Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  She wondered what the girlfriend would do if she knew that Katia was Bacchus’s sister, that this had been her life from before she could walk. Her father used her as a sex doll before her brother was old enough to partake; he joined in the gang-banging when he was just eight years old, along with Baen, her other brother. She had had the good fortune to be the only girl born into the family, the two boys only too happy to dominate her to keep their father’s attention off them. They knew he would get just as much of a rise watching them dominate her as doing it himself. The vicarious thrill helped to sustain the predatory juices flowing through his body when his dick was too limp to pump the juices directly, and he was reduced to penetrating glances. Option B, when he was younger, was to take out his sexual domination fantasies on the boys, which he did when they refused to act their parts and actually tried to come between the old man and Katia.

  The German shepherds sprawled on the floor, were uninterested and unmoved by the rape in progress; their own protective impulses as distorted as the humans in their care.

  Katia knew why Bacchus had broken form and picked her, even though he seldom touched her, anymore. He accepted his place in the pecking order of their family and in the natural order of the universe, but some part of him still felt guilt over her fate. Some part of him loved her. At least, that was the story she kept telling herself. As much as he was capable of love after what his father had done to him as much as to her. Also, she knew his body, his likes and dislikes, could read his cues well enough to make him come off like a sexual stud to his girlfriend better than any of the other girls. The other girls would try just as hard—they knew the drill, but they weren’t as gifted as she in casting Bacchus in the Adonis role.

  The girl had already come twice watching their performance, eager for her turn, looking forward to the Hyde part of Bacchus as much as the Jekyll part, the soft, loving, tender, romantic side that Katia would never see, that she so desperately wanted to see. In Katia’s mind, Bacchus was her only true mate for life, her one true love. But he couldn’t be romantic and tender with her, couldn’t push past the programmed behavior.

  She doubted he could do more than act the part with his girlfriend, but he’d learned to fake it pretty well, disassociate that part of himself from the predatory part, to make it easier to think of himself as a good person. Katia told herself if his performance was particularly good, it was because he was imagining making love to Katia, something he could never do directly, not without stirring all the painful memories of how he had treated her over the years. That was her explanation for why he staged these dramas within eyesight of her keyhole, of all the floors and all the rooms in which he could have stuck her. He was making love to her the only way he knew how.

  Finished with her, Bacchus unceremoniously threw her back in her room and locked the door.

  She watched from the keyhole as act two unfolded with the girlfriend, who was now so worked up, he had to make love to her then and there, his actions gentle and teasing. He stroked her with his fingers as if with a feather, his touch was so light. He kissed her tentatively on the lips briefly again and again, denied her the deep penetration of his tongue until she forced her tongue down his throat, unable to take the teasing any more.

  She hoisted herself on his hips, wrapped her legs around them, when he refused to show the animal strength and passion he’d exercised on Katia. The more he drew out the lovemaking, with gentle kisses up and down her, refused to penetrate her and rush the foreplay, the more he blew on her skin and tickled it with his light touch, went over every inch of her, the more she came in anticipation of what would come next.

  And she kept eying the keyhole to make sure Katia was appreciating what she and she alone could have, never suspecting, she was the surrogate sex doll. Though Katia felt she was getting the last laugh, she couldn’t deny their lovemaking was getting to her.

  After they’d finished, Bacchus threw his girlfriend’s shawl around her, and escorted her, very gentlemanly, his arm around the small of her back, out the door. Perhaps he would take her to the theater, to a bookstore, to see a street-musician play, all the fine things evocative of fine living that he would never take Katia to see.

  She had tasted those things once, for a couple years when she had managed to escape her family and actually created a decent life for herself. She even enrolled herself in college after testing to certify she could do the work, having little or no paperwork or history to offer as an alternative. When the university dean was curious about her being self-taught, she didn’t bother to explain that she had overheard Bacchus balancing the books, from which she had picked up mathematical acumen. When it came to her facility with languages, she didn’t mention the international TV stations the foreign-speaking clients loved to spend their time watching between rounds of going at it with the women, which could be overheard through the door, or their limited drunken vocabularies, which made picking up the basics of speaking in most any language easy enough with less than a couple thousand words to master with each one.

  When they found Katia, they made sure she couldn’t get away this time, fit her with a collar that sent an electrical impulse, like a Taser, knocking her out if she came too close to the perimeter of the house. They hadn’t bothered fitting the other girls with them, too expensive, and too risky, just Katia, who they would rather see dead from a malfunctioning device than free.

  After rubbing the collar of complacency about her neck, and feeling her blood boil, she reached for the spoon under the mattress, and once again focused her mind on it, all her rage, a lifetime of simmering resentments, intent on creating the laser-like focus of energy that could melt the spoon enough for it to bend on its own.

  After minutes or hours doing the concentration exercise—she felt strangely calm and detached from any burning feelings of any kind, any desire for a particular outcome.

  She noticed the spoon vibrate in her hands.

