by Ken Hansen
“Is that why you are doing this? Are you still pissed about Hanna and me?”
Kadir laughed heartily. “You still do not comprehend, do you? You think this is all about you.”
“No, Pardus, I know it is not.”
“Well, well, at least you understand who I am…”
…“Pardus,” Tomadus said to himself, slowly opening and closing his eyes. He repeated, “Pardus.” A tingle went down his spine and his little creature began clawing at his gut. He sat in the control booth, shaking his head while struggling to connect the wild thoughts washing over his latest glowing revelation. He felt the betrayal, and it had come from his friend. No, not from his friend, but Pardus. They were just images of the other world, of Huxley in D.C., yet they seemed so real, so present. He’d made a mistake then. He could not repeat it here. The room seemed to close in on him as the sweat poured out of his face. While several technicians worked intensely at their terminals in the control booth, he could still see the proceedings on the stage through the glass and hear it through the speakers in the booth.
The Governor said, “Let us recall what you said on visi-scan a few days ago. You claimed to be able to perform miracles. You said you could rebuild the Temple of the Rock in three days if we tore it down? Now, tell us, how can this be?”
Isa stood mute.
The Governor stepped away from the microphone and conferred quietly with the Grand Imam and Abh Beyth Diyn. When he returned, he said, “Since you refuse to speak, we find we must assist your memory with our newest version of the triangulum penetrans, equipped with the new technology of light amplification.”
Tomadus gasped. The Three Empires had adapted part of his invention to further demonize their methods of punishment and torture. But how effective would it be? Thank goodness he would not find out today. They would stop before the pain had begun, wouldn’t they? As the guards scrambled on the stage to hoist Isa up to the inverted triangle, Tomadus saw a technician in the booth smile with satisfaction, eject a storage disk and place the disk at an unoccupied desk next to the First Consul’s three-jeweled letter opener.
More sweat dripped down Tomadus’s brow. When he reached in his pocket for a handkerchief, the folded letter grazed his fingers. Jochi. Now trembling, he closed his eyes and bit his lip. Could he manage to read the letter in this state? She had seemed prescient. Could he live with himself if he didn’t? He unfolded the paper and began to read:
My Dear Tomadus,
You honestly are so dear to me. I know you may not believe that now, but you must. I only realized a few hours ago how much I have truly loved you and for how long. I know I would love you now even if you favored my worst enemy. How could I not?
I fear for you as I fear for Isa. Isa wants to die as a martyr. No, that is not quite right. He believes God wants him to die as a martyr. We both know what happened to Jesus. It now happens again. Only this time, maybe you can save him. I don’t know.
You have put so much faith in your friend, the First Consul, but you will find your faith misplaced and your error will again undo you. Did you not learn this from the other world? Your friend was and is a destroyer, but you have never seen it. Stop him before it is too late!
If you cannot save Isa, Tomadus, at least let him save you. Let him save Huxley and Sonatina and their world. You have never quite believed me; you have never quite trusted me—even in that other world, even when I was Sonatina. I loved you then, and I love you still. You must trust me now.
You might think me insane, but I believe I have seen two very different worlds through Sonatina’s eyes —two different futures for that world. The first made me wretch in horror. The second made me whimper helplessly. The second is worse, far worse. I think we can help, Tomadus. Both of us, together. Isa told me that the Father has granted both of us beautiful gifts, and we must use them. He said that if we have faith, we will do what is right and save ourselves and others.
I did not understand him then, but he would say no more. I know he has always wanted you to believe in the Father, but it seemed like he was saying something more this time. Then, after the soldiers took him away last night, I prayed and fell into a dream that repeated these horrible visions of the other world. The evil man—I think it was Pardus—taunted you to do something and you looked at me and asked me what to do, but I had no answers. Then Isa appeared and you finally asked him. He nodded to me and suddenly I knew. “Do it, Chris,” I said. “Sacrifice yourself and you’ll save billions.”
I’m not sure what this dream means, but I know it is the key. Somehow, you must get this message to Huxley. You said you thought he sometimes dreamed about you. Find a way to tell him, Tomadus. Tell him, and he may hear! You must have faith. Chris Huxley must have faith. He must sacrifice himself, whatever that means.
I love you and shall wait for you,
Jochi
Tears streamed down Tomadus’s face. Across two universes, he had known, but somehow refused to believe; across two worlds, he had loved, but somehow refused to trust.
He looked around and saw the technicians were preoccupied with their tasks. He slowly reached over, picked up the disk and inserted it in the monitor near him. A vid of his testimony began playing. He quickly put the monitor’s headphones to his ears and was sickened to hear his own voice say things he could never possibly utter aloud. But it was unmistakably his voice—how had they altered it?
Turning his head slowly toward the sound stage, Tomadus stared at the chair he had sat in during his testimony. It was the same chair in exactly the same place as during his conversation with the First Consul the evening before. The cameras must have been rolling when he was being candid with the First Consul. But he had said nothing damning, had he?
