Mission Creep exploded. “You tellin’ me Pres’dent Gild’s the target of our mission?”
“Mr. Creep, in this context, the term ‘target’ is a misnomer. You were the ‘target’ of Forrest’s training, and you were not harmed in any way. This mission will only aid the President and further advance his political goals and…” Mission Creep had risen to his feet, and he stood like a quaking pillar of rage.
“I’m not inf’tratin’ the mind of no honest Provisian president, no how!” He raged. “I done voted fo’ him. The man’s a Gods’ honest patriot.”
“Sir, if you will allow me to finish explaining the mission, perhaps…” Mission Creep dashed his commemorative EgoCone against the black marble table and stormed out of the briefing room. I was not upset or surprised by his reaction, but I was disturbed by the fact that I found it completely predictable. You can know a person by surfing through their ego in a way that their own mother can’t know them. For the Creep, President Gild represented someone who understood and respected his sacrifice. The fact that Gild was mealy-mouthed and about as articulate as a blemmybaboon being tasered only furthered his appeal. Gild was a rich and powerful man who lacked the intelligence and guile to say nice things to veterans because it was politically expedient. For the Creep, it followed that what he had said must be authentic. Gild’s handshake was the capstone of an odyssey towards manhood that he had had to stumble towards on his own, with one father dead and the other intentionally disfigured and humiliated as a collaborator of the Ignobles. Some people paid lip service to respect for soldiers but feared post-traumatic episodes and looked with pity on a prosthetic arm, let alone a stretched and spooled replacement skin. Others looked on military men with indifference, as if they would giggle about the Provisian Advancement and Research Agency still struggling to grow replacement testicles for soldiers who had had them blown off. The Creep and men like him didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘demagogue,’ but they understood honor, and right or wrong they felt that Gild respected them.
I turned back to Dr. Tower. “Continue.” I said. “I can handle this. I’m a natural. I’m prepared to venture into any ego, regardless of the stakes or how psychotically huge it might happen to be.”
“GILDED NECROPOLIS”
1
My loft was almost completely dark, barely lit by the rays of dawn. I wanted it that way. I didn’t want to see things clearly right now, particularly my own reflection as I pulled on the button-down shirt they had given me. I understood that I would benefit by looking a bit less conspicuous for this mission, which would begin with an ordinary tour of the Presidential Palace, but some things are a stretch even when they are absolutely necessary. If I turned on the lights, I knew I would look like someone going door to door asking people if they’ve heard the Good News of our Lord and Savior Gramiphonius, so I kept the lights off.
They had given me everything at a rendezvous point the previous night. A shuffling courier handed me a package outside an all-night laundromat called ‘A Good Turn.’ The moon was out and the air was cold, and I had no desire to read this next chunk of shadowy heepshit while these nocturnal zombies stared at their clothes being thrashed in the wash.
I went home and read over the mission while I smoked. On its face, it seemed pretty straightforward. I was to wear these appallingly bad clothes so I could pass for a tourist, and follow the tour of the Presidential Palace for a while. A phony ID was safely stashed in my wallet. Eventually, two Arcane Agents who were also Dry Men would escort me away and show me to room L24, which contained an EgoCone that would be in range to reach President Gild’s unconscious. Mission Creep was not mentioned, but there was a device that looked like a pen that I could click for help if I got into trouble.
The letter also informed me that I had received my sixth degree for completing the training so quickly, and that this mission would get me my seventh. I shook my head in vexation. How was it that they were again trusting me with such important and delicate missions and hurrying me through the ranks after I had failed them so recently? Maybe they knew that my refusal to kill Lauren was a result of my past with her and not an act of deliberate defiance…or maybe there was more to their interest in me than they let on.
I tried to put all this out of my mind and get some sleep, but I doubt I managed more than three hours. And now here I was, pulling on these awful clothes so that I could rub elbows with people who believed that Gilbert Gild would solve all their problems, and lead them to some unimaginable paradise of salvation and bliss.
