The Delirium Brief

by Charles Stross

  He ought to change into a regular suit, he realizes. And groom himself. A disheveled man in evening dress arriving at an airport with blood on his shoes and wild eyes and no papers, such a man will raise questions. Nor does he want to leave the hibernating host where his Lord’s enemies might find it. They might experiment on it. They might try to cure it. They might find the link that binds it to his Lord and send a poison of the mind through it. If the new handmaid is waiting in accordance with his instructions, he’ll take time to convert her before he leaves; but leave he must, before the new day dawns …

  Schiller drives feverishly, paying little attention to speed limits as he thunders towards the imagined safety of the city. Within the M25 he will be harder to see, he intuits, one more cell of human consciousness within the teeming swirling dreams of the human superorganism slowly waking towards an apprehension of its own ultimate power—but here in the countryside, laid out on these strips of tarmac illuminated by the amber and unblinking gaze of streetlights, he’s vulnerable to the predator that awakened and came to sniff around the edges of his ritual.

  An hour passes, minutes trickling away like the rough-edged grains of crematory remains. The satnav—he can’t remember having programmed it; he must have done so during the blackout when he felt Anneka die—directs him dispassionately, routing him around roadworks and blockages, and through the congestion charge zone where traffic consists almost entirely of buses, taxis, and delivery vehicles. London is a knotty rat’s nest of streets but Schiller pays no attention, his mind fixed on the guide star of a higher calling as his hands manipulate the steering wheel and controls. Finally he turns the big car onto a narrow street and his robot guide recites, “Turn left in twenty yards and you have reached your destination.”

  “Praise God,” Schiller says fervently. The car park entrance looms, and he noses into it. Stops the car in the first empty space—a disabled slot, but he’ll be gone before any fine can trouble him—and runs, gasping and clutching his chest, for the elevator entrance.

  As the lift elevates him silently into the building, he glances down and sees that a fine mist of blood drops have soiled the gleaming tips of his shoes. Schiller shudders convulsively. Passport, papers, Anneka’s briefcase and secure laptop—he remembers where she left them. One bag, that’s all. He can be packed and gone in minutes, almost as if he were never here. His host twitches uneasily, squeezing uncomfortably at the crotch of his trousers. It hasn’t fed recently; blood alone isn’t enough, and if his men left the new girl here—

  He’s in the lobby of the apartment, shaking his head as the burglar alarm beeps. Punching numbers in, his hand shakes so much that he gets it wrong the first time and the beeping escalates angrily while he makes a second attempt. He double-locks the door, leans against the wall, and gasps for breath past the tightness in his chest. “Slow down or you’ll die,” he tells himself, then gasps some more. Finally he closes his eyes, and tries to recall the words to one of the prayers his Lord showed him. Peace of mind gradually steals over him as he hums the oddly alien phonemes. Yes, this is what he should do, he realizes. Leave the new missionary sister behind to work God’s will on this dark island. Take the remaining host from the fridge, and the briefcase and the bible and the gun, and go to Stansted. Fly after the setting moon, to the mountains and hills of Colorado, and pray on his knees for forgiveness—

  Briefcase. It’s on the table. He opens it, trudges to the kitchen, and finds the Mason jar where he left it. The host within senses him and stretches languorously, comforted by proximity. And Ray realizes he can still hear it in his soul, thrumming contentedly: he’s not alone. The caster of the shadow was a liar and his Lord is not dead. Smiling, he carries the jar back into the living room and places it inside Anneka’s bag.

  The bloody droplets on his evening shoes seem to mock him when he glances at the carpet.

  Ray feels a stab of petulant resentment. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: but what if the hour cometh and the man is unavoidably detained? What if the man is detained indefinitely while the supplicant, the faithful worshipper, ekes out his life alone on an insignificant island where no gods tread? Or worse, where only the wrong gods move among the mortals? Disgusted, he walks towards the bedroom. He needs to get himself under control. Take care of business. Seal the deal. Live the dream.

  He opens the bedroom door and turns on the light.

  There’s a woman on the bed, lying on her side, facing the doorway. She’s an ice-blonde, perfect in every way but for her hair, which is cut in a flapper bob—ungodly, in his opinion, but hair can be grown out—and she wears a red silk minidress so short that her stocking tops are visible. Her wrists are cuffed and chained to her ankles behind her back. The guards gagged her, which annoys him (don’t they know she could choke, unattended?) but she’s awake now, staring at him with wide blue eyes.

  Schiller smiles shyly as he sheds his tuxedo jacket. “Don’t be afraid,” he reassures her as he bends down to unlace his shoes. He unzips his trousers and lets them drop. “I’m not going to hurt you.” His host flexes lazily, questing towards the future handmaid. She rolls away from him, over onto her back, muffled sounds coming from behind the leather ball gag. “I’m going to show you something wonderful; it’ll bring you closer to the Lord.” He steps out of his trousers and pushes down his boxers. “Do you pray?” Almost shyly, “Would you like to pray with me?”

