by Mick Farren
Mansard raised a weary eyebrow. "So what do we have there? The usual hellfire and blood?"
"The boy seems to be going for broke."
"Oh, yeah?"
"He wants a sky walker."
"Does he, by God?"
"A hundred-foot hologram figure on top of the Garden."
"No shit. What does he want? A figure of himself?"
Jimmy Gadd shook his head. "Uh-uh."
"Not another Jesus?"
"Nope."
"I'm not in any condition to play guessing games."
"He wants us to do the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse charging the Empire State Building."
Mansard whistled. His hangover was temporarily forgotten. "Does Proverb have any idea what something like that is going to cost?"
Gadd nodded. "I checked with Jason, his controller. They seem prepared to go the distance as far as the money is concerned. Proverb seems to have something to prove."
Mansard started making calculations on a pad. "Can we put up an image that big?"
Gadd ran a hand through his hair. "In theory we can, if we get something of an overcast and rent every fog generator in town. The real problem is the multiple imaging. We've only done single figures. This is four horsemen. Count them. Four. Four horsemen and four horses. For all practical purposes, it's eight figures. Nobody's ever attempted anything close to it. Not even Visioninc."
Despite himself, Mansard grinned. "It'd be an all-time coup. Can we do it?"
"If we get the hardware that we need."
"So what would we need?"
"With those new DL-70s from Sony, it'd be a breeze, but we don't have the DL-70s yet."
"I thought that it was all arranged. Didn't we have the tithe barriers beaten?" Mansard asked.
"On paper we did. We had the stuff ordered through a Chilean purchasing agent. It's the usual way of getting around the Japanese embargo. Everyone does it."
"So where are they?"
"Last I heard they were still sitting in a warehouse at Santiago airport. You know what the Chileans are like."
"Can we get them in time?"
"I sure as hell hope so. Marty's on the phone right now."
Mansard started flipping through the script. "The interior effects seem well within our capabilities."
Gadd nodded. "No problem. Although Proverb does seem to be going for the edge."
Mansard continued to examine the script. "He does, doesn't he? But, then again, Arlen Proverb has never been your run-of-the-mill preacher."
Arlen Proverb had never been anything like a run-of-the-mill preacher. In the tight power frame of the theocracy, Arlen Proverb was the rebel, the perennial thorn. Although, for public consumption, it was all brothers in the Lord, there was a deep and hostile gulf between Faithful and his cronies and the flamboyant Proverb. He simply had too big a following for them to off him. Where Faithful and his circle radiated a scrubbed corporate wholesomeness, Proverb ranted and roared and dressed in Nashville spangles. He was a wild man, a throwback to the tent shows and the snake handling of the raging Bible belt, a hunched and brooding figure in a white jumpsuit that could suddenly lash out with an Old Testament fury. He was a throwback, though, who performed in front of a battery of state-of-the-art special effects of such intensity that they were close to psychedelic. He was adored by the unemployed, the blue collar, the marginal, the brought down, and just about anyone who had a head of anger that he wanted to blow off. In that, he was the closest thing the country had to an aboveground political opposition. Unlike Faithful, who expected passive acceptance from his devotees, Proverb encouraged his followers to be an integral part of the show. They stomped and clapped. They had visions and talked in tongues. They even writhed on the floor in convulsive spasms of ecstasy. In fact, ecstasy was what set Proverb apart from the others. He delivered an old-time, holy roller good time, and that made him dangerous.
Mansard stopped at a page in the script. "He's actually going to use 'Love Me Tender'?"
Gadd shrugged. "That's what it says,"
"He's sailing kind of close to the wind, isn't he?"
"He's always attracted Elvi in his crowds."
"But he's never pandered to them before."
The followers of Elvis Presley were another problem that the Faithful orthodoxy had with Arlen Proverb. The Elvi flocked to his shows in droves, out in the open in their scarves and badges, sideburns and sunglasses. There was no doubt that the Elvis cult was a non-Christian belief, and on a number of occasions plans had been hatched at a high level to suppress it. Somehow, though, they had never been acted upon. Elvis was so deep in the psyche of poor white America that even the Fundamentalists were scared to mess with his memory. They seemed to suspect instinctively that they might be dealing with a sleeping giant who, if roused by oppression, might become quite uncontrollable. For Proverb actually to go out of his way to court them was something else entirely, and it would undoubtedly widen the gulf between him and the hierarchy.
Mansard grinned. "Proverb's up to something."
Jimmy Gadd was not smiling. "Do you really think we should be getting involved with him?"
"We've always done Proverb."
"If he's planning on tweaking Faithful's tail by playing up to the Elvi it could be the start of a whole holy nasty. We don't want any of that nastiness to rebound on the company."
"Nothing nasty can rebound on us. We're just the hired whores. Next month we'll be working for Swan. Sublime to ridiculous. We take no sides. They know they need us more than we need them. In the meantime, we'll give Proverb his four horsemen. Maybe they'll all want monster sky walkers after that. We can get rich and go put on rock-and-roll spectaculars in Australia."
Gadd grinned wryly. "That'll be the day." Mansard became professional. "Let's get to it."
