Croyd moved then to the dumpster and opened its side hatch. He smiled almost immediately, for there were long strands of Christmas ribbon near at hand. He withdrew several of these and stuffed them into a side pocket. He leaned forward. If there were ribbon, then-
The sound of rapid footfalls came and went. He spun, raising his hands to defend himself, but there was no one near.
Then he spotted him. A small man in a coat several times too large for him had halted briefly at the windowsill, where he snatched one of the larger bottles and two of the doggie bags. He ran off immediately then, toward the far end of the alley where two other shabby figures waited.
"Hey!" Croyd yelled. "Stop!" and he reached with his power but the man was out of range.
All that he heard was laughter, and a cry of, "Tonight we party, boys!"
Sighing, Croyd withdrew a large wad of red and green Christmas paper from the dumpster and returned to the window to repackage the remainder of the remains.
After he had walked several blocks, his bright parcel beneath his arm, he passed a bar called The Dugout and realized he was in the Village. His brow furrowed for a moment, but then he saw a taxi and waved, and the car pulled over. Everything was okay. Even the headache was gone.
Jube looked up, saw Croyd smiling at him. "How- How did it go?" he asked.
"Mission accomplished," Croyd answered, passing him the key.
"You got it? There was something on the news about Darlingfoot "
"I got it."
"And the possessions?"
"There weren't any."
"You sure of that, fella?"
"Absolutely. Nothing there but him, and he's in the bathtub."
"What?"
"It's okay, because I closed the drain."
"What do you mean?"
"My cab was involved in an accident on the way over and some of the bottles broke. So watch out for glass when you unwrap it."
"Bottles? Broken glass?"
"He was kind of-reduced. But I got you everything that was left."
"Left?"
"Available. He sort of came apart and melted a bit. But I saved most of him. He's all wrapped up in shiny paper with a red ribbon around him. I hope that's okay."
"Yeah… That's fine, Croyd. Sounds like you did your best. "
Jube passed him an envelope.
"I'll buy you dinner at Aces High," Croyd said, "as soon as I shower and change."
"No, thanks. I-I've got things to do."
"Take along some disinfectant if you're stopping by the apartment.
"
"Yeah… I gather there were some problems?"
"Naw, it was a piece of cake."
Croyd walked off whistling, hands in his pockets. Jube stared at the key as a distant clock began to chime the hour.
UNTO THE SIXTH GENERATION
By Walter Jon Williams
Part One
Cold rain tapped on the skylights. The drizzle had finally silenced the Salvation Army Santa on the corner, and Maxim Travnicek was thankful-the jangling had been going on for days. He lit a Russian cigarette and reached for a bottle of schnapps.
Travnicek took reading glasses out of his jacket and peered at the controls on the flux generators. He was a forbiddingly tall man, hawk-nosed, coldly handsome. To his former colleagues at MIT he was known as "Czechoslovakia's answer to Victor Frankenstein," a label coined by a fellow professor, Bushmill, who had later gotten a dean's appointment and sacked Travnicek at the earliest opportunity.
"Fuck your mother, Bushmill," Travnicek said, in Slovak. He swallowed schnapps from his bottle. "And fuck you too, Victor Frankenstein. If you'd known jack shit about computer programming you would never have run into trouble."
The comparison with Frankenstein had stung. The image of the ill-fated resurrectionist had, it seemed, always followed him. His first teaching job in the West would be at Frankenstein's alma mater, Ingolstadt. He'd hated every minute of his time in Bavaria. He'd never had much use for Germans, especially as role models. Which may have explained his dismissal from Ingolstadt after five years.
Now, after Ingolstadt, after MIT, after Texas A amp;M, he was reduced to this loft. For weeks he had lived in a trance, existing on canned food, nicotine, and amphetamines, losing track first of hours, and then of days, his fervid brain existing in a perpetual explosion of ideas, concepts, techniques. On a conscious level Travnicek barely knew where it was all coming. from; at such times it seemed as if something deep inside his cellular makeup were speaking to the world through his body and mind, bypassing his consciousness, his personality…
Always it had been thus. When he grew obsessed by a project everything else fell by the wayside. He barely needed to sleep; his body temperature fluctuated wildly; his thoughts were swift and purposeful, moving him solidly toward his goal. Tesla, he had read, was the same way-the same manner of spirit, angel, or demon, now spoke through Travnicek.
But now, in the late morning, the trance had faded. The work was done. He wasn't certain how-later on he'd have to go through it all piece by piece and work out what he'd accomplished; he suspected he had about a half-dozen basic patents here that would make him rich for all time-but that would be later, because Travnicek knew that soon the euphoria would vanish and weariness would descend. He had to finish the project before then. He took another gulp of schnapps and grinned as he gazed down the long barnlike length of his loft.
The loft was lit by a cold row of fluorescents. Homebuilt tables were littered with molds, vats, ROM burners, tabletop microcomputers. Papers, empty food tins, and ground-out cigarettes littered the crude pressboard floor. Blowups of Leonardo's drawings of male anatomy were stapled to the rafters.
Strapped to a table at the far end of the table was a tall naked man. He was hairless and the roof of his skull was transparent, but otherwise he looked like something out of one of Leonardo's better wet dreams.
The man on the table was connected to other equipment by stout electric cables. His eyes were closed.
Travnicek adjusted a control on his camouflage jumpsuit. He couldn't afford to heat his entire loft, and instead wore an, electric suit intended by its designers to keep portly outdoorsmen warm while they crouched in duck blinds. He glanced at the skylights. The rain appeared to be lessening. Good. He didn't need Victor Frankenstein's cheap theatrics, his thunder and lightning, as background for his work.
He straightened his tie as if for an invisible audience proper dress was important to him and he wore a tie and jacket under the jumpsuit-and then he pressed the button that would start the flux generators. A low moan filled the loft, was felt as a deep vibration through the floorboards. The fluorescents on the ceiling dimmed and flickered. Half went out. The moan became a shriek. Saint Elmo's fire danced among the roofbeams. There was an electric smell.
Dimly, Travnicek heard a regular thumping. The lady in the apartment below was banging on her ceiling with a broomstick.
The scream reached its peak. Ultrasonics made Travnicek's worktables dance, and shattered crockery throughout the building. In the apartment below, the television set imploded. Travnicek threw another switch. Sweat trickled down his nose.
The android on the table twitched as the energy from the flux generators was dumped into his body. The table glowed with Saint Elmo's fire. Travnicek bit through the cardboard tube of his cigarette. The glowing end fell unnoticed to the floor.
The sound from the generators began to die down. The sound of the broomstick did not, nor the dim threats from below.
"You'll pay for that television, motherfucker!"
"Jam the broomstick up your ass, my darling," said Travnicek. In German, an ideal language for the excremental. The stunned fluorescent lights began to flicker on again. Leonardo's stern drawings gazed down at the android as it opened its dark eyes. The flickering fluorescents provided a strobe effect that made the eyewhites seem unreal. The head turned; the eyes saw Travnicek, then focused. Under the transparent dome that topped the skull, a silver dish spun. The sound of the broomstick ceased.