Somando
The stranger looked exactly the same age as he had on the night he’d killed him
The train pulled in like a scene from a silent movie. The music was drifting over the town but the perfect replica of an old diesel train that glided over the poppy trail and stopped at the station was silent. One man got off the train and then it glided away toward the coast. He was dressed in a black wool coat open in the front to display his weapons, and he stood with his hands on his hips, looking at Memphis, who stopped and remembered to be respectful.
The new arrival was four inches taller than Memphis, but Memphis was only five nine. They had the same wiry build. But unlike Memphis, the stranger wasn’t respectful. Memphis could duplicate in himself the musculature of the facial expression behind the placid indifference of the stranger’s respectful mask, and when he did so, he found that it was connected to an inner arrogance.
Memphis knew their eyes were transmitting and receiving information during the brief moment they looked fully at each other. He didn’t know how much he had given away, but he knew his defenses had taken a shock. The stranger looked exactly the same age as he had on the night he’d killed him.
The shock unbalanced him by sending waves through the field. Memphis was aware of them without following them or being identified with them. They were strings of numbers which stimulated sensory memories, and they were connected to the music coming from the Mission. One was a string in which he had never killed anybody as a child, but had the memory of this man imprinted because he would have to kill him. Another was that when the man died in one universe the identity shifted to another. Time was meaningless here. He could as easily appear now as at any other moment.
Memphis recalled the image of this man’s eyes when he heard the click of the hammer as it (he smiled at the Freudian wording) cocked, and he turned to look at the baby in the doorway. There was the moment of recognition that can seem to last forever. What an absurd thing it must have been to see a child with a gun sticking out in front of him, aimed at you. Your instinct is to look away, like you’d look away from eye contact with a bad dog. It didn’t matter. You were already dead. Things were directed by an unseen hand.
The visual memory was the same every time. The stranger was blown backward and he never moved again. Until today he’d never moved again. Now he was leading the porters toward the Ash Fork Hotel. Memphis could hear him talking to one of them about his name.
“Of course it’s an unusual name,” he was saying, “especially if you spell it. You spell it with the line down though the S, so that it is pronounced more like Z, $omando. A name that is both serious but with a Latin accessibility.”
“Not human,” Memphis said softly.
“Are you on business, Mr. $omando?” the porter asked. He was a black man, highly paid because of his authenticity. His voice was skilled, affecting a Mississippi accent with a hint of vanilla, his large frame was in the thrall of an exaggerated politeness so as to not frighten people should they notice how powerfully built he was.
$omando flashed another look at Memphis, whose first attention was on the train moving away in the distance. But his second attention felt the look and examined the eyes again.
“Business? Yes. I’m in the security business,” $omando said loudly enough for Memphis to hear.
Memphis heard a childish vanity in the voice. He knew it portended an aggressive charm and a vindictive revenge for any wounding. And he knew that this was one clever goddamned $omacorpse. He’d been fooled by it at first, and thought it was human, but now he was sure it was a holographic projection into an energy field solidifying its form through a probability drive. “You’re just a fucking bank account,” he said, loud enough for $omando to hear him.
The $omacorpse stiffened with wounded pride, and moved off toward his hotel. He was imagining killing the Mexican, and the image sent a surge of pleasure though his chips.