by Kage Baker
“You’re mean,” Bugleg told him resentfully.
“Damn right I am,” Ratlin retorted. “Takes a mean fellow to get anywhere in this life.”
“But that’s wrong,” Bugleg insisted. “Being mean is wrong.”
Ratlin snarled at him and reached over to the door controls. “I’ll do it,” he threatened. “I’ll pitch you out! Out, crash, on your big stupid sanctimonial head.”
They bickered along like this for the next while, as the agcar sped on in the general direction of Wanstead, veering unsteadily through the sparse traffic, and they barely noticed when it turned in at last under an arch that bore the legend: MANOR PARK PUBLIC STORAGE.
“Here we are,” observed Ratlin. The car swerved into a parking space and, shutting itself off, settled to the ground. He ordered the door open and managed to restrain his urge to boot Bugleg as he climbed out. Emerging himself, he set off briskly down the long corridor into the depths of the storage complex.
It was dimly lit and funereal, as all such places are, and made more so by the décor: here and there in niches along the walls, following the Benthamite creed of utility in all things, were mounted the more attractive of the headstones and other memorials that had graced the old Manor Park Cemetery. Neither Bugleg nor Ratlin had much appreciation for art, however. They hurried along in silence and at last stopped in the gloom before a door numbered 666.
“Here.” Ratlin keyed in a code and the door opened with a sad little chime, the first few notes of a well-known funeral march. Bugleg didn’t get the joke, however, and followed him unsmiling into the chamber beyond.
It was one of the bigger units the storage facility had to offer, but there was barely room to walk its length for the hundreds of green chlorilar drums stacked deep and high. Bugleg had to turn sideways and squeeze after Ratlin, who ran chuckling along the access way. “You see?” he cried. “All you could ever need. The stuff your dreams are made of, the answer to your prayers!”
“I don’t pray,” said Bugleg crossly, looking up at the towering drums. “That’s sick. Anyway, this says it’s food,” he added, pointing to the universal symbol on each drum showing a spoon and fork.
“Well, of course it says it’s food,” answered Ratlin, baring his teeth. “Stupid, think it’d have a label on it says Sweet Poison, Cyborgs Only Please? You mooncalf. Says it’s treacle! But if you look at it magnified you’ll see dear little monsters sludging about in the stuff, ready to rip and rend any cyborg’s innards they can get their hooks into.”
Bugleg winced. “But—but not hurt them. Just shut them off. It won’t hurt anybody.”
Ratlin just stared at him, too amazed to be annoyed. “Oh, no, of course it won’t hurt anybody,” he said at last. “Your slaves ain’t anybody, after all, are they? They’ll just swallow it down and fly off into the sky on pink wings, see if they don’t.”
When they emerged, neither of them noticed the agvan parked near the entrance, though it had not been there when they went in. Ratlin’s car sped away down the street, clipping a light standard near the corner but not enough to slow it appreciably as it set its course back to Neasden.
No sooner had it gone than the van’s door opened and Labienus emerged, followed by another immortal. They hurried into the storage facility, replaying the audio surveillance transcript and counting the footsteps they heard. When they stood opposite the door of unit 666, Labienus halted and tilted his head.
“Here,” he said, inhaling deeply. “What’s that, Kiu? Would you say that’s treacle?”
“No,” she replied, closing her eyes as she analyzed it. “But it’s something we’re meant to think is treacle.”
“Ha.” Labienus considered the keypad and scanned for thermoluminescence. He struck the lit keys in order of faintness, the brightest last. The tiny dirge played for them and the lock disengaged. With smiles of self-congratulation they went in.
Ten minutes later they came out with a sampler tube full of a dark brown substance, carefully sealed in a biohazard pouch. “Analysis is all very well,” Kiu was saying, “but the proof will be a test, of course.”
“Of course,” Labienus agreed. “I have a number of deserving brethren in mind. It’s been long enough since the Options Research scandal that we can risk a quiet disappearance or two.”
Kiu just nodded. There was no other vehicle parked on the street when they returned to the van, because they would have noticed if there had been one. Not until after they had climbed into the back and the van had driven off did another surveillance van, nearly identical, come slowly around the corner and park.
