“It will be your last act,” said Leander. “After this you may retire with honour.”
“And a plateful of porridge where my brain used to be. No thank you. Let someone else gain glory—preferably yourself.”
“What is this,” asked Sylphide in helpless bewilderment, “some kind of funny exercise?”
“Yes, love, it’s hilarious,” explained Dion. “The gent here wants me to chop Victoria in exchange for nothing.”
“In exchange for doing nothing,” corrected Leander looking significantly at Sylphide. “And also in exchange for guaranteeing a peaceful fecundity in your time.”
“Normally,” explained Dion, “he lives under a wet stone but the run of dry weather has unsettled him.”
“Of course,” said Leander gently, raising the laser pistol, “if you are not interested in the welfare of the third and fourth generations—or even the second—we can settle the matter after a fashion here and now.”
“Not so fast, scorpion. How do I know that this will be the last gambit?”
Leander sighed. “Is there no trust between us?”
“No.”
“You sadden me. I have here a confession signed by myself that I personally am responsible for the dyeing of Parliament and the anticipated death of the queen. It is your certificate of freedom… In the event of a slight misunderstanding, you or your good infra would—I presume—know what to do with it.”
Dion gazed at the darkening sky and shivered. “It’s colder than you think. Come inside and we’ll discuss your little essay in treason over a glass or two of pain killer.”
“Charmed, I’m sure.” Leander tucked his laser pistol away. “Incidentally, if I do not return to London by midday tomorrow, you will be embarrassingly dead and therefore quite unable to contemplate the interesting future of any offspring, potential or actual. That would be sad, would it not?”
“Perhaps,” conceded Dion. “Nevertheless, the sentiment has been registered.”
Sylphide began to cry. “It’s a nightmare,” she sobbed. “It can’t be like this. All we wanted to do was live and love and be alone. Why should anybody want to take it away?”
Dion kissed her gently. “That’s the sixty-four milliard lion question, love.” He glanced at Leander. “And the answer is quite simple. Because some bastard joker made it easier for a rich dom to pass through the eye of a camel than for a poor sport to needle his way into the kingdom of heaven.”
Seventeen
IT was a fine, still morning with a slight bouquet of frost in the wine-sharp air. Dion, in an iridescent sky suit and with a racing jet pack strapped to his back, lay flat on his face, the snout of his scoped laser rifle poking discreetly between the thick pillars of the low balustrade. The balustrade had been added to the flattened top of the Cenotaph in Whitehall during the early twenties, when vid was still more or less earth-bound and state occasions had to be shot from solid coigns of vantage.
But now that ground controlled hover-cameras were used, Dion had the top of the Cenotaph all to himself—which was just as well, because even the sensation-hungry doms of Centrovid might have stopped short at aiding and abetting regicide.
He had been lying there since before daylight, and he was stiff with fear and stillness, having hardly moved during the last four hours. Despite the chameleon-like qualities of his sky suit, even the slightest movement might have been picked up by a drifting hover-camera or a patrolling Peace Officer; and then his Id digits would have been up. Even frustrated regicide would merit a grade one.
As he lay there, waiting for Leander’s radio bleep from Admiralty Arch to signal that the procession was four minutes away, Dion had time to think about all the things he did not want to think about. Like how the next half hour would probably see him permanently dead, anyway. If he chopped Victoria, a lot of people would be justifiably annoyed; and if he did not chop her there were those who would also be somewhat annoyed. Thus it was merely a case of the devil or the deep blue yonder.
Leander’s instructions had been explicit and nothing if not unequivocal. “Permanent not temporary death is required, dearest boy,” he had said. “If Victoria survives, she’ll be a lousy heroine. So you either burn her head off or cut her in two. Monarchy, in this lovely dom’s world, has to be seen to be a hazardous occupation.”
