Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 83

"So I am," Ringo answered.

There was a thump, and something inhuman made a strangled noise of pain. Doc didn't flinch, but Miss Lil cringed.

"You learn those smarts in dentist school?" Ringo called.

"Come by 'em honestly," Doc said.

Flora jerked a thumb down a side pa.s.sage and raised her eyebrows to Miss Lil in a question.

Miss Lil glanced. Nodded. Smiled.

Flora's answering grin showed how crooked those front teeth really were.

Doc remembered Miss Lil's dead-on sense of direction. An unfamiliar sensation-a little bright hope-flickered in his chest, beside the dull old recognized burn of the disease that was killing him.

But Missus Jorgensen put up a hand. Not whispering, just talking so low it wouldn't carry, she said, "John Ringo doesn't die here."

"c.r.a.p," Flora hissed. She glanced around. "All right. No killing shots."

"When does he die?" The demand was out of Doc's mouth before he even realized he'd made it. In for a penny, he thought. "And who kills him?"

Missus Jorgensen shook her head "You know I can't tell you that."

"Right," Doc said. "If you changed the past, you'd change the future. And then you might not even exist."

She nodded. "Doc-"

"Don't worry, ma'am," he said. "Whatever answer you gave, it wouldn't satisfy me."

Doc slipped the coach gun into its sheath, slung it over his shoulders, and walked forward again, hands held high. He went alone-or nearly alone: Bill ghosted down the wall beside him, for support of morale and covering fire if nothing more. But Doc didn't look at him. Doc didn't do anything as he rounded the corner into John Ringo's sights, in fact, other than raise his hands up just a little tiny bit higher.

Ringo-a dark fellow with a moustache like a set of window drapes-stood against the far wall of a chamber as big as the one where they'd stabled the horses, holding the moon man around the neck. This room was in better repair, though-the walls and floor rusting, sure, but scrubbed and not heaped with debris. There was a sort of nest of fabric at one end, and transparent jugs full of what must be drinking water.

The moon man in Ringo's grasp was no taller than a boy of twelve, and just as skinny. Its long hands curved over Ringo's arm where his grasp forced its head up. Ringo pushed the muzzle of his pistol against the creature's head hard enough that even from across the room, Doc could see its slick gray flesh denting.

Poor critter, Doc thought. Marooned here like Robinson Crusoe. And we're the cannibal savages.

Ringo grinned over the moon man's head as Doc stopped twelve or fifteen feet away. "I'm heeled now, Holliday."

"I can see that." Doc clicked candy against his tongue with his teeth, letting his hands drift wide. "I said all I wanted out of you is ten paces in the street, John. This isn't a street. And that isn't a combatant."

"But it's worth something, isn't it?" Ringo asked. "There's gotta be a bounty. That's why you all are out here."

Doc opened his mouth. He closed it again. For a change, he thought for a second.

"That's right," Doc said. He edged a step or two closer to Ringo. A step or two farther from Bill, and the potential cover of the bend in the corridor. "There's a bounty. Thirty thousand dollars. But only if we bring it in alive."

He didn't hear the women coming down the side corridor. He had to a.s.sume they were there, though, and that their silence was for Ringo's benefit ... or detriment.

"Thirty ... thousand?" Ringo said it like he'd never heard of so much money. Doc appreciated the reverence; he might have said the same words the same way himself if their situations were reversed.

"Alive," Doc said.

Ringo might not have noticed it, but his hand eased off a little on the pistol. The moon man's head came up straighter. It blinked at Doc with vast, sea-dark eyes.

He didn't dare look at it. He kept his attention on Ringo's face. "I'll split it with you."

"Where are the rest of 'em?" Ringo asked.

Doc shrugged. "Thirty thousand seemed better than five thousand."

Ringo snorted. But Doc knew that was the key to successful lying. People judged what other people would do by what they themselves would do. You could tell a h.e.l.l of a lot about a man by what he a.s.sumed others got up to. If you're looking for a thief, bet on the man who's always accusing his neighbors.

"So what's to stop me taking that whole thirty thousand myself?" Ringo slid the muzzle back from the moon man's head, turned it to face Doc. The barrel looked as big and black as barrels always do.

Now,Doc thought. Now! But there was no crack of gunfire from the side corridor, no blossom of blood from Ringo's skull. Doc forced his eyes to stay trained on Ringo. "You don't know where to collect. Do you think there are wanted posters for that thing?"

"So you tell me where," Ringo said. "Or I shoot you and then I shoot it."

He was just the sort to spoil a well so somebody else couldn't use it too. "I can draw a map," he said. And snorted. "That is, a.s.suming you could read it."

"Who's holding the shooting iron, Holliday?"

"Not much of a threat," Doc said, "when we both know you're going to use it no matter what I say."

Ringo couldn't keep the grin from lifting the corners of his moustache, like h.e.l.l's curtain drawn back from an unholy proscenium arch. "Maybe you better tell me where and from who to collect that bounty."

"Maybe so," Doc said. "Maybe I'd rather chew a bu-"

The echoes of a single gun's report weren't any easier to bear in this chamber than they had been in the one where they had left the horses. Doc winced-how the h.e.l.l was that supposed to keep John Ringo alive until he met whatever unholy date with destiny these five had planned out for him-and then realized: Flora, walking forward now with Lil's smoking six-gun leveled, had shot the pistol out of Ringo's hand. Which was a h.e.l.l of a lot harder, Doc knew, than Eastern lady writers made it out to be in the dime novels.

