“But I don’t know any . . . transforming robots . . . I don’t think.”
“I guess that’s the point,” Hallory says. “You could think of it like meeting your obligations to equally represent minorities on the team. Have you asked yourself, do you have the machine world covered?”
“Honey, I don’t think the machines have a lobby group we need to worry about, unless they’re armed. . . .”
I think briefly at this juncture about Think Tank.
“Next thing you’ll be making suggestions for a fucking superhero with Down’s Syndrome or something. It’s not happening, OK?”
“Zephyr, the numbers are really good.”
“I’m sure they are,” I say.
She waits a beat. “Even for a disabled person, we’re getting feedback that there’s a lot of angles as far as accessories go, there’s even a synergy between the robot guy.”
“There is no robot guy!”
“Only because you’re being so negative about it.”
“Christ, Hallory,” I say, sounding spent. “You know I love you and everything, but you have to listen to what you’re saying here. The two members of my team you’re most interested in don’t exist, and maybe they’re having an affair together? The robot guy and the girl with mechanical legs?”
“It’s not a bad idea.”
“I’m hanging up now. I’ll fax you the final roster when I get the licenses signed off.”
A gravid silence hangs between us. I don’t know if I’m sympathetic just because I want to get into her pants, but I feel guilty about chewing Hallory out and there’s nothing but embarrassed, possibly sullen vibes emanating back down the phone line.
“I’d green light the Red Monolith toy, though,” I say reluctantly. “He would’ve liked that.”
“Cool,” Miss O’Hagan comes back. “I’ll courier you over some new concept art. Where should I, uh, do that?”
“No concept art,” I snap. “He wore red and black, with yellow panels under his arms. And a motorbike helmet, damn it.”
I snap the phone shut and jam it back into its purse hard. I’m fuming with anger and yet mostly I’m just annoyed at myself. I consider annihilating the TV and instead exercise just a modicum of control, giving it enough spark to power it on. The widescreen resolves into a picture of British actors picketing the skyscraper where the Union Jacks have their base. Seeker’s vanishing fortress is certainly a better deal than a headquarters where even a bunch of freakin’ thespianoids can manage to find you. As the small crowds wave their placards, Protector himself appears – the third British mask to bear that name – and tries to settle the crowd with an inaudible speech that soon turns to violence. It’s not a good look as he jets through the crowd bowling women and policemen over, bottles smashing the glass façade of the building lobby. I reflect on an image of his teammate Lionheart, last time he was in Atlantic City, with a beard of puke dribbling from his chin into some stripper’s lap.
I glare at the screen throughout a twelve-minute commercial break, promos for American Hero, Celebrity Heroes, Heroes: Where Are They Now, You Can Be A Hero, Heroes Unlimited, Arena Heroes, Down And Out In Atlantic City and London, and a cooking show with some raven-haired British bint who eyes the camera insouciantly and looks like she’s licking up cum as she devours a mess of chocolate cake and cream on a child’s-sized spoon.
A newsbreak live from the NBN chopper shows some ridiculously buff dude with black hair and a gold cape fucking around the top of the Silver Tower, seemingly inspecting the array of antennae and digital receivers. NBN splices in some of the free-to-air feed Chancel himself provides, giving a fish-eye lensed view of the stranger up close, a furrow to his otherwise fine, completely unfamiliar features.
It’s enough for me. I’m angry and already dressed. I press my mask into place and stomp through to the wallspace and the open window and basically throw myself out and plunge into the glimmering dusk.
*
IT’S ONLY A couple of seconds across the city at the speed I’m travelling. Golden Boy hears me coming and turns as I use the concrete ledge as a brake and snarl, “Who the fuck are you?” as the news copter whirrs around for a new angle.
The other guy has about half-a-foot on me, which isn’t anything unusual as I’ve explained before. I’m just ordinary height. He has shoulders like a bull, black hair in a sort of Imperial Roman cast, a gold circlet around his brows matched by the cape and little sandals. His arms and legs are bare, the rest of him in a clinging reddish blouse, thick belt and trunks.
