by Jack Yeovil
Shiba looked again at Colonel Presley. The hair, dyed black and swept back, was the same, and so was the thin, agile body. He had lost the babyfat he remembered from the earliest films, and was almost gaunt now. Facially, he was an almost exact match for the Statue of Liberty, with sad blank eyes and heavy lips. When he had sung earlier, the voice had been richer, deeper than on the earliest recordings. If only he had kept out of the clutches of managers and madmen, he would have been bigger than all of them. Bigger than Tcherkassoff, than Dodd, than Sinatra…
He was appalled to find that none of the Americans remembered Elvis as more than a fad of the long-ago '50s, on a par with hula-hoops, flagpole-squatting and red and green 3-D movies. That was another reason for the country's degeneracy, its failure. It always neglected its past greatness. As the 21st century bore down, America was backpedalling to stay where it was. It had neither a future, nor a tradition.
Shiba hoped to return to Japan soon.
But at least he had met the King. And, thanks to Dr Blaikley, he had some inkling of the potential within himself.
He dropped to all fours, and weaved across the compound to his office. Once Cape Canaveral was taken, he would requisition a satellite link and communicate with Kyoto. Then, the operation could be decently closed down.
It occurred to him only then that perhaps his current form would not prove pleasing to the higher echelons. There was a great deal of prejudice against the abnormal, the impure. Anger flared as he imagined Inoshira Kube sneering at his craggy grey body. He felt hungry. He imagined his jaws clenching around Inoshira's head.
His body might be that of an alligator, he knew, but his soul was burned pure.
VII
Once the Keystone was responding properly, the rest of the Needlepoint System fell into place. It was a more or less tedious business, transmitting test signals and receiving the programmed response codes, and Duroc left Sister Addams to handle it. Machsler's files contained all the long-unused Q and A buzzwords needed to convince the Keystone's Security Program that it was receiving orders from a duly authorized US Government source. Addams estimated at least twelve solid hours of interface were necessary, before they would have full control of the ring of death. Duroc wished someone had thought to tell him that before he first tested the thing out.
Duroc had hoped to get some down-time with Simone. ZeeBeeCee were putting out a three-hour Tribute to Gavin Mantle, complete with home movie footage of his childhood and interviews with all his family, friends and work-mates, followed by a group of experts discussing the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion. The scientific debate would be the important part of the show. Duroc wanted to find out how close to the truth the investigators were getting. There was still a window of opportunity for someone to cotton on to the takeover and activation of the Needlepoint System and to deploy thermonuclear missiles against Keystone, disabling the entire ring. Once the whole system was on-line, nothing from Earth could get through, and Elder Seth could rain down fire from the heavens at will. But until then, they were vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike.
Duroc, who was used to running through all the worst eventualities, had listed the nations, organizations and individuals capable, working singly or in cooperation, of putting together the missile strike force necessary for the job. GenTech, the Winter Corporation and Haussmann A.G. of course; Russia, America, the UEC and China, probably; the Pan-Islamic Congress. McDisneyworld, Greater Rhodesia, Japan and the Vatican, maybe.
When that listing unnerved him too much, he tried to steel his resolve by listing individuals and institutions against whom the Needlepoint System could be profitably deployed. Pope Georgi headed any list, of course, and Duroc would have added Sister Chantal Juillerat, the pontiff's computer-packing hit woman, and Father Declan O'Shaughnessy, the Vatican's top cyberfeed jockey, to any top ten of dangerous Roman Catholics. After that, it was back to petty personal vendettas: Jessamyn Bonney, by whatever name, was top of that chart; and Dr Ottokar Proctor, for failing to keep his part of a bargain; not to mention United States Cavalry Trooper Nathan Stack, the Navaho Hawk-That-Settles, Simone's bullying pimp, expendable risk Machsler, UEC President Le Pen for being an idiot, and so many others…
But just now the Cape had other, more immediate, problems, and Duroc was supposed to see to them. Brother Turney's expedition against the Suitcase People had not returned, and they had lost radio contact with them. Turney had found an enclosure of the freaks out in the swamps and, at the time of his last report, was about to move in and clean them out. Evidently, he had met with more than the expected resistance. Hitherto, Duroc had assumed he was dealing with a scattered and uncoordinated nuisance, but obviously not all the mutants were sub-normal morons.
