Gorgon Child

by Steven Barnes

  Rose dropped her eyes shyly. "The Scavengers helped me after the quake. I was burning up with fever, and they brought in medicine. I can't repay what I owe. This is the closest I can come."

  One of the Scavenger women escorted the girl out.

  And what now?

  "Aubry ..." Leo began.

  Aubry waved his hand, demanding silence. "That's the game. It's over. It was gonna happen sooner or later. It's not like I can lose myself in a crowd. I can't say I'm not Aubry Knight. I can't prove I'm not guilty of murder."

  Quarry stood, and all eyes went to him. "Aubry. You know that we would fight for you." Everyone at the table nodded. "Unfortunately, this isn't the Ortegas. This is a federal warrant. What the hell are we supposed to do?"

  "There isn't much I can do but leave." He looked out at them, the only family he had ever had, and bowed his head.

  Promise reached out and took his hand. Of course there was nothing for the two of them to say to each other. She would go where he went. There was no choice for her.

  She smiled to the two men at Aubry's sides. "I know where we can go. Maybe you can already guess. If not, there's no need to weigh you down with information you don't need. We'll come back if we can."

  The majority of the things Promise wanted to take lay close by one another. A few items of clothing, an extra pair of shoes. A few reminders of their life among the Scavengers.

  On the other side of the room, Aubry packed a duffel bag. He paused for a moment, and turned to face her. "Did I play it right?"

  She smiled, coming to him. She pressed herself against his body so that she could hear the slow thunder of his heartbeat. "You did the only thing. It will be all right. Besides—" She looked up at him, and kissed him firmly. "It's high time that you met my family."

  The fuel cell of their electric car would take them five hundred miles before it needed recharging with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. They would make connections for food and shelter along the way. If it became necessary to ditch the car, they could, and would. Until then, safe transport, with forged papers, was theirs.

  Leo looked into Promise's eyes for a long moment, then closed his own. "I'm so damned sorry."

  "There's nothing to do, Leo."

  "If there's anything you need ..." The unfinished offer hung in the air unanswered, unanswerable. "Go with God, both of you."

  They nodded, and the side of the garage rolled up. With a rolling purr the engine began to turn.

  The sun would be up in a few hours. By then they would be on their way.

  "Be well," Leo said. "Survive."

  "That's all I know how to do." Aubry's mouth twisted in a grin, and he clasped Leo's hand. "Good-bye."

  They rolled out into the early morning. They were forty miles north of the Maze, out past the San Fernando Valley. Their papers would get them as far as San Francisco, and from there . . . Time would tell.

  Chapter Six

  Rose

  Friday, May 19

  With a quiet whirr, the folding door between McMartin's pool and living room slid open. Rose stepped through gingerly. The polished wooden deck around the pool tingled her bare feet.

  McMartin's bulk hung suspended in the pool. Fractured light from the faceted plastic dome in the ceiling cast a kaleidoscope of lazily rotating colors on his pale acres of skin. He made a lazy flip, dipping beneath the saturated glycerin solution, then surfaced again. He stared at her as he came up. Although the fluid ran into his small, dark eyes, he didn't blink. One globular hand reached to the floating tray eternally in front of him, and scooped a handful of cold ham mousse, the pinkish gelatin glistening in his hand before he smeared it into his mouth.

  "Rose," he said placidly. She walked around the edge of the pool, watching him from the corner of her eye. Did he know? How could he ... ?

  McMartin seemed to know many things that no one should know, and used facts with the precision of a surgeon. She hoped that she hadn't made a mistake. She couldn't afford to lose her job.

  "Rose," he repeated. "Didn't you hear me?"

  "I'm sorry, sir." She looked nervously about. Where were the other girls?

  He ignored her question. "I want you to check the thermostat. It isn't sampling often enough. Maybe the pump assembly is malfunctioning. It's been half a degree off all day." He giggled, and plucked a stuffed blue crab shell from the crowded tray, examined and rejected it in favor of a crispy black mint-barbecued leg of lamb.

