you are. And you’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off, won t you?” Again a pause. A frown, of sorts. He was entering some new place. “Because—the Entities—the Entities—look, I tried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—'Anson’s eyes went wide. Ron had never called him “Anse.” Who was he talking to?
“The Entities—”
Yet another pause. A very long one.
“I’m listening, Dad.”
That smile. Those eyes.
That pause that did not end.
“Dad?”
“He isn’t going to say anything else, Anson,” Cassandra told him quietly.
I ttried, Anse—I goddamn well tried—
Khalid carved a magnificent stone almost overnight. Anson made sure that he spelled Jeffrey correctly. They all stood together in the cemetery—it was still raining, the day of his burial—and Rosalie said a few words about her brother, and Paul spoke, and Peggy, and then Anson, who got as far as saying, “He was a lot better man than he thought he was,” and bit his lip and picked up the shovel.
A fog of grief hung over Anson for days. The subtraction of Ron from his life left him in a weirdly free-floating state, unchecked as he was, now, by Ron’s constant presence, his wisdom, his graceful witty spirit, his poise and balance. The loss was tremendous and irrevocable.
But then, though the sense of mourning did not recede, a new feeling began to take hold of him, a strange sense of liberation. It was as if he had been imprisoned all these years, encased within Ron’s complex, lively, mercurial self. He—sober-sided, earnest, even plodding—had never felt himself to be the fiery Ron’s equal in any way. But now Ron was gone. Anson no longer needed to fear the disapproval of that active, unpredictable mind. He could do anything he wanted, now.
Anything. And what he wanted was to drive the Entities from the world.
The words of his dying father echoed in his mind:
—The Entities—the Entities—
—You’ll be the one who finally brings the thing off—you’ll be the one—
—The one—the one—
Anson played with those words, moved them this way and that, stood them upside down and rightside up again. The one. The one. Both Ron and the Colonel, he thought—and Anse too, in a way—had lived all those years waiting, suspended in maddening inaction, dreaming of a world without the Entities but unwilling, for one reason or another, to give the order for the launching of a counterattack. But now he was in command. The Carmichael of the era, Ron had said. Was he to live a life of waiting too? To go through the slow cycle of the years up here on this mountain, looking forever toward the perfect time to strike? There would never be a perfect time. They must simply choose a time, be it perfect or not, and at long last begin to lash back at the conquerors.
There was no one to hold him back, any more. That was a little frightening, but, yes, it was liberating, too. Ron’s death seemed to him to be a signal to act.
He found himself wondering if this was some kind of manic overreaction to his father’s death.
No, Anson decided. No. It was simply that the time had come to make the big move.
The pounding in his head was starting again. That terrible pressure, the furious knuckles knocking from within. This is the time, it seemed to be saying. This is the time. This is the time.
If not now, when?
When?
Anson waited two weeks after the funeral.
On a bright, crisp morning he came striding into the chart room. “All right,” he said, looking about the room at Steve and Charlie and Paul and Peggy and Mike. “I think that the right moment to get things started has arrived. I’m sending Tony down to L.A. to take out Prime.
Nobody said a word against it. Nobody dared. This was Anson’s party all the way. He had that look in his eye, the look that came over him when something started throbbing inside his head, that unanswerable something that told him to get on with the job of saving the world.
Down there in Los Angeles, Andy was in business in a big way, or at least semi-big. Mickey Megabyte, ace pardoner. It beat sitting around the ranch listening to the sheep go baa.
He found a little apartment right in the middle of his district, just south of Wilshire, and for the first two days sat there wondering how people who needed a pardoner’s services were going to know how to find him. But they knew. It wasn’t necessary for him to beat the bushes for jobs. In his first week he did four pardoning deals, splicing himself neatly and expertly into the system to reverse a driver’s-license cancellation for a man who lived on Country Club Drive, to cancel a mystifying denial of a marriage permit for a couple from Koreatown, to arrange a visit to relatives in New Mexico for someone who had arbitrarily been refused exit passage from Los Angeles—the Entities were getting tighter and tighter about letting people move about from place to place, God only knew why, but who ever had any answers to questions about Entity policies?—and to maneuver a promotion and a raise for a LACON highway patrolman who was raising two families at opposite ends of the city.
That last one was pushing things a little, doing a hack for a LACON man, but the fellow came to Andy with valid documentation from Mary Canary saying it was safe to take on the job, and Andy risked it. It worked out. So did the others. Everybody paid promptly and Andy obediently flipped his commissions over to the guild right away and all was well.
So: the pardoning career of Mickey Megabyte had begun. Easy money for not very much work. He would begin to yearn for something more challenging after a while, he knew. But Andy didn’t expect to spend his life at this, after all. It was his plan to pile up bank accounts for himself all around the continent and then write himself an exit ticket that would let him get out of L.A. and see a little of the world.
After the fourth pardon came a surprise, though. Someone from Mary Canary’s staff dropped around and said to him, “You like to do things a little too well, don’t you, kid?”
“What?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you? You can’t make every fucking pardon you write a perfect one. You do that all the time, you’re bound to attract the attention of the Entities, and that’s not something you really want to do, is it? Or anything that we would want you to do.”
Andy didn’t get it. “I’m supposed to write bad pardons some of the time, is that what you’re saying? Pardons that don’t go through?”
“Right. Some of them, anyway. I know, I know, it’s a professional thing with you. You have a rep to maintain and you want to look good. But don’t look too good, you know what I mean? For your own sake. And also it makes everybody else look bad, because nobody else does perfect work. Once word gets around town about you, customers will start coming in here from other districts, and you can see the problem with that. So flub a few, Mickey. Stiff a client, now and then, okay? For your own sake. Okay? Okay?”
That was hard, being expected to do less than perfect work. It went against his nature to do an incompetent hack. But he’d have to write a couple of stiffs before long, he supposed, just to keep the guild guys happy.
At the beginning of the second week a woman came to him who wanted a transfer to San Diego. Nice-looking woman, twenty-eight, maybe thirty years old, job in the LACON judiciary wing, had some reason for wanting to change towns but couldn’t swing the transfer arrangements. Tessa, her name was. Fluffy red hair, full red lips, pleasant smile, good figure. Nice. He had always had a thing for older women.
Andy was uneasy about having so many LACON people coming to him for pardons. But this one had the right letter of recommendation too.
He started setting up the hack for her.
Then he said, thinking about the fluffy red hair, the good figure, the week and a half he had just spent sleeping alone in this strange new town, “You know, Tessa, I’ve got an idea. Suppose I write a transfer for both of us, for Florida, or maybe Mexico. Mexico would be nice, wouldn’t it? Cuernavaca, Acapulco, somewhere down there in the sun.” A sudden wild impulse. But what the hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained. “We could have a nice little holiday together, okay? And when we came back you’d go to San Diego, or wherever you wanted, and—”
Andy could see her reaction right away, and it wasn’t a good one.