  The girl sits up, and the chains fall away from her as she spits out the ball gag that concealed her teeth. “Yeth, but I spell it differently,” she says, lisping breathily as she leans towards him.

  Schiller’s eyes widen and he starts to retreat, but he’s too late.

  Mhari climbs across the bed, wraps uncannily strong arms around him, and leans her head against the cleft between his neck and his collar bone. “I don’t pray: you’re my prey. Mine, motherfucker!”

  And then she begins to feed.

  TWELVE

  EPILOGUE: THE QUISLING BREED

  It’s after midnight and the party’s already over when I climb down the ladder from India 97’s cabin, flinching slightly at the rotors whirling overhead, and walk across the field towards the garden and the floodlit mansion beyond.

  The SA’s waiting for me beside the open back gate to the paddock. He looks old, and gray, and so very tired.

  “What,” I ask, “the fuck”—voice rising—“have you done?”

  “Walk with me.”

  He turns without waiting and walks through the gate, then along a narrow gravel path between flower beds. I swear some more, then follow him.

  “Is she all right?” I call ahead.

  He doesn’t answer, and for a moment it feels as if my head’s about to explode. I had her on speed dial and kept trying during the flight but the call went straight to voicemail every time.

  He bears right, towards a row of smaller buildings—cottages? stables?—around the side of the house, then casts around as if looking for something. Then he steps onto the lawn, walks halfway towards the yard full of parked cars behind the buildings, and stops.

  “It happened here,” he says.

  “What happened?”

  “She should be dead.” He swallows. In the sharp glare of the floodlights I see the shadow of his Adam’s apple move. “According to Forecasting Ops—”

  “Fuck Forecasting Ops, is she all right?”

  He cracks. “Maybe. Probably. Not sure.”

  “Why.” I take a step towards him. “Don’t. You.” Dr. Armstrong gestures at a smear of darkness near his feet. I take another step towards him and realize the grass is damp. I’ve just trodden in something squishy, and it smells horrible, fecal. “Know?”

  “Two class 6 or higher entities faced off at a range of five meters right here. You’re standing in all that’s left of one of them.” The light glints silver off his spectacle lenses. “Your wife was lying right … there.” He points to one end of the mess. “Her ward was broken. According to Control’s diagnostic monitoring
she put her phone into Hail Mary mode just before the incident, but it would have been about as much use as an umbrella in a hurricane. Forecasting Ops projected that if this particular fork in the decision tree came to pass—it was only an eighteen percent probability—she’d be a greasy smear on the lawn.”

  I could strangle him. Fuck, I could eat his soul, except it’s probably stringy and tastes of cardboard and spreadsheets. “Is she all right?” I ask softly.

  The SA takes a deep breath. “She’s on the second floor in room 309—Schiller’s guest suite—having a long, hot shower, according to Dr. Schwartz. Cassie is looking after her. She’s a bit shaken, unquote, and she’s had a very bad day. When we finish here—”

  “What—”

  “I want you to go to her.” He glances round. “Walk with me,” he says again.

  This time, I don’t put up a fight.

  “I made a bargain with the devil,” Dr. Armstrong says as he picks his way across the blood-drenched grass in the direction of the car park, “and part of the package deal is my soul. Your wife”—his voice falters—“was going to be my successor eventually, assuming that she came through all right and passed all the tests. And assuming she did indeed survive whatever happened out here.” He raises a hand before I can interrupt. “The person upstairs thinks she’s your wife, Mr. Howard, the way you think you’re still just Bob Howard, a bit of a lad who likes messing with computers and having a laugh over a pint of beer. But I want you also to be very certain, at the same time, that she has been at ground zero of a nonsurvivable event. Now, there are several various and sundry reasons—and some of them are even relatively innocent—why she might have come through; but it’s also a remote possibility that she died, the way you died six years ago in Brookwood Cemetery—and I’m trusting you to work out what happened. You know what it’s like to try and pay no attention to the papery whisper of the tantalizingly appetizing souls around you, so I trust you to go easy on her, but the organization needs to know. Because I don’t believe she survived because her phone absorbed the entire force of the blast. She placed the Pale Violin beyond human reach some time ago and its master has subsequently shown no sign of interest in her, and I don’t think the Black Pharaoh would have saved her out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “The Black”—I blank for a moment as my brain reboots—“the Black Pharaoh?”

  “I said I made a deal with the devil, didn’t I?” The SA shrugs. “It was Him, or the Sleeper: who would you rather work for?”

  Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. “That’s treason—”

  “Only if it be unsuccessful,” he says tonelessly. “The fix is in. The fix was in even before you noticed there was a problem in need of a solution. That’s why I had to keep you in the dark, in the sandbox, for so long. We work under oath to the authority vested in the Crown: but you didn’t ask which Crown the new oath and warrant cards are sworn to. The PM’s dead, Bob. Half the cabinet are brain-wormed castrati thanks to Schiller. Our biggest traditional ally appears to be in the throes of a takeover by something so much worse than the Sleeper that Schiller chose to flee and make his stand here. And the agency is in ruins. What else would you expect the Board to do?” Gravel crunches beneath my boots as we cross onto the car park. There’s a big-ass pavilion on the lawn and I see ambulances with flashing lights loading up stretcher cases from inside it. “We have to be realistic. Pick fights we can win.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Iris.” I reflexively rub my right upper arm, the patch that still aches in bad weather.