  She checked the bank of digital displays. Everything seemed in order, but she couldn't tell him that. McMartin would certainly claim that his skin was more sensitive than any mechanical probe.

  "It must be broken, sir. Nothing shows up wrong. I'll make a note to have it checked."

  "Yes." He giggled again. "You do that. Half a degree is totally unacceptable. My skin is so sensitive. Thank you, sweet mouse."

  Rose slipped a latex cap over her finger-length hair.

  Something was wrong, she could feel it. Usually, he would vibrate with eagerness, waiting for Rose and the other Mazies to minister to his needs. To massage him in the water, to roll him onto his back in the thickened water. Kneading and stroking and pleasuring him. He would hang in the water like a Portuguese man-of-war, groaning and petting one or another of them. Pulling them close to his obscenely lush mouth for a foul, thick-tongued kiss.

  Today none of the other girls was there. He looked at her with all sexual interest submerged. There was no hunger visible in his eyes. At least, nothing she could see on the surface. No interest, no feeling. Just an emptiness. Rose shuddered.

  She stepped into the water.

  She loved its buoyancy, its divine warmth. It would have been heavenly but for the presence of McMartin. He was a motionless, swollen blob of a Golem in the center of a room-sized flotation tank.

  There were times when she wished that she could merely hang there, by herself. Just let her troubles drift away in the same fluid that supported her weight.

  She had to remember that this was business, and only business. What she thought, or felt, or wanted, meant nothing at all to McMartin.

  She wiggled eellike through the slime.

  He watched her approach, motionless save for a bovine chewing motion.

  She treaded water in front of him. "Where are the others?"

  "None but you today, my dear," he whispered. "But that's all right. You're my favorite, you know."

  She smiled modestly, suppressing a shudder. He knows. Dear Lord, he knows. . . .

  She began to wipe him off. The heavy artificial sponges helped remove the slick of brownish fungus that always formed on him.

  It was much harder without the other girls to help. Not just in terms of shared exertion. Misery loves company. There was a shared disgust, a private joking that made things tolerable if not pleasant.

  He opened his mouth. Rose scrubbed his teeth for him. His little black eyes watched her every movement as she removed the plaque. He hawked and spit into the water. The constant whirlpool flushed it away, as it did all his body wastes.

  "Where were you last night?" he asked mildly.

  "At home, sir." From a bag at her waist Rose extracted a pair of clippers, cutting his fingernails. The pale curls of soft tissue were swept away in the current.

  "Did you feel DeLacourte's address?"

  Damn! She should have known he would ask. The only politic thing to say was yes.

  "Of course." She paused, trying to anticipate his emotional needs. "He's a very great man."

  "Indeed he is," McMartin said, as if truly interested in her opinion. ' 'What did you think of his final statements?" He smiled benignly.

  Her mind scrambled. What had DeLacourte's closing statements been the last few weeks? Always, on . . .

  "Gorgon? The special antiterrorist force? I . . . don't know about things like that. The President says they're necessary."

  McMartin frowned. "Yes, I've heard him say that. But they're assassins, dear. They came within a hair of killing the legiti
mate head of a foreign power. Did blow his brother into kitty kibble. Everyone knows it, and everyone pretends it isn't true. Disgusting."

  "I don't know, sir. I've never had a problem with them ..." She began to tremble, and fought to conceal it. Being this close to him, alone for the first time, she was suddenly terribly aware of the immensity of his body. He was HUGE, by far the largest human being she had ever seen. And his constant immersion in the flotation tank had caused muscle atrophy: he seemed to be a bag of human pus. In her darker fantasies he loomed translucent, the pulsing sacks of his organs suspended in warm, clotted jelly.

  McMartin performed a lazy breaststroke, and tremors shivered through the sludgy water.

  "I want to watch the tape again."

  "Yes, sir."

  "And while we do . . ."He clapped his hands, and the Omnivision holo lit up. The image of Sterling DeLacourte appeared above their heads. McMartin rolled onto his back. "And while I watch, take care of me, my dear."

