Health Agent

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I sure can. What a terrible coincidence. Could someone have done it on purpose, as a joke, or as industrial sabotage to discredit you and Cugok?”

  “Maybe, but it looks like an honest fuck-up to me.”

  “Can it be withdrawn or neutralized in the people who took it?”

  “No need; it will run its course and disperse naturally a few weeks, at the most, after the drug is no longer taken. Without a trace.”

  “Whew…what a strange thing to happen. Especially right now, with Meathearts in the news. But maybe it will sell more tickets, huh? Scandals are good publicity.”

  “It hasn’t been revealed that the ‘friendly flesh’ technique is used in Meathearts, yet. Please, Mr. Black…do I have your confidence on that? One scandal for Cugok is enough right now. The Health Agency will be told about its use in Meathearts, anyway.”

  “Word of honor. After all, you’ve got something on me, now, too…don’t you?” Monty held out his hand. “Mauve is going to introduce me to Mr. Cangue before the show so I should run. A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Dwork…you’re a fascinating person.”

  “Pleasure to meet you. Hope to see you again.”

  Monty encircled Mauve’s waist with his arm. “I’ll be around.”

  *

  “An accident?” Mauve whispered.

  “I’ll check in with HAP tomorrow just to make certain they have Dwork by name to look into.”

  “Then again, he did point out the accident to you himself.”

  “I would have heard; it made him look good and upset. Also, he seems to have a bad habit of pointing out and boasting about his own sick achievements…”

  They walked up to a man whose back was toward them, as he was absorbed in conversation with a pretty, plumpish woman Monty recognized from photos as Aurora Lehrman. He remembered that she was currently romantically involved with Dwork. She smiled over the man’s head as Monty and Mauve approached.

  “Ferule?” Mauve said.

  The man turned about. “Hello, Mauve.”

  “Hi, Mauve,” said Aurora.

  Introductions were traded. Monty shook hands with Aurora Lehrman, and then with the director of Meathearts, Ferule Cangue.

  He was a dwarf, huge-headed and stub-bodied, with his hair cut in a monk’s crown-of-thorns wreath, dyed platinum blond and combed to his eyebrows in even bangs. His irises were metallic chrome. Even without the cut and color of his hair and his dyed eyes…he sure wasn’t Toll Loveland. Monty was a bit amused, but then he’d never seen a photo of Cangue or revealed to Mauve his suspicion that Cangue could be Loveland.

  Then again, Monty remembered Dwork’s beagle, “imaginatively” stretched like a rubber band. Why not compressed?

  “Heard a lot about you, Mr. Cangue. As the cliché goes.”

  “Good things, I hope, as the cliché goes.”

  “Well, not from Yancy Mays…but then we won’t be hearing from him again.”

  “That was a horrible thing, whether he disapproved of my work or not.”

  “He liked you,” Monty said to Aurora.

  “Mauve says you haven’t seen the play yet, but that you have prime seating for tonight,” said the actress.

  “Yup. I forgot my rain slicker and umbrella, though.”

  “Oh, it isn’t that bad.”

  “I heard people are scalping the front rows for up to five hundred munits. I think some people want to get sprayed.”

  “I saw a man in the front row lean forward with his mouth open last time when I got my arm whacked off, and I was told he jerked off while I was raped, but usually the sickos don’t get in the top seats up front. They can go and see this stuff for real in the alleys, anyway. You’re always gonna attract a few sickos; it’s inevitable. Makes us look bad, but you can’t stop because of a few morons.”

  “I introduced Monty to Westy. They had a nice talk,” said Mauve.

  “Mauve tells me that you caught M-670 at Pandora’s Box, so you’re a bit of an actor now too, Mr. Black,” observed Cangue in his dwarf’s voice.

  “An unwilling one…for a while, anyway. But that show’s over now, isn’t it? I’m sure your show is a lot more…tasteful and meaningful than Loveland’s psychotic masturbation, eh Mr. Cangue?”

  “Now you sound like Yancy Mays. I’m sure you won’t care for my opinion, but I found Toll Loveland’s show to be quite brilliant and ingenious in its own horrifying way.”

