The shorter of the two Inspectors, the one with one continuous eyebrow, turned to confront her.
“You knew we were coming,” he said, his outrage welling up. “You expected us and killed thirty men!”
Kim was swinging her sawed-off shotgun at her right side. “An’ I guess you guys was really gonna serve us tea and cookies, right? Is that what the orders mean when they say ‘Eliminate all surplus personnel’? Dat mean pin bibs on us an’ serve tea?”
The taller Inspector adjusted his thick glasses, hands starting to tremble. “What … where did you ever hear … something like that?”
Faiging had his arms crossed, a hand in each armpit to keep them warm. In a short jab, he pointed to the lab roof and tucked the hand back in. Perched above them was an odd electrical structure, looking like a giant wire mesh teacup, several feet across.
“Satellite dish,” the inventor said, shivering now. He sounded like a child proud of an exquisite toy. “Had it for years. Printer hidden in the lab copies out any of the Monitor’s dispatches. You gully satellites?”
“They’ll figure it out,” said One-Eyebrow, gaping upward. “They’ll know what you’ve done.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Faiging said. “We can truck everything down the road a hunnerd miles, blow it up. Look like the revolutionaries done it. I’m making a new keyboard now, can send out some kinda message. I dunno yet. Somethin’.” He was backing up now.
Kim was still swinging the shotgun, and her brow pinched into an exasperated expression. “Both ya’lls flies are hanging open!”
When the two Inspectors looked down, she pulled off two rapid shots. She didn’t have to look into their eyes.
Faiging forced himself to look at the steaming wounds. His ears were ringing like high-pitched sirens. “Kim, you’re so dramatic.”
“We done it, Boss. You ain’t happy?”
“We bought a little time, is all.”
[Back to Table of Contents]
34
Memoir
It was this night we started the Plan, and this small army I have shouldered into the Great Mountains is bedding weary. But it feels quite balls-out, and I laugh now—hunkering on this ridgetop a short shot from the center of Government, our scouts say, and preparing attack. And writing, as I have done since childhood, but writing without fear.
Hak! I am a tourist in my own life. All past is a closed book thrown on the fire. Tomorrow, perhaps all we have of the future, I cannot write yet.
In the day, this is the brightest place ever seen—we are so much closer to the sun, I suppose, so up these rocks. It is a happy blindliness, making battle and death seem quite impossible.
A qualmy commander would turn back now, considering what an odd root bag our forces make. How the old man Rosenthal Webb limped out this far, I dunno. His sidekick Gregory is a bright enough muscler, and he calls the gray-head sometimes Old Man Windmill, which Gregory swears has nothing to do with farting. There’s a Rafer with us, out adark swinging in the trees now, I suppose. He develops a fondness for Webb’s mind, for Pec-Pec’s mind, and the flesh of all others—and I swear that I mean that not sexual.
Pec-Pec is quite a salamander. He tells an odd story on being the father of all Rafers, and his father being some kind of god to them. So you can see why he’s not one to try to gully to the bottom, lest you end up with a headache. I like to think of such mouthings as balderdash, but you cannot be sure with Pec-Pec. I have seen directly that the man takes license with reality, with physical things.
And speaking of odd things, I have further observations about the llamas, those beasts that we made hire of, the ones that can talk, in our tongue, clear as mountain sky. They haven’t a memory, I have noticed—they never gully much from days back. But they do think and talk. They do talk.
I say to one llama, Salvadore, “With so little memory, how do you know who you are one day to the next?”
And he stutters something like, “We live in packs. We talk around what we know … keep collective knowing floating among us. If one llama takes a roguish mind, the rest of us can conspire to take care what he hears—edit his memory—until his mind is right again.”
That, of course, is leaving out all of Salvadore’s hooms and grunts and spits. Took him an hour to get that much clear. But I put back to him, “What if once the single llama is right and the many are wrong?” And he replies, “That’s never happened—not that any of us can remember.”
And then it was that I decided to script some more, even not knowing what I would do with this. That’s what writing is, I say: a permanent memory. No wonder the Government, whatever that is, doesn’t like it.
