent to which she was gung-ho. She was chock full of that quality and would express it at the drop of a hat. “There was a point there, Atom, I’d set things up so that I was committing several hundred offenses in one instant, and I could feel the very atmosphere change—it was as though my misdemeanors had reached such a superdensity that they began to implode.”
“Like a black hole, collapsing in on itself?”
“Exactly.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like god. Could you come over?”
By the time I got there the area was under containment by the cops. Behind them a hole in space spiralled like the water spinning down a drain, a tornado of light sucking scraps of paper and nuggets of masonry out of view.
The trooper boy Marty Nada was stood at the cordon tape yelling through a bullhorn so I went to ask him the deal. He didn’t bother to lower the bullhorn. “Oh hi, Atom. Ah it’s a singularity of some kind, its gravity so powerful not even lies can escape. We’ve lost five officers going near that thing.”
“How’d it happen, they know?”
“Still guessing. Pun gun misfire? Etherics? Eschaton rifle’d do it, right person.”
