Jimmy Guang's House Of Gladmech Part 2

Whatever the reason for Slava's action, his visibility gave the evening an entirely different flavor. Jimmy Guang looked back to where Marta sat near the wall.

She was getting up. She did not look in his direction as she left.

Angry and fearful, Jimmy Guang raced through his prematch patter, leaning heavily on the crowd to bet local, to show some pride in Osh. He played shamelessly on whatever regional animosities he could think of and channeled them into ferocious wagering. By the time the mechs themselves appeared, the floor was thrumming with the stomping of feet and dust was sifting down from the rafters.

John Wayne destroyed Lokomotiv Lev in less than ten minutes. The Russian robot lumbered to the center of the ring looking purely invincible: squat, barely human in shape, with customized steel plating welded around its sensing apparatus and most joints. It looked as if Lev's crew had scavenged the armor from a tank. They had also, it appeared, amped up the grasping power of the pincers that served Lev for hands and provided the robot with epoxy sprayers and other nozzles whose function Jimmy Guang couldn't begin to fathom. Still, John Wayne was quicker, and more importantly, he had adapted himself to the idea that he was fighting for his life-or, as he preferred it, optimal functionality. Lokomotiv Lev had been programmed to destroy John Wayne; John Wayne to survive. So Lev managed to glue shut John Wayne's primary torch, encouraged by the hoa.r.s.e shouts of the Bishkek Russian contingent (and some of the more fundamentalist IF guerrillas, who hated modernity and blamed it on America). Then Lev caught and tore away a significant amount of John Wayne's external plating, and for a brief moment it looked as if the Bishkek mech would get its pincers into John Wayne's internals. The voice of the crowd grew constricted, frenzied. John Wayne's escape brought them back into full-throated roar, and the momentum of the match seemed to shift. Lev couldn't keep the American in one place for long enough to bring its full strength to bear. And while it tried, John Wayne danced to the side and slashed at Lev's joints with his remaining torch until, as a thundering cheer rose from the weave-and-kaffiyeh side of the arena, Lev's left leg failed entirely and it toppled to that side. Within a minute, John Wayne had disabled both of Lev's pincers, and shortly after that Lokomotiv Lev was fit only for Pavel to scavenge gyros and CPU s.p.a.ce.

The room of the old hangar rattled with the fierce roars of the winning side. The uproar was deafening, and grew a sharp edge as the Russians from Bishkek got up and left, leaving their champion to leak hydraulic fluid into the sand. What an odd stew of rivalries here, thought Jimmy Guang: Russians and Kirghiz, different divisions of Russians, even a strange flavor of the old Russian-American Cold War. Money changed hands in thick handfuls, and parts of the crowd broke into spontaneous chants that reminded Jimmy Guang of the fenced-off portions of European soccer stadia. Look what I've done, he thought as John Wayne clanked and whirred toward him. He snapped the robot a mock salute, and John Wayne saluted back. Over the robot's shoulder Jimmy Guang saw Slava Butsayev get up and follow the Bishkek group, and he knew at that moment that he could wait no longer.

Butsayev and the Bishkek Russians found their way to his favorite bar, and there they drank until the sky was beginning to lighten. Meeting out on the street in front of the bar, they began shouting at each other. Jimmy Guang's Russian wasn't good enough to determine the source of the disagreement, but it grew heated, and after a sudden flurry of punches, the Bishkek group began walking in the direction of the airport. Slava Butsayev watched them go. After a moment, he called something after them, some Russian colloquialism Jimmy Guang had never heard before. Then Butsayev set off down a side street, wending his way toward the area of the bazaar.

Jimmy Guang was stiff and chilly from his vigil, which he had kept from the vantage of a second-floor balcony in an empty apartment house opposite the bar. He resisted the impulse to shoot Butsayev right then and there: apart from the difficulty of hitting someone with a pistol shot from that distance, there was the question of propriety. Jimmy Guang Hamid was a man who did things a certain way, as his mother had plotted graphs a certain way in her cla.s.srooms or his father held the pencil a certain way when drafting. He had never killed a man, had never fired a gun, and if he was to do it now it would have to be done in a certain way. So he followed Slava Butsayev through the twisting ancient streets near the bazaar, and it was not until Butsayev came upon a teenage girl sweeping a crooked concrete porch in front of a building honeycombed with darkened windows that Jimmy Guang removed the gun from the waistband of his trousers. The trousers immediately sunk onto his hips, and he hoped that they did not sink any further to trip him up in what might follow.