  “Speaking of whom.”

  “Oh, you didn’t … please tell me you didn’t?”

  “Sorry, Bob, but that’s how it’s going to be, now. Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.”

  A middle-aged woman in a black suit is heading our way. I recognize her and I feel a sick sense of dread. “Michael, Bob.” She gives me a small, tight-lipped smile. “The Leader is ready to see you now,” she tells the SA. To me: “It’s been a long time.”

  “Not long enough.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “I won’t hold any grudges if you agree not to.”

  I look at Iris. I used to like her, once. That was before she sacrificed a baby in front of me. “Life’s too short,” I say, taking care to mind my words.

  “I see.” She straightens her back and turns away. “He’s waiting, Michael,” she upbraids the SA, and I experience a sudden nauseating perspective flip: Iris is bossing the Senior Auditor around? Is this what we’re coming to, the shape of things under the reign of the Black Pharaoh?

  “He’ll deal with you later,” she tells me, offhand. “I expect you’ll want to visit your wife first.” Then she stalks away in the direction of the tent, clearly taking charge.

  Dr. Armstrong looks at me.

  “Why?” I ask again.

  He shrugs, almost embarrassed. “She’s a good manager,” he says, almost defensively. Lowering his voice: “If the Board had not authorized and I refused to cooperate with this, Dr. O’Brien and I would both be dead, along with the rest of the Auditors. Cassie Brewer would be dead too, and the Host unbound, and the government in the hands of the Sleeper’s Inner Temple by sunrise tomorrow. You and Johnny might have survived, if you had the wits to get on board the first flight out and not look back. This was much too close for comfort, Mr. Howard. We could have kept fighting, but we would have had to win every battle; they only have to win once. The Board voted to throw in their lot with a lesser evil so that a new binding geas could be installed. We just have to hope and trust that the lesser evil is in fact less deadly than the alternative.”

  Behind him an older woman in a purple frock is picking her way towards us. “You there! I say—”

  Dr. Armstrong turns towards her. “Can I help you?”

  “You’re”—she stops and peers at me—“I saw you on television,” she announces, in much the same tone she might telegraph the discovery of a wasps’ nest in her attic. “Weren’t you disbanded? Home Office,” she adds.

  I roll my eyes. “Yeah, we were disbanded.”

  “But not for long,” the SA remarks drily. “Bob, you handle this; I have to report to our new Master.” He walks away, whistling; he’s so far off-key that it takes me a few seconds to recognize “My Way”: I did what I had to do …

  “What do you want?” I ask the woman from the Home Office, more brusquely than is strictly called for (because it is late and I am eager to make my way to room 309 and confirm that Mo is safe and uninjured and no more an undead thing of horror than I am).

  She nearly recoils, but she’s made of stern stuff. “I was talking to a woman earlier, before the lightning strike—tall, red hair, something to do with Transhuman Coordination, I think she was one of your lot—” Now she recoils as I stare at her.

  “Yes?”

  “So she is one of your people?”

  “What happened?” I demand.

  Home Office woman bends but doesn’t quite reach breaking point. “She went that way”—she points at the lawn—“told me to follow. And I saw what happened. The lightning strike? The woman in white with the gun and the glowing jade eyes, and the man with no face and a laugh like dust swirling in an empty tomb—and she wasn’t there, between the first stroke of lightning and the next”—she blinks rapidly and begins to shake—“and I want to say, I need, if you’re looking for her I’m supposed to tell you something, something like—” Her eyes begin to glow and her voice changes as something hijacks her larynx. “Aw der hal amedn aset, aw der hal amedn aset! Aw der hal amedn aset, aw der hal—”

  It’s a feeder, of course. Dumb, but not so dumb you can’t program them to loop a message, like a demented voicemail machine from hell. Fucker must have crept in while the cleanup crew’s back was turned, and of course the civilians aren’t warded. Being looped, it’s too busy running her vocal chords to eat properly, so I crunch down on it and catch her body as she topples. She’s still breathing, so maybe she’ll survive the attack. But right now I
’m so furious and frightened I hardly care.

  I wave for a paramedic, then walk towards the steps up to the terrace and the open French doors to join the Black Pharaoh’s court, leaving the last of the humans behind.

  ALSO BY CHARLES STROSS

  Singularity Sky

  Iron Sunrise

  Accelerando

  Glasshouse

  Halting State

  Saturn’s Children

  Rule 34

  Scratch Monkey

  The Rapture of the Nerds (with Cory Doctorow)

  Neptune’s Brood

  THE MERCHANT PRINCES

  The Bloodline Feud

  (comprising The Family Trade and The Hidden Family)

  The Traders’ War

  (comprising The Clan Corporate and The Merchants’ War)

  The Revolution Trade

  (comprising The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens)

  Empire Games