Our band is a mite hang-faced at my decision to leave the hand bombs behind. But I insist they will not work here. We must draw out the enemy, lure him with our vulnerability. The bombs would only reach a soldier or two, not the beast we seek.
Even the half-witted Inspector feels the tension. We gagged him today to keep him from scream-singing into the canyons for the pleasure of the echoes.
For now, our task is reconnaissance. Pec-Pec says he is exploring the valley yonder in his mind-float, a buggabee that I will never understand. The Rafer Tha’Enton (if his ankle is not too swollen—I say there’s bad damage, and he ignores it) will continue to run the canyon rim to scout upper lookouts and defenses.
We are hoping that the stronghold has depended mostly on its remoteness for defense—which is a factor we have only been able to conquer with the muscle of llamas and Pec-Pec’s astounding mental reach, however it works, to steer us in the right direction. If there are legions defending the canyon, we will die. But if the Government has such forces in this wilderness, they might be of more regular use at the northward prison mine, Blue Hole, to be called down here only for some nasty bellyganger.
Well, we move in the next couple of days, and that’s good, because my boots are shredding and I could use a bath. That flat lake, I can feel it now.
—Commander Anton Takk
Okay, I could not sleep. I wrote another lie: I am really the commander of nothing, and I put it down here on the worry that Webb might read this someday and hammer my lip again.
[Back to Table of Contents]
35
The Diary
When Nora Londi entered the massive dim room housing the thinker boxes, Loo and the llama Diego were working at the semicircular console in the center. The cool dryness was beginning to gnaw at her bones. It may be good for the machines, she thought to herself, but this ain’t fit for humans—the Monitor, maybe, but not humans.
She folded her arms across her chest and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. She found the structure of the cavern and the labyrinth of rooms and passageways confounding. The Monitor claimed that the ancients had carved them out of the solid rock, but that was preposterous. Still, the interior seemed humanly deliberate sometimes, nothing like the haphazard river caves she knew from eastward. But the farther west you go, Londi thought, the less things make sense.
As she paced down a passageway, amid the humming thinker boxes and their odd acrid odor, Londi found her eyes drawn to the ceiling. It was dark, and the ceiling was high, but there appeared to be a gridwork of girders doming the room.
Loo’s fingers were clattering over a keyboard on the counter, and she and Diego were exchanging an incomprehensible babble in that language that was tailor-made for the tongueless little woman. The screen glowed green as script moved across it. Londi decided not to speak, wondering if these passive machines could really hurtle the giant Bullet into the air, wondering what the words on the screen meant. Londi could not remember having wanted to read before.
And she had never known quite this sense of helplessness and despair, for the Monitor had put it to her quite bluntly: She was to become one of his breeding machines, a star player in his human kennel, with proceedings to begin the next day. Booger, is that what the village down by the beach was? A breeding pen?
Her eyes fell to Loo’s fore
arms, which shone green in the machine’s light like some velvety fabric. Londi wanted to touch the dark skin. She wondered if Loo had ever borne a child.
Loo rapped the llama on the snout, apparently a signal for him to stop talking. Diego recoiled with a scraping of hooves but obeyed. Shoving the keyboard aside, Loo pulled down a bulb-shaped microphone on its bendable stand. She spoke into it, “Hoo-ooooma. Oonga-hoor…” And the writing continued to spill across the screen, faster than ever. She pointed the microphone at Diego, who added his own words. When the script continued, the llama snorted gleefully at his contribution.
Diego turned, noticing Londi for the first time. “Oh, hooma, hello.”
“Hello,” she replied. “Learning to fly the sky machine? Or fire the big Bullet?”
Loo hooted a protest, and Diego answered, “No. She showing … diary in machine memory. Hoom.”
“She’ll still skin ya when the time’s right.”
Loo snarled and whirled around in her chair, firing a stream of knife-edged words. Diego translated cautiously: “Dooma, oom. She saying you … built backwards, too large, too—hoom—not smart. Cow in a cattle pen….”
