Coils

Coils by Fred Saberhagen and Roger Zelazny

Introduction

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1982 by The Amber Corporation and Fred Saberhagen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form.

Cover art by: Howard Chaykin Interior Illustrations by: Ron Miller

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

lickaderick. Clickaderick.

Starboard, two degrees.

Click. Click.

… And through the half-built drowse-dream, words unlaunch a thousand ships, burn my topless towers, aluminum. Sweet, and fleeing… Fled now. What—

“You’re a strange man, Donald BelPatri,” they came. “Things have happened to you.”

I did not turn my head. I feigned sleep as I sorted my senses. The world had slipped away again, as it sometimes does. Or had I? Still here, now, though, us, as I’d left us, but moments before. Here: The roof of my houseboat, Hash Clash, puttering along, maybe a kilometer an hour, through the mangrove channel that winds southwest along the flank of Long Key, about halfway down from Miami toward Key West. Warm, cool, light, dark. Flick, flick…

We were running on the new autopilot, a Radio Shack model, which matched information from the recently installed government navigational beacons along the waterway against its programmed-in map, seasoning the mixture with a little radar as a charm against collisions. The channel here was quite narrow, with places where two houseboats would be pinched in passing—which also meant it was sufficiently shady to make extended periods of summertime exposure comfortable. More than that. Pleasurable. And that was all I really cared about. But—

I did not turn my head to Cora right away; I just grunted. I had to do that much at least, because I could tell from her tone that she knew I was awake.

But my response was far from adequate. She waited silently for something better.

“A truism,” I said at last. “Name three people to whom things have not happened. Name one.”

“Well-educated,” Cora mused now, as if she were dictating notes into a recorder. “Reasonably intelligent. Age about… what? Twenty-seven?”

“Give or take.”

“Size, large. Though not yet deformed by excessive intake of Italian food.” In the two weeks since we’d met, we’d developed a standing joke about our mutual fondness for pasta. It made a pretty way to keep the interrogation light. “Financial position—evidently secure. Ambitions…” Cora deliberately let it trail off.

“To have a good time,” I supplied, still not turning.

With my eyes closed, the puttering of the engine blended in my imagination with the chattering through the microcomputer of bytes of information. I didn’t really trust the damned thing yet. If I did I could have passed from drowsiness into a deep, dark sleep, with it in charge of things. Then this questioning would have been avoided. Well… postponed, I guess. Sooner or later, though, I knew that it would be upon me. Cora had been working up to it for several days now.

“Which,” she answered, “you have elevated to art-form status. Eyes blue. Hair dark and curly. Rugged features. A prejudiced person might even say‘handsome’. No visible…”

No, none quite visible. Under ordinary circumstances, that is. But that was why her voice had trailed off this time. The scars were well concealed under the famous dark and curly. She had discovered them about a week ago, one day when my head was in her lap, and had asked me about them. Suddenly, it seemed as if she had been nagging me continuously on the subject, and I wished to hell that she would stop.

I knew that if I told her bluntly to mind her own business, she would.

But, of course, I might never see her again after I did that. And I was discovering that I wanted very much to go on seeing her.

She seemed attracted to me on a deeper-than-summer-vacation level, and I…

I turned my head, resting it on folded forearms, looked at her. She was tall too, almost six feet, a long lithe body stretched out now on the beach towel spread on the houseboat roof. She’d taken off the top of her two-piece swimsuit, but the piece of fabric was in handy reach—in case of an emergency, such as perhaps a serious argument with me.

A basically cautious young lady, as might be expected of a schoolteacher. Basically lovely, too. Not a Hollywood face, by any means. Her dark hair was worn shorter than current fashion decreed, because, she said, it was easier to manage that way, and she had other things to do in life than take care of her hair… and the most basic thing about her, I was discovering, was that I didn’t want to lose her.

“No visible reason for existence?” I suggested at last. Lightly, of course.

Cora shifted her position to meet my eyes.

“Tell me about where you grew up,” she said. “From your speech I’d say it was somewhere in the Middle West.”

Less danger there, or so it seemed. Danger? Did I really mean that? Yes, I realized. For an awkward moment I felt as if I were caught in a forked stick and held up for scrutiny. It hurt more in some places than others. Like my scars. I had always considered myself a private person beyond a certain point, and…

I was vouchsafed a glimpse of myself struggling in the pincers. Something was wrong. It was as if there were certain things I wasn’t even allowing myself to ask. I saw, in my first moment’s self-scrutiny in years, that there was a strand of irrationality woven through my being. But that was all that I saw. No way to approach it, let alone untwine it.

The thought passed as quickly as it had come, and I was glad of it. The ground was safer here.

“Upper Michigan,” I answered. “A town so small that I’m sure you never heard of it. Called Baghdad, of all things.”

“As in ‘-on-the-subway?’ ”

“A long way from. Hiawatha National Forest isn’t far away. A million lakes and a billion mosquitoes… What can I say? I’d a pretty typical small-town existence.”

She smiled, for the first time in a long while.

“I envy that,” she said. “I’ve told you something about Cleveland. I suppose your father owned the local lumber mill or whatever?”

I shook my head.

“No. He just worked in it”

I didn’t feel much like talking about my parents, or even thinking about them, for that matter. They had been good people. Life in Baghdad had been idyllic. I’d led a sort of Huck Finn existence as a kid. Still, that was a long time ago, and I’d no desire to go back.

Another houseboat came into sight from around the bend and puttered toward us. My robot moved us a bit farther to starboard, providing ample leeway.

“I thought maybe you were living on some sort of inheritance.”

Perhaps it was the sun that started my head to aching. I sat up. I rubbed the back of my neck.

“We didn’t bring along any fishing gear, did we?” I said. “Damn! I was going to. Forgot.”

“All right, Don, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

The other houseboat had cut its engines and was coasting past us on momentum. The heads of two young men had just appeared at the same window on our side. Topless girl sunbathers were not that uncommon anymore, but ones as attractive as Cora evidently were. One of the boys said something that I tried to tune out. Uncomfortably, I moved to block their view as Cora started putting on her top. My head was throbbing now.