The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK
Page 96
I looked around, and found that we were already in No Angel’s Land. The Devil and I were—my soul had vanished. “Don’t worry about that,” said the Devil. “I had it packed off straight to Hell.”
I said, “That was a bit presidential of you, seeing that we haven’t finalized the trade-in yet.”
“Oh, we will,” said he. “If we don’t, M. Electricia, you can have your old one back. But we will, and meanwhile I couldn’t stand his caterwauling any longer. Thank foresight, we have very good sound-soak in my realm.”
I began to correct him about my name, but couldn’t remember what else besides “Electricia” it might be. So I just let him ramble on about the excellent sound-soak they had in Hell and all the reasons they needed it, while I started looking around at the souls available for trade-in. At first they seemed to be pebbles, and then hundreds of puppy dogs all vying for my attention, and then finally I saw that they were people, miniature and yet life-sized both at once.
Some of them were in luxury, and some were in pain. Cleopatra was reclining on silk cushions eating peeled grapes, while some old Scandinavian king who had forced his subjects to be baptized or die was having what I think they called the blood-eagle operation performed on him by a couple of floaters who looked like Nazis from the Last Great War. Several twentieth-century evangelists were taking turns pushing each other into a blue bonfire, while Andrew Carnegie was complaining that he’d been given red caviar when he wanted black. I saw Alexander the Great weeping because there were no more oysters to conquer, while Roland was blowing his horn in an enthusiastic jam session with the Bugle Boy of Company D. A Chinese mandarin was having his fingernails trimmed and manicured by Marilyn Monroe, but I couldn’t tell whether that was one of the luxurious processes or one of the painful ones.
All this puzzled me until I understood that they were all doing it to themselves or one another. Nobody was forcing them to do, suffer, or enjoy anything. No angels or demons were around to help, advise, or even oversee them. Except for his satanic majesty, who was still talking about the superior sound-soak of Hell, the only angels or demons in sight turned out to be Robin Hood’s Merry Band in costume. All these souls were simply filling up their eternities as best they could.
The one thing they had in common was that every one of them was scrabbling, pleading, begging to be my new soul. Cleopatra offered me her grapes, Alexander all his oysters, the Chinese mandarin his long fingernails, which had been cased in gold before being clipped. Roland offered me his horn. I won’t even tell you what Marilyn Monroe offered me. The TV evangelists offered me the Oxford ten-meter shelf of Bibles, and Andrew Carnegie offered me all the fines ever collected on all the overdue books in all his libraries, which he said was where his real fortune had come from.
Finally, with a great deal of difficulty, I got them all lined up and started interviewing them, hoping in that way to find the best one for my purpose. In a few hours I had narrowed it down to Roland, Robin Hood, the old Scandinavian king, and the Bugle Boy of Company D.
I drew the four of them into a circle around me and described at full length what I intended to do. The Scandinavian king called it unchristian and huffed off with his lungs still flapping. I was a little sorry to see him go, considering his expertise. Robin Hood said he had no moral objection to it, himself; in fact, it sounded like his kind of sport; but where was the financial profit in it? When I told him there was none, he demanded to know if that meant we’d have to give to the poor out of our own pocket, so I dismissed him. Remembering that Roland had brought about his own original death over some silly scruple about how many measures to count out before coming in with his horn, I dismissed him too, rather regretfully. That left me with the Bugle Boy of Company D.
“Well,” I asked him, “what’s wrong with you?”
“Oh, not a thing, ma’am,” said he. “Not a blessed thing. No’m, Ah’s yore ever-lovin’ soul brother fo’ shore. All the way with you, ma’am, all the livelong way!”
I turned around to the Devil and said, “All right, I’ll take this one.”
“And between the boiling lake and the rack room,” he was saying, “we had genuine cork sound-soak half a meter thick installed as early as the fourteenth century—Oh, I beg your pardon? Yes, M. Electricia, an excellent choice. I’m sure it will give you complete satisfaction. Shall I wrap it up or install it here?”
