by Ewing, Al
“So they were all sealed in. Outside, there were jews, and blacks, and other races, and travellers, and homosexuals, and everyone else they wanted to eradicate; inside, only themselves. Aryans. Their dream of a pure Aryan world, on a tiny scale.”
El Sombra sighed. “But some were more Aryan than others, amigo?”
“Exactly!” De Lareine laughed, mockingly, as he swept his arms wide to take in all the corpses littered around them. “It helped that food was becoming scarce. No sunlight, you see. A diet composed principally of mushrooms. It’s shocking nobody thought of it earlier.” He sniggered. “But people were growing discontent. And in the face of discontent...”
“...they found someone to blame.”
“The redheads were first. Oh, they defended themselves tooth and nail, but eventually the city was made pure once again. You will find the bulk of their bodies in great storage-houses, the remainder in the form of ash. After that, brunettes, and once the problem of hair had been sorted out, those whose eye colour differed from the correct shade of blue. Then those with freckles or blemishes on the skin. And of course, anyone with a physical or mental deformity had to go, which was increasingly everyone.” He smiled, as if savouring the thought. “Mushrooms are no diet.”
El Sombra shuddered. “I can guess the rest.”
“Eventually, it was just the immortal Führer and his closest and most Aryan underlings. When they finally turned on each other, it was just a fight over whether or not they’d be allowed out. And that was that. The end of the Ultimate Reich.”
“How do you know all this, amigo?”
“Many spies have many eyes, my friend. We know because we watched.” De Lareine smiled his maddening, unsettling smile, as if trying to keep a giggle from spilling out. “We have certain technologies available to us that you would describe as magic, but are quite common in our homeland.”
El Sombra nodded. “You’re from Zor-Ek-Narr. The Forbidden Kingdom.”
“I wondered when you’d guess.”
The eyes behind the mask narrowed, as El Sombra took in the all-over stubble, and the catlike twitch of De Lareine’s walk, and the canine teeth that had been surgically removed to better allow him to blend in with Homo Sapiens. “You’re a Leopard Man.”
De Lareine grinned.
“So Doc Thunder’s ex-girlfriend is the Secret Queen of the World.” El Sombra shrugged. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“The Queen was the first to exist in this world, along with the original Keeper of the Stone, the Shaper of us All and the Weeper of Stars, whose domain was sorrow. And the Sacrificial Lamb, of course, but there are always sacrifices, aren’t there?” The cat-man sniggered. El Sombra could hear the capital letters – which struck him as unbearably pretentious – and he didn’t much like the talk of sacrifices either. His hand gripped the hilt of the sword.
“We” – De Lareine continued, warming to his theme – “by which I mean Us, the Hunting People, all descend from the Shaper’s first machinations, which precipitated a great Battle of Gods, at the end of which the Shaper and the Weeper were destroyed by the Titans and the Keeper set free from –”
“Who else was in this mythology of yours?” El Sombra interrupted. “The Peeper? The Leaper? The Creeper? Not that I’m saying Maya made all this up to keep you lot in line, amigo, but she could have picked better names.”
“Not a fan of mythology?” De Lareine giggled. “But here we are, in the realm of Dis, among the rotting corpses of the damned, going to kill a Dragon. Mythology’s everywhere we look. This is a world of mythology, my human friend.”
Something in that jogged El Sombra’s memory. “There is another world,” he murmured. “There is a better world...”
De Lareine smiled again. “Different, certainly. They’re rioting in London, you know.”
El Sombra looked at him, mildly curious at the seeming change of subject. “Really? I’ll admit, I’ve been expecting it since Victoria –”
“Oh, not that London,” De Lareine said, and giggled. The giggle, El Sombra decided, was worse than the titter.
They walked towards the Reichstag in silence.
INSIDE, EL SOMBRA could hear the soft chug of steam machinery filling the air, the puffing of great engines, the slow ticking of clockwork.
He could hear the Führer waiting for him.
He breathed in, ignoring the stench of the rotting dead, and tried to still his mind. But it had been a long time since he’d had to do that, and he found stray thoughts still bubbling up from the recesses of his mind. He had been waiting for more than twenty years for this moment, and now it was here, and his sword was in his hand. His body had become older and fatter in his absence, but that didn’t matter. His leg – the one he forced to walk without a limp – was stiff and in constant pain, but that didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered now.
When the time came – in the next few minutes – he knew he would be able to move fast enough. He breathed in and out, slowly, imagining the battle, running the different scenarios through his head. The Mecha-Führer, huge in its chamber of smoke and steam, would perhaps rear from its throne, bellowing in fury, and smash one great metal fist down to smash the marble floor underneath, but El Sombra would already have leapt away...
...or perhaps Hitler would unleash a barrage of machine-gun fire from hidden weapons in its arms, the heavy .88-calibre bullets chewing up the walls and floor and even the ceiling as El Sombra dodged like a dervish, his blade coming close and closer to the hydraulics that were the Führer’s lifeblood...
...or perhaps there would be time for conversation first, a few deathless words exchanged between the most evil man in the world and the avenging ghost who had walked across a planet to destroy him utterly...