  She couldn’t be sure what had caused it. Perhaps it was her heart skipping a beat as Baen and the boys came in from the street. In a tradition that had started early in childhood, with the boys bringing home their friends to have a turn on Katia. It made them popular, it earned them favors as well, and money, and eventually enough to start their own business and “recruit” more whores. They kidnapped the women and enslaved them with drugs so they weren’t particularly motivated to run away, so long as their arms were supplied the nectar of the gods. Tips and tricks on sex trafficking, they picked up from the friends they brought home. Not to mention their helpful suggestions on the art of how to run a black market business, as father had imparted none of those skills before his death. He was too busy taking the money the boys brought home from including their friends in things and using it to drink himself into oblivion. Maybe he, too, was trying to escape the horror of what he’d become and what he’d inflicted on others, not able to escape who he was, but not able to live with it either.

  With the sounds of the clients arriving, the other girls in the room beside her cried. She was scarcely conscious of them until now. They’d all gotten quite good at retreating into their own space in the crowded room, putting themselves somewhere else, entirely. They were all starting to get wet between their legs in sync, too, just one of the Pavlovian-responses. They even breathed in dry heaves and emitted sexual panting sounds, as much to arouse the boys on the other side of the door, who were just as unable to prevent their programmed and now largely unconscious responses. Katia hated that the same thing was happening to her and that being more conscious of what was going on was no protection—if anything, it just added to the stabbing pain in her heart.

  “How about a free taste, huh?” one of the men said.

  “You want a free taste, eh? You don’t want to pay?” Baen said, mockingly. “Boys, how do we feel about that?” He flicked his finger.

  The three German Shepherds in the room tore the man apart.

  Other dogs ran down the stairs to join the feeding frenzy.

>   Each of the dogs paraded by one of the paying customers with a piece of the nonpaying customer in his mouth on its way out the room.

  When the German Shepherds were done, the only thing that would be left of the man who refused to pay was the money on the floor, which Baen picked up and pocketed. “Anybody else doesn’t want to pay?”

  The marks reached for their money, handed it over. Baen counted it, satisfied, mostly. “You—you didn’t pay your full amount. You were the one who shorted me last time,” he said.

  “That’s right,” the lanky kid said.

  “Oh, I see,” Baen said, suddenly recognizing the request being made of him. “You want the five finger discount, no problem.” He balled his hands into fists and mercilessly pummeled the kid. Each time the youth stood up, he punished him some more. The kid refused to stay down. Evidently, being beaten to within inches of death was his fantasy.

  “I heard about you, you’re not so tough,” the kid goaded. He really shouldn’t have said that. When Baen was through with him, he may have been dead; Katia couldn’t tell. The other men had balled themselves up against the far edges of the room, terrified.

  “Relax, boys. Just a special request, that’s all. We get a few of his kind from time to time. More since I developed a reputation.” He picked the kid’s pockets of money. He held up the bills. “The extra is for the care and dedication I put into my work.”

  Baen kicked the door to Katia’s room open and stood there laughing. “Quick, boys. The flashlight only lingers on a face for five seconds. Have to make your decision in that time. Have to risk it landing on someone prettier in the next five seconds, but the flashlight never sweeps the floor a second time. If you miss your chance, you’ll make love to some faceless cunt in the dark, if that’s your fancy.” The game, Baen’s favorite, never failed to work. The boys, no doubt worked up by all the talk of things to come on the way over here, the money collected before they even walked in the door, jumped at the faces in the light like bats seeking the mouth of a cave.

  Katia sat, back pressed against the wall, glared at Baen—at his chest. The light off her, he had no way of knowing. She had maintained that curiously tranquil state she’d slipped into after what she’d been through with her brother raping her then making love to his girlfriend in front of her to finish squeezing the last juices out of her. She had been over-boiling with emotions, those of the moment piggybacked on those of the past. It had all come to a head, and burst before the steadying, calming influence of the silly little spoon she’d held in her hands.

  Now there was just one thing to find out.

  If it was easier to bend the universe to her will from this state, or harder. If she needed to ride the tidal wave of emotions when it was at its height, without falling off the surfboard, or if, indeed the opposite state, this empty feeling, this void in her, this dead calm, was the more useful state of mind.

  She concentrated on slowing Baen’s heart. Slowing it to a stop.

  By the time he passed the light on her, he could no longer sustain the flashlight in his hand.

  He dropped like an anchor, unsure of what to make of the stony expression on her face, different than anything he’d seen before, but he could hardly focus all his attention there.

  Katia held on to the state as long as she could—to make sure Baen was dead.

  But she lost focus, and entered her usual busy frenetic state of mind. She picked up on the boys getting freaked out; they called out to one another. “Christ, what happened to him?” One of them felt his neck for a pulse. “A heart attack, I think.” “Shit, let’s get out of here.” The boys scattered like cockroaches.

  The girls remained where they were, the door to freedom staring them in the face. And still no one moved.

