Evil Ascending

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Realizing she had no choice but to return them, Rajani thought she would simply direct the children to the police in Flagstaff. Despite stasis, she remembered seeing ample evidence—on television—that the police would gladly pack the children into one of their black-and-white vehicles and take them directly home. When she began to suggest this strategy, Dorothy nixed it instantly. "The state of Arizona is last in social spending, Rajani. In Rumanian orphanages, they tell the kids to clean their plates because there are starving children in Arizona who would love to have whatever they leave."

  For a moment or two the sharp resentment Rajani sensed from Dorothy seemed out of place, but she recalled plenty of cases she'd studied in which the disadvantaged were suspicious of authorities. So, despite what she knew of the police from "Cagney and Lacey" and "Barney Miller," she fell back to a second line of defense. Unfortunately, Magnum, PI and Jessica Fletcher did not have phone listings in Arizona, and the local paper had no ad in it for the Equalizer.

  Realizing she was on her own didn't depress her. She found her mission oddly revitalizing after the long trek south and east. If I cannot find their father, how can I expect to locate this Coyote or help defeat Fiddleback? Resolved to finding a way into Flagstaff and acknowledging that even the A-team would find this difficult, she set about organizing a plan.

  Daizaimoku, she quickly discovered, owned the whole city and controlled the vast majority of it. To protect its interests, the multinational corporation had fortified the city with a series of trenches and walls that reminded Rajani of pictures she'd seen of Berlin—except these lacked the gay and happy graffiti that suggested hope to those on the wrong side of the wall in Germany. Armed men walked the walls, and patrols with slavering monster-dogs made a circuit on a random schedule on the ground outside the tallest wall.

  "Daisymuck controls the east and south gates. The Mormon enclave controls the west gate and the Indians control the north. No way we're getting in either of the last two—we're not Indians and I don't want to be caught by the Mormons." Dorothy defiantly folded her arms across her chest. "We came out of the east gate, but that's because Andy stopped by his place first. We lived closer to the south gate."

  Rajani frowned as she considered and rejected strategies. Squatting around a small fire amid the vast refugee camp outside Flagstaff, she found concentrating virtually impossible. Dirty, scrawny children ran pell-mell through the tent-and-cardboard city, screaming in terror or squealing in play. Roving gangs of men and women cruised through the camp like schools of sharks looking for prey to rob. Brain-blasted derelicts wallowed in their delusions, mumbling to themselves and jealously guarding collections of worthless trinkets as if they were the keys to the universe.

  "I have seen the guards let some people into Flagstaff, Dorothy. Why would they do that?"

  "Proxxers, like my dad."

  "I don't understand."

  Dorothy sat down beside her and checked both ways to see no one was watching. She dug deep into her clothing and pulled out a laminated blue identification card. It had the Daizaimoku logo in hologram on it and her name and thumbprint in red. Micro-fine type on the front and back defined all the rights and privileges she earned by possessing the card.

  Dorothy's voice dropped into a hoarse whisper tinged with fear. "This is my Daisymuck ID card. It's blue because I can't vote, but I got it because my dad has signed his vote proxies over to the Corp. For his vote we get to eat, have housing and stuff. It ain't a whole lot but . . ." Dorothy's stomach growled.

  "It's something." Rajani likewise kept her voice low. "Can't that get you back into the city?"

  She shook her head. "Only in the company of a valid adult card. The folks that get in have a card from somewhere else that can be exchanged for one with Daisymuck. I have Mickey's card, so we could return if you had a white card."

  Rajani smiled slowly. "If I had a card, I could go in and they'd give me a Daizaimoku card, right? Then I could go in and out at will? I could come out and get you?"

  Dorothy nodded slowly. "Yeah, but finding a card to exchange is tough." She slipped her blue card into her clothes again as a sharp-eyed gang of adults wandered past. "The rovers are looking for cards that will get them in, too."

  "Couldn't I, ah . . ." What is the word I'm looking for? ". . . forge one?"