He was sequestered in the armoury with Brother Tozer, trying to work out which of the blips on the tablescreen were Suitcase People. It wasn't easy, because each mutation was different. Some were cold-blooded, some weren't. Some of the blips could be ordinary animals. Some of the mutants wouldn't register. Duroc wished he had a spare biochemist to autopsy the Suitcase People they had been able to kill. Maybe there was some nerve poison that would only affect their metabolisms, and they could spray the swamps with it, avoiding a messy shoot-out.
"Radar isn't much use, Elder," Tozer was saying, "nor are thy heat sensors…not that they've ever been satisfactory in this climate. Mine advice would be to install some sort of movement detectors. Nothing can get about in a swamp without making waves. Thou couldst monitor that, and have a perfect early warning system."
Duroc nodded. "How long?"
"Once we getteth the equipment, a day or two at the most."
"Once we get the equipment?"
"Yea verily. Of course, that's the snag. For a job like unto this, thou'd need custom-made goods. GenTech, probably. The ungodly Japcorp supplieth most of the Sanctioned Agencies."
Blips were massing near the site of Turney's last call-in.
"What's that?"
Tozer frowned. "I dost not know. Do alligators swarm?"
Duroc didn't know either. The church had too many people who knew what to do with a desert like Salt Lake City, but no specialists in swampland. Recently, he had been wondering whether Elder Seth wasn't getting too wrapped up in the big picture to take care of the details. This whole Canaveral Project was ridden with niggling minor considerations that hadn't been cleared up. The Suitcase People wouldn't have been a problem if the Church of Joseph had known about them before the establishment of the base on the Cape. A few passes with napalm and some poison in the swamps would have wiped them out. But now, they were going to be more difficult to get rid of than an infestation of termites. They had to be taken in their own environment, and they were a lot better at swamp warfare than any of Tozer's security people.
Provisionally, Duroc decided to request an airlift of Donnys and Maries. He could send them out on search-and-destroy missions and not feel he was wasting a human resource. They were among the most loyal and dedicated of the Elder's followers, but that didn't make him any more comfortable around them.
There was a small teevee in the armoury, usually tuned in to the Josephite cable service with its non-stop fund-raising telethons, choral concerts from the Tabernacle, advertisements for the resettlement drives and smarmy homilies on wishy-washy religious themes. Just now, Duroc had ZeeBeeCee tuned. The Gavin Mantle show was on. There was an intense argument taking place between lawyers representing Clodagh Mantle and Erik Kartalian, both of whom were contesting the channel's claim to Gavin's swelled estate. They cut to Sonny Pigg, singing his instant cash-in song, "Bye-bye Gavin."
"Look," said Tozer, "there seems to be some pattern…"
The blips were converging, amassing. There must be some sort of jungle telegraph. Duroc remembered his uncle taking him to see Johnny Weissmuller films as a child. He imagined hordes of animals crashing through the mud calling out to each other.
"Where is that place?"
Tozer pressed a key, and place
names were superimposed over the large-scale map.
"Narcoossee? What's there?"
Tozer asked the map a question, and got a read-out. He whistled.
'"Tis a GenTech research establishment, Elder. BioDiv. Classified, of course. They're supposed to be conducting a long-term investigation into immune reactions."
The green blips were joining together, forming a large blobby mass.
"Immune reactions?"
"That's what they say."
"Nonsense. They're creating monsters."
Tozer agreed. "That's possible. The godless multinats have been trying to get round the legal restrictions on altering the divinely-designed human form for years."
Duroc saw it immediately.
"And they've got a good source of human raw material in the indentees. They can write their own ticket out here."