“A spiritu fornicationis, Domine, libera nos,” he chuckles. “This-a question, it is rhetorical, no?”
“What?”
The foreigner smiles and next thing I know there is immense pain in my chest as eye-beams lance through me. I lose all strength and drop from the air – not a good thing when we’re about forty floors from the ground – and it is only rebounding off the hard concrete ledge that jolts me back into awareness long enough to grab for a hand-hold. Meanwhile, the dude in the cape gives a final once-over to the audio-visual apparatus on the outside of the tower, glances at me, and then rockets heavenward.
I’m a ruin. I only just manage to roll onto the ledge and lay there for long seconds with the smell of my own cooked bacon filling the air despite the competing cross-winds. The news helicopter turns around and a megaphoned voice booms my name a few times before I manage to sit up, gasping, actually trying not to break into tears of embarrassed, pained frustration as I probe the wound to my chest in disbelief.
“Who the hell was that?”
The leather is scorched and peeling and basically destroyed. Likewise for the top-most layers of my skin and pectoral muscle. It hurts like a motherfucker and if it wasn’t for my own persistent physiognomy I’d be winging my way to the ER right now. All I know is I need to get somewhere private and strip down. Victim of my own adventures as I have been so many times these past years, I’m a veteran at this routine and manage to get to my feet without much more than wincing. I remember once seeing a Canadian hero called Manowar do the same thing after a few of Cogito’s goons triple-teamed us with some of these industrial lasers he’d whipped into weapons. Poor bastard didn’t realize he’d been nearly cut in half by the beams and stood only to watch his intestines and liver pour onto the ground. I think somehow he lived, though he’s been institutionalized ever since. I guess you don’t adjust easy to seeing your insides in the dirt.
I give the chopper a little wave and a wan smile and shrug, oh well, for the cameras. I have to shake myself off a moment to ascertain that my powers haven’t deserted me completely, and then I do the crouch thing and pretty much abscond from the whole disaster, avoiding the news loops for the next two days that show me getting my ass handed to me from pretty much every angle Amadeus Chancel could provide.
Everyone’s happy enough to lend their own little comments to my performance, but they don’t even think to ask who the hell was my opponent. The only time anyone even thinks to address the matter – and to add insult to injury, it’s Nightwind – the panelists just shrug their shoulders and move on to the next schmuck.
From my sickbed, with the wound healing nicely, I scrub Chancellor’s name from the ‘potentials’ list and work the phone, whittling down the final candidates via conference call as the big night comes ever closer.
Zephyr 4.7 “To Contemplate The Higher World”
FINALLY I do not have to explain to my two mothers why I reschedule our dinner. With Zephyr’s secret out, I am a rare recipient of motherly concern, double-barreled, after I solve hours of satellite TV programming shortfall by dint of my poor performance on the roof of the city’s telecommunications hub. I call out for pizza and Chinese and Turkish food and convince my well-wishers it’s “just a flesh wound” and dose my incinerated chest with salt washes and iodine and a couple of tubes of the “Human Regenerative Tissue Paste Type III” we looted from a KAAS stronghold years back.
I’m on my feet in no
time, and in a new suit.
At least the break gives me the chance to catch up on my homework. We’ve whittled down our team to six members and three in reserve, Seeker and I both chickening out of telling Mastodon he can only be a back-up. I’ve also spent more hours with Sal Doro’s spreadsheet than I’d care to remember – and while I now have a far more intricate understanding of the Mafia’s corporate web in this country, I’m at a loss to explain why Azzurro’s flunkies would be busting in to rob a lab at Mys-Tech that he technically already owns. The Excel document has given me a half-dozen lairs to check, once I have the time. I’m starting to think I need a sidekick, but I remember where that reasoning got me last time. No deal. Perhaps it could make an interesting training exercise for Tessa.