The escape plan was simple enough to succeed—if it could be got off the ground. As soon as Leander had given his signal from Admiralty Arch, he would jet to the roof of the New Peace House, parallel to the Cenotaph, and wait for Dion to start burning. Then, as Dion lifted from the Cenotaph with his racing jets at full scream, Leander would create a small diversion and try to cut down any pursuing Peace Officers. Finally, the two of them would rendezvous at ten thousand feet—hopefully two thousand feet more than Peace Officers would dare to rise—and jet north together. Over Cambridgeshire, assuming they had thrown off all pursuit, they would separate. They would touch down at a deserted barn, where Leander had already stashed conventional rented sky gear, dump their rifles and racing kit, and say a briefly moving farewell to each other for ever. Then Dion would lift north to Wits’ End and Leander would lift south to London—two innocent squires going about their lawful occasions.
It was a reasonable plan—but one which Dion already knew was not going to work. It was not going to work because to make something like that work you had to want it to work. And, as always, he did not quite know what he wanted.
So he lay there sweating, with the cold air bathing his face, listening to the muted murmur of traffic and the nearer sounds of the infras and sports already lining the route and who had been paid a lion or two to cheer the Queen’s progress.
To burn or not to burn, that was the question. Whether ‘twere nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous mediocrity, or to take arms against a sea of doms, and by opposing end them?
But, for Stopes sake! Would the frying of Victoria topple the entire monstrous regiment of women? It would not. It would merely stir the bitches up a bit. So why the ferkinell?
Answer: because D. Quern had entered upon a somewhat improbable pact with the devil’s disciple. Or because D. Quern had developed joie de mourir. Or because D. Quern was plain bored.
The radio bleep from Leander came through the micro-ceiver lodged in his ear, and D. Quern jumped like a startled rabbit. The movement would surely be noticed. But it wasn’t. He was rather disappointed.
“Bon chance, sport,” whispered Leander’s crackly voice. “The sausage is yours for the cooking. Give it Fahrenheit two thousand with love… See you on top of the clouds, wonder boy. Out.”
“Or in Hades,” growled Dion to himself, “making like a micro-miniaturized snowball.”
He raised himself cautiously up on one knee, his head still lower than the top of the balustrade, and peeped between the pillars. The carriage, preceded by half a squadron of Household Cavalry, their shaped metal breastplates bounding and glinting like a multiplicity of twin voracious eyes in the vague sunlight, turned into Whitehall.
Dion was trembling. The laser rifle felt simultaneously like a white hot poker and a rod that weighed ten metric tons.
Sir Dion Quern, he thought; having recently received a knighthood, the royal bounty, and the intimate attention of the Queen’s own person, did thereafter brood upon these injuries and resolved to bring to a permanent death the body of his most gracious liege sovereign. Therefore let his name be expunged from the records for ever. And, despite the demise of Her Majesty, it shall be as if the sick-psych had never been misconceived.
He raised the laser rifle unsteadily and looked through the scope. Victoria, at two hundred metres and 10X, was smiling. Graciously. In the great tradition of British monarchs. They had smiled graciously for too many bleeding centuries. Now was the time to do some little something about it.
Dion notched back to maximum power, settled his cheek against the stock of the rifle and peered through the scope once more. The breast-eyes on the cuiras
ses of the Household Cavalry danced hypnotically. Goddammit, there were rainbows all over the place. Goddammit, it must be raining. Goddammit, it wasn’t raining. Goddammit, he was crying!
He tried to press the fire stud, but his finger was frozen like a petrified question mark.
One hundred and fifty yards. Victoria’s smile was the smile of the sphinx. Anyone not a certifiable idiot could see she was as bored as hell. It would be an act of mercy to relieve her boredom.
The paid sports and infras lining the route began to cheer themselves hoarse and stupid, secure in the comfortable prospect of an imminence of alcohol. A number of feeble-minded doms were tossing handfuls of plastic rose petals. The vid cameras hovered like a swarm of giant flies.
He tried to press the fire stud again, and failed.
It was ridiculous.
It was ridiculous that a grown man could not execute a grown woman who was the symbol of feminine power in this dom-happy world into which he had been thrust.