...or El Sombra would fight to a standstill, and then one great fist would reach out and crush him, ending his life and the hopes of the millions of unavenged dead the monster had left in his wake...
...or Adolf Hitler would fall to his metal knees and weep, and beg forgiveness...
...or this, or that, or any other thing.
El Sombra smiled, and he was standing at the door to the great central chamber, the office of the Führer. At the door of history.
He announced himself with a laugh.
It was rich, and full, and it carried over the dead and rotting corpses strewn through the corridors of the Reichstag. It touched the human robots milling endlessly through the streets on their meaningless tasks, making them look up in the endless darkness and remember, if only for a moment. Even De Lareine lost his maddening smile for a brief instant in the face of it.
It was such a laugh...
Then, El Sombra opened the door to the Office of the Führer, and stepped through.
The Führer was waiting for him.
The massive metal body, more than three stories in height, sat upon a vast iron throne, motionless. The immense bronze head, frozen forever into an expression of pure hate, gazed down at El Sombra with black, empty eyes. The weapons bristling from every part of its body could, he knew, destroy him in an instant.
All around them, there were the sounds of machinery, endlessly grinding and turning and clicking in the walls and floor, but the Mecha-Führer was completely silent, utterly motionless.
In the centre of its chest rested a tank of toxic green fluid, and on the surface of the fluid, a human brain floated, like the corpse of a goldfish.
It was quite dead.
El Sombra stared at the Führer for a long moment. Eventually, he spoke, and his voice was cracked and raw, and choked with rage.
“Is... is this a joke?”
His hands shook like an old man’s.
De Lareine smiled his terrible smile. “The Führer’s body needed a great deal of maintenance and repair, you know. After two years, one of the processes delivering oxygen to his brain failed... and there was nobody left to repair it. He died, slowly.” Another smile. “There would have been some pain, at the end.”<
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El Sombra slammed his fist into the great iron throne on which the massive body sat, shattering his knuckles and tearing the skin from them. He didn’t seem to notice. “Some pain,” he choked, through gritted teeth.
“They were going to upgrade him.” De Lareine shrugged. “There was another body waiting for his brain to be transferred to in the laboratory, but the final trouble started before anything could be done. There was some speculation on whether one of the higher-ranking Nazis would implant themselves in that second body and stage a coup. What a coup it would have been, eh?” Another infuriating giggle. “Two giant robots smashing each other through the ruins of the Reichstag, and to the victor goes the Ultimate Reich. That would have been an ending, wouldn’t it? But I suppose nobody wanted to give their humanity up.” He grinned, wider. “If only you’d arrived sooner, eh?”
El Sombra was still staring into the empty, dead eyes of the Führer.
“This isn’t right,” he said, eventually, in a strangled voice. “How... how can it end like this?”
“Why shouldn’t it?” De Lareine shrugged. “Here’s a thought. Maybe, despite his twenty-year tantrum and all his dressing up, spoilt little Djego is not the centre of the universe –”
El Sombra turned, face red, tears streaming from his eyes, and charged at De Lareine, slashing his sword in an arc aimed at tearing the guts from the Leopard Man. But El Sombra was forty years old, and a little fat, and his leg hurt, and De Lareine was faster even than his father, who had won the Last Great Games in the golden temple of Ig-Nur-Hoth, against a mechanical minotaur built for the purpose.
El Sombra crashed down onto the floor, into the soot scattered about, as De Lareine walked around him, speaking in his nonchalant purr. “Did you really believe Adolf Hitler would wait around for your sword? Did you not imagine that it might be better for him to seal himself off in a hole to die, instead of murdering and enslaving continents until you finally got around to him? Did you think you were the hero of your own little story, El Sombra, with your mask and your laugh and your –”
“Shut up!” El Sombra cried out, scrambling to his feet, the sword shaking in his hand, tears and snot running down his face. “He was mine! He was mine to kill!” He lifted the sword, the tip trembling. “Bring him back,” he screamed, “do you hear me? Bring him back to life!”
De Lareine had to laugh at that.
El Sombra lunged haphazardly forward, slashing blindly. De Lareine languidly ducked the wild stroke, then stepped aside, allowing the masked man to lumber past him like a bull past a matador. Then, before El Sombra could lose his footing again, De Lareine turned and struck, aiming the heel of his hand at the middle of El Sombra’s back.
There was a sickening crack, like the branch of a rotten tree, and El Sombra crashed once more onto the filthy marble floor, and this time he did not get up again.
After a moment, he spoke in a small, weak voice, like a little boy’s. “I can’t... I can’t move my...” He swallowed, staring into the distance. “What happened?”
“Life,” De Lareine replied. He sniffed the air, twice, then left the room.
“Don’t go –” El Sombra called after him, but he was already gone. The minutes passed, and though El Sombra felt no pain, he could feel himself growing weaker, and his vision was starting to blur. He wanted to look up at the lifeless robot towering over him – to make his last sight the dead brain floating in its tank, as if that would bring him closure – but he found he could not turn his head.