  She smiled, curling her lips into a lie. She swam up in between the grotesquely swollen thighs, searching.

  McMartin hiccoughed with sudden pleasure as she reached her goal.

  "—Harris a bad man, I'm saying he's a dupe. The men who control him are no more than cowards and frauds—"

  The words became muffled as Rose bobbed below the surface of the water.

  "I do not advocate violence, and yet this is the only language these people understand. I am a man of peace, and yet the filthy homosexuals—man shall not lie with man! This is clearly stated in the Bible. Why then does our government protect this filth, use them to destabilize foreign regimes. We claim that the Pan Africans are our enemies—we have made them so, with terrorism of our own. . ."

  McMartin was beginning to breathe a little harder now. Rose gulped air, keeping him excited with her hands, and dove back beneath the surface.

  "And if we tolerate this degeneracy—"

  McMartin was growing too excited. His thighs pressed against the sides of her head, and the pressure grew crushing. She panicked, trying to pull away, but couldn't move. She thrashed her legs desperately as her lungs screamed for air.

  No! Please . . .

  The enormous thighs kept her pinned. Her lungs, desperate, aching now, spasmed and sucked in thick, warm water. Adrenaline exploded in her body and for a few seconds she was supernormally strong. Blind terror, fear of imminent death, gave her the strength of a giantess. She struggled insanely to drag in a single mouthful of air. His hands were on her head. She twisted, trying to bite the flabby thighs, to fight, to survive, or failing that to commit one last desperately defiant act.

  Her efforts meant nothing to him. Almost tenderly, McMartin's gelatinous body smothered her motions. The roaring in her ears was all-consuming. And then there was no more thought at all.

  A door at the edge of the pool slid back, and Killinger appeared.

  "It's over?"

  "Yes." McMartin's thick tongue slid out, licking a slick of dried salt from his lips. "Actually, it was quite good. It . . . touched that moment, Marcel. It seemed to last forever." His eyes were sleepily half-lidded. "I want you to run a risk analysis—I wouldn't mind having this arranged on a regular basis. Ah well." His eyes snapped open, and he was viciously alert. "Business before pleasure." He kicked at Rose's body and it rolled limply in the water. It floated slowly, sadly toward the rim of the pool.

  Rose's body floated facedown in the swirling water, pink buttocks bobbing gently as the foam swirled away found her. Killinger took a pole from the wall. He was moving stiffly, as if the ultrasound knives and electronic-pulse cauterizers and tissue growth accelerators had not yet returned him to the one hundred percent mark. He extended a wire loop from the end, and slipped it around Rose's head, drawing her to the edge of the pool.

  "It's almost time for your report, isn't it?" Killinger grinned at him. "What would DeLacourte say if he knew about you?"

  "He won't know. He is a good man. A holy man, whose cause is just." McMartin shrugged. "If my reasons aren't the same as his, well, that's too bad." McMartin waved his arms and legs, propelling himself to the edge of the pool. He paddled over to the side of the pool and smiled up at Killinger.

  "Never," McMartin said. He smiled, showing short, pearl-white rows of teeth. "Never suggest such a thing again. Never let me know that such a thought has crossed your mind."

  Killinger started to speak, and then caught himself. The smile was not the smile of a man, it was the smile of a rabid animal whose lips curled up at the moment before attack. His neck rippled with tension. Killinger had wandered very close to a line, and his task now was to keep from teetering off.

  "I . . . didn't mean anything by that."

  McMartin reached up, took Killinger's hand with a hand softer than a baby's. "I'm sure you didn't, my dear." McMartin sighed vastly, and paddled back. "But you must purge such thoughts. I am vulnerable to sins of the flesh. And such a nice lot of flesh, don't you think?"

  He laughed tonelessly and dove under the surface of the water like a bloated otter.

  Killinger wiped the slime from his hand. He was trembling, and hated himself for it. Suddenly Killinger wanted nothing more than to get the hell out. Teasing McMartin made about as much sense as getting a blowjob from a rattlesnake.