I told him that he’d better install it at once, since I wasn’t quite sure how to go about it, this being my first experience with this sort of thing and, as it turned out, the Bugle Boy’s, too. It would be very difficult to describe exactly how the Devil managed that installation, except that it was quick, a bit painful, and involved something like a large ivory shoehorn. When it was done, I felt quite comfortable and loose-limbed, “laid back” as I think they used to say, only I had a terrific urge to play a trumpet.
The Devil tossed the Bugle Boy’s trumpet in as a fringe of the deal, and I went about my business, meanwhile trying to play. I couldn’t get anything but squawks and phhts out of the trumpet, which was very frustrating to me. Also to the Bugle Boy, who kept giving me hints and tips from his place deep inside me: “Pucker your lips. Tighten up your mouth. Relax and open up your throat, just let the air flow right on through. Shut your eyes.” And so on.
With my eyes shut, I saw myself walking through a pleasant forest glade, and my only worry in life seemed to be that I couldn’t get a tune out of the trumpet. I was trying to play Scott Joplin’s “Entertainer,” but not a single note would come.
After a while, I opened my eyes again and there, in the middle distance, was the very man I had my business with. He had raped my sister and fooled the police about it, and so naturally, you understand, I had to kill him. I wanted to do it very slowly, and for just a moment I thought I had the soul of the old Scandinavian king inside me, after all.
Just as I remembered, however, that I was really running on the Bugle Boy’s soul, the urge became absolutely overpowering to put the trumpet to my lips again and blow. And this time—all at once and on the sudden—the notes poured out, pure and perfect, a song that might have been “The Entertainer,” or Dizzy Armstrong’s “Saint Patrick’s Rag,” or the Judgment Day fanfare, but whichever and whatever it was, it was so glorious that I couldn’t stop playing.
My enemy turned…slowly… He had a huge green knife in his hand. But I couldn’t stop playing. He lifted the knife…slowly…and still I’d rather play my song than attack him. He took aim…like so…very carefully…and I thought, “There’s plenty of time. I can always throw the horn at him, but there’s plenty of time yet. I can always throw the horn and hit him square in the head with it.” Then I thought I had thrown the horn, and I closed my eyes to watch it hit him, splattering his brains and blood over everything.
But all this while my song flowed on, so loud in my ears that I could hear nothing else. I opened my eyes again, and saw that I hadn’t hurled the trumpet at all. I still had it to my mouth, and still played it for everything that I was worth, while my enemy still stood there, only a little nearer, grinning wickedly, and ready to let loose with his knife.
It flew from his hand and thudded solidly into my heart. As I fell, the last, round note I blew turned out to be the Bugle Boy himself.
“You let me down!” I told him. “You lied to me.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he replied. “Was your boy, but I just done changed my mind.”
With that, up he flew to Heaven, and I awoke.
* * * *
“Oh, dear!” Elsin sighed and shuddered. “Yes, I understand why you’d never want to try it a third time, after such a nightmare as that!”
“Nightmare?” Talasia blinked at her. “Oh, no, that was my first dream, the good one. I awoke feeling…I can hardly describe the great sense of peace. And if I’d paid attention to that dream ...” She checked the thought and shrugged it off with a smile.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she told him. Then, holding it up to spin slowly in the lamplight, she went on, “Now. Who would like to try it tonight?”
THE DREAMSTONE II: LICENSED TO KILL
As none of the others seemed about to volunteer themselves, John Stock said, “I’ll try it.” Stubbing out his imported, brown-papered Tareem cigarette, he took the Dreamstone from the newcomer’s hand. “Under my pillow, I think you said, and it will give me a rare dream experience.”
“Pleasurable,” Magadance repeated. “According to your own ideas, of course. Unless you should happen to be a monster of total depravity, which I doubt.” She gave him a smile.