A pair of immortals emerged and, looking around cautiously, made their way into the storage facility and straight to unit 666. When they came out they too had a biohazard pouch containing a sampler tube full of… treacle?
“Maybe we should tie it to the roof of the van,” joked one of the immortals. The other one looked at him in disdain.
“I’ve worked for Aegeus a lot longer than you have,” he said. “When he says there’s a hazard, you can be damned sure there’s a hazard.”
“I’m not reading one,” his companion scoffed, tucking the pouch into his coat pocket as they walked out to their van.
“What would be more dangerous than a hazard we couldn’t perceive, you fool?” snapped the other immortal. His friend considered that and abruptly looked terrified. He took the pouch from his pocket and held it at arm’s length until they got to the van, where he dropped it in a biogen box and closed the lid firmly.
PART III
CHAPTER 10
In the Hill and Out of It
It was the scariest thing Tiara had ever done, but all the great heroines walked with her, advised her, so that on a star-dizzy night she went out to the distant front of the hill. There she found the concealed trail up to the front door, and paraded there until the wind took the scent of her down into the tunnels.
Not long to wait then. She retreated into the barbed darkness of a bramble hedge until Uncle Ratlin came peering out, casting to and fro uncertainly.
“Is it you, Baby doll?” he hissed. “Come to pay us a visit for lovely old time’s sake? Getting a little randified? Oh, please let it be you.”
“It is I, and no other,” Tiara told him. “But I’ve not come to give, not at all. I’ve come only to see how you’re working on my new hill. Where’s my holoset of a thousand channels? Where’s my lace curtains and fine things?” Uncle Ratlin trembled at the sight of Tiara and reached out as though he’d dearly like to squeeze her, but controlled himself with effort.
“Why, my dear—my dearest—a fine hill like what I’m making for you takes time, you see? Takes near as forever. I’ve got your Uncles Glot and Spondip, you remember them, well, I’ve had them out searching all night every night for just the right spot, clean sweet stone with water running through, and the air just wobbly enough so the big people can’t see it too easily. And haven’t they found the prettiest site in all the world!”
“Have they now? And is it near to here, Uncle dear?”Tiara inquired, edging a little closer and then retreating.
“Eeeee! Oh, the turn of your little ankle, sweetmeat—well, it’s not so near as Barbie knows about it, but not so far we mightn’t run there in a short hot night,” Uncle Ratlin told her, rubbing his hands over himself nervously. “And we’ll run there when it’s done, shall we, darling, just you and me and the Uncles? And a host of stupids to wait on you? Leave old Barbie here to stew in her own grease? No killing, if you like. Just walk out the door, whore. Eh?”
“Perhaps.” Tiara circled around a gorse bush, peering through its flowers at Ratlin. “Though of course there’s the big people to worry about. I want none of them tracking up my nice stain-resistant carpets with their muddy boots! Especially the cyborg ones, the slaves.”
“Well, but there’s my famous plan, you see!” Uncle Ratlin grinned and ventured forward to the bush. “There won’t be any of the slaves by then, darling. We’ll have killed them entir
ely! Not so long now neither. Delivery system perfected, don’t you know?”
“And how should I know?” Tiara found a shaft of starlight and began to dance in it, pretending to watch her gray shadow but keeping an eye on Uncle Ratlin. “I am young and beautiful, and you killed the slave dusty long years ago, before ever I was born or thought of. How’d you kill him, anyway? Was it waves of death from a gun?”
“O, no, my love,” Ratlin told her, coming around the bush into the starlight. “That wasn’t enough. We tried and tried with the disrupter fields, but he was proof against that now; shoot him however many times we might, though he turned purple and red like brambleberries, he always went pink again in the end. His nasty little inside things were taking care of him, had learned to reprogram themselves, you see? I’d get so tired, staying up so late, blasting him, and I’d think he’d die, he’d go all stiff and blue and we’d be so happy—but or ever the day broke, he’d shiver and draw breath and start that damned crying again. I cried, too.”