Londi was marching toward the passage to the outdoors, her face aflame, and didn’t hear the last of it. A succession of violent images paraded through her mind—a knife blade arcing through the air, a log chain whistling in a circle over her head, the crunch of a bone under her hands.
Her biceps tensed and eased with each memory.
She stopped at one of the thinker boxes and pounded its black metal hood. Loo and Diego had returned to their work and ignored the echoing crunch. An electrical cord ran from the back of the newly dented machine casing down to the floor, and Londi gave it a furious yank. It came free of the floor easily, the machine’s lights died, and Londi studied the pronged plug at the cord’s end. It looked like the bones of a severed wrist, she decided.
Outside, the sun was low in the west. Londi was surveying the cooling canyon spread before her when a peculiar, calming sensation crept through her body, slowly, from the base of her neck to her ankles, like the most powerful of barroom potions.
She glanced about the ledge and saw that she was alone. She loosed the leather tie holding her hair back and rubbed her scalp nervously with both hands. It was the feeling of swimming nude in a cold stream, and of being watched—maybe not exactly watched, but with someone, close, embracing, and even closer than that. Not carnal, but sexual nevertheless.
When panic rose in her chest, it subsided just as quickly, forcibly eased by this new presence. And then came the strangely accented voice in her head—in her head—resounding: I am a friend, Nora Londi, do not be afraid. Your memory is now mine, too. Through you, I have seen the big Bullet. Thank you. I have seen the Bullet. Now let us examine the village.
Londi stepped onto the rocky trail and carried Pec-Pec in her mind down the canyon wall.
[Back to Table of Contents]
36
Override
The crystals in the rock above the Monitor’s oval bed began to glow faintly. His meaty white hand groped the bedside table until he found the mirrored sunglasses, and when he slipped them on, a relieved sigh gurgled up his throat. Outside, he knew, dawn was spilling into the canyon and seeping ever so dimly down the yards of rock corridor around several turns and into his chamber to burn at his sensitive eyes.
Uhhh.
Again his hand thumped across the table until he found the flask. He uncapped it with the flick of a thumb and turned it up against his lips. The thick syrup of distilled cactus oozed down his tongue, sour and sugary at the same time. He sat up with a grunt.
The Monitor had not slept well. A vague unease had kept his mind churning, searching for answers to the unanswerable. And he was beginning to admit that it was time to move headquarters—a notion that nudged him even closer to depression.
But there were immediate matters, too. He strode stiffly to his desk and glared down at the printouts stacked on their open folder. The top dispatch was the source of his current distress:
Code: A10-08 Yachette
Destination: Monitor/Eyes only
Routing: SATline/Scramble
Origin: Pipbury Station wireless/Linex 64
Message: Two Inspection vehicles on Monitor assignment destroyed in pass near Fontana. Thirty-two dead. Appears work of revolutionaries.
The Monitor had tried for two hours the day before to raise Pipbury Station, but the bumpkins seemed to have left their wireless unattended. He gulped again from his flask. His legs were warming now, his nerves snapping to life.
Something was amiss here. The revolutionaries had not even attempted such an attack for a dozen years or more. They seemed to have sagged into some sorry inertia, running such pathetic little missions that they were hardly worth persuing anymore. But as soon as the Monitor tried to have Cred Faiging picked up, the Security team was massacred. Cred Faiging, the genius of invention. The mechanical genius. The electronic genius.
The Monitor flicked on his computer terminal and squinted behind his sunglasses until his eyes adjusted to the light. He pecked in the code, destination, routing, and origin necessary to communicate with New Chicago Central Wireless—they would be in the office by now.
Message: Trying to raise Pipbury Station. Please check status.
Message: Pipbury Station in sporadic operation for last two months. Shipment of new receiver caroms is pending approval of capital purchase request.
Message: Confirm Pipbury Station transmission to me at 17:00 yesterday your time, SATline/Scrambled routing, Code A10-08 “Yachette.”