"Should I start Manny on the visualization?" Mansard nodded. "Yeah. The sooner we get the master drawings, the sooner we can start on the rig design."
Kline
Cynthia Kline came out of the heavily protected street entrance to the CCC Astor Place complex and discovered that the combination of the bread riot and the bombing and the official response to both had turned the streets to total chaos. The only traffic that seemed to be moving belonged to law enforcement. Police Pharaohs and prowlers, the deacons' Continentals and their sinister buses with the blind windows and cargoes of unfortunate prisoners, came and went at high speed with sirens screaming and lights flashing. Cynthia had originally intended to take a cab home, but that was clearly impossible. The subway offered no better prospects. It was well past the rush hour, and there were still lines of people waiting to get into the Astor Place station, casting nervous glances at all the police activity. A number of uptown lines had failed, and a lot of commuters seemed resigned to the prospect of spending the night on the platforms. The buses were equally bad. The insides were packed, and still more people clung to the sides and the backrails even though they did not seem to be going anywhere.
Cynthia got a tight grip on her shoulder bag and started out in the direction of Third Avenue. Her clerical auxiliary uniform helped to get her through the knots of officers who filled the sidewalk in front of the building. They all seemed so tightly wrapped, so dangerously primed for violence, and she wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. After all her training and even after operating under cover for so long, the proximity of so much armed authority still made her nervous. She would never forget the horrors of '04 and '05 when so many of her friends had vanished.
Things were no better on the corner of Third. Civilian traffic had been waved over to the curb, and even the pedestrians who usually crowded the corners of Third and St. Marks had melted away. She had no more chance of getting a cab than she had of flying in the air. She had to face the fact that she was walking home. As she started north up Third, she wondered how many streets in the twenties would be closed off because of the riot.
"Want a ride, baby?"
Cynthia swung around, ready t
o tell whomever it was to take a jump. But it was a regular police cruiser that had pulled up at the curb. Two young patrolmen were grinning at her from behind the steel grill, their expressions suggesting that their intentions were less than honorable. They were out to have a little fun.
"Going our way?"
Her instinct was to tell them what they could do with their ride, but at the thought of the long walk to her apartment, she put on an idiotic smile and pushed her voice up half an octave. Experience had taught her that cops were easier to handle if they thought they were dealing with Betty Boop.
"I need to get to Thirty-eighth and Ninth."
"No problem."
"You want to squeeze in the front here with us?"
Cynthia regarded the helmets and riot guns racked and ready between the front seats. Fitting her in was an obvious physical impossibility.
"Too tight a squeeze," she said.
The nearest cop's grin broadened. "You could sit on my lap."
"I think I'll get in the back."
He pretended to be horrified. "A nice girl like you can't sit in there. That's where we put the prisoners."
His partner joined in. "You know? Sinners?"
"We've had all kind of scumbags back there."
"Probably diseased."
Cynthia reached for the rear door handle. "I'll manage."
"Suit yourself."
The lock popped. Cynthia opened the door and climbed inside. There actually were some unpleasant-looking stains on the plastic seat cover.
"You asked for it."
"I'll live with it."
"Hold tight."
"I'm holding."
The cruiser took off in a squeal of laid rubber, the scream of its siren, and a blaze of flashing lights. The boys were showing off. They had those plain, scrubbed, unlined faces that seemed to have become so common in the last few years, as if they were manufactured somewhere out in the Midwest, complete with crewcuts, emotionless eyes, and mouths that seemed designed only to leer and sneer. They roared up Third Avenue at high speed. At Fifteenth Street they all but plowed into a bus.
"Goddamn it."
"Had to be on Fifteenth Street."
As they got underway again, the cop riding shotgun swivelled in his seat. "You know about Fifteenth Street?" His leer was back.
The driver sniggered. "Sure she does. I heard some of these clerical auxiliaries even moonlight back there."
Cynthia Kline did not, in fact, know anything about Fifteenth Street and made the appropriate noises. She was certain that the grinning assholes in the front seat couldn't wait to tell her. She was immediately proved right.
"The dekes have a house on that block. A regular sink of iniquity. It's where they go to have a bit of illicit fun."
"When the strain of being righteous gets too much for them."
The driver laughed. Cynthia found the sound instantly irritating.
"Maybe you shouldn't talk like that in front of the lady. I mean, she's practically one of them."
Shotgun put his face close to the grille that separated the back of the car from the front. "You wouldn't get us into trouble, would you, gorgeous?"
Cynthia shook her head. "I always do my best to avoid trouble."
She was storing away the tidbit of information about Fifteenth Street in the back of her mind. There was no knowing when something like that might come in handy. She might be a damn sight more use moonlighting in a deacon whorehouse than shuffling data on Astor Place. Or maybe not. She could imagine what those repressed bastards might want to have done to them.
The cruiser was still screaming up Third as if it were on its way to an emergency. The two cops kept up a running commentary on individuals on the sidewalk. All of it was abusive and a good percentage was homicidal.
"Look at that big fat bastard. Imagine pumping a hollow point into his fat gut."
