by Michael Shea
The APP was released into the amphitheater the moment the blindfold was placed. And as far as anyone could tell, all Jack MacMahon knew of it was a sudden soft yet powerful hum, a stirring of the air, and a touch, no more. Then he lay perfectly still.
Val asked, “How long are we looking at, Audrey?”
She smiled, a dark lean woman with probing eyes. “There’s a fifteen minute minimum. But it’s lunchtime—want us to make it an hour so you can grab a bite in the canteen?”
Val turned his gaze, his half-smiling surprise, full on his employee. “Ouch! Is that your way of saying I’m a monster? Understand—I’m not offended. You’re tops at your job here, and it’s yours as long as you want it. But really—shouldn’t you quit? Feeling that way?”
“Not if you don’t insist I do, Val.” She smiled cooly. “I like to smartass about people’s morals because I don’t have any.”
Val chuckled. “There are those who preach morals, and the rest of us who have work to do in the real world. Let’s go for the quarter hour.” A grin here. “I’ll skip lunch, and settle for taking a leak.”
And he strolled out of the arena to the showers. In the bathroom, he took time to look in the mirror a while. He liked the new calm he saw there. Audrey’s attitude had helped, had centered him.
Was this fellow in the glass here a monster? Sure. A monster-maker who was about to inflict his homicidal brood on people who had not volunteered to face them.
“And how do you feel about that, Mr. Margolian?” he asked himself pleasantly, seeing the glint of his own genuine curiosity in the question.
“I feel … airborne. I feel I am about to witness a miracle of my own creating.” He studied the face that had just said that, and saw there a calm man who was the destiny, the doom of several thousand people. Who was a Valkyrie, a chooser-of-the-slain.
And, smiling slightly, he said, “So be it.”
He returned to the arena with a minute to spare. Stood chatting politely with the techs who were waiting to paralyze what emerged from Mr. MacMahon’s body. Soon enough came the powerful rupturing of meat and bone. Val scrutinized what emerged. Very satisfactory …
* * *
Val did go up to the canteen then. Carried some coffee to a secluded table. Satisfied with the predators of Assault on Sunrise, he returned his thoughts to the predators who meant to prey on him.
For the past few days, his studio spies had been filing some very suggestive reports: a movement of shoot hardware over at Argosy Studios, some funny business with raft inventories at Val’s own Properties Division, and several discreet meetings between his own Mark Millar and Argosy’s Razz Abdul.
At first Val thought this was a cat’s-away romp between the two wannabes. A case of some juniors going extracurricular while the master was up in the mountains.
Until it occurred to him to wonder whether the pair’s Work in Progress might not have his own shoot in Sunrise for its subject.
Then he’d considered those blue mountain skies from a new perspective, and how his own bright flotilla of shoot-rafts would look, maneuvering in that brilliant sky above the embattled town.…
To weigh the prospect of this spectacle was to be enraptured by it. He recognized at once that the younger men’s aim had to be the theft of his own shoot, because of the incredible scenes that shoot would yield, captured from overhead.
More focused researches clinched it. Razz Abdul had signed off a major work order with FLOSS-WERKEN: the installation of high-altitude augments on the anti-grav engines of an impressive little fleet of rafts.
There it was. They could only need a high-alt fleet because they were going to shoot his shoot from above.
For the first time he found that he actually liked Mark Millar, his vision and daring. What footage there! The extras beseiged by APPS down in their town, and above them Val’s flashing fleet lit first by the sun and later by the moon, and above them Mark’s boats filming it all!
It opened Val’s directorial third eye right up. The two second-stringers had found a cinematic mother lode. Val’s own pioneering use of public airspace in this vid—real-life Live Action—had laid his shoot naked to their cams.
If they kept their heads, the pair of them were on the brink of an epochal vid—a genre-spawner.
There he himself would be for them, down in the aerial traffic above the town, and below him the human/alien seethe of combat on the rooftops and in the streets. How neatly he’d been surrounded. Imprisoned in his work, while they gobbled his vid, picked his cinematic carcass to the bones.
He commed the capo of his legal eagles.