“Poor dearie,” cooed Tiara. “Poor Uncle. How it must have vexed your heart! But however did you really and finally kill the wicked slave, then?”
“Well—” Uncle Ratlin scuttled forward and made a grab for her, but Tiara was too swift for him. She leaped into the branches of a tree, so that all he had in his hand was a scrap of her cobwebby gown, and he whined and tore at his beard in frustration as she laughed down at him from against the stars.
“Tell me,” she demanded. “If I’m to be your own Quean I must know all.”
“It was his biomechanicals, darling girl!” He yelled the secret aloud and then froze, with only his darting eyes moving, casting suspicious glances side to side.
“Biomechanicals?”Tiara flexed and sprang, higher into the tree.
“No use to blast him, you see?” Uncle Ratlin told her in a lower voice, following her along the ground. “Except that it made him hold still awhile. And in that little while we could cut him, take samples of his nasty cyborg blood and look at it up close. Got a good look at the tiny dreadfuls that crawl about in his body and make him live. And, darling, it was me—not Spondip nor Glot nor Moonifan, but onliest me—that thought, well, we could make those, too, couldn’t we? Our very own biomechanicals to make war on his?
“And that’s what we did, sugar. The stupids made them for us all according to plan. So tiny you couldn’t see them but through a glass, our very own bitsy black crabs in a vial of death for the slave.”
“How wonderful,” said Tiara, hating him. “How marvelous. And did you give him them to drink, and blind his blue eyes that way, poisoning his sore body?”
“Drink? No.” Uncle Ratlin scrabbled experimentally at the tree bark, peering up through the branches at her. “We shot him so he lay still, and then we put them in a needle and stuck them into his heart. He’d have puked up anything we gave him to drink, you see? Because he knew we had him. But the others won’t know!
“And you should have seen, my lovey, seen how he clawed and scratched and cried for breath. How his face went black, as our things moved under his skin! This time when he choked his last it really finally and forever was his very last. We took turns watching, Spondip and I and Stilcheese, hours we waited, but he never went pink again. Never breathed. Dead, at last!”
“Oh, at last,” echoed Tiara.
“And that was when we knew we had the Ruin in our own hands, my adorable Quean,” said Uncle Ratlin, attempting a short leap up the tree and not quite making it. “The perfected Ruin to avenge the kin. Such cleverness! You hark now. The slaves are frightful greedy for chocolates.”
“Chocolates,” repeated Tiara uncertainly, pushing at the Memory for a definition. It supplied her with a mental image of bright-wrapped bars and boxes on shop shelves, a nice smell, sweet and luring.
“Creams and kisses and syrups and mousses,” gloated Uncle Ratlin. “They can’t resist them. Your uncle Ratlin owns a chocolate fabricatory and has big people working in it.”
“Oh, you never,”Tiara scoffed, but she leaned down a little more closely to hear.
“I do!” Ratlin insisted. He jumped and caught a low branch. He hung there a moment, panting with effort, before he went on: “How proud you’d be of your big fine uncle if you could only see! Big people laboring to make their own Ruin for your uncle Ratlin, and them never knowing. Big people nodding and scraping and doing my will. I’m as important as anybody on holo, I can tell you.”
“Can I believe this?” wondered Tiara, retreating upward again. Ratlin looked up despairingly and hoisted himself astraddle the branch.
“Believe it, for it’s all true,” he implored. “And oh, my rows of silver vats mixing the creams, my dearie, and oh my vacuum-sealed Packaged Assortments! With a lovely picture of rosebuds on the box, just think, and curly writing saying RATLIN’S FINEST.”
“I am amazed, and know not what to say,” Tiara told him. She dangled her legs just out of his reach. He whimpered and reached for her, but she drew back and ordered: “Tell us more!”
“It’s all to trick the slaves! Haven’t they indulged themselves with my Raspberry Truffles and Marzipan Fudge Delights this many a year, with no harm to themselves at all? They’ll never suspect a thing!” Uncle Ratlin began to hump the branch in his neediness.
“But what ought they to suspect, you strong clever studling uncle?” Tiara coaxed.
“That the terrible day will come when the big people gift them with special-ordered assortments, a box for each slave, here, ‘thank you for faithful years of service!’”