Speaking of whom, she’s invited herself along to the Grand Lesbian Paternity-Revealing Dinner as well, figuring she may as well be privy to the information that could well loom as large in her life’s future as mine. It’s a weird sort of logic I can’t fault.
Along the way I call in to the Wallachian Fortress, which rendezvous with me through space-time at the corner of Imperial and Fourth, the alleyway beside a burger barn, and Seeker’s there along with Vulcana, all her limbs present and accounted for, but my efforts at witty banter fall short with something dark and sensitive in Connie’s eyes, and when I try and pull her aside to ask what’s wrong, the willowy, rubbery woman just shrugs me off and disappears into her own quarters.
“Vulcana’s staying here?” I ask.
It’s just me and Seeker, awkward again as my co-captain dusts dandruff from my shoulder.
“Yes, there’s room enough to house several thousand, if we’re ever forced to.”
“So, like, I could have quarters here too, if I wanted?”
Seeker nods. “I do. It might be good to be . . . closer.”
“For like meetings and stuff,” I say.
“Yes.”
I chew the inside of my cheek for a few seconds.
“So do they have wi-fi, or what’s the deal?”
Seeker shakes her head.
“Come with me,” she says and actually leads me by the arm from one dank medieval chamber and into a hallway of similar dimensions. “There’s one last meeting we’ve got to have.”
“I think you’ve used that line already.” I smirk and add, “You’re not just going to take me somewhere quiet and jump my bones, are you?”
Seeker aka Loren stops dead in the dungeon hall and there’s a silence so complete I can actually hear what sounds like the clanking of chains. I’m half expecting something from the Wandering Monster Table to come around the corner. Instead, it’s just Seeker’s eyes that well up.
“You think that’s funny?”
“Christ, I was just trying to be light-hearted.”
“Stop blaspheming, Zephyr,” Seeker says abruptly. “The monks have been complaining.”
“I thought you said this wasn’t about Christianity?”
“It’s complicated,” she replies.
“Look, I’m sorry if I offended you. It was just a gag.”
“I know,” Seeker replies, hurt still. “Everything’s just a gag to you, a joke.”
I say nothing on the grounds I’ll otherwise incriminate myself.
Seeker dips her head and there’s another awkward pause, nothing moving except my offsider’s hairstyle, doing the underwater thing with not a beach in sight. To break the silence I consider asking her if she knows any transforming robot-type guys, but this seems unlikely. She turns, downcast still, and I’m as surprised as the next guy, figuratively speaking, when her hand reaches out and takes my fingers seemingly of its own volition. We stand there a moment, Seeker sniffling, and while I’m taken back to the moment of my liberation at Twilight’s Grant Turkey Roast, obviously I am the only one of the pair unable to more easily connect with the raw feelings that still emanate from that encounter. I gently tug my fingers free and Seeker’s hand drops limply to her side.
“Wh-who is it we’ve got to see?” I ask.
She takes a juddery breath, frustrated now and reeling herself in as she deftly wipes her eyes with the backs of her palms and sweeps her hair needlessly free and turns back down the corridor, leading the way as we bang through a massive oak door and down some curling stone steps.
“Simon Magus.”
*
“SIMON MAGUS?” I say, voice needlessly shrill. “I haven’t seen that guy for years.”
“I think that’s the point, Zephyr,” Seeker replies. “I don’t think the world’s foremost magician keeps regular office hours.”
At the bottom of the steps I am surprised to see pink light spilling from a cloudy portal. If I recall my last encounter with Simon Magus, after kicking butt against a small army of ensorcelled fairytale creatures, we fell out over what to do with the Welsh Dragon – an actual Welsh dragon. Call me sentimental if you will, but I think if there’s not many dragons in the world we should be trying to keep them around, even with their occasional rampages. Simon saw it otherwise. The Welsh nature god, which is what the dragon effectively was, now works in a bilingual second-hand bookshop in Aberystwyth and is married to a drab slip of a girl who used to be another of the magician’s enemies until he transformed her as well.
