It occurred to him, with unwelcome clarity, that the idealistic dancers on the beach had carried the rainbow of living flesh on the inside, and dry, cracked clay on the outside.
His cellular telephone buzzed, and he fumbled it up from between the seats and flipped open the cover. “Yes?” he said furiously after he had switched it on.
“Get your toes aft of the white line, please,” drawled a man’s humorous voice, “and sit your ass down in one of the seats! I’m in control of this bus, and you’re upsetting the children!”
In his first seconds of confusion Armentrout knew he recognized the voice, but he seemed to remember it as disembodied—a ghost?—and this was clearly not a ghost call. The voice and the background breeze-hiss were real, unlike the eternal clattering busy-mess of the group-projected ghost-bar.
“You was comin’ on to my daughter, man,” the voice said now; “You can’t blame me for having got a bit testy, now can you?” Before Armentrout could stammer out anything, the voice went on: “This is Omar Salvoy, and I can’t talk for long. Listen, you and I each got a gun pointed at the other, haven’t we? Mexican standoff. I think we can work together, both eat off the same plate. Here’s the thing—you’d like to get Koot Hoomie Parganas locked up in your clinic, wouldn’t you, in a coma and brain-dead, on perpetual life-support? Or haven’t you thought it through that far?”
It made Armentrout dizzy to hear this voice on the phone speaking his recent, somewhat shameful, thought aloud. “Y-yes,” he said, glancing sideways at Long John Beach and then in the rear-view mirror at the two placid Styrofoam heads. “What you describe is…it could, I guess you’ve figured out that it could, benefit you and me both. But not yet—it would have to be after he had been induced to, uh, officially… take the crown, if you know what I mean. I was just at the Fisher King’s castle, this morning, and it’s very evident from the look of things there that no new king has been consecrated yet. But after that’s occurred, I could set things up so that you and I could both benefit. As you know, I’m uniquely able to set up that scenario, just as you describe it.”
“Ipse dipshit. Now the girls have got some cockamamie idea about restoring the dead king, the old one, to life—I gotta monkeywrench that scheme, that guy is really old, he’s hardened in his thought-paths and likely to be resistant, not like the kid would be.”
“All ROM and no RAM,” agreed Armentrout, though he didn’t see how any of this would matter in a brain-dead body.
“Rom? Ram? Gypsies, sheep? Easy on the mystical, there, Doctor, I want you for science. You do know about how the spirit-transfer thing works, knocking a personality out of somebody’s head?”
“Uh.” Armentrout wiped his forehead and blinked sweat out of his eyes to be able to watch the freeway lanes. “Yes.” I wasn’t being mystical, he thought—doesn’t Salvoy know anything about computers? Oh well, give him the science. “The force that, that holds them in, works the opposite of forces like gravity and electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force, which all get weaker as the, the satellite, say, moves further away from the primary; ghost personalities are more strongly restrained, the further they get out, especially in sane people, but feel no clumping-together force at all if they stay within the mind’s confines. It’s much the same situation as is theorized for the quarks that make up subatomic particles—if they stay close together, they experience what’s called asymptotic—”
“Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to pick up my ass and tote it out of here. I’m at a pay phone—we’ve stopped for gas in King City, and her boyfriend has just ducked off to visit the gents’ and pump the gas. You’d better get up here, right now; and then on to San Fran, apparently—this thing will go a lot smoother if we’ve got a real licensed psychiatrist along, for authority-figuring in case any locals should object to anything. Wave the stethoscope, flourish the prescription pad. I’ll make a point of getting out here again and calling you with more specific directions as we proceed, so Lake your telephone with you, you can do that, can’t you?”
“King City? San Francisco? Certainly, I’ve got the phone with me now. Obviously. But the P—the boy—he’s alive, I gather? Is he in San Francisco? We need—”
“He’s alive, and on his way there. Gotta go—stay by the phone.”
The line was dead, and Armentrout clicked the phone off, closed the cover, and wedged it carefully between the seat and the console. He would have to dig out of the trunk the phone-battery recharger that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter.
His lips were twitching in a brittle, almost frightened grin. There’s no reason why this shouldn’t work, he thought. When the king died eleven days ago, his death opened a temporary drain in the psychic floor locally, so that all my vengeful old California ghosts, at least, were sucked away, leaving me with their abandoned memories and strengths intact and harmless. I was fifty miles away, and my ghosts were banished! That drain has since closed up—but imagine if I could be in the same building with a flatline Fisher King! If we can get the new king on perpetual brain-dead life-support, the drain could be held propped open for…for decades. I’ll be able to outright terminate patients, consume their whole lives, without fear of being hassled by their outraged ghost personalities afterward. And Omar Salvoy will be able to—what? I suppose to evict all the girls from Plumtree’s head, so that he’ll have that youthful body all to himself, to live in.
It’ll be the best of both worlds, Armentrout thought, nodding and smiling twitchily. All the forgiveness that Dionysus’s pagadebiti wine offers, but with the profit from | the sin retained intact too!
He glanced again at Long John Beach and the two heads in the backseat. I may be able to outright ditch the three of you in San Francisco, he thought.
“WHO WERE you calling?” asked Cochran, frowning.
They hadn’t found a Mobil station here in King City, and so they were using I some of the Jenkins woman’s cash at this Shell station, and apparently the Torino’s f tank hadn’t had room for a whole twenty’s worth of gas—Cochran was stuffing a couple of ones into the pocket of his corduroy bell-bottoms. He must have bought the cheapest gas.
Plumtree blinked at him around the aluminum cowl of the pay telephone. There was only a dial tone to be heard from the thoroughly warmed earpiece of the receiver she held in her hand. Cochran looked tired and bed-raggled, she noted, in the cold morning sunlight, and she could see strands of white hair among the disordered brown locks tangled over his forehead.
“It was ringing,” she said, in the old reflexive dismissal of a patch of lost time. | “Nobody on when I picked it up.” She reflected that this might be the literal truth; but she wasn’t happy to find herself reverting to the helpless shuck-and-jive evasions, the poker-table calls that were bluffs because she didn’t know what her hole cards were, so she went on spontaneously, “Let’s get breakfast now, there’s a Denny’s a block back—we can just have coffee with the others at the Cliff House place—and maybe a dessert, if they have some kind of sweetrolls there. And listen, if there’s a Sav-On or someplace open in this town, I’d like to buy some fresh underwear—these panties I’ve got on still say Tuesday on ’em—and Tiffany’s been wearing them.”