He returned it with a slight upward curvature of the lips. “As to that, M. Magadance, you may find it wiser not to make snap judgments of new acquaintances. The more so, in such a place as this.” Young, lithe, and darkly attractive, with a strong touch of the exotic…Talasia Magadance should, he silently directed the stone, be an adequate supporting player in any dream.
Dr. Macumber said, “Suppose he has his dream, wakes up, and it’s still the middle of the night?”
“In that case, his best course would probably be to take it out from under his pillow and put it in the next room until morning. Occasionally, if the dreamer can fall back to sleep within a few seconds, the action may pick up again and still count as the first dream. But most of the time, it would count as the second, when the nightmares usually begin.”
“And get lethal by the third or fourth one, is that so?” Macumber added with his customary chuckle.
“According to the mysterious foreigner who passed it on to M. Magadance aboard a Nile riverboat,” said John Stock. “But I, you will recall, am among those individuals who enjoy nightmares. I would be willing to challenge this talisman to destroy me.”
* * * *
The assignment was very simple. Collect the microchip and bring it home for Codes and Deciphering to play with. M. would hardly have needed to send a double oh agent for that. Not Double Oh Nine, anyway. Not without so much as a dossier on any known enemy superkiller who needed to be eliminated.
On the other hand, it was all one to John Stock, 009, whether he killed or not. he was a coolly efficient machine in either case, equally competent at murdering the First Lady, if so directed, or escorting her across the street for a hamburger. M. had said to collect the microfilm and bring it home. It would be collected and brought home. Competent agents carried out assignments. They did not have adventures.
Not even in the Casbah, redolent with its centuries of cast-off opulence. The garbage can of the Middle East, ripe for the rifling of alley cats both Soviet and Free. Prince, pawn, knight, and pride-of-the-Free-World alley cat, adept in half a dozen martial arts, master of half a hundred secret weapon devices and rarely if ever needing more than a simple pinch or at most his pearl-handled pistol, John Stock stalked the Casbah.
It would have helped if M. had said where, exactly, in the Casbah contact would be made. Or what the counteragent with the microdisk would look like. Or what the microdot itself would look like. Still, while data of this sort, while useful enough, were not essential. Not to a competent agent.
A bare-chested, baggy-trousered male sprang up like a gymnast from one of a row of large clay jars, disappeared down the open throat of its neighbor, bounced back up again, and so on down the row, doing aerial somersaults between jars. His hands dripped with jewelry. The contact? No: Douglas Fairbanks. Stock prowled on.
At a burst of machine-gun fire behind him, he casually turned to survey the situation. Only Arabs and Israelis at another of their petty jihads. Nothing to do with Stock’s present mission. John Stock was a fundamental cog in the balance between the two superpowers that could, between them, crush Israelis, Arabs, and every other little nation to pulp that happened to find itself in the path of their final showdown, like gnats caught between cymbals. Leaving the rumble to bloody the alley far behind him, Stock pursued his way.
A herd of rats erupted from a lower doorway and flowed across the refuse-littered pavement in his path. He drew back a few centimeters in distaste, wishing to spare the polish of his genuine leather Camson loafers any contact with a furry body, and smoked a cigarette while waiting for them to pass.
Beyond the stream of rats the alley took a strange twist, reminiscent of optical illusion images, spanned by an arched doorway that seemed to be now on the eastern and now on the western side of the street. As Stock smoked his cigarette, a veiled woman appeared in the archway. He recognized her importance in the affair even before she beckoned to him.
He looked down at the river of rats. It had swelled to a good two meters wide, and the current showed no signs of slowing. Returning his gaze to the veiled woman, he replied, “In a moment.”
Even to his own ears, the roar of the rushing torrent swallowed the sound of his words. The woman frowned with her eyebrows and stamped with her foot. He shrugged and made a fatalistic gesture at the tumbling rats. She stamped her foot again and lowered her veil for an instant. He would have known her anywhere, with those Nordic features, those curls of blond hair framing the cheeks. Maggie Dance. A very important figure indeed, but on which side?