“Well,” I thought, “He’ll never manage that, but I can prevent him from starting a thermonuclear war.” Provisia might be beyond saving, but I sure as shit wasn’t going out like that.
2
It came as a relief when strong arms pinned me from either side and I found myself between two towering Arcane Agents. The tour was exactly the kind of masturbatory idiocy I had expected. Tourists lined up to place their hands on a golden handprint that ‘President Gild had touched.’ Tabloid magazine covers singing Gild’s praises in a host of imaginary battles with corruption were framed and illuminated. People were actually studying the things, as if they hadn’t passed them a thousand times at their local marts and trading posts.
“Sir, you’ll have to come with us.” One of them said. I had been told to expect this, and I was relieved to be off the cretin crawl, but it is quite a trick to maintain your cool when you’re being frog-marched between two giants. They hustled me past a horde of Gild supporters who had finally found it in themselves to tear their eyes from the portraits of their Wonderful Leader, to let their cheap necklace cameras drop to their fat bellies as their eyes followed me. As I was being led away, I saw them begin to reluctantly waddle after their tour guide.
Looking from one to the other, I realized that I had seen them before. These were the two heavies who had once brought a desperate and defenseless Robert Wolfram to my room at Gild’s casino. The rise of Gild’s political star must have carried them along, from rent-a-thugs to AA guards. I felt my first wave of panic. I doubted that these two were Dry Men. If they were die-hard Gild loyalists, they couldn’t be privy to this plan to secretly influence him.
They slammed me down on an antique chair in a small, windowless room that reminded me of the Time Out chamber at the orphanage. “Don’t move.” One said. The other spoke into his sleeve mic. “He’s here.” A minute later, a door opened and I was struck with another uncomfortable attack of recognition.
It was Mickey, the heep embryo guy, the one I had roped into stealing piles of silver for me when I was working that desperate and doomed story about Adventurer-Heroes. “It’s him,” Mickey confirmed. “We definitely need to double-check his credentials. This one’s nothing but trouble.”
My mind wasn’t racing so much as it was taking a mountain-ridge turn at one hundred miles an hour and careening over the edge. Few people meet more than one person in their lifetime who looks like me. And if they double-checked my ID card, the game was up, as I doubted that Mickey would believe I had changed my name to “Jiminy K. Blotman.”
“Mickey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“With any luck, not getting fucked by you a second time.” I looked at him again. He was recognizable, but the naïve innocence had been beaten out of him. This was not the harried and pathetic rube that thought you had to eat heep embryos to be a man. “My mistress sold my indenture to the Provisium Sulfide mines after what you put me up to back home. I would have died there if they hadn’t realized I could read and sold my indenture to Elephantine Solutions, who sold it to the Gild campaign.”
“I never meant any harm to you. We were partners.”
“You pretended to be a magic tree, made me steal enough silver to buy fourteen indentured servants, and then split before the heat was on.” There was anger in his voice, but not rage. It was a controlled burn, as if he had been practicing that line every day since the robbery.
“We had to go our separ
ate ways, remember? That was when all that shit was going down with Commander Choke. We weren’t both going to get out of a war zone together, so we split the swag and…”
He was shaking his head, his eyes dead and heavy with contempt. It was futile to try to mess around with his memory. The heist I had roped him into had taken on the same gargantuan proportions as Mission Creep’s spilled ashes. He would never forget it. It was part of his personal tragedy, a mythos of a poor servant who got shafted by the wrong grifter and had to work and struggle and fight to survive. A word whizzed through my mind, searching for a target—retrotype. Where had I heard that before? Something about echoes of the past, the roles we play in each other’s stories.
One of the AA giants handcuffed both my hands to the rails of the antique chair. Old and ornamental and uncomfortable as it was, it was made of wrought iron. I wouldn’t be able to snap the arms. If I was going to make a break for it, I would have to wear it like a turtle’s shell and flee with my back bent, and I wouldn’t be able to outrun them in that condition.