It turned out that had not been necessary. The splices in the vid were obvious, but only to someone who knew what they had done. The vid carefully interspersed the questions and snippets of answers, showing an image of the Governor instead of Tomadus whenever a clip was too short to seem real. He knew it was fake, but nobody else would:
“Tomadus of Roma, what say you?” said the Governor.
“I have followed Isa and the Way for nearly a year now, and have been with him in many of his discussions with his followers.”
“Thank you, Tomadus. Why have you followed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were you with him at the so-called ‘Adin Miracle?’”
“Yes. He has traveled widely, you know. Some say it was a miracle, but I know otherwise. Adin…told me. It was a pharmaceutical trick. I myself felt Adin’s body as he lay on the table. He was alive!”
“Tomadus, have you ever heard Isa say he is the Mahdi, returned from occultation to now lead us to peace and justice.”
“Yes.”
“Very well, then have you heard him say he is the Messiah promised to the Jews?”
“I can say this without any reservation whatsoever. He has said he is God.”
“Has he said how he will try to work with the Three Emperors?”
“He will try to usurp their power.”
“I see. That is revealing. Thank you, Tomadus, for your honest testimony. You are dismissed.”
Tomadus slunk back in his chair and the light once again consumed him…
…Huxley stared back at Kadir’s image, Pardus’s image. “If you wrote the poem, who else could you be? But if the end is not about me, then why is the last stanza all about my father and me?”
“They must have used a rather large hose to suck out all of your intelligence when you became a spy boy. You were pretty damn smart in college.”
Huxley stared at the monitor, moving his mind rapidly over the last stanza, searching for more:
On truth lies yet obscured thy fathers’ end.
To myths our hearts do reach and then depend.
We seek our consolation with a friend.
Remember now the Maine and then ascend.
To know his fate you must to hell descend.
>
Pardus laughed. “You think the last stanza is only about you and your father?”
Huxley’s lips curled in as he closed his eyes. There was something about the first line that had always bothered him. “The apostrophe.”
“There you go.”
“It came at the end of ‘fathers,’ not before the ‘s’.”
“Exactly, so it refers not to just one father but two or more. Hell, Huxley, do I know English grammar better than you?”
“I filed it away as a typo.”
Pardus clicked his tongue and tilted his head. “Bad idea.”
“So it must also be another reference to Washington.”
“Of course.”
At first Huxley nodded, but then shook his head. Did he dare let on what he knew? There was nothing Pardus could do now—the NNSA had recovered the stolen nukes. “It doesn’t matter, you know. I didn’t fall for your little deceit. You never realized I turned Anwari to our side. He helped me figure out you planned the whole scavenger hunt as your little ruse to make us look at DC and ignore New York. Well, we stopped your plan cold yesterday when we recovered the two nukes on their way into the harbor.”
Pardus grimaced.
Huxley smirked and nodded. “That’s right—you might kill me you son of a bitch, but the world will be safe. And, just think, you could have just killed me in my sleep so many years ago if you had wanted, but now you have spent what—a few hundred million bucks of your family’s money? And what do you get out of it but a dead friend? Kind of crappy return on investment, don’t you think?”
“Interesting,” responded Pardus with a curious smile.
Not the response Huxley had expected. “What?”
“Right to the end, you remain clueless. Let me translate the last stanza of the poem for you. If you had been capable of translating it yourself, you might have figured out the whole thing. I am of a sporting nature, Huxley—you know that. I gave you a chance, but you blew it.”
Sneering, Huxley shook his head in defiance at Pardus. He’s just full of shit. The poem hadn’t given him any clues except about some fathers. But wait, what was that about the myth? We reach our hearts out to myths and then depend on them. The myth had made Huxley believe Washington was the target, or had it? No!
Pardus interrupted his thoughts, “I see from your expression that you may have finally found enlightenment. How wonderful for you.”
“So what is the myth?” asked Huxley quickly.
Pardus’s teeth gleamed with his pride. “Why all of it, of course…”
…“All a myth,” Tomadus said, the yellow light beginning to fade. A vid-tech squinted and cocked his head at Tomadus. Tomadus blinked hard and brought himself back from Huxley and Pardus and the other world, back to the control booth. Undoubtedly, the vid of his fake testimony was just one weapon in the First Consul’s arsenal of deception. Tomadus winced. He was helping this devil kill Isa. Worse yet, he had provided the tool to kill Isa’s message for good.
The display of the terminal reflected in his eyes as he looked at the technicians in the room. They didn’t know he’d uncovered the deception. They were too busy working on their next counterfeit. I know the technology better than they. I still have a chance.
Tomadus leaned forward and tapped on the terminal’s keyboard. The screen showed exactly what he had feared. He could switch it over now, but that would not be enough; he must mask reality from the technicians themselves or all would be lost. He began typing on the terminal and soon found the kernel. A little segment of code in just the right spot would do the trick. He hit the button, the little routine ran, and the screen returned to its steady state. He sat back satisfied, though his smile lasted but a fleeting moment.