One hundred yards. He brushed the tears away and tried hating her.
It didn’t work. With a tremendous mental effort, he superimposed Juno’s face on that of Victoria’s. That didn’t work either. His finger was frozen like a question mark that would never uncurl.
Then suddenly he thought of his mother, who had died of an embolism and seventeen pregnancies. Who had killed herself to buy him an education and a little time. And he was filled with a righteous anger.
Queen Victoria the Second of England was a symbol of the society that had made such a sacrifice necessary. It was time, therefore, for Victoria to collect on behalf of all the doms she represented, the interest on the seventeenth pan of afterbirth.
Dion Quern stood up on the top of the Cenotaph. The Cenotaph itself represented ten million dead men. They had not died for anything glorious, whatever the historians tried to invent. Nor did they die so that a debased breed of woman should inherit the earth.
Somehow, he sensed that they were with him. And there was a majority verdict.
He brushed away the tears and looked through the scope. His brain was cold and the question mark on the end of his hand was flexible. Victoria was still smiling.
The question mark tightened, and the smile vaporized. The horses reared. A few breastplates clanged deliciously on the roadway. The cheering seemed to swell into an ovation. And, ten light-years away, on the roof of a building opposite, Leander Smith was chopping vainly with a laser pistol at the swarm of Peace Officers already jetting towards the top of the Cenotaph.
Dion did not move. He did not even want to move. He dropped the laser rifle and just stood there waiting.
He did not have to wait long.
Within thirty seconds he had been beaten into an unconscious pulp.
Within the same thirty seconds, Leander Smith realized that Dion no longer had any intention of jetting up to a rendezvous at ten thousand feet. But by that time he had left his own escape a little too late. Even as he began to rise, an enterprising dom burned off his jet pack with a lucky sweep from four hundred yards. He fell back on to the roof and broke his ankle.
He sat there waiting for them, laughing at the great shaggy assassination joke. Laughing quite hysterically at the inevitable prospect of grade one.
Eighteen
THE room was small, white and bare. There were no windows. Artificial light with a greenish tint emanated from some source behind a circular metal grille in the ceiling. The metal door was magnetically locked. Two hard chairs were fixed magnetically to the floor. Dion Quern, hastily patched up from his impromptu beating, sat on one of them; and Leander Smith, nursing the tension spray bandage on his foot, sat on the other.
Dion was trying to recollect the morning’s events through a fog of pain and confusion. “I suppose I killed her?” he enquired at length.
Leander grimaced, and shifted his foot. “That you did, my son. Quite permanently. It is some small consolation in our present sorrow… Why the Stopes didn’t you jet?”
“I don’t know,” said Dion. Then he added as an afterthought: “Maybe because I knew I’d killed her.” He became angry. “What the hell, you great green gryphon! Why didn’t your lousy Lost Legion supply some more dedicated assassin? And in any crapulous contingency, it was not the task for a tottery twosome such as we.”
“Interesting,” mused Leander. “You have a tendency to alliterate in times of stress.”
“Stuff the alliteration. Now that the excreta closes bubbling over our cracked crania, your little Lost Legion will have to unearth other zombies its miscarriages to perform. That, at least, affords fractional consolation.”
“There is no Lost Legion,” said Leander sombrely. “It surrendered this morning.”
Dion’s mouth opened, but it was some time before the words came out. “What of the revolutionary army? What of the High Command?”
Leander smiled. “Little one, I was the High Command. You were the entire army corps—including cavalry and secret weapon.”
There was a further silence while Dion swallowed and inwardly digested.
“So you planted the bomb in my tin heart?”
“There is no bomb in your tin heart.”
“What about the homing device?”
“There is no homing device.”
“Then how the Stopes did you know where I would be? That time in St. James’s Park and then at Wits’ End.”
“Intelligence plus patience plus gullibility equals miracles,” explained Leander. “I knew you were at Buck House, so I simply waited and followed you when you left. It was time-consuming, but the stakes were high. As for your little grey house in the north, all I had to do was lock on to Dom Juno, so to speak—who, I may add, jets like one dispossessed…Quod erat faciendum, as one might say. Or perhaps inveniendum would be more appropriate.”
