Miss Brandymoon's Device: a novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp (Divided Man Book 1)

by Skelley, Rune

  The preacher once again seated himself, and used the intercom to summon the guards to remove Marcus. He looked at Kyle appraisingly.

  Kyle found the state of hypnosis Shaw had imposed on him easy to adapt to. His alertness was boosted, because the choice of what to focus on wasn’t his. He was glad not to be used like Marcus. Thinking how helpless he would be to prevent it scared him, but his personal choices about how to feel were also made for him. He remained perfectly calm.

  The interlude while the prisoners were swapped lasted about three minutes, time Shaw spent in prayer or meditation. Kyle spent it trying to think about resisting Shaw’s control, which proved quite difficult. He could consider hypothetical escapes involving hypothetical people, but not himself.

  Two guards entered the room, with Fin between them, bound, hooded, and cooperating meekly. Kyle knew the meekness masked a low cunning. Moreover, he knew Fin’s eyes were open.

  The reverend nodded and the hood was removed.

  Fin was staring into Shaw’s beatific face, his own features blank but a storm lurking in his eyes. A second passed, and Fin cracked an incredulous grin. He convulsed with suppressed laughter, shaking his head. Kyle struggled with a silly smile that kept climbing onto his face despite his determination to look professional. Shaw sat patiently while Fin got the giggles out of his system, but his serenity seemed forced.

  Fin composed himself and said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Reverend.”

  Shaw replied guardedly, “Thank you, young man. Please take a seat.”

  “I didn’t know you had moved on to guerrilla evangelism. Only us few, sad wing nuts left, and the show doesn’t reach us? Makes sense I guess...”

  “Please do have a seat.” The guards leaned on Fin, pressing him into the chair. “How did you know Kyle was involved in the girl’s disappearance?”

  Fin shot a hostile look at Kyle who sat in his chair like an attentive lap-dog. “Lucky guess.”

  Kyle felt a bewildering flash of anger, directed at himself.

  “You’re lying,” Shaw stated.

  “Not really.” Fin smiled. “I gave him the impression there was a witness. It worked.” The smile slid away. “Sort of.”

  “Yes. And now here you are.”

  “In the clutches of the Holy Carnival Barker.”

  “I’m doing God’s work,” Shaw said.

  Another reptilian smile appeared on Fin’s face. “You wanna know what I think? I think god gives you menial shit jobs to do, to keep you out of his hair. He doesn’t have the heart to tell you you’re not as cool as his other zealots.”

  “You can’t shake my faith. You must realize that?”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do. Besides, faith, insanity. Tomato, toe-mah-toe.”

  “Let me tell you what I see,” said Shaw calmly. “I see a bitter young man. His bitterness makes his world a dark, loveless place. Because the world is dark to him, he assumes it is also dark to everyone else. He thinks the darkness is truly real.”

  Fin smiled easily. “You only have me here right now because I risked my life for Rook. Who you kidnapped, by the way.”

  Kyle felt unaccountably worried about Rook. He knew perfectly well where she was, but the feeling persisted regardless. Shaw flicked him an irritated glance.

  Fin went on, “I see a violent old man who projects his self-loathing onto younger people and feels compelled to interfere in their happiness.”

  Shaw didn’t mind being judged. It seemed he might smile. “I refer to God’s love, of course, not your addiction to sin, your lust.” The guards stepped back and exited the room like sleepwalkers. “Recklessness is no proof of love, and you obviously aren’t happy.”

  “Confinement makes that tough. I’d be very happy, fucking ecstatic, if you’d let me go.”

  Shaw held his impassive expression and continued to stare at Fin. “Release is what we all seek, but right now, you couldn’t possibly escape. You are bound, and under guard. This building is well-stocked with mercenaries. And remote. Where will you run? Miles of empty countryside lay in all directions. There is no urgent reason to flee, anyway. The continent still drifts no matter where on it you might be. The —”

  Fin crossed his eyes and sneered. Shaw’s eyes widened slightly as he stopped speaking. He blinked and swallowed. Fin smirked. “You were saying? Something monotonous and pedantic.”