  McMartin surfaced, streaming water from mouth and nose. "I am but a simple servant. Flawed, human. In need of salvation. A man like DeLacourte needs his flawed human vessels, don't you think?"

  "Yeah. Sure. I guess." Get me out of here.

  "Good. Now get this shit out of here. Now."

  McMartin watched Killinger haul Rose's body from the room, and smiled in satisfaction. Fear worked quite well in controlling the lower types, yes it did.

  Now, then. It was necessary to gather his thoughts. It occurred to him, almost belatedly, that it was fear that controlled him as well.

  Perhaps, to a man like DeLacourte, even he, McMartin, was one of the lower types. Merely a creature of base flesh. McMartin looked at his vast, pink body bobbling in the glycerin, and smiled with satisfaction. He nudged his floating tray over nearer to him, and poured himself a giant shot of tequila. Before he tossed it back, he licked a bit of the salty fungus from his shoulder.

  He giggled as the tequila burned its way down.

  Flesh, yes.

  But such a nice lot of flesh . . .

  Chapter Seven

  The Gray Man

  Monday, May 22

  The black limousine broke away from the black glass spires lining the Madison Avenue Compway and turned onto Sixth Street. From here, the beacons would bring it into the garage. Jack Hands didn't really need to think about the process at all, could allow his mind to drift. At the moment, his thoughts were concentrated on the man in the back seat of the car he drove. The man who just might be the next President of the United States.

  Jack Hands had known this man for ten years. Had driven and served him as personal secretary all over America and Europe. He wondered whether there was any force on Earth sufficient to prevent that dream from becoming reality.

  The power wielded here, on Madison Avenue, was different from Washington, but Jack Hands had never become inured to it.

  Here, in a twenty- by four-block area, all the communications in America were gathered into the single most complicated switchboard in the world. All five national broadcasting networks operated from here, the major sensie lines stretched out across the country with their direct-induction overloads. The major magazines of the country had their executive offices here. The estimated two million people who created, processed, conducted, built, manipulated, interpreted, destroyed, and controlled the minds and media of the country. Their names and faces were rarely known to the public, but more than any elected officials, they actually helmed the good ship America.

  He looked into the rear seat, through the tiny sliver of partitioned glass unobscured by curtains. Sterling DeLacourte was, as usual, talking to the flat telescreen in the back seat. Talking,
arranging, dealing with. Most people, even his business associates, dealt with DeLacourte only through holo. Hands felt a special cachet in knowing the Prophet in the flesh. So to speak.

  DeLacourte. Time magazine had cynically echoed his followers, calling him "America's Ambassador to the Lord." That was OK by Hands. He figured it was OK by most of America, too.

  He turned the limo into the drive, and slid down into the parking garage. The rumble of its ground-effect skirt died as the turbines slowed. The limo settled onto its hydraulics without a bump. Jack unsnapped his safety harness and stepped out.

  Jack Hands took a metal rod from his pocket. He clicked a button at the base and swept it around as it telescoped into a half meter of antenna. The digital meter built into the handle didn't twitch: there was no electronic surveillance. Once within the offices of TriNet, they would be even more secure. This was DeLacourte's private world, more so than his thirty-room mansion in Connecticut. More than his five-bedroom suite in East Manhattan in the Perfumed Stockade. Even more than the yacht anchored four miles off the Florida Keys.

  Jack pressed his wristwatch against the door handle, and it popped open.

  Sterling DeLacourte was only an inch over six feet, but gave the impression of greater height. He was as slender as a whisper, but carried himself with the mass of a giant. Crowds parted for him like the Red Sea.

  There might have been a hundred generations of holy crusaders in his blood. He had a long, immaculately tailored head of gray hair. His eyes were piercingly blue. His face was roughly hewn, a work of flat planes that caught the Omnivision receptors perfectly. He seemed a man of infinite strength. It was possible to draw any conclusion, sustain any impression one desired of DeLacourte. Sensuality, austerity, power, the kindly father, the stern disciplinarian, the unyielding apostle. Or the magnate, sole owner of the greatest independent satellite network in the world.