“At the Clinic you demonstrated that you could kill me.”
“Sweet child, I borrowed a servo-cardiac interrupter from a careless domdoc. They’re standard equipment for testing electro-mechanical hearts. The absolute range is, I believe, ten yards. And the absolute limit for induced death is forty seconds. After that time, the emergency pump in your tin heart takes over.”
“So it was all a con,” said Dion weakly.
“May I suggest that you conned yourself—with minimal assistance.”
“Why-for crysake?”
“Who knows?” said Leander, beginning to enjoy himself. “Who knows? Maybe you just wanted to be a zero hero.”
“Not me, grave-robber, you,” explained Dion coldly. “Why you? Why this Lost Legion ploy? Why this compulsion to recruit one Dion Quern as a protagonist in your private fantasy? Why paint doms purple, burn the Queen and set it all up for someone to stir the porridge in what passes for your brain?”
Leander laughed. “Questions! Questions! Let us see if there are any satisfactory answers. One: the Lost Legion ploy. As an ex-poet, you will surely accept my plea of romanticism. Two: the recruitment of Dion Quern. Is it not enough, dear playmate, that I liked your face, to say nothing of your spirit? Three: why paint doms purple, etcetera. Gestures, my son. Less than magnificent, perhaps, but still gestures… I regret nothing. And on behalf of you, I regret nothing. We are as we are, and we presumed to be men. The meal was excellent, and now there is the reckoning. It would be churlish to complain.”
Dion did not know whether to laugh or cry. But he met Leander’s gaze, and the impulse to laughter won.
The sound of it reverberated harshly in the small bare room. Listening to it almost objectively even as he was convulsed in the act of producing it, Dion relished what would probably be his last boisterous guffaw at the mazy-dazy cosmos. But it was more than a guffaw and less than laughter. It was a heavily disguised cry from the heart. Eventually he calmed down sufficiently to realize that Leander was speaking again.
“I was quite a patient nihilist,” said Leander. “I moiled, toiled and boiled eleven years at the Trafalgar Square Clinic, waiting for the right kind of L
ancelot to dive head first and with a wild shout into this plethora of dragons. Then you came along for time shots with a faceful of misery and a psychofile that showed three grade threes. I said to myself: this is the boyo. Here is a bright bouncy lad with an excess of adrenalin and enough imagination to swallow the totally absurd. How right I was. How wrongly right I was. You had just the combination of high intelligence and excessive stupidity to assume the posture of the Light Brigade when I said charge.”
“There were others?” enquired Dion.
“There were others. In the course of years, there were others. Some I expended on small pranks like livening up baby farms. Some I sent on fanciful missions to foreign parts—you know the sort of thing: sports of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your one-night stands… But you—you had genuine potential. You made the joke worth while. You had a touch of artistry that almost made it credible—even to me.”
“It could have been credible,” said Dion slowly. “It could still be credible. Somewhere there might be a magna-colour, stereophonic three-dee Lost Legion waiting for the final shout.”
“Dion, dear innocent, you were born a fool,” retorted Leander. “Kindly do not try to outdo nature. You have seen surely that there are no gentlemen left in England, and all the rest are now abed. For there are more beds than bodies in this demi-sec paradise. You cannot make a deaf-aid out of a silk kimono. Guts are obsolete. Pranksters play—viz. the late revels at Stonehenge—but no one fights. Fighting needs guts, and guts are as aforementioned. We can prick the doms’ bottoms, but we can’t fight any more… Hell, Master Ridley, we can’t even light a decent candle, you and I. The cunning bitches have cheated us by throwing out capital punishment and keeping the death sentence. We shall wear our grade ones like clowns’ hats and collect a backside kick from every oat-fed eunuch… But,” he laughed, “the meal was excellent and the non-vintage wine had a briefly amusing presumption. Amen.”
There was a silence.
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