There seemed to be nobody that they did not hate. But, Cynthia reflected, it was actually understandable that the younger cops should behave like an occupying army. That was virtually what they were. After the takeover, working on the principle of divide and rule, the NYPD had adopted the same recruiting policy that the deacons used. They went out and hired country boys from the depressed Midwest. The new rookies came as strangers to a town they disliked and distrusted, and they quickly developed a relationship of mutual loathing with its inhabitants.
They hung a tire-wrenching left on Twenty-third Street and started heading west. Cynthia realized that they were driving directly into the riot area.
"Are you going to drop me off, or what?" she asked.
"Thought we'd take a look around first. You want to see what's happening, don't you?"
"I…"She trailed off as she realized that there was no point in answering. She was going to get a tour of the riot scene whether she wanted one or not. She had seen riots before, more than enough, but she was not about to admit that. It hardly fitted with her current identity.
There was a police barricade across Eighth Avenue. A crowd had gathered on the north side of Twenty-third Street. Quiet and sullen, the rubbernecks kept a cautious distance from the line of heavily armed police. There was a smell of gasoline and burned plastic in the air, as well as the bite of lingering tear gas. Gunships circled overhead with their rotors slapping and their spotlights probing the area. As the cruiser nosed up to the barricade, two patrolmen in full riot gear, visors locked down, pulled a pair of sawhorses aside to let them pass. The cruiser had to give way, though, as a paramedic unit came through. The two cops put on their helmets and downlocked their Remingtons. They were noticeably more tense now that they were in the battle line.
"There's been a lot of casualties. St. Vincent's is having quite a problem coping," the driver said.
Shotgun grunted. "Bastards should be left in the street to bleed."
"A lot of them were."
Cynthia wanted nothing more than to be out of there.
Beyond that barrier, the power was out and the streetlamps dark. The only lights came from flickering fires, the searchlights of the slowly turning gunships, and the rotating red and blue of the dozens of police and fire department vehicles. The center of everything was the supermarket at the corner of Twentieth. It had been reduced to nothing but a burned-out skeleton of blackened girders. To the north and east, the lights on the Empire State Building shone bright and clear. Farther north, the Trump Grand Tower gleamed in the night.
"The firemen couldn't get to the blaze until about an hour ago. There were snipers on the rooftops."
"Can't take the guns away from the people." Shotgun sounded bitter. It was one of the major paradoxes of the Faithful regime that although pornography and rock music had been outlawed, it was easier than ever to get a gun. During the campaign of 2000, Larry Faithful had gotten himself so far into hock with the gun lobby that there was no way he could ever institute gun controls. In a situation of almost complete repression, the American people had the inalienable right to arm themselves to the teeth.
They passed a long line of chained and handcuffed people, covered by riot guns while waiting for transport to the lockup. Other huddled shapes draped in black plastic sheeting were obviously bodies. The car crunched over a continuous carpet of broken window glass. There were still flames inside a building across the street from the supermarket. Cynthia peered through the rear window of the cruiser. Despite all that she had seen, part of her still found it hard to believe that such chaos could result from what was really only a minor distribution screwup in the Daily Bread program. She remembered the words of Tom Weber, her political science instructor back at the camp in the woods outside Vancouver. "It's far easier to run an inefficient welfare program that fouls up all the time than just end welfare altogether. You have the advantage of appearing to do something while, at the same time, you are equipped with an ideal tool to manipulate the underclass. Faithful's Daily Bread program is the perfect example. By substituting a crude handout for every other kind of more sophisticated s
afety-net program, it reduced the recipients to the most degradedly dependent level. Whenever glitches occur in the system, they spark riots. If you start instigating these glitches according to a planned pattern, you are able to use them as an excuse to raze neighborhoods and relocate unwanted populations."
The cops were guffawing.
"Daily Bread."
"Sounds like a newspaper."
"So let the scum eat newspaper."
The neighborhood looked as if it were well on the way to being razed. Cynthia doubted that the A&P would ever be rebuilt. The cardboard box people would be setting up homes in the ruin inside of a week. The police stood around in tight, watchful knots, weapons at the ready, scanning the rooftops. They obviously had the area secured but were still nervous about random sniper fire. House clearing had already started. A brown-skinned teenager was being dragged from a doorway. Two cops were holding his arms, and a third had him by the hair. There was blood on his face, and his eyes were wide with terror. He put up a certain minimal struggle, and immediately the three uniforms laid into him with their nightsticks. The cops in the front of the cruiser shouted encouragement.
"Yeah! Trash that piece of garbage!"
"Beat some manners into the little bastard!"
Cynthia had had quite enough. "I'd really like to get home now."
"Don't worry, gorgeous. We'll get you home."
"It's been a long day and I'm kind of beat."
"Where were you going to? Thirty-fourth and Tenth?"
"Thirty-eighth and Ninth."
"Whatever. We'll take you up there as soon as we take a look around the side streets."
The two young cops exchanged a look that Cynthia did not like at all.
"Don't you have to call in?" she asked.
The driver shrugged. "There's no point. It's chaos back on Astor Place. Ground control's completely jammed."