Message: Logs show no such transmission relayed through New Chicago Central Wireless.”
No such transmission? All transmissions, scrambled or otherwise, were relayed through Central Wireless. Unless someone had discovered how to tap into the satellite.
So. Cred Faiging was playing games—that was the best guess. Cred Faiging was not going to cooperate.
Cred Faiging would be dealt with later today. Then he would begin arrangements to move headquarters. But now…
The Monitor punched two buttons, and a record of his communication with Central Wireless clattered out of the printer. Then he cleared the computer screen and called up a program titled “Warhead Delivery Systems Launch Sequence.”
He smiled, and a teardrop of saliva formed at the left corner of his mouth. There were only two parameter blanks left in the program, and he filled them in:
Diagnostic status: Override.
Launch timer: 1 hour.
An hour. Mmm. Time enough to hop down to the beach and watch the bullet soar.
He stored the program and imagined the wave of orders gushing into the Bullet—all the minutiae of trajectory, multiple warhead deployment, timing.
“Take that, Europe,” he murmured at the blank screen.
He heard a distant rumbling, and he turned an ear toward the door. Not his Bullet, certainly not this soon. The noise was rhythmic, oddly lyrical. It sounded like music.
[Back to Table of Contents]
37
The Symphony
When Tha’Enton descended onto the beach he spat on his hands and rubbed them in the sand, hoping the sticky, browning bloodstains on his skin would scour away. One lookout on the north rim of the canyon would not be causing trouble when the sun came up this morning. But blood-sticky fingers would not do for a musician’s virtuoso performance.
Every motion seemed painfully, epically more difficult than it needed to be. His ankle throbbed, and his mind was blistered with the demands of honor.
The llama Pinta, who did not speak any tongue that the Defender was familiar with, had handled the excruciating climb down the cliff in expert silence. He admired the beast. But now she seemed restless, and the hundreds of ebony sticks suspended in the frame strapped to her back tinkled with her nervousness.
He laid a hand on the Pa as it wobbled over the llama’s shoulders, partly for support and partly to qui
et the instrument. The Defender pointed gruffly to the black stretch of silent lake, and Pinta obediently began the mushy trek across the 100 yards of sand. It was a soothing walk, relatively, for the bearded warrior’s damaged ankle—quite a relief from the stony mountainside. It is only pain, he told himself, just a feeling, something like tasting a sour fruit. Tha’Enton found himself thinking of the sea of pillows blanketing one of the Tan-Tan tents, and the Pleasure-Givers, and the incense … and then he forced his mind away from the homeland.
A narrow strip of sky along the eastern horizon had turned turquoise. Instinctively, Tha’Enton searched the still-black dome above for the Orion constellation, and when he found the Hunter’s three-star belt, he murmured the Defender’s prayer, one line for each star:
“Honor the enemy with death,
Honor the weapon with a sure toss and a warm home,
Honor the body with bravery.”
The air whispered faintly of sea life, reminding him of the Southland marshes. At the edge of the wet sand, Tha’Enton set up the Pa. The lake edge rustled with minuscule wave action, and the Defender-Sounder decided that would be the First Sound, the foundation on which the coming musical composition would be built.
He had purposely descended the canyon wall just west of the cliff-side village. He positioned the Pa so that he faced east, the view taking in the cluster of mud and rock homes just above the sand, the cliff trails, the long finger of beach and the distant waterfall gushing into the turbine. Tha’Enton heaved his weight onto each of the Pa’s three legs until they were firmly planted in the hard undersand. Then he began the tedious task of unclamping each set of 718 bones so that they teetered freely on the quarter-sphere rack, ready to be twittered between the musician’s fingers.
That done, the musician untied his waist-skin and tucked it under one of Pinta’s backstraps. Naked and ready. His only adornments, ironically, were functions of fighting: the quiver over his shoulder, a knife strapped to each calf, and a burnished brass crotchplate. If his will not to draw blood was to be tested—tempted—then it should be a real test, he reasoned, with all of the tools of war at hand.
The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] Page 14