Duroc wasn't sure how he should proceed. The Church was powerful, and every day its worldly influence grew, but GenTech was the largest organization on the planet. It had more employees than most countries had citizens, and its economy was stronger than that of every nation in the world. He didn't want to get the Church of Joseph into a shooting war with the corp. As the Soviet Union was rapidly finding out, that was a conflict that could only be resolved in the favour of the businessmen.
"Pull in all the patrols that are still out there," he ordered. "I'm going to have to consult with Salt Lake on this."
Tozer saluted. "Blessed be, Elder."
A comedian was delivering Gavin Mantle's funeral oration in a cathedral full of mourners, doing a series of "bolt out of the blue" jokes. He was getting nervous laughs.
"Divine lightning" was the expression that was being mainly used to "explain" the Blotto Lotto winner's sudden death.
Duroc felt unusually on edge. So many of the current circumstances were beyond his control. Tomorrow, when the world was held tight in a Josephite fist, he would breathe again.
He wondered where Simone was. The girl was spooked too, he knew, and he hadn't had time to find out what was wrong.
He left the armoury, and stood on the expanse of cracked, drying concrete. The swamp smell was still strong, and rancid clumps of rotting vegetation were still lying around. He would have them cleared when the crisis point was passed.
The shadow of the rusting gantry fell over the launchpad. Duroc rubbed his eyes. He could have sworn that there was a smudgy shadow in the air by the thing. It was indistinct, but there seemed to be a shape taking form.
"Elder," said a Donny, "would you come over and look at this?"
He was smiling, and had a pipe in his hand. They all had pipes, but he had never seen one smoke.
He followed the terminal-stage Josephite over to the gantry. Close-up, the rotting pile was more ominous. It shifted slightly, creaking. It was probably dangerous, and ought to be pulled down.
He looked up. The shadow was still there.
"Look. These have appeared…"
The Donny pointed into the pit. It had been drained. The bottom was blackened from the immense discharge of a Titan 7 rocket. There had been a bad accident here, he had heard.
At the bottom of the pit, outlined a stark white against the sooty black, were three Hiroshima-blast shadows.
They were negative people, with large round heads and thick limbs.
Duroc looked at the Donny. He was calm, his handsome face expressionless, unreadable. He wondered whether the thing could have curiosity, fear, love…
He looked back at the silhouette astronauts.
"But…"
They had moved. He stared at them for a few seconds, and they were still. One seemed to be reaching out, as if to make a reduced-gravity hop on the moon and languidly drift for fifteen yards. Another was rising from a kneeling position, as if finishing prayers. They didn't move.
He looked at the Donny again, and looked back. The leaper was in the air, his lower-legs bent back from the knees, the riser was nearly upright.
The Donny wandered away silently. Night was falling. The white astronaut shapes were brighter in the darkness.
This was one more thing for Duroc to worry about.
He left the gantry, putting the three blast ghosts out of his mind, and looked for Simone.
He found the indenture girl in the bungalow, and she made him forget all his worries for too-short minutes.
The sun went down on the Cape.
XIII
Elder Nguyen Seth, the Summoner, concentrated on the bowl of blood, and his consciousness left his ancient body to roam beyond. In the Outer Darkness, the Dark Ones waited patiently, as they had always done, but Seth could feel their excitement building. After millennia, the scant months that stood between the present and the Day of the Summoning were like seconds. Time had always been the one thing Seth had in abundance, but now there were so many things to be done, and so many sacrifices to be seen to.
Elder Seth looked down upon the gently revolving globe, the Needlepoint satellites sharply outlined against the clouds and the oceans. Lights winked on their years-dead exterior surfaces as they communicated with Sister Addams in Cape Canaveral. The ring of satellite weapons felt comfortable. The Elder slipped into them, and took them as a body. He allowed the IFF transmissions to continue, feeling a tingle as each of the links in the Needlepoint Ring came on line.