  Even Mickey giggled at that idea.

  Dorothy looked at her closely for a second, then shook her head. "For a gangbanger from Eclipse, you sure can be a Snow White. These cards have special fibers worked through them to prevent forgery. The microtype is virtually impossible to duplicate. Not only that, but if they detected a forgery, they'd take you out and shoot you."

  "For forgery?"

  Dorothy nodded solemnly. "Daizaimoku owns the votes of the proxxers. They use them to make the laws. They could be using them right now to pass a law that says squatting outside Flagstaff is a capital crime, and they could shoot all of us."

  "But that would be illegal." Rajani blinked in surprise. "This is still the United States, isn't it?"

  "Sure, so 10 years from now some court somewhere says what happened was wrong and someone gets fined. Big deal. They own Flag, they write the laws, they administer justice—their justice." She reached over and tousled her brother's hair.

  "Let me look at your card again." Rajani forced all distraction away as Dorothy produced the small, blue card. Rajani took it from her and studied it closely. She memorized how it looked and what it said. She cataloged its weight and texture and temperature. She flipped it over and back, then looked over the layout on the card again. Once she had every little detail fixed in her mind, she slipped the card back to Dorothy.

  "What's another corp they would likely have seen here, but wouldn't find so familiar that they'd be able to spot a fake right off the bat?"

  Dorothy shrugged. "Maybe one of the Phoenix corps, like Sumitomo-Dial or Genentech-Carbide." She looked around through the litter surrounding their little campsite. Amid a small pile of metal scraps that Mickey had gathered up, she found the bent top of a tin of Vienna sausages. She straightened it out against her thigh, then handed it to Rajani. "There, Genentech-Carbide All-Natural Simulated Koktail Weenies. Their logo's in the corner."

  Good, even close to the right size for the card. Rajani used her right thumbnail to score a line in the piece of metal, then she tore the aluminum along that line. She scraped the torn edge along a rock to dull it, then quickly brandished it. "What do you think?"

  Dorothy shivered and pulled Mickey close. "I think you stand a better chance of finding a kinky guard and working a deal with him than getting them to accept that as an ID card."

  Rajani glanced up at the night sky. "Another hour or two, and then I go." She smiled a devilish grin. "This will work. Trust me."

  Rajani waited until the wee hours of the night to make her approach. Out of range of Mickey's constant anxiety, she opened herself up to the thoughts and feelings of the three men on duty at the southern gate. The two armed guards who challenged those who approached both seemed sleepy, though their level of mental activity started a slow climb as she approached. The third man, sitting in a glassed-in cage in the center of the 15-foot-thick wall, had a flat-level of brain activity which Rajani had come to associate with a drug-induced coma or watching television.

  "Need a card exchange." Rajani flashed her fake ID at the man approaching her. He hesitated, and she sensed confusion in him. She pushed her hat back on her head, and he looked up into her eyes. Locked!

  She projected into his brain a composite image made from Dorothy's ID card and the logo from the wiener tin. His confusion spiked into panic, but she sent sensations of embarrassment at having made a mistake and welcome relief at having recognized that fact. The man blushed, then shook his head. Right along with her, he wondered how he could ever have thought this harmless woman was a threat.

  He waved her on through the gate to the interior man. As she approached him, Rajani forced her racing heart to calm. Dr. Chandra's e
xperiments had shown her to be very competent in manipulating and reading living creatures. Unfortunately for her, unlike other alien species, she showed no aptitude whatsoever for computer cracking or being able to mentally guide and influence machines.

  A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In this case, it's Immigration Officer Grant, here. Rajani smiled sweetly at the man in the cage and saw the small image of a television reflected in his glasses. As he looked up at her she sensed resentment at being disturbed, but she let him know she'd be no trouble at all. A routine card issue, she would be hardly more time than the vertblok cutting into the movie on the TV.

  A small tray slid out from the wall. A panel rose up like an alligator's upper jaw. "Put the card in here, please." The microphone and synthesizer made his voice tinny and mechanical. Rajani immediately felt the fragile link she had established with him crumbling.