"Now'd be a good time to run," Flora said, her posse arrayed behind her, as Ringo stood there disbelieving, shaking his b.l.o.o.d.y, numb right hand.

He stood rooted on the spot, though, until the moon man turned its head and clamped that wide, lipless slash of a mouth closed on Ringo's arm.

They let him run. Miss Lil moved to the moon man, her hands outstretched, her voice soft. As she crouched down beside it, it didn't flinch.

"Victory?" Bill said to Missus Shutt.

"Victory," she agreed.

John Henry Holliday looked down at the spatter of red blood on orange rust and shook his head. "I'm d.a.m.ned tired."

Flora and her partners left Holliday at the last fork in the road, their little gray guest bundled up in concealing clothes and riding crunched up on the brown mare behind Miss Lil. Before she'd left, Flora pulled Doc aside to pay him the second half of his money, and a little bonus, and to share a private word or two.

He'd been the one who'd spoken first, though. "So. You really are from the future."

"Something like that, Doc," she said. "But not exactly. It's against the rules to explain."

He looked her in the eye. "Call me John," he'd said. "I haven't much use for rules, Miss Flora."

"John," she said. "That's one of the reasons I wanted to meet you."

1.

A dusty sun crested the rooftops of Tombstone on the first day of November, 1881. Doc Holliday staggered across the vacant lot next to Fly's boarding house. There was nothing in his life so pressing as the idea of a shot of whiskey to ease the ice-pick of pain through and behind his left eye.

And nothing in his life so unwelcome as the spectre of John Ringo strolling down Fremont Street in a yellow check s.h.i.+rt that needed was.h.i.+ng. Or maybe burning.

Ringo turned his head and spat in the dust between Doc's boots.

Another day, Holliday might have stepped over it.

This particular day, he stopped dead in the street. Having been deputized, he had the right to carry a firearm in the streets of Tombstone. Not every man did.

His hand hovered over his holster as he turned and faced Ringo. The sun stabbed through his pupils until he thought the back of his head might explode from the pressure, but he kept his voice level and full of the milk of human kindness and the venom of sweet reason.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h," Doc said. "If you ain't heeled, you go and heel yourself."

But Ringo just turned and showed him an empty right hip, hands spread mockingly wide.

Doc said, "Ringo, all I want out of you is ten paces in the street. And mark my words, some day I will get them."

"You better hope not, Holliday," Ringo said, spinning on the ball of one foot.

Impotently, Doc watched him stagger away. By the gait, he could tell that Ringo was still drunk from the night before.

A solution Doc wished he'd embraced his own self. Instead, he kept walking, intent on undertaking the next best option-getting drunk again.

He was seated staring at the ornate back bar of the Alhambra Saloon when John Ringo walked in. Still unarmed, still with the rolling gait of a sailor off the sea or a man on a bender. He pretended not to see Doc, and Doc pretended not to see him.

Doc was on his second whiskey when three men and a woman came up on his left side. The leader-or at least the one in the front-was careful to keep a respectful distance.

"Doctor Holliday?" the lead man asked.

He was tall, broad, red-cheeked behind gingery stubble. A healthy-looking fellow with his s.h.i.+rt collar open in the heat. Doc's hand crept up to check his own b.u.t.ton.

"I am," Doc said. "But I'm pretty sure I don't owe you any money."

The man said, "The opposite, sir. We are hoping for the opportunity to pay you some."

Doc let his hand rest on the side of his whiskey gla.s.s, but didn't lift it. The pain in his head wasn't going away.

He asked, "Who might you be?"

"Reuben," the man said. "Jeremy. We hear there's an old wreck out in the desert. We hear you've been there."

"Once," Doc allowed, cautiously. "On my way into Tombstone."

"We want to hire you to take us there."

"Not up to it today, I'm afraid."

"Doctor Holliday-"

But Doc turned back to the bar, and the man didn't persist. He and his friends formed a huddle by the vacant faro table, whispering an argument Doc was pleased to ignore until he spotted a flash of dirty yellow and black. Headed that way.

Ringo stopped about four feet off from Reuben and his group and cleared his throat. "I can take you out to the wreck."

Doc put his forehead on his palm.

"And you would be?"

"John Ringo," Ringo said. "I know this desert like my hand."

Doc took a deep breath and let it out again. He still had half a gla.s.s of whiskey.

And he had half a mind to let Ringo try it. These men might be easterners, but the leather on their holsters was worn soft and slick. They might give the cowboy a harder accounting than he was reckoning on if he lured them into an ambush.

He managed to make himself wait another three whole seconds with that line of thought before turning his stool. "Reuben."

Reuben looked up from haggling with Ringo. "Doctor Holliday."

Ringo shot Doc a wild look full of bitter promises. Doc shrugged. "You better run along, Johnny."

Ringo opened his mouth-Doc could almost see him forming the words You haven't heard the last of me. And then he shut it in silence, squared his shoulders, and stalked off like a wet cat.

Doc said, "I'll go. This once. I won't make it a habit, sir."

One of the men behind Reuben leaned to another and said something excitedly, incomprehensibly, making Doc want to blow his nose to clear his ears.

Neither that nor Ringo's performance were what sent the chill of recognition through Doc. He winced and rubbed his eyes.

Reuben said, "What?"

"Deja vu. d.a.m.n. That's funny." Doc heard his own tones ring flat as the rattle of a captured snake. A sinking and inexplicable sense of futility sucked at him. "I'd swear I've had every word of this conversation some d.a.m.n other time."

The Horrid Glory of Its Wings "Speaking of livers," the unicorn said, "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."

-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn My mother doesn't know about the harpy.