Butsayev acted with the speed and decisiveness of a hunter, rather than the swagger of the torturer. He made as if to walk past the girl, who had stopped sweeping and dropped her eyes toward the street as he approached. He said something to her and reached out to curl her hair around his fingers. She flinched, and his hand clenched.

Now, thought Jimmy Guang. Before he can do anything.

"Corporal Butsayev," he said, and Butsayev froze.

When he saw who had addressed him, though, a sly grin split his face, which was like his brother's only in coloration. "Robot Guy," he said. "Want in on the fun?"

Jimmy Guang brought the gun up and pointed it at Butsayev's nose. "You are a despicable man," he said, "and you do despicable things."

He pulled the trigger, and the Colt went off with a tremendous bang. Jimmy Guang's arm leaped up, and his hand, numbed by the recoil, let go of the gun. The muzzle flash faded from his eyes, and he saw Slava Butsayev lying on his left side in the street. There was a hole punched in Butsayev's face, just to the left of his nose and below his eye. The eye was rolled back, showing only white.

His fall had pulled the girl to the ground beside him. She was was streaked with blood. As if picking lice off herself, she removed the dead man's hand from her hair finger by finger. "You should go home," Jimmy Guang said, and she ran into the building whose porch she had been sweeping.

The sky in the east was pale blue. Jimmy Guang dropped the gun near Butsayev's head and squatted next to the corpse. He rummaged through Butsayev's pockets until he found a small drawstring bag. When he pulled it from Butsayev's coat, its seam split, and teeth fell to the stones of the street. He cupped the bag in his palm and replaced the teeth carefully, one at a time. Pinching the seam between his fingers, Jimmy Guang walked back toward Lenin Street as the first curious faces began to appear in the windows around him.

The angel said to Mohammed: G.o.d has knowledge of all the good you do. Jimmy Guang's father had often reminded his son of this. The verse comforted Jimmy Guang, made him feel as if he was important, noticed, his actions weighed fairly and with sympathy. That was a G.o.d he could believe in, take solace in. But as he walked slowly back to his office, the knowledge that G.o.d watched him filled Jimmy Guang with deep sadness and shame. He had killed a man. He had become part of the war, and something of him had been lost.

He went directly through the bazaar to Osh's ancient old quarter, the surviving Osh of Alexander the Great and Mohammed and, if you believed local traditions, King Solomon as well. And now Marta, who lived in a dusty stone building with her parents and sisters. All of her brothers were up in the mountains fighting the Russians.

Jimmy Guang stopped in the street before her house to straighten his tie and tighten his belt, which he had let out a notch to accommodate the gun. He ran his handkerchief quickly over his shoes, patted at his hair, and only then knocked on the front door of the Chu house.

Marta herself answered. Over her shoulder Jimmy Guang could see her parents. They were smaller than she was, and both beginning to be a bit hunchbacked. She was tall, taller than Jimmy Guang, with strong hands.

"It's early, Jimmy," she said.

He took her arm and led her out, shutting the door behind her and waving quickly at her parents. "I have something to show you," he said when they were outside. Traffic was just beginning to appear on the narrow street, bicycles and an oxcart or two. It struck Jimmy Guang that the year could be 1930 instead of 2083. Somewhere the Russians had satellites that could tell the color of your eyes, and somewhere there were aircraft guided by robots smarter than the recently-departed Lokomotiv Lev, and in the mountains Uplinked Russian soldiers patrolled with inhuman precision; but here on this street Osh was as Osh had always been. There was something quietly defiant about it.

Jimmy Guang removed the bag of teeth from his pocket and held it out to Marta. She took it, and teeth spilled from the open seam. Jimmy Guang had a moment of irrational fear that Russian soldiers would rise from the teeth, as in a story his father had read to him once. Instead, Marta let out a scream and flung the bag to the ground. She covered her face and began to sob. The teeth rattled like dice on the street.

"Marta," he said, wanting to touch her but afraid.

"It took you after all," Marta said through her hands. "The war, it took you."

For a long while he didn't know what to say. It was true.

"I thought that's what you wanted," he said at last.