“Zachary? Val.”
“Hi, Chief.”
“Zack, I want everything on the Studio’s proprietary statutes. Here’s the situation…”
After Val commed off, he sat thinking. From feeling under siege, he’d come to feel much better. Worst case, he could freeze their release, force them to share title before he allowed it, and then only after Sunrise had hit the screen. Best case, he could own their vid.
Meantime, he could spare the cams to shoot them shooting him. And could he not contrive some guerilla action against them in the bargain? Could he not eke out some APPs for them as well as for his extras? Maybe.
Peacefully absorbed now, Val followed branching trains of thought. His handsome face was perhaps most likeable in moments like these. The man himself was absent from it, and only his conception filled it. He had a look of faint absent wonder, his eyes delighting now in this detail, now in that, his face guileless—except that the crease of his cracked cheekbone (now and again darkened by shadow) gave his look an accent of darker intent, even a faint gleam of homicide.
* * *
Racquetball made such a wonderful racket. While they played, Razz and Mark’s talk was as staccato as their hotly contested game.
“Moonlight! That’s gonna be bitchin!”
“Backlight the shoot-rafts against the moon!”
“All silhouettes!”
They swatted logistics back and forth in the echoing court. They’d shoot from payrafts, these the most agile anti-gravs, and would have a high-alt modification, a major refrigeration unit added for that output.
They’d been of two minds about how much their “pirate” fleet should interact with Margolian’s fleet. Mark had been for staying aloof from them, Razz for swooping down to get close-ups of them at work. But now, as they sat in the sauna, Mark conceded. “They’re our cast, after all,” he said abruptly into the silence. “They’re part of our cast, that Panoply crew. You’re right. We have to dive to close-ups. Those rafters, after all, will be our heroes and demons.”
“Now you’re talking. We can get some comedy going! We can swoop down and hang just off their bows, and we can remonstrate, upbraid them—all in fun, right?”
“Exactly! And some straight stuff too! Capture some of their conflict maybe, their doubts.”
“You see it now, don’t you—I knew you would. Irresistible stuff!”
“Absolutely. And listen: your name goes first. I brook no denial.” And, after a beat, Mark added, “From the heart, Homes. Mos def!”
And they both erupted in wild laughter, knowing they had it now, that they were going to get it just right. As long as they had even, worst-case scenario, bootleg footage, they were going to make it into vid history.
XII
THE MONSTER’S FLESH
Ming rode her Harley into the hills behind Abel and Christy for some battle practice. Cherokee, their motor-magician and official hog-whisperer, was at the shop resurrecting—as only he could do—Abel’s Indian, a bellowing dinosaur of a bike that Cherokee openly coveted for his own.
“This look good, guys?” Abel asked them. His ATV towed a two-wheel trailer of empty wooden wine kegs. Below them stretched gentle slopes of hollows and hillocks to give the rolling kegs an erratic pattern.
“Set ’em loose,” said Ming.
Abel kicked open the tailgate latch and the kegs started tumbling
and jouncing downhill. Gunning their bikes, Ming and Christy zigzagged after them.
They fired their pumps one-armed, the butts to their hips, punching double-ought wads through the little juggernauts’ staves, working their slides one-handed. Ming had nailed four by the end of their run.
“Damn!” cried the guilelessly outspoken Christy, a natural enthusiast for all forms of vehicular insanity. “You’re a rock star! I taught you biking, you gotta teach me rafting, sis!”
Ming always dealt very crisply and unsentimentally with young Christy—actually they were of an age—but there was something about that “sis” of his that deeply irked her because she found herself liking it.
“Speak of the devil!” Abel crowed as a raft came dropping down, Trek at the helm. He hung its bows down so he sat almost facing them, easy in its slanted bottom.
“I love your work! I been watching you make those barrels dance! Hate to interrupt, but would you guys put off maneuvers an’ come to the hangar? Somethin’ big’s cookin we need your help on.”
The “hangar” being Ike’s Engine Repair, where the fleet—now nine craft—was housed.
“I’m not flying a raft! No way, no how! I told that bitch that!” Ming surprised herself with this outburst. Had she been arguing mentally with Devlin all along?