“But that’s wrong,” cried Tiara. “That’s stupid, to kill their own creatures they made. How like the murdering big people.”
“Ain’t it, though?” Uncle Ratlin grinned up at her. “Stupider than they know, because with their slaves gone, they’ll have nobody to protect them when we pay them out, and bloody hell how we will pay them out for all they’ve done to us! Ages since forever hiding in the hills, afraid of their bullies and thieves, but never again, not once their slaves are all dead. They’re not so big or so holy-holy when they’re afraid. Oh, I’ve vials of poisons to hiss into their air, leak into their water. I’ve pulses to shut down their machines. We’ll see who’s so high and mighty, this time three months have come and gone!”
“You are just so clever,”Tiara exclaimed. “Three months, you say?”
“I do,” Ratlin told her, clambering up to stand on his branch. “And once it’s all over and done there’ll be all the time in the world to dig you your beautiful hill. All the pieces are in place, my pretty thing.”
“Well, you’ve won my heart entirely. Nothing must be allowed to stand in the way of such a triumph! I graciously grant you delay in the delivery of my own hill. If you can do all this, sweet Uncle, you shall surely enjoy my favor when the world’s won.”
“Not a little favor now?” Uncle Ratlin leered slyly, peering up her skirt. “To console your poor old uncle and send him back to the workshop with a spring in his step?”
“Oh, you’ve no time for such things,” Tiara told him airily. “Now that I know what work you have in hand, I really must insist you get on with it. Avenge the kin, Uncle, and become the hero I dream of, and then, oh, then, I’ll come to thee in a sheer negligée to passionate and provocate thy heart!”
So saying, she launched herself out into the air and caught the branch of a neighboring tree, and swung away through the night. Ratlin vaulted after her with a shriek, but he was not so young as he had been. He fell from the bough and landed in the long grass like a windfall apple. He lay there weeping and listening to her laughter fading away, little silver-bell laughter like the stars themselves laughing.
The slave suffered a collapse when Tiara explained the whole plot to him. For close to an hour he lay curled in a heap, and forgot where he was and who she was, and it took all her patience to talk to him gently. At last she lay down beside him and put her face next to his, and stroked back his hair, and sang to him until his terrors subsided
a little. “And, you know,” she told him, “my treasure, my own, it’ll never happen at all.”
“It won’t?” He groped with his working hand to knuckle away tears.
“No indeed, because we’ll thwart his black designs.” Tiara sat up, and pulled him up with her. “We’ll be like brave clever Commander Bell-Fairfax. We’ll make up the finest plan in the world. We’ll warn the slaves, just as Bess the landlord’s daughter warned her lover with her death, only we will not die. Now, how will we warn them, my dearest?”
“I don’t know.” The slave began to shake again. “I don’t know where any of them are—don’t know how to get word—Joseph would have known, but Joseph, poor Joseph, they shot him and he lay there crippled and it was my fault—”
“Stop it right now,” Tiara ordered, and wound her arms around him tight. “You must think of what’s to be done, not sad things. You’ll be as clever as Odysseus. Just think, poor Aladdin lay in the dark, just like you here now, despairing of all hope forever, and didn’t he have a happy ending? Yes, with a genie in the lamp?”
“Arabian Nights,” the slave gasped. “Suleyman! Joseph had a friend—and he was powerful, he had influence—he was a Section Head—and he told Joseph a way—Oh, think, Lewis, think!” He smacked his forehead with his fist as though to beat the memory back in, once, twice, again, until she caught his hand and held it still.
“No more hurting yourself,” she commanded. “You will surely remember.”
“But what was it Joseph told me, that time?” the slave wailed. “You could get messages to Suleyman if there was anything you’d discovered, you could send him word and the Company would never know. You could go to a place—you could leave a message—oh, I didn’t use to be like this, you know, I could remember anything, but it’s all scrambled up inside—Allah, Allah is merciful, Allah is compassionate, yes, yes! Compassionates. The Compassionates of Allah.”The slave began to giggle helplessly, and she let him laugh until he had run out of breath.