3
I reached into my pocket, and clicked the button of the pen the Dry Men gave me. It was no substitute for having Mission Creep in my corner, but with any luck they’d send some help my way. “I’ve got to go back to the tour,” Mickey said. “One of you should stay with him until the guard can haul him to the basement dungeons and throw away the damned key.”
The Agents nodded. One went back on patrol, the other crossed his hands in front of his crotch and hunkered down to make sure that I didn’t twitch a muscle until I could be permanently detained with Gild’s other enemies. I tried to stay calm. I was sure that I had visited worse places in my long, strange time, and the Dry Men would probably be able to get me out, unless my capture itself was part of their game, and they didn’t really expect me to complete this mission.
I startled when the AA thug collapsed to the floor in a puddle of twitching jelly. A drone the size of a piece of bread hovered into view. “The mission is not aborted. Use the disguise ring.” It fired an ordinary-looking brass ring at my chest and flew away. “Come back here! Can’t you cut me loose with a laser or something?”
If it could, it chose not to. “Little bastard,” I muttered. I fidgeted awkwardly until I could get the ring into my palm, and then struggled to singlehandedly slip it onto my finger. In a flash, my bark vanished, replaced with completely humanoid flesh. “Hot damn!” I said. “This I’ll have to keep.” I crabshuffled with the chair so that I was sitting before a mirror.
It was not my bark-free face looking back at me—I looked old and authoritative, with silver hair and hollow cheeks. I decided that I looked a bit like a general, perhaps a retired one now working as a defense consultant. This changed things.
“I need Arcane Agents immediately!” I bellowed. One of them promptly appeared. “This is an outrage! I’m General Roland Clark, and I was detained and handcuffed by this semi-moronic degenerate!” I nodded my head towards the incapacitated guard, who was helpfully wetting himself. “Release me at once and take me to L level.”
He complied. I got the sense from his facial expression that he had expected this kind of act from the guard on the floor. Arcane Agents who put in the years and the training hours have to resent hangers-on who get lucky and ride an old connection to the top. He took me to an elevator, and we rode to L level in silence. I could see my reflection in the chrome of the doors. It’s a weird thing when the person looking back at you in a mirror is not yourself, but I had to admit that I was excited by the possibilities of this ring. It could be the next best thing to an actual counter spell for my enchantment.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience, sir. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t. Keep the President safe and don’t hassle those who serve him.” He nodded and disappeared back into the elevator. I was no longer in desperate trouble, but the plan remained alarmingly sideways. I had not been able to contact the other Dry Men operatives, and there would be no one to guard the door. As far as I knew, there was no such person as General Roland Clark, and no good could come of impersonating someone who doesn’t exist. It was best to get this thing done as soon as possible.
Room L24 was open. The familiar dunce cap of the EgoCone was sitting there waiting for me, along with a hanging Egonaut suit. There was nothing that could block the door or hold it shut if the wrong person opened it. I had no time to worry about these complications. I’d just have to trust the other Dry Men on this mission to distinguish between their asses and elbows and keep me safe and extract me at the end, which was the easy part. How could people so powerful be so incompetent?
I pulled on the Egonaut suit and put on the metal booster cap. I sealed myself in the hatch. “This won’t be at all like the last time.” I lied to myself. “This launch will be so much easier.” I started the countdown.
4
It was not any easier than the last one, but it was different. The hurling sensation was altered, and more unpleasant and intense. My mind was pulled downward rather than backward, and it was catapulted into a nonexistent stratosphere. There was again that blind loss of awareness, where you are conscious of nothing but zipping and hurtling through nonspace.
Again, I found myself strapped in and falling in the claustrophobic cone, and I heard the splash as it landed. Gasping in the dim lights of the interior, I removed my cap and loosened the straps and belts around my seat. Something was not right. There was a sound like a burbling hiss coming from the outside. I reached for the hatch and opened it up.