It was obvious. On the other side of the river from himself.
Something whizzed past his left ear. He whirled, at the same time dropping into a defensive stance, to find a ninja on his trail.
Black-suited, black-gloved, black-masked, his eyes and the bridge of his nose the only skin in sight, the ninja lifted a second sharp-pointed star and let it fly. Gauging its trajectory, Stock evaded it with ease.
Out of darts, the ninja came at him with two meters of heavy bamboo. “Competent,” thought John Stock, as he dodged the first swing. “Almost competent enough,” he thought as he dodged the second. “But not quite,” as, dodging the third, he caught the end of the pole and gave it a hard twang, snapping the ninja back down the alley like a piece of overripe fruit.
Before the ninja could return, Stock had planted the freed end of the bamboo in the middle of the rat river and begun his pole vault.
For one interminable moment at the height of his arch, his movement stopped and he poised there suspended, a carpet of rats opening their jaws beneath him. Thousands of rats, each one the size of a German Shepherd and mostly mouth, each tooth a needle at its point and a column at its base. Then the freeze broke and he fell, tingling with unaccustomed exhilaration, safe on the other side.
“You’re too late,” said Maggie Dance. “Bond has it.”
“Bond!” Stock glanced back at the flood. Its last tails had reached the midway point, leaving half the alley clear. “Did Bond send the rats, too?”
“Of course. To delay you just long enough.”
“It adds up.” Who but Bond would risk the public health of an entire city for the sake of his…adventures?
A fleeting doubt crossed John Stock’s mind as to whether or not he and Bond were supposed to be on the same side. He dismissed it. Free or Soviet, whichever side employed such bumbling hedonists as Bond deserved to lose.
A fanfare of shouts and cries echoed through the alley. The last rats had disappeared, leaving the ninja free to charge. At his heels came an army of fellow ninja interspersed with all the strange riffraff of the Casbah, some of them very strange indeed. Stock caught Maggie Dance’s elbow and ran with her.
A meld of doorways, tunnels, and bazaars later, they lay together in one crimson-draperied double berth of a luxury airplane, naked and knotted tightly in each other’s arms. That airplane ride was very good.
At length they had come down in Hong Kong, where Bond was in hiding. “The contact is, ‘Blue Gravy,’” Maggie whispered into his ea
r with a last kiss.
On his way out of the airport, he dressed again in his custom-tailored attire . He attracted no attention. Donning and discarding one’s garments in public was common practice in this airport, which resembled a giant casino.
Repeating the code words, which he recognized as medical slang, he moved on into the city, and found that Hong Kong looked much more like Stockholm than it used to. Stockholm with a high number of Chinese restaurants, naturally. Trying to remember what “Blue Gravy” meant in medical slang, he decided to dine in the Palace of the Pearl Pagodas.
It was the kind of place Bond would like, a gleaming pleasure palace raised on an island in the middle of the lake. Stock saw it with the moonrise behind it and the sunset at his own back, so that it rose the color of iridescent peaches against a tourmaline backdrop. Restaurants in its lower pagodas, gambling dens in its upper, love nests for the evening among its rooftop gardens, and below its ground level, places that respectable people never suspected.
Stock purchased transportation to the island. The boat rode low in the moonlit waters, now and then shipping a few drops through holes in the starboard and larboard sides. In the pools of water at the bottom of the boat played a pair of white rats. A third white rat perched parrotlike on the boatman’s left shoulder.
“They are unclean animals,” Stock remonstrated.
“Na, zor,” said the ferryman. “They come from the laboratory and to the laboratory they be returnin’, and meanwhile they helps ‘un wi’ the bailin’, y’see.” The ferryman grinned, displaying several missing teeth. Stock lit a cigarette and watched its smoke drift around the moon.