Trek raised a placating palm. “No! She thought—we thought you’d think that. We need you guys to make a run, and it’s a run on wheels we need. This is deep-wraps, guys. It’s I-shit-you-not life and death. Get Cherokee an’ follow me. You’re gonna have to leave by dark.”
In the back corner of Ike’s Engine Repair’s big-vaulted garage was a small, crowded machine shop. Devlin bade everyone in. Mazy, Lance, and Radner were already there. Shutting the door, she sealed them all in the cold oily smell of machinery. It was somehow the right scent, a smell of mustered weapons, of danger and urgent defenses.
“Mazy?” Devlin prompted.
Mazy’s eyes always had a merry squint to them, like she was wondering if you’d understand a joke she wanted to tell you. She looked at the bikers—a little smile for Ming—and cleared her throat. “We need you to bring something up from the Valley. What we need you to bring us … is a sample of what’s gonna start killing us when the shoot starts. We just got word of it. Sandy dangled a mil of her own clacks, and we hooked a studio tech.” She broke out in a grin. “What we have here is gift-of-god luck. The guy will be in Outer Redding at a bar at sunup.
“The thing is, we do not dare the air. Any of our rafts will draw sharp eyes, not to mention they’re stolen and could draw the heat. But bikers, well, they’re thick as fleas down in the valley.”
“Hey!” protested Abel.
“Will you guys do this?” Mazy asked with a winning smile—which Ming in her heart had to admit that she still found pretty damn winning. They hadn’t spoken since she’d joined the bikers. “If you bring it back, we might be able to find out how to kill this fucking shit that’s gonna be killing us.”
Abel: “Would we do this? Does Howdy Doody have little wooden balls?”
Cherokee: “Is the bear Catholic?”
Christy: “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
The Wheel Rights answered themselves in a chorus of damn-straights and fuckin-ayes. Sandy Devlin offered a money belt to Abel, and then noting his girth, switched it to Cherokee. “Meeting’s set for early tomorrow—it’s the safest time to get there. Buckle this five mil on under your leathers. The guy’s name is Dukes. He’ll be in Outer Redding at the Pink Elephant and he’s got a sample of what the APPs on this flick are going to be made of. Nano-gel.”
Abel spoke. “You’re puttin a shitload of faith in us. We won’t fuck it up.”
“Famous last words,” piped Christy, an automatic comeback of his to any of Abel’s more solemn utterances.
* * *
So just before midnight the bikers roared down through the mountains headed for the Five. The three men liked to ride gaudy when they took their bikes down to the Valley. Christy’d had his Hanger ’kick tanner cure him a road-killed skunk’s pelt, and the kid had made this a plume curving over his helmet crest. The open jaws frontal just above his eyes. Portly Abel liked buckskins with major fringes. These roared like soft brown flames off his bulk as he ran at full throttle. Cherokee wore his own totem helmet. He’d found a big red-tail, dead of starvation up in the mountains during a drought year. Her wings—half unfolded—he’d lovingly polyurethaned and mounted, and they swept back from the temples of his WWII infantry helmet. All three had hair enough to banner out from the fringes of their warlike headgear.
Ming scorned Panoply and panache. She wore only big silver reflecting goggles like bug’s eyes, above which her short ragged ’do flashed silver as the sun came up. Plain black leather wrapped the rest of her.
The Five was pouring under their wheels as the east grew pale, and Redding hove in sight just after sunup. It sat on low ridges to either side of the freeway. Outer Redding littered some slightly higher hills to the east of the healthy part of town. Up there, tattered trailers perched on bulldozed niches in the slope, and along the Z of bad road climbing that slope larger shapes stood here and there—of cinder block or corrugated metal or rain-bleached carpentry with shingled roofs. Outer Redding. Warren of drug kitchens. Haven of highwaymen. Home to numerous wheeled bandits of the breed who’d attacked Curtis and Jool a year before on their last run down to L.A.