  “Many psychotic killers are brilliant and ingenious. You sound like you were there, Mr. Cangue.”

  “No—fortunately,” Cangue laughed. “I saw the vid. Was that derived from your memory?”

  “Another agent’s.”

  “I’ve got to get changed,” said Aurora. “Curtain in forty-five minutes.” She kissed the hand that would soon be lying away from her on the stage. “See you next week, pal,” she said to it for Monty’s amusement. He found it blackly humorous, he supposed. “Nice to meet you, Monty. Hey, why don’t you and Mauve join me for a drink after the show?”

  “That would be nice. Monty?” said Mauve.

  “Great.” Maybe Dwork would be there, hoped Monty, but as it turned out he wouldn’t be. The Stems would silently accompany them, however, at Dwork’s insistence.

  “I have to get cracking now, too,” said Ferule Cangue, shaking Monty’s hand once more. “See you again, Mr. Black?”

  “I would imagine so.”

  “Good. Mauve, I think you should psych up a bit now, too.”

  “Right.” Cangue waddled off after Lehrman, and Mauve took Monty as far as she could go toward seating him in the audience without revealing herself to the loudly mumbling influx of people. She kissed Monty. “See you after the show. Stay at my place tonight?”

  “I’d like that. Good luck, tonight. Break a leg, don’t they say?”

  “Rip a face. Hack an arm, in this case. See ya.”

  “See ya,” he said, then turned to go find his seat in the audience.

  *

  Monty didn’t know how much stage fright Mauve might be experiencing, but he himself gripped the arms of his chair tightly as if strapped in it, as if it were the chair he had seen backstage in Westy Dwork’s work area, as if it were he who was waiting to be mutilated. The show would begin any moment now, he guessed. The drone of the audience, all settled in (nobody being stupid enough to miss the opening scene), was great; the theater was the inside of a giant beehive. Monty could single out a conversation from it, however, and more so when he focused on it to distract himself from his anxiety: the two women seated to his right.

  From them he learned that in two weeks it was going to snow black snow in Punktown. It was an artwork conceived by the well-known Eric Hughes, who some years back had made the sky over his hometown, nearby Miniosis—which actually dwarfed Punktown—a vivid blood red for the entire length of a day, so as to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the infamous street riots there that had been slowly spreading ever since, changing the once fashionable, sophisticated city into a smoldering and increasingly gutted husk, now a close rival to Punktown for violence and squalor—where before, Punktown had been like a rotting corpse to Miniosis’ misty ethereal splendor. Still, the rich and powerful clung to their city in heavily fortified areas, and colonial security forces from Earth had reduced the so-called “freedom fighters” to splintered terrorist gangs, but the battles went on, buildings were taken or burned, the cancer slowly spread. The fighters hid out in Punktown at times to recruit fresh soldiers from the underworld ranks of mutants; they seduced the surly roaming street gangs, the homeless, the teenaged girl and boy freelance prosties, the disgruntled among the Chooms, lost souls of endless types woven into one crazy quilt, united by their anger and fear into some sort of effort that gave them a direction, a sense of purpose, an enemy to engage, an identity. They were steadily taking a giant city for themselves. Creating a new society. It was, to Monty, both horrifying and inspirational. At times he had alternately fantasized about dropping a bomb on Miniosis or going t
here to disappear into the army in its haunts of rubble and ruins.

  This year, to commemorate the anniversary of last year’s takeover of an atmosphere control station at the planet Echo’s Earth colony-town of Oracle by a schism branch of the Red Jihad—in which thirty-seven thousand colonists had been killed by the sabotage of the station, the poisoning of the atmosphere causing extensive damage to the planet’s overall environment as well—Eric Hughes was going to make it snow a blizzard in Punktown, and the blizzard would be black. In fact, Monty overheard, Hughes would be utilizing Punktown’s own atmosphere recycling facility to a great extent to accomplish this feat. Naturally the Health Agency would be working very closely with him to keep an eye on things. And stores everywhere would be selling cheap Halloween skull masks, which the population of Punktown would be urged to wear for the entire length of the day. Already the striking image of this took hold of Monty’s mind. If you can’t bring people to the art, bring the art to the people, he thought. But where Toll Loveland had followed this theory by spreading death, Hughes was using it as a protest against it. Monty smiled. He liked it. Hughes was a bold, true artist, he decided.