  “Cooperate. You will in the end anyway.”

  “Uh, I think your prophetic faculties have let you down on that one.”

  “Have they.” Shaw’s face and voice were icy. He didn’t move or blink, but he became a crushing, smothering presence all over Fin. A coiling constrictor, heavy, oppressive, insinuating.

  The world capsized, plunging Kyle into howling chaos. He couldn’t scream. He was drowning. The undertow lashed him upon the bottom and wrenched him through an invisible fissure. Lacerated and wrung dry, he gave a start at the sudden eerie silence.

  What could be worse than the inside of Fin’s head?

  It looked every bit as unpleasant as Kyle expected. Steam vents hissed all around the landscape of barren rock and twisted lifeless trees. The heavy sky glowed an ominous overcast orange. As Shaw focused his attention on different aspects, Kyle’s was focused also. He picked up on Shaw’s interpretation of their surroundings. An alien planet. Shaw thought he understood what it meant, but Kyle feared he was wrong. Whatever things might mean somewhere else, they surely wouldn’t mean here.

  A vicious, hot wind buffeted Kyle. Shaw glanced back and chuckled. “This is a lesson I never meant to give you, but I can always wipe your memory later.”

  They traversed a spine of oily black rock with a steep drop on each side. Kyle paid meticulous attention to every step he took on the slick, uneven surface. To the left a tar pit roiled, inimical and glossy. To the right were several glimmering pools of water, their bottoms coated with brightly colored minerals and their surfaces reflecting the glare of the sky.

  Shaw muttered distractedly that some of the pollution was drugs, but not all of it. He concentrated on something for a moment and his grasp on Kyle weakened. Horrified, Kyle envisioned himself left behind. Shaw might not know as much as he thought he did, but he remained Kyle’s best chance of survival. He followed Shaw like a wary, distant shadow.

  The first order of business would be to locate the center.

  This thought felt so reasonable and natural that at first Kyle presumed it had been his own. Shaw halted, as if waiting for Kyle to show the way, and Kyle realized Shaw had provided that knowledge as part of this tutorial on ransacking someone’s mind. Kyle looked in every direction, but it wasn’t obvious to him that this bleak place would even have a center. The reverend smirked and suddenly Kyle could feel which way to go.

  The second order of business, thought Shaw, is the shortcut. With that, their surroundings fast-forwarded away, leaving Kyle with flickering half-seen impressions of a rugged journey. Shaw didn’t share how to do that trick.

  Kyle’s initial disgust at the idea of entering Fin’s mind had given way to eagerness to learn all Shaw’s secrets. If he learned enough, maybe he could hang on to some of it when Shaw tried to erase it later.

  The landscape went to dunes, every direction uphill. Glassy outcroppings hindered their progress and Shaw stopped to survey. Kyle felt the sand shifting under them. The valley deepened and steepened. The dunes rose and merged with the orange sky. Kyle looked to Shaw for an explanation or reassurance. Shaw gave neither.

  The gully continued to deepen, becoming a ravine and then an open mine. The deeper the hole became, the darker it got, and the wetter the sand.

  Kyle could feel it under his nails, could see the mound growing beside the hole, felt the summer breeze stirring childhood memories. Soon he would reach packed soil and clay, elementally cool to the touch. He could smell it already.

  As they sank deeper into the pit, Kyle sank into Fin’s memories. He realized that some of Fin had been bleeding through even before Shaw
dragged him in here. In here, it was far more intense. Kyle recognized the park, remembered walking up to that sandbox. He recalled meeting Fin for the first time, unaware that they were brothers. Fin’s memory engulfed him.

  The hole was big enough to sit in now. He was happy inside his hole. Digging was satisfying. The hole need serve no other purpose.

  He looked up at the boy beside the sandbox. A stranger, really. They were the same size, but didn’t go to the same school.

  “Fin,” the boy said, “my dad says you have to leave soon. He asked where you are.”

  The damp mixture of clay and sand binds exceptionally well. At the bottom of the hole is the magic spot to build a castle with this magic mud. There is also magic in words, so as he sits in the hole, building, he speaks. He speaks Fin’s words.