  Katia, too, decided she was going nowhere. She didn’t know when that fugue she’d slipped into would return, if ever, if it was even her at all that had done anything, as opposed to coincidence. If she had done this thing, she needed to learn more control; she couldn’t afford to have the tool fail her when she needed it most. Maybe there was some limit to the power, moreover. Like a muscle that would wear out with use, and need a recovery period. What were her limits? How long would it take to reach them? How long would recovery take? No, escape was still a long ways away. But now she had a goal, not just for herself, but for the girls. She would take them with her, train them as she’d trained herself. And one day…

  SIXTY-TWO

  Festus set down the atomic engine he’d just teleported in from the steampunk era, wiped it off with his chamois, made sure it glimmered. He recalled Chaplin’s stupefied expression at his disappearing with it before his eyes, and chuckled.

  His old Victorian home was full of such collectibles adorning every nook and cranny, including the display boxes set into the walls up and down the stairways leading to each of the four floors in the house, and running to the basement.

  “Where am I packing this off to?” Barkly asked, leading the Shetland pony by the reins. It would be his job to tote the engine up or down the flights of stairs as necessary, and to hoist it onto the pony’s back, despite Barkly’s twisted spine. His vertebrae snaked sideways from his hip to his head, thus depriving him of the more attention-getting hump of many of his spina bifida brethren, who also elicited more empathy, for reasons which were unclear to Barkly.

  “I think, possibly up a story, in the center of the room, where I can admire it when I take my afternoon tea,” Festus said.

  “This would be such a lovely home if you decorated it appropriately, instead of cluttering it with this junk.”

  Festus smiled ruefully. “Someone has to throw a pipe wrench into things, Barkly. Or life gets going too good, people get complacent. Time comes to a complete standstill. Or just the opposite, progress happens so fast, there’s no single point in history to settle into and make your home. Someone has to attend to the balance in the universe.”

  Barkly snorted. “Maybe you should find a job,” he said, straining to get the engine onto the back of the pony, “that doesn’t involve angry people determined to avenge what you’ve done to them.”

  “If it weren’t for those vengeful bastards, I’d be no more than a tiresome museum curator.”

  “You mean, like me. Screw you and your dying mother too,” Barkly said. He lead Betsy, their Shetland pony, up the stairs. Her neighing communicated rather well how she felt about the idea. Must have felt like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro from her perspective.

  Festus ambled downstairs to the basement. Stepping into the black abyss, he flicked on the lights.

  When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he ogled the suspended animation tubes, which held the fools who had been crazy enough to come after him. Each one dated to a different period in history, a fact poetically and succinctly conveyed in the clothing they wore.

  He walked up to one of the display tubes, and opened the case. The Skyhawk warrior from the future collapsed into his hands.

  Festus eased him to the ground, gave him time to revive.

  Skyhawk rushed to his feet, still groggy and disoriented. “You again. How many times must I kill you for you to die?”

  Festus smiled wearily. “It’s time to set you free, Skyhawk.”

  “Why?” Skyhawk, suspicious, turned his sword in his hand, itching to use it. His outfit seemed as appropriate to medieval Europe as it was to fighting off Krewals on the spaceship he’d been yanked from, circa 2350, in some quadrant of the universe Festus couldn’t quite recall.

  “I chanced upon a people that have been frozen in time for millennia. Maybe the space anomalies in the region affects their minds, circumvents their memories, so they have no awareness of never changing. Maybe the biophysics in this sector of space boosts their imaginations so they have no desire to attend to matters in the real world. Maybe the effects of the space anomalies are more subtle, such as favoring certain forms of genetics, and the kinds of characters who abhor change. Must be a fairly recent development. There are
indications this was once a vital and thriving civilization. Whatever is causing the disturbance, I’m sure you’ll sort it out, and get the wheel of time turning again.”

  “You yanked me out of my timeline for doing just that. Now you want to set me free to do what I do best?”

  “Here, your efforts will liberate billions. That’s a lot of bang for the buck, Skyhawk. Hate me all you want, but the timeline I rescued you from… you would have affected, what, a few thousand souls, at most?”

  “So you say. Entire civilizations have arisen out of prison-ship castoffs.”

  “Yes, you see into the future well, just not as well as I do. Trust me, your lifeline was going nowhere. Any palm reader worth his salts would have spotted as much.”

  Sufficiently rankled, Skyhawk lashed out at him with the sword, roaring like a lion with frustration, only to find himself thrown back by the edges of the force field containing him, not visible until the tip of his sword reached the extremity of his makeshift world.

  “What is it to be, Skyhawk? Back in the case to await another assignment more up your alley?”

  Skyhawk rotated the blade in his hand. The tic appeared to help him think. “I’ll take this one.”

  “Good.” Festus stood, approached the control panel governing the box shaped by the interpenetrating force fields.

  “I’ll find a way to kill you if it’s the last thing I do,” Skyhawk threatened.

  “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t try. Of course, you’ll have your hands full for a time just surviving where I send you.”

  He slid the controls down, and Skyhawk was gone.

  Skyhawk, like the others, would spend half their time on their assignments, the other half of their time figuring out how to get back at him. That was why Festus had settled into this early twenty-first century Renaissance era. With so many people spiking high levels of psychic energy, it would be very hard to get a lock on him. And that wasn’t including the ones, who, like him, were teleporting in from elsewhere for the same reasons—cover to ply their trade in peace. Some would never affect this timeline much, just use it as a base of operations for affecting neighboring timelines. Festus, wasn’t one of those.