  “Too ostentatious, for my taste,” said one of the two women. “Does he think we haven’t all heard about Oracle by now? God, we were inundated with it for months. If I want art I’ll go seek it out myself; don’t shove it down my throat. And all we need is to have our town bogged down in a foot of black snow. Terrible, pretentious fatuousness. All I can say is they’d better melt the stuff away the next day.”

  Monty hoped not. He hoped it would be cold, so the snow would stay. And he hoped the woman to his right slipped and fell in it, too.

  The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, the hive fell into an instant hush. A totally white room representing an apartment. In the center of the stage stood Mauve Pond in a white dress, stiff and composed like a statue in a shrine commanding their reverence. A minute passed; she didn’t move. A sacrifice, waiting. It was excruciating for Monty. It was as if a noose were around Mauve’s throat and the crowd waited for the trapdoor to fall through. Very much like that.

  The door was kicked in…Monty flinched with the audience…Mauve came to whirling life…a tall man in a white suit burst in. A blond wig and mustache, but Monty knew him as Westy Dwork.

  The struggle. She screamed. His scalpel. And now blood. Blood. It sprayed. Splashed. The audience gasped, cried out. A wave of “Ohhh!” fell down on Monty from behind. Mauve’s shrieks and now gurgles made him dizzy; the white dazzled him. Dwork made sure that at no time did he block the audience’s view of his slicing. Monty wanted to pull out a gun and shoot him whether Mauve felt the pain or not.

  At last it was over, the room darkened, vanished. Monty felt too close; he didn’t want to see the rest, he wanted space, but he knew he must stay…and the second half of the stage became lit. A white set, a white car, Aurora Lehrman in a white dress poised as if to unlock the door. Ticking seconds…she didn’t move. This suspense disgusted Monty; he realized he was furious.

  The rapists burst onto the stage, and Monty’s heart leaped higher than the hearts of the rest of the audience…even before Aurora was struck, slapped, slammed onto the hood of the car, even before her dress was torn away, even before she was viciously raped by first one and then the other man and then had her right arm hacked off with two chops of a machete…

  He felt blasted, and barely heard or absorbed the rest of the play, barely acknowledged Mauve’s acting, though he could tell it was good (but Aurora was much better).

  “Brilliant,” sighed the woman at his right when it was over, breathless as if from sex. The audience applauded loudly, and Monty trembled amidst their standing ovation.

  Monty showed a pass to get backstage. People were smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. He hoped to get to Mauve directly but Westy Dwork, devoid of his disguise and scrubbed of blood, intercepted him.

  “How’d you like it?”

  “A little violent for my taste.”

  “Oh—everyone’s a critic. But haven’t you yourself killed people, Mr. Black?”

  “I didn’t call it art. Excuse me.” Monty brushed past him to find Mauve.

  He spotted her, plowed toward her, crowded her into a safe corner. Her scars had never looked so deep, raw, frightening—as if they might split open and bleed if she so much as smiled, but they didn’t when she did. “How’d you like it?”

  “You were great, powerful. It was very disturbing. You’re a brave lady—braver than me.”

  She had on a silk robe, her hair was mussed, she looked spent. “You do look drained,” she noted, smiling still. “I didn’t know you were so squeamish.”

  “It was Aurora, mostly. Those rapists.”

  “Oh, yeah, that is powerful.” Mauve appeared somewhat disappointed, probably wanting her ordeal to seem the more powerful of the two to him. “So…is it still on for tonight?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. Really.” He had someplace to go now. Also, he knew the scars wouldn’t enhance his sexual performance, after all. Not after this.

  Mauve’s disappointment grew. “Why can’t you? You look turned off.”

