Asimov's SF, April 2003 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-10T14:01:30+00:00

The Madness of Crowds by Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley’s latest novel is Whole Wide World. His next book, White Devils, will be published in 2004.

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To answer some of your questions:

Yes, I really am Bill McAbe’s older, not-so-smart, and much-less-famous brother;

No, I don’t know where Bill is, but I’m certain that he didn’t plant the bomb that blew up his apartment and killed his assistant, and I do think he’s still alive: sue me if you think I’m prejudiced;

Yes, I do know why he disappeared. He told me everything, and toward the end I was part of it.

How do you know that I’m who I say I am? How do you know if what I’m going to tell you is true? Be patient, friend. I’ll get to that.

* * *

As far as I’m concerned, it began three weeks ago, when I got back from a disappointing dinner party (at which a very good friend of mine tried to match me with someone totally unsuitable), to find my answer phone blinking. It was the manager of this club that I happen to know. He said that he had someone in his office who claimed to be my brother. One of the security guys had found him prowling around on the roof, and would I like to come down and sort it out or would I prefer he called the cops?

I went right over, and it was lucky for Bill that this guy, Stavros, a three hundred pound Greek sweetheart, happened to owe me a favor after I had designed the club’s wet room at cost price. I got Bill out of there after only a half hour of kissing ass, making all kinds of promises that it would never happen again. I even got Bill’s stuff back, although the security guy had stomped on it pretty thoroughly, thinking it was some kind of recording equipment; the club, a very discreet consensual sex place, was highly sensitive about that kind of thing. Well, it was recording equipment of a kind, although it wasn’t a video camera or a tape recorder. Bill hugged the bag to his chest all through the ride downtown to his loft apartment in Tribeca, for once in his life clamming up—you know Bill, you know how unusual that is—and refusing to tell me what he had been doing up there on the roof, fussing with his bleeding nose and saying that maybe he’d let me know in a couple of days, providing the Samoan asshole who’d kicked his stuff up and down the stairs hadn’t compromised the samples.

I didn’t push it. I was tired, I had a headache from too much wine and Stavros’s cigar smoke. I even forgot about Bill’s promise, until I got a call three days later.

Bill and I both lived in New York City, and we saw each other once a month for a pizza pie lunch at Hot John’s, in the Village, where Bill would suck me dry of gossip about

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