“Tomadus, what have you been up to?” the First Consul said from over his shoulder. The First Consul reached over to the keyboard, hit a few buttons and the vid of Tomadus’s testimony began to play. “I see my technicians have done an excellent job with this…testimony.” The First Consul stood up straight and looked at the two technicians on the other side of the control booth, his almost sinister smile now so much different than the gentle, calming smile to which Tomadus had become so accustomed. “Well done, men!”
When Tomadus scrambled to leave the booth, a quite distinctive clicking sound stopped him cold. A guard holding a rap rifle aimed it at Tomadus, its bolt now cocked back. “Very wise, Tomadus,” taunted the First Consul. “You did not wish to miss the remainder of the show, did you? After all, we have you to thank for our new torture device.”
Tomadus swiveled his head toward the glass wall and looked out at the stage. Isa was now hanging on the modified triangulum penetrans, his arms outstretched. The many small glass lenses now glowed red. Isa gritted his teeth in pain.
The First Consul laughed. “This is a prototype, of course. It is just one application of your wonderful invention. The remaining military applications will be so much more useful in the long run. Thank you so much for your assistance, by the way. You really did deserve that medal.”
“It’s killing him.”
“Oh, not yet, not for a good while,” the First Consul replied. “You see, one of the advantages of your enhanced light rays is that we can use them to fine tune the instrument itself. We can determine when we have hit a key organ and deactivate a particular beam. It allows us to keep the marshmallow browning nicely without setting it on fire. But I am afraid, eventually, he will die.”
Isa screamed. The First Consul looked up and rubbed his hands together. “Wonderful! It looks like they have increased the intensity. I do so enjoy a good cookout.”
Tomadus nearly retched and began shaking at the scene before him. Smoke rose from the triangulum penetrans behind Isa’s body. He could smell the horrible odor of burning flesh. Jochi had been right—he was responsible, in more ways than one.
The light flashed across Tomadus’s eyes and another vision entered his brain…
…Kadir, Pardus, let out a long, derisive laugh. “Please, let me explain. While it is quite enjoyable to watch you struggle to peel the layers of the onion away, I have no time for this childish entertainment. Now, recall that the first line of the last stanza was: ‘On truth lies yet obscured thy fathers’ end.’ And what is ‘truth’ but what one thinks is ‘right’? So from Jefferson’s view, the truth about the end of Washington stood to his right but obscured. Of course, the Southwest Wharf is to the right of Jefferson. Your father met his end there, but it is also the home of my lovely boat, the Infernum, which obscures the means of Washington’s end.”
Huxley wrinkled his brow. What did the Infernum have to do with Washington’s end?
Pardus said, “And further nested is the word ‘lies.’ Because the ‘lies’ remained obscured there as well—the ‘lies’ that I allowed you and your government to adopt as their truth. You all so wanted to believe you had found the warheads in New York, and so you did, even before they were dismantled. Thus, your heart reached out to this myth, as in the poem, and then you all depended on it. More on this myth in a minute, but I wish to finish the poem first. It is great fun, is it not?”
Huxley just shook his head.
Pardus shrugged. “So after depending on this myth, you sought consolation with me on my boat. How nice of you, Hux. Similarly, your nation’s spy agencies have sought consolation with me as their good Arab friend. How many times have I provided insights to help them find those terrible terrorists! And, of course, let us not forget that the organization I founded, The Brotherhood of Arab Nations for Peace, has been at the forefront of bringing Arabs together to assist America’s obsession with mollifying the less compliant segment of the Arab populace. You are welcome for that, by the way.”
Huxley kept shaking his head slightly, almost imperceptibly.
Pardus leaned forward. “The remainder of the poem clearly refers to you coming aboard my lovely Ship of Fate, the Infernum. While you did not need to be here, it is terribly satisfying to me that you should be aboard the s
hip that launches a nuclear bomb over Washington, D.C.”
His head sunk low, Huxley mumbled, “So the warheads in New York were also fakes.”
“A little slow, but then you have been on an emotional roller coaster. For some reason you all seemed to think it was impossible to take the warheads apart and just use the weapons-grade plutonium. Making a new warhead is pretty easy when you have the material and a few hundred million dollars to work with. I left enough nuclear material in the original warheads and lowered the resistance of Rosenthal’s device just enough to ensure it set off your little UNGARD device.”
“Why me?” asked Huxley in a low voice. “Why did you involve me?”
Pardus, who seemed no longer to resemble his old friend Kadir, stared back at Huxley through the monitor. “Why not? You were the perfect dupe, Huxley. God has long been dead to you, and you constantly try to prove it. You wanted to believe in Anwari not just to save the world, but also to validate yourself. Deep inside, you wanted to show that when the chips were down, you would take a Muslim’s word the same as a Christian’s. But this isn’t about the glory of God. It never was. With a little help from me, Anwari figured out that the love for Allah could not possibly be my true motive. No, my motives differ quite significantly from that, I am afraid. You might say they are quite the opposite. Hell, when are politics and the wars of men truly motivated by the love of God? You know better.”