  “Here is the tower. It’s where my dad lives. He’s a wizard, and he keeps everybody safe. He can’t leave the castle or the dust trolls will win the war.”

  The sandcastle responded to all this magic. Mysterious flickering lights moved about in the scratched-on windows. The tower had a proper flat top ringed with lumpy battlements. The spell of building and speaking was nearly complete. He spoke the final words, “This is my daddy’s house.”

  The other boy smiled dully and jumped down into the hole. Evil sneakers annihilated the beautiful castle.

  The hole became utterly black.

  Kyle’s pulse raced. The bleed-through left him trying to shake off lingering hatred for the ‘other boy.’ Actual anger at himself for being vulnerable to such a juvenile grudge mingled with the borrowed animosity, and he got mad at Fin. Such a prick, still pissy about something that happened when they were five years old.

  Before him loomed a slouching fortress of mud and sand, revealed at the bottom of the mineshaft.

  Shaw surveyed the structure. He approached it slowly, dragging Kyle along and sending him reassuring vibes as he explained what they were looking at.

  “At the core of every mind is a structure, its architecture showing the fundamental nature of the personality. It is the personality.” Shaw paused, and among his good vibrations Kyle picked up that this was the first sandcastle he’d encountered. “No matter its appearance, there are rules about these things. Rules I know how to break. And because the core structure also houses the main repository of a person’s knowledge and beliefs, this is where I will get the answers this prisoner refused to give up willingly.”

  They passed through the doorway.

  Chapter Ten

  LAVA

  Abel and Seth Shaw married their cousins, Mary and Rebekah, and fled the influences of society. Intermarriage between their offspring being encouraged, the population grew. Shaw Oracle is remote now, 50 years after it was abandoned by its sole surviving inhabitant. I can only imagine the world unto itself it would have been to him, let alone when it was founded in 1851, eight years before Blessed.

  My extensive on-site research has provided me invaluable insight into the previously unexamined early life and religious education of Brian Shaw. In a setting so isolated, any aberrant interpretation of scripture would be carried, perhaps amplified, for generations. It is unclear what the exact beliefs of Shaw Oracle were, but they were definitely as inbred as the inhabitants.

  from Brainwashed by Julie Rome ©1998 Futhark Press

  As Kyle followed Shaw into the sandcastle at the core of Fin’s mind, a portcullis of interwoven steel thistle leaves engaged to block their escape, ringing like swords driven through solid stone, not the cell-door clank Kyle anticipated. Why had it closed behind them?

  Shaw kept moving forward, into the center of the single circular room that made up the ground floor. The walls and floor were basalt, and only the cruel latticework of the portcullis let any light into the chamber.

  A length of thin rope lay strewn on the floor. The ceiling was rough beams and the planks of the floor above, with dust sifting down through the copious gaps. A trapdoor near the opposite side of the room drew Shaw, and a rope ladder unspooled upon his arrival. They proceeded to the second level.

  This circular chamber had less illumination, gaining light only from a single arrow slit and the pittance that filtered up in exchange for dust through the cracks in the floor. A massive wooden table sat alone in the center of the room. It had exquisite carved dragons running up the legs, hideous talon feet, and sculpted folds and tassels like a rich, heavy cloth thrown over it, all fashioned from a single piece of wood. A sorcerer’s table.

  Upon it rested an unfurled scroll, a tall, slender candle, and a layer of dust over an inch thick. Shaw approached the table. He shook the dust off the scroll but couldn’t read it in the dim light.

  Before Shaw could light the candle, the swirls of dust he’d disturbed coalesced into a ratlike creature about four feet long, which lunged onto the table and made off with the candlestick. As Shaw checked that there weren’t more popping up, the beast dove through the trapdoor. “A mental antibody of sorts,” Shaw said. “We’re foreign to this psyche, so we’re triggering its immune system.” Shaw took the scroll to the minuscule window.

  Low panic crept over Kyle. Through his newfound symbiosis with Fin he had gained more autonomy and could decide for himself where to stray. A growling horde of dust trolls swarmed on the lower level, visible through the cracks in the floor. Shouldn’t Shaw be trying harder not to trigger the immune system, given what a self-destructive fuck-up Fin was?