Midway up the slope, the Pink Elephant looked like a gravely decayed bon vivant. Its stuccoed walls had begun pink, and been touched up over the years with whatever shades or near relatives of that color had come to hand, till presently its hue was more like skin disease. It had a whole wall of windows, but half of these were boarded over with plywood thickly hieroglyphed with felt-tipped gibberish and anatomical cartoons. It sported a neon sign on which a few letters of tubular glass still survived: INK EL.
“They were right,” grumbled Abel as they kickstanded their rides, cocking an ear to the silence of the place. “This is as good a time as any to come to this shit-hole.” He sniffed the air. “You can smell everyone sleepin off their drunks.”
The double metal door wore scabs of old posters flaking off of it. It looked like it had been kicked by everything known to man. The four of them entered a wide, rambling interior, irregularly partitioned, that seemed to stretch in all directions into a green gloom.
Here and there bulky men slept with their heads on their arms on the beer-puddled tables. Three jukeboxes of different vintages stood along one wall. The glass on two of these had been caved in.
The Sunrisers filed quietly among the tables, crossing dark floors, with an occasional crunch of glass under their boots. They passed only one conscious patron, a gaunt, pale woman staring at them from a booth she shared with a huge man who snored, his head on the table. His earring—a brass chain—dangled in the puddle of spit his mouth had leaked.
A final turning, and they found him in a dark corner booth, a biggish bald man armed as they were: a chopped twelve-gauge across his back and two cross-holstered forty-fives below his ribs.
“Dukes?” asked Abel pleasantly.
“Just so,” the man smiled. They tucked into the booth and quietly introduced themselves. Perhaps stirred by their entry, groggy bikers were becoming more or less vertical in the gloom, coughing and belching, cracking their first beers of the day.
Dukes was a smiling, rangy man. He looked in his fifties and tough. Between his forearms on the table stood a full pitcher of beer and glasses. He began filling these. Only Ming declined.
Amenities done, Dukes said, “Well then. So show me, please.”
Cherokee discreetly unlimbered the belt and handed it under the table. Faint papery sounds rose from Dukes’ busy fingers.
He smiled at them all and strapped on the belt under his jacket. Brought something up from his lap, and set it on the table: a lidded one-gallon paint can.
“OK, kiddos,” he said in a low voice. “Lean real close.
I’m due back this evening. Sorry this has to be quick and dirty, cause you got some risky shit here. This piece of gel is in its base active mode. It’s pure raw material and gives you no clue to the shape of the APPs that’ll be made of it. This is the stuff in its, like, minimal or rest mode, called PSI: Pursuit, Seizure, and Ingestion. Meaning it’ll catch and consume anything organic that moves.
“When you come to trying to work with it, dump it into a walled-in pen or pit with smooth vertical sides and no cracks or seams it can ooze through, OK? Cause if it can, it will. It’s highly fluid and can exert powerful pressure. To capture it and put it back in whatever container you’re using”—Dukes grinned here—“you’ll need your paint stick.”
And he pulled out something that looked like a foot-rule, with little nodes on it instead of numbers. “You stick it into the gel and press here and the gel coheres around the stick. You push this node to drop it back in the can. I don’t have any idea what-all this stuff can do beyond the basics I’m gonna show you, but just bear in mind your APPs are gonna be made of it. So, come on.”
The five of them slipped out through that warren-like gloom as discreetly as they could, and went round to the back of the establishment. Here sprawled a chaotic dump of motor parts and box-springs, chassis and old appliances, and every other kind of bulky trash. The sun—bright gold across the Valley—put the Elephant in chilly shadow. “Over here should work,” said Dukes, leading them over to an abandoned claw-foot bathtub.
“You see I found us a guinea pig.”
A very sizeable tarantula was in the tub. It was futilely trying to scramble up the slippery enamel sides. The drain hole’s plug was firmly in place. “OK,” said Dukes. “Watch everything I do.”
He popped the lid off the can, and thrust his “paint stick” inside it. He thumbed a node … and drew out a translucent sphere, blackish green. This globe just perceptibly rippled, yet gripped the stick as if welded to it. There was a fugitive corruscation within it, blurred constellations slowly cycling. Dukes thumbed again, and the sphere plopped into the tub.