“How could it end this way?” De Lareine’s voice echoed from the corridor, along with the rattle of metal on metal. “Because it was always going to end this way. You were always part of the Queen’s history, little Djego, passed from Queen to Queen... a Chinese whisper in an empty room... a joke in reverse... first the laughter, then the sick, twisted punchline.” He squatted in El Sombra’s line of vision, the tray of surgical instruments in his hands, letting him see the scalpel, the chisel, the saw, the tank of nutrients waiting for the brain. “You’ll understand in the end, don’t worry. You’ll look back and laugh.”
“No,” said Djego, in a small, frightened voice, as the tears dampened the red cloth over his eyes. De Lareine only smiled.
“Your chariot awaits,” the Leopard Man said, and began to cut.
THE DOOR TO the dome opened again at sunrise.
From inside, there was the ugly sound of metal on concrete, of something impossibly large and heavy being dragged by something even larger.
Then the metal man emerged from his hole, dragging the corpse of the Führer behind him.
They were both around three stories tall, although the metal man was slightly taller, and from a distance they might have looked the same; but on closer inspection there was little resemblance. One – the dead Führer – was a fearsome construction of sharp edges and jagged metal, exposed pistons and gears scraping against the earth. Its ugly bronze head was contorted into an expression of endless rage and hate, and in the glass tank at the centre of its chest, a lump of dead flesh still floated obscenely, visible to the world.
The metal man was of more modern design – a thing of sleek muscle and sinew sculpted in steel and copper, whose inner workings gently whirred and purred where the Führer’s had screamed and ground. His body had never been customised to suit its original purpose, so he wore no swastika, and he was thankful for that. The bronze head that sat atop his great shoulders was similarly unsculpted – a placeholder, bald, and possessed of the serene expression of a shop window dummy, or perhaps a Buddhist monk.
Like the Führer, the metal man’s chest contained a tank of life-giving fluid, though this one was opaque rather than transparent. To the undiscerning eye, the metal man would appear a simple robot, although a very large one. Nevertheless, the tank contained a human brain, and unlike the Führer’s, it would need little in the way of support. The brain in the metal man’s chest would, perhaps, live for thousands of years.
He wondered how he would spend the time.
He remembered little of his former life; he had been a man named El Sombra, or perhaps Djego. He had been stupid – he realised that now – but that was something he would never be again.
Apart from that, there was only a succession of faces, the memory of laughter and of a final, awful betrayal that had destroyed him. But there was also the sense that a great and terrible mission had ended at last, and it was time for a new life to begin. Perhaps, as time went by, he might recall more of his past; for now, there was only the wonder of being alive, and new, and filled with purpose.
He knew he would have to explain himself, to convince the humans who would come for him that he was not their enemy, but he was confident that he could do that. The calculating arrays inside him were whirring efficiently, supplied by the data from his living brain, and he knew he was much more now than he had been. Yes, he could explain.
He could explain everything to everyone.
The metal man took a last look back at the great dome of Fortress Berlin. Somewhere in there, the Leopard Man was hunting, freed from his own mission. And in the Führer’s old office, the empty, lifeless clay of El Sombra – or was it Djego? – lay, discarded, like a butterfly’s cocoon.
The metal man thought on this, as the Führer rusted at his feet and the tanks began to approach from over the hills ahead.
He would need a new name.
PLUTO
“EVEN IF SOMEONE walked through that one, I’d still believe it,” Carina Contreras-Ortega said. She was looking through a window into a minimally decorated room, where two people, a man and a woman, had been playing the Japanese game Go for some considerable time, each of them lost in thought. Occasionally, Carina thought she heard a frustrated sigh, or saw one of them make a tiny movement, but for the most part they simply stared at the pieces on the board, which were all a uniform grey. There was no way to tell which piece was on which side, or whose move it was.
Except there was no room, no players, no boa
rd, no window. It was all painted canvas. The breathing of the players, their irritable sighs, the tiny movements of their bodies – all were illusions created by the sheer realism of the image. Despite herself, Carina found herself completely drawn into the world it presented; the posture of the two motionless grandmasters suggested detailed histories, a relationship stretching back years. The pieces were grey, Carina realised, because the true game was not found on the board, but in the players.
It really was a breathtaking illusion, and quite the most realistic she’d ever seen.
But then, illusion and reality changed places so often in France. Carina smiled, turning to the man standing by her side.
He turned towards her, and the clockwork in his head ticked absently, reminding her that he was not a man, in the strictest sense of the word; rather, the illusion of one.
His name was Anatole-744, and he was twelve years old, which meant that his skin was pale pink, but still obviously painted metal, and his green eyes did not move. His voice was deep and a little grating, never changing pitch or timbre or volume; it was the same harsh monotone whether he was talking of the tourist hot-spots of Marseilles or of Nazi war atrocities. The black hair on his head, brushed into a conservative style, was the most realistic thing about him; horsehair, perhaps. The hotel had been very sorry that they could not provide a newer model, but they had assured her that Anatole-744 was fully programmed as a guide.
After another click, the robot cocked his head. His face was set in a vague half-smile that could pass for a number of different emotions at once, but Carina was getting better at reading his body language, and when he spoke, she read mild confusion into the metallic drone of his voice.