  He needs to look at me again. She held the card out, then hesitated. The man's anger began to build, but the television distracted him. He waited with his hand on the withdrawal lever for the basket as tiny pictures flashed across his glasses. "C'mon, put the card in." Along with his demand came the first inkling of suspicion.

  Rajani fought down her panic and read his full name from his identification tag. "Bob Grant. Do you have a cousin named John?"

  Grant's head came up and their gazes met. "John? Yes."

  Suspicion continued to climb, but anger slowly backed off. Rajani caught fragments of memories from the Immigration officer. "I thought so. I can see the family resemblance." More images came through and she quickly sifted them for any solid sort of detail she could latch onto. "I knew him up in Taos years ago."

  A moment's confusion washed over the man's face. "Taos? But John never . . ."

  "It was a vacation. He was off on a lark. You know how he was." She smiled softly and looked down. "Only a week, but I'll never forget him." She pulsed sexual innuendo out with her statement, and got more puzzlement back in return. That confused her for a moment, then she sent Grant a revision of her image in which she sharpened her features a bit and let the hint of stubble dot her chin.

  Her quick sex change made Grant blush, and she felt an urge on his part to get rid of this evidence of his cousin's unnatural life-style. "Are you sure you want in here? Daizaimoku doesn't put up with any strangeness. They're very conservative here."

  "I know," she admitted as she looked up and softened her image again. "That was a time before I found out who I was and had my surgery." She smiled as she pushed a wave of confusion over Grant, then followed it with a quick one-two punch of exhaustion, and a vain hope that the damned reader wouldn't force him into preparing the card manually.

  Her assault succeeded in blasting Grant's rudimentary mental defenses into kindling. To him, she was a transsexual/homosexual who had not settled for just a sex change. She'd gone so far as to tattoo her body black and gold and have some alterations done to her eyes. She was definitely a weird one, which was just exactly what he didn't need, especially during the middle of the Sylvester Stallone Comedy Film Festival. Why my shift?

  Rajani took advantage of his vulnerability and pushed him. "I remember John talking about the time you went fishing and those dogs came after you. He said he was angry that he got bit and you didn't, but when that farmhand nursed him back to health and awakened him, well, he considered it a blessing in disguise."

  Guilt gushed from Grant like oil from a ruptured pipeline. Rajani sent a message back through the waves of emotion pouring from the man. I don't want this on my shift, she sent. She'll be trouble if she gets in, and I don't want that on me. Why couldn't she have come back during the day?

  The spark of an idea began in his brain and her assurances that he was brilliant fanned it to life. Grant smiled at her from his cage. "Look, because you're one of John's friends, I'm going to give you a temp pass. Once you're inside, you can get a card at a center. That way you can keep your old card just in case you head back to wherever." He winked at her to assure her that he was doing her a favor.

  "You are even more of a squared-away guy than John said, Bob." She palmed her fake card as the metal tray retracted into the wall. Grant hastily scrawled something on a sheet of paper, then shoved it into the tray and back out to her. She took it, nearly laughed at the illegible signature at the bottom, then winked at him.

  "Maybe I'll look you up when I get settled, okay, Bob?"

  "Sure. Drinks are on me," he smiled in contrast to the panic he was projecting. Rajani let his panic grow rapidly and sowed his mind with confusion. So much so, in fact, that it would be four days before he wondered why, after he gave her the pass, she wandered back out in the squatters' camp.

  The immigration officer at the east gate accepted the temporary pass and issued her an official pass with the click of a half-dozen computer buttons. "Leslie Grant" legitimately entered Flagstaff with her two step-children in tow. Dorothy took charge of the expedition once they passed through the outer wall. Mickey let Rajani hold his hand as they trooped through the streets after his sister.

  Rajani sensed Dorothy's disappointment as they reached the destination she'd directed them toward. "Dammit, they've shifted things again. This was our contiminimum block, but it's been changed."