Down there, humans swarmed towards their predestined End. Seth thought of his favoured followers: Dune in Florida, serving as his family always had done; Priapus in Berlin, the anarchic satyr ejaculating hate with each thrust; the Waiting Snake in Rome, preparing to strike fatally at the heart of the Vatican. He considered the hordes pouring into Salt Lake City, making it a Paradise on Earth, and of their gradual transformation into Waltons, as their hair blonded and stiffened, their features melted and reformed as handsome masks, and their bodies turned to mannequins. How few of them would be among the Elect, the favoured of the Dark Ones.
For his part, Nguyen Seth hungered for oblivion. His centuries weighted him like chains. With the world's end, and the achievement of the Dark Purpose, his ordeals would be over.
"Old man?"
It was Krokodil, still inside his mind like a nestling parasite, trying to eat away at him.
"It's nearly over, old man."
If he was still capable of it, Seth loved Krokodil for her wrong-headed persistence. She contained in her the seeds of the defeat of the Dark Ones, but she would never unleash them so long as she were questing solely for revenge against him. She was so typically human, so limited in her vision. With literally half a view of the world, she was obsessed with him, and that obsession was the key to her failure. How unworthy she was of her ennoblement. She was the only being on the planet who could face down one of the Dark Ones, and yet she frittered her power away on selfish concerns.
"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…"
She was mocking him. Foolish girl.
Soon, Dune would feed Krokodil's heat pattern into the Needlepoint computer at Cape Canaveral, and a beam from the sky would end her.
Seth wondered how much he would miss the girl.
IX
PERSEUS: SOURMASH.
KINGMAKER: ADAGGIO.
PICADILLY: YELLOWSTONE.
TIN LIZZY: COPPICE.
PETREL: CLAW HAMMER.
CURLY JOE: VIGILANCE.
Stealth was not one of Raimundo Rex's strong points. They switched off the motors of their swamp-skimmers once they hit the Indian River, which put them within earshot of the Cape, and fell back on paddles. Raimundo kept bumping his head on low cypresses, and his bulk made the skimmer sit dangerously low in the water. Elvis was sure the saurian had been doping before the mission. It was hard to tell what with his independently-floating reptile eyes, but the Op thought Raimundo had hopped himself up on some zooper-blast.
A lot of other Ops used drugs to get them through the combats, but Elvis thought they were stone crazy. Back in the music days, he had popped his share of pills to keep him going eight gigs a
week, and in the army he had been shot full of morph-plus several times, when he was badly wounded, and he had found the dissociation from his body deeply disturbing. Since then, he had been down hard on recreational or professional drugs. He had first earned the enmity of the Good Ole Boys by turning over to the cops a couple of Memphis dealers who had paid off plenty to stay in business. The smacksynth salesmen had gone in one side of the revolving door and come out the other, protected by a court order and the word of Judgement Q. Harbottle. Drugs were a poison, seeping through the cities of America, turning everything sour…
In Cuba, when he had been shot in the chest and had been in surgery for twelve hours, they had given him enough morph-plus to deaden the pain of torture by flaying. He had had bad dreams, and never really been able to shake them off. He would find himself standing alone in a beam of bright white light like police interrogators use, uncomfortably strapped into a white, fringed, spangled clown outfit. He was sweating like a pig, and his clothes were sticky, and he was mumbling his way through a song he could barely remember, trying to do his old act despite the pains shooting through his legs and arms. The lyric of "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" hovered just beyond his mental grasp, and he was repeating the title over and over again like a mantra, gabbling "are you lonesome tonight, are you lonesome toniiiiight, are you lonesome toniiiiiiiight?" The worst of it was that he was weighed down by heavy pads on his stomach, his buttocks, his thighs, his arms, his legs and under his chin. No matter how he fought, he couldn't get free of the weights. They weren't just fixed to him by tape or wire, they were growing out of him as if he had spent twenty years guzzling brews and downing cheeseburgers by the faceful. There were drugs in him too, not just the medical anaesthetics, but a potent mixture of everything illegal that could be injected, snorted, inhaled, infused, swallowed, skin-popped or poured into his ears. Since Cuba, that nightmare had come back to him too often.