  Shaw read, “Away too long, and the land is lost. Dust trolls take the castle too, as I’ve no longer any taste for war.”

  He snapped his full attention onto Kyle, gouging for an explanation. “How do you know what those creatures are called?” Kyle didn’t understand either, something Shaw was reluctant to accept. Crushing pressure forced Kyle onto his knees. His limbs sagged and an invisible elephant stood on his chest. “Tell me what you know about this prisoner, and how much he knows about you,” Shaw demanded. Kyle could only shake his head. That made Shaw look even more cross, so Kyle nodded instead. The pressure in his chest slacked enough for speech.

  “He’s just a druggie,” Kyle gasped. “He’s always been a shit. If you think I’ll try to protect him, you’re wrong. So what if he’s my brother, I work for you.”

  Shaw released him, smiling. “I knew there was something, felt you absorbing knowledge from your surroundings. I knew you were exploiting some secret connection. I don’t blame you for keeping it to yourself, but nothing remains hidden from me.” Turning, he added, “I’m not concerned about this mind’s defense measures because I have an escape plan. You don’t.”

  Shaw walked off to study one of the four massive chains that extended up the wall toward the distant ceiling, blending into darkness. Shortly he moved counterclockwise to the next one.

  Kyle went to the scroll and spread it out flat. A second message, clearly Fin’s handwriting, read, Pardon all the childish fantasy melodrama down here. Head up to the roof for some real Revelations.

  Kyle checked on the dust trolls again, and saw some making a fuss over the candlestick while others did something with the rope. Light flashed up through the floor as a dust troll applied the lit candle to the frayed end. The light of the flames drove the dust trolls to the edges of the room, showing Kyle the rope’s tortuous loops. The other end was inserted into the center of the floor. It burned with an angry, hissing shower of sparks.

  Shaw reached the fourth chain. Whatever he’d done at the other three he did there as well, and a convulsion shook the floor. With loud ratcheting sounds, the floor began to rise.

  The ride up was slow, bone-shaking and dusty. As they neared the top, another trapdoor presented itself, with a rope ladder waiting.

  Kyle and Shaw climbed up onto the tower’s flat roof.

  Battlements like massive tombstones loomed all around. Like tombstones, they were inscribed. Kyle approached one of them with Shaw. It read, Divided Seed shall a Divided Child Beget, who will grow into a Divided Man.

  To Kyle, the
verse sounded like something from the bible.

  Distress emanated from Shaw. Kyle, bathed in the reverend’s confusion, began to see its cause. The words did not come from the bible. Shaw had written them.

  Finding his New Revelations being excerpted here obviously rocked Shaw. Kyle looked at a few other stones. One laid out the mothers’ journey into shadows, the next described the father’s trials and punishment for dividing his seed, and the next told of a ‘Completer’ who could heal the Divided Man. The tone implied strongly that this healing was significant to the fate of the world.

  Kyle recalled the trolls below, and went to the trapdoor. Straining for some clear impression of how much of the fuse remained, he caught a glimmer of its combustion near the center point.

  “It’s you!” Shaw cried. “You and your brother! Just as it was shown to me!” The reverend’s face was an ecstatic grimace. He spun around with arms uplifted, weeping and laughing.

  Kyle couldn’t make sense of Shaw’s words, and right then he didn’t care. This was the worst place they could possibly stand, so he fled the roof in the most direct way — out between the battlements. As he reeled and tumbled beside the tower he felt a shockwave. An instant later, searing molten rock shot up in a glowing shaft that obliterated the roof. Geysers of lava spewed out the arrow slit and raged over the ledges between the battlements.

  Kyle fell, and the bright stream of lava shot up and out of sight into the heavy clouds like some infernal beanstalk. Cracks radiated from the base of the tower, and lava seethed and splashed in them. Large chunks of ground broke free and capsized into the orange melt. The fissures extended in a throbbing web to every horizon.

  Something different fell too, limp and broken but somehow alive. Kyle didn’t know what it was, but he knew it was not of this place. He latched on.