  "Don't you mean con-do-min-ium?" Rajani looked at the building in front of which Dorothy had stopped. The exterior had been painted a standard khaki tan and looked as if it had some flat sort of metal siding on it. Each apartment was marked by a single window in the street end of the building. Along the side, Rajani saw ribbed siding that added some texture to the building, but no windows or doors on that side. She saw the start of balconies and railing on the back side and assumed stairs there provided access to each of the four floors.

  The building itself had no street number, but beneath each window, in foot-high letters, she saw an eight-digit number. "What was your address, Dorothy?"

  "We lived in #49337629." She pointed at the third floor and along to the third apartment from the far end. "It used to be there, but now it's gone. And, yes, I did mean contiminimum. You have to have these down in Phoenix."

  Mickey pointed off along the street. "Uane!"

  Dorothy followed her brother's line of sight and smiled. "Yes, a crane. C'mon."

  Holding firmly on to Mickey's hand, Rajani followed Dorothy down the street. As they traveled, she saw a number of other apartment complexes that looked as if they had been built out of the same sort of materials as the first one they'd looked at, but these had a different shape. One was a pyramid and another had two holes in the center. While each looked to Rajani to be different in overall shape, each could be broken own into small, boxy apartment components.

  It's like dwellings put together from building blocks. Rajani saw the crane lifting a metal container and slowly lowering it into place on a new stack of buildings. They used to ship things in containers like this before I went into stasis. Now they cut a window in them and house people. As the box descended, two workers snapped power and plumbing connectors in place, linking the upper apartment with the one below it.

  "There, on the bottom row, that's our apartment." Dorothy started crossing a side street and heading toward the building.

  Rajani grabbed her arm. "Wait. They're still building there. Is it safe?"

  Dorothy frowned at her. "Of course it's safe. You ride for a while, then there's a bump and it's business as usual."

  "You mean you stay in the thing when it is moved?"

  Dorothy answered her with a withering stare. "You've never had a contiminimum moved on you?"

  Rajani shook her head. "No, never. Why would they move it?"

  The girl shrugged. "The Mormon Polys must have moved some folks in to unbalance this district." She pulled her arm free from Rajani's grasp and continued to the building. The man operating the crane shouted something at her, but she just flipped him off and walked up to apartment #49337629

  . Mickey tugged on Rajani's arm and led her across the stree
t.

  The first thing that hit her about the apartment was the scent of stale beer and even more stale sweat. Its sharp odor made her wince and almost caused her to vomit. At first she thought something must have died in there, then she realized that impression came from the stench combined with the level of mental activity she sensed from inside the dark box.

  Mickey twisted his hand free of hers and went flying through the room. He hugged the shin of the slender, pale man sitting in a recliner. The light from the huge black-and-white television painted the man in cadaverous tones of white and gray. He clutched a beer can in his right hand and stared without blinking at the pictures moving across the screen. Though his left hand rested two inches from Mickey's head, he seemed not to notice his son, and made no move to greet him. The remote control remained in that hand as firmly as if it had been grafted on.

  Rajani looked up as light from a refrigerator splashed out into the room from the middle of the apartment. Dorothy bent over and stuck her head into the white box, then straightened up and cursed. "On the Coors diet again, eh, Dad?" Anger and concern mixed in her voice, and Rajani knew Dorothy feared the worst for both her father and her brother.

  Rajani choked down the lump in her throat. "This is your father?" Contempt filled her words and radiated out from her like sound waves from a tuning fork. Mickey's head snapped up. "This is the reason you wanted to come home?"

  Dorothy closed the refrigerator door, cloaking herself with darkness. "He is my father. We are family." She didn't say it, but Rajani knew Dorothy clung desperately to something that was bad because it was better than having nothing.

  The man in the chair stirred a bit. "Dot? Getcher pa a beer?" His right hand opened, and the can it held dropped out of sight. It clattered heavily into an unseen aluminum midden and, from the sound it made, Rajani knew it had not been empty.