“We’re not . . . going through this portal, are we?” I ask, struggling to clear my throat and not sound too ginger.
“It’s not a portal. It’s just a door like any other,” Seeker explains.
“Well . . . it doesn’t look like it.”
“That’s because we are in the catacombs now,” Seeker says. “There’s no need to maintain solid-state illusions for the benefits of corporeal minds.”
“Corporeal minds?”
“Like yours.”
“Oh,” I say. “Yours too?”
“Not once we are in the Otherrealms.”
“Not those again.”
“We’re in the heart of the machine now, Zephyr. Or in the bowels, to be more accurate.”
She gestures to the fluffy-looking and I am sure quite harmless void. I keep expecting things to slip through with mandibles and vaginas for eyes.
“This is the interface of pure ideational energy, what drives the ship.”
“Ship?” I say. “I thought it was a castle.”
“Come on Zephyr, you know it moves.”
“Sure.”
I shrug and imagine something like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise back in Kirk and Spock’s days.
“I know this baby can travel in space-time. I just thought you’d punch in some numbers or something.”
“That’s not really how it operates.”
“I figured.”
“I’ve only been calling it technology for ease of language so far,” Seeker goes on. “The Wallachians made their scientific advances in a parallel universe and before we had the sort of Empiricist understanding of the universe so dominant today. The fortress is powered by an ideational drive, one of the most advanced technologies in the universe – so advanced, to push the Asimov line, that it looks like magic to most of us.”
“Ideational,” I say with a blank expression. “You mentioned that before when talking about these Otherrealms of yours.”
“The Otherworld, the Afterlife, Hell, Nirvana, the Happy Hunting Grounds, whatever you want to call it – these are all derived from pure ideational space. An ideational drive is a propulsive mechanism that uses this energy, the purest energy in the cosmos, to move along.
“But it travels using ideas, and as you can understand, I am sure,” she says without a great deal of confidence, “in the history of the world and all space-time, as you call it, there’s a lot of different ideas. Empiricism, which assigns everything rational, codifiable, quantifiable numbers, is just one of these.”
“I think you’re trying to explain to me why we didn’t just type in August 12, 823 when we buried Ash and the Drill the other day.”
“I am.”
She gives a wan smil
e that is one part apology, another part self-acknowledged geek, and the rest just total cuteness.
“I guess the shortest way to explain it is that the ship travels along discursive lines generated by ideas.”
“Christ, those French university types must just love you,” I say and shake my head. “It still seems kinda imprecise.”
“Maybe. But when you start throwing in a view of the multiverse that takes in quantum realities, you’d be surprised that when you ‘do the math’ – and yes I’m being metaphoric when I say that – the Wallachians’ system is actually far more elegant.”
I point at the swirling, glowing fog.
“And you’re still trying to tell me that isn’t a portal?”
Seeker laughs, the first one that’s sounded genuine in years.
“Okay. Yes, Zephyr, it’s a portal. You’ve well and truly made it a portal now. For me, though, it’s just a doorway. A doorway to a space. So let’s walk through.”
She disappears through the glowing cotton candy as I ask, “What space?”
We step out onto a tiled terrace, the view over the low stone walls being a valley filled with mist, the domes of some enormous, monastic-looking architecture rising up to reflect back the distant mountains, a shining sea, an alien sun enameling the trammeled surface, tiny blips that might be ships except they float too high to be on the water.
There are a number of low wooden tables and benches and a few Asian men dressed like Taoist monks eating quickly and efficiently and giving the impression they are needed quickly elsewhere. There’s just one Westerner in a long white coat and matching pants, a lavender tie at the unloosened throat of his shirt the only color in the whole ensemble. Even Simon Magus’s short, male model hair is preternaturally silver, not dissimilar to his grey eyes. Yet he stands and smiles warmly enough as we appear, and strangely awkward in my leather gear, I crane around and note the impressiveness of the Wallachian castle superimposed on the other side of the quadrangle.
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