While the waters of Mission Creep’s unconscious were neutral, if a bit murky and clouded, Gild’s could not even be described as waters. I was in a deep expanse of corrosive purple fluid. Looking down at the surface, I could tell that the purple was eating away at the EgoCone, simmering it like butter in a skillet. I could feel the cone sinking as it dissolved into this horrifying acid. My eyes found the horizon, and I could see a city coming into view, like an island in the purple. The cone was floating towards it, but it seemed that it would dissolve before it reached land.
I ducked back inside, my eyes scanning for anything that I could use to paddle, to hasten the passage of this blasted dunce cap to the end of this sea of hate. There was nothing. Everything was the seat and the control panel. Could I tear out the seat, and try to ride it like a crash raft after the cone gave up the ghost? Doubtful—I couldn’t tear it out of the cockpit. There was no leverage, and it was bolted on if not seamlessly fused to the base. The situation was so bizarre and awful I couldn’t even think of an appropriate curse, and I screamed in unintelligible rage. I opened the hatch again, and scuttled topside. It seemed that the acid would find its way to the hollow interior shortly, and then the cone would be like a cocoon tossed into a flame. Had I done something wrong? The possibility of a corrosive landing had never even been discussed. The cone shifted to an alarming horizontal position, probably a result of the purple devouring the cabin.
The city was hazy, but no longer so distant. It was certainly too far to jump, but I could see a streetlight coming into view, high and close. If I had a grappling hook, I could snag it and swing to safety. But I did not have a grappling hook. Well, how serious was all this, really? The physical cone itself was not going to be destroyed. It was still in room L24 of the Presidential Palace. Did it follow that my being burned alive here meant that I would be OK back there?
I looked down at my hands. They were familiar and bark-covered, the effects of the disguise ring apparently not carrying over into this realm. I wasn’t disappointed—there wasn’t time to be—but it was a shock to realize that I felt more human impersonating the general, as if I had just been playacting as myself since Lauren made me wear the bark. What do you do when the disguises feel more real than the man who wears them? Soon there wouldn’t be any need to worry about such things. The end was coming fast, and if there was a way out, I couldn’t see it.
I sat down on the sinking remains of the cone, and c
rossed my legs in a meditative pose. I had lived my whole life with no peace. Every decent person who had ever cared about me was dead, and I had spent so many years racing and cruising through narcotic avenues that I had hardly stopped to reflect on it. I tried to clear my mind, to buy myself a little peace before the end.
Dread did not appear to me, but I thought of him. He had told me that the Gods were real. Well, why not put them to the test? “I pray that my astral body will not be destroyed here, in this hellish non-place.” I intoned. Being raised by zealots can give a body an intense aversion to prayer, and I had to start slow and pick up momentum as I went. “I pray to Dread, and to Victoriola, Goddess of the sweet, carbonated taste of victory. I pray to Gramiphonius, who sang our world into being. I pray to Dejavushnu, and Nocturnus. I pray to complete my mission for the Dry Men. I pray to the God of determinism and the twitch, the fateful Reflexus…”
That one did it. It was as if my body was being zapped back into motion, controlled remotely. I reached over, and my hand found a rope and hastily fastened it into a lasso with knots I didn’t know that I knew. I encircled the lamp post with expert targeting, pushed off with my feet against the disappearing cone, jumped and tugged.
I crashed on land and forced myself up to my feet. Where the hell had I gotten the rope? I looked at it, and realized that it wasn’t a rope at all, but a vine. I had sprouted it from my hip the way I sometimes grew twigs and leaves. It had punctured a ragged hole the size of a Provisian noble coin in my suit. Shit. Was I able to do this at will now? Or did it only work in this realm? I had never gotten to understand exactly what abilities my enchantment conferred on me. Disfigurement and the communicable contagion of sexual contact has a way of getting you to just hate an enchantment like this. I supposed I wouldn’t say no to a perk or two.
Fables of Failure Page 17