She rubbed at her eyes, then closed the distance between them with a step. "We have to get out of here," she said. "Now. Come with me."

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter where we go. The war is here. It's claiming you, Jimmy." She looked at him. Saw him hesitating, and knew why.

An impulse seized Jimmy Guang. He took all of the evening's winnings from his inside coat pocket. "Here," he said, and closed one of Marta's hands around the thick wad of dollars and rubles and euros and rupees and G.o.d only knew what else. "Take this and go to Pavel. Wait for me."

Her face grew still.

"Just until sundown," Jimmy Guang pleaded. "Just wait until sundown."

When he got back to the office, Russian soldiers were waiting for him.

"What do you expect of me?" Captain Vasily Butsayev asked Jimmy Guang Hamid.

They were standing in a field southwest of Osh. Distant thunder rolled down on them from a jet pa.s.sing far overhead. Jimmy Guang listened, and he listened to the wind, and he watched the dry gra.s.s bend, and he smelled the mountains. Captain Butsayev was going to kill him, he was sure, and Jimmy Guang was saddened by this because it meant he had overestimated the captain from their first meeting.

About five hundred yards away stood the House of Gladmech. The wall facing them was patched with rusting rectangles of corrugated tin scavenged from other hangars destroyed in various a.s.saults. One of the patches covered part of the sign on that wall, and Jimmy Guang pursed his lips in annoyance. If he survived the afternoon he would have that fixed.

Jimmy Guang realized that although he did not want to, he would have to speak. So he decided to speak truthfully.

"Your brother was an evil man who preyed on women," he said, looking Butsayev in the eye. "I am in love with one of those women, and because I love her I had to kill your brother. I had to try to heal her, and your brother's life was like an infection in her spirit. She could not live while he did, and I need her, Captain Butsayev. I need her very badly to live."

Butsayev looked toward the mountains. "You heal a woman by killing a man. You create an illusionary peace among men by making a spectacle of destroying robots. If I were close to you, Mr. Hamid, I would fear your impulses to do good deeds." Still speaking softly, Butsayev quoted: " 'Do not walk proudly on the earth. You cannot cleave the earth, nor can you rival the mountains in stature.' "

A Russian officer quoting from the Koran. Jimmy Guang could not decide whether this was a good omen or bad.

"My actions were not meant to be prideful," he said, and almost said more, but stopped himself. "Captain Butsayev. I will no longer defend myself. I have done what I have done, and you shall do what you shall do. Given the same situation again, a thousand times, I would kill your brother a thousand times."

Butsayev waved an arm over his head, a gesture of some sort to someone Jimmy Guang couldn't see. A rocket tore through the air, and Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech exploded in an expanding cloud of dirty smoke. Large pieces of its metal walls flew up into the air and came slanting crazily back down to embed themselves in the earth.

John Wayne was in there, Jimmy Guang thought.

"Nor do I do that out of pride, Mr. Hamid," said Butsayev. "Leave now. Go with your woman, go back where you came from. Leave war to those of us who have made it our profession. And remember: I am not a butcher like my brother. But neither am I a weak man. Go now."

Butsayev walked toward his waiting jeep, leaving Jimmy Guang alone in the field. A wave of sorrow overcame him. For the House of Gladmech, yes, but mostly for Vasily Butsayev, whose respect Jimmy Guang realized he had treasured.

When he got to Pavel's, Marta was no longer there. "She said she was going to find her brothers," Pavel said. "You were to follow her."

"Where are her brothers?"

Pavel looked at Jimmy Guang, a small quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Do you understand what I am telling you? She is going to the mountains. If she is going to the mountains, it is not up to me to tell you where to find her."

Another test, thought Jimmy Guang. He did not think she was leaving him, no. Pavel might smirk, but Jimmy Guang had been smirked at before. He knew what he knew. She feared the war in him, the way it had crept into the corners of his mind, and when he had followed her through the rocks and the snow and the privations of the Tien Shan, he would be purified again. She would see him and know that this was true, that what had drawn him to the war was gone in the blast of a rocket and that she herself had drawn him away from it again. Perhaps he would find her in the mountains, among the militias and the mujahideen. Perhaps she would have gone ahead of him to Shanghai, or Delhi, and he would find her waiting for him at his father's house with a cup of tea in her hand.

The End