  “Yeah, all right, I’ll be over…but later…I don’t know when. I can’t explain it right now—I will when I can, trust me.” It would be good if he stayed with her. She could very well be in danger. Again. He knew what had happened to her in the past, but he still wanted the confirmation. “You told me the first night we talked that two guys raped you in your apartment…”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Cangue use your experience as a model for the rape in the play? For more ‘gritty realism’?”

  “Yes, he did. He patterned the two rapists after them…”

  “Right down to their red plastic jackets?”

  “Yes.”

  Monty nodded.

  SIXTEEN

  Only one other of the six little cafeteria tables was occupied, by a short dark-skinned Indian woman in a white lab smock eating an off-schedule lunch, an insectoid helmet on the table by her plate. Monty had a hot cup of mustard in front of him and nervously smoked a black-papered herbal cigarette.

  Monty looked up sharply as Captain Nedland entered, thin and morose-looking as ever, dressed all in black as Monty was. Soft-spoken as ever, too. “You’re back in, if you want it.”

  A purely vain part of him wanted to smile, but too many other parts of him didn’t. “I think I do.”

  “You do or you don’t, my man…we’re not going to beg you. The big man is much impressed by what you’ve dug up…though like me, he wishes very much that you’d come forward sooner.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t have substantial info.”

  “Well, he’s impressed and he’s grateful. See, Monty, we aren’t the reptiles you seemed to have thought we are, but of course we realize you were under a lot of duress when you had M-670. Like I say, we’re willing to take you on under ninety-day probation, but you have to want it—I’m not going to push you. I’d like to have you, but…” Finally Nedland sat across from him. He glanced over at the Indian technician. “Are you almost done, Anu?”

  “Oh yes, yes, pardon me, Captain.” Anu went to rinse off her plate, gathered up her lunch bag and the helmet she wore in her work.

  “Sorry,” Nedland told her. “Don’t mean to rush you, but…”

  “No problem, no problem.” Anu scurried out.

  “Do I get to continue on this case?” Monty asked.

  “Naturally. You’re inside, close to the questionable individuals, and you’ve done very well so far.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Monty.

  “Good. I knew you would. But after this you will stay with us, won’t you? This has to be work first, revenge second.”

  “I’ll be a pro.”

  “Good.”

  “It beats selling newspapers, I guess.”

  “Well, I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm than that. So, you didn’t tell the girl that Be
ak’s wife was raped and hacked up by two punks in red jackets…”

  “No—I didn’t want to endanger her any more than I already have. If she shows a new fear or disgust at the opening scenes involving her and Aurora, they might get really suspicious of her. I will try to find out about her rape, though, in a more casual way. But now I’m not sure I even want to see her at all…not until it’s all over. If anything happened to her because of me…”

  “Well, wait, Monty, we can’t defeat our purpose, here. She’s what got you close to these people…”

  “They know I was a health agent…they already followed us once.”

  “But didn’t she say she still wanted to pursue this even after you suggested the risk to her? She’s a plucky girl, Monty. Besides, I realize you have feelings for her, but many other lives could be at risk, whether this is Loveland or a Loveland imitator.”

  “I still won’t tell her about the red jackets for now.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “It isn’t an imitator, it’s Loveland. He knew of Beak because Beak was the one whose memories of Pandora’s Box were used to view it, and they showed him on the news several times. He waited a while, then punished Beak by killing his wife. Mauve was raped before the show opened but obviously after having won the role, and then the staging of the rape in the play was supposedly inspired by that. It’s all just more of Loveland’s games with symmetry and echoes. He’s amusing himself by leaving all these clues floating out there in the open…he thinks we’re too inferior to catch them.”

  “What about this ‘accidental’ mix-up at Cugok—that looks odd.”

  “It does. Dwork says it’s harmless, but I don’t know. It’s too strange. He made sure to point it out to me himself so he’d look innocent and properly concerned. Another arrogant asshole underestimating me.”

  “Why would a sick artist have so many accomplices? They can’t all be deranged fans of his.”

  “It’s a deranged world,” was all Monty could offer at this point.

  “I’ve already got Tanabe and Giddry on the Cugok mix-up, so I’ll put them on the case. I don’t want you going down to Cugok or that’ll blow your closeness to the theater people…”