Death Ray Butterfly

by Tom Lichtenberg

dollhouse in the backyard of his mother's uncle, an old barber named Clayton Jeffries.

  Of course his real name was not Root Turagu. It was something like Billy Pride, or Rick Rock, something like that. He went with Turagu because it sounded tribal. Man had tattoos up and down, around and about, pretty much everywhere he had skin, and they were all especially tribal looking too. Kept his war councils on the lawn back there. One time I went and looked him up, just to see for myself. I'd been hearing his name being whispered here and there so I figured I would take the bull by the horns, so to speak, find out if it really was all bull and no horns like I thought.

  Turagu was sitting there on a lawn chair, eating a grilled cheese sandwich and drinking an orange soda. One of the tattoos on his right forearm was running Xvfd and he had some kind of jigsaw puzzle application running on it. Every now and then he'd glance down and tap on a piece with his left hand index finger to direct an alteration in the pattern. He seemed pretty engrossed in the project. He didn't notice me for awhile, or at least I thought so, but eventually he looked up and briefly nodded towards a chair (his own was surrounded by several other, equally ratty looking faded plastic pieces of furniture).

  “Go ahead, Inspector”, he said, take a seat. “Can I offer you a sandwich?”

  I declined his offer of food but did sit down.

  “You got some questions”, he continued, “but I don't got no answers. You see me. Here I am. This is it.”

  “People say you're some kind of big shot”, I remarked, and he laughed.

  “I built my rep with care”, he grinned. “It pays to have some word.”

  “So what is it?”, I asked. “You get some kind of tribute delivered?”

  “Every Friday night”, he smiled. “Eight o'clock sharp. You should come around and see. Home worship delivery. Don't it beat all?”

  “I don't get it”, I said. “What's in it for them?”

  “Some of them want to follow”, he muttered, checking his forearm with a look of disapproval. “Frickin' loombot, do what I say, dammit!”

  He tapped away furiously on his arm and I had to ask him what he was doing.

  “Mongrel config”, he replied, as if that was supposed to mean something to me.

  “I'm shaping the shapes”, he continued. “I'll dish 'em out when they're ready.”

  “Shapes for what?”

  “The shapes, man”, he said, staring at me as if I was crazy. “Everything's got to have a shape. Where do you think they come from? Out the sky?”

  I had to admit I didn't know. I always thought that things simply formed themselves as they were destined to be, according to their genetic blueprints. Maybe this guy thought he was God.

  “Nanoptics?“, I guessed.

  “I don't deal with that”, he spat. “Leave that for the crooners and the spoilers who think they know but they don't know. It's the shapes, man. It's all of that.”

  I didn't get much more out of him from that interview. The more we talked, the less sense it made. It was pretty clear that I was going to have to get some more education on these matters. I had to turn to some kind of expert, which meant I had to find one.

  Ten

  Turned out the big number one expert I was looking for was the one and only Arab "Cricket" Jones. I'd already been curious about him because of Jimmy Kruzel's nonstop whining about his gambling luck, but I had no idea who he really was. I didn't know he was actually even famous. He was some kind of physicist-novelist-pop-culture-pundit-hero, had published all sorts of books and given all kinds of speeches, and was even renowned for naming his son Enrico Fermi Planck Einstein Newton K. Jones.

  He lived in a top floor penthouse apartment in Fulsom Towers downtown. I met him there, flanked by his supermodel wife and aforementioned infant son. Jones was an ordinary looking sort; not too tall, not too light, sporting a crewcut and thick tortoise-shell rimmed glasses. He was very polite, ushered me in, offered me a brandy, sat me down in a thickly carpeted library with a picture window overlooking the harbor. He sat himself behind an obsidian slab of a desk, and with his head propped up by his elbows, seemed to be studying me carefully. I was inspecting him as well. He seemed inordinately confident, like someone who had everything all figured out, and yet was not so above it all to be bored or condescending. The look in his eyes was one of genuine interest and curiosity.

  “I've heard of you, of course”, he said. “Certain acquaintances of mine have even threatened me with your name.”

  “Kruzel?”, i offered, and he nodded.

  “Among others”, he agreed. “Some you may have already heard of, others of whom you most certainly will.”

  “I'm not here for you”, I reassured him.

  “You have questions”, he suggested.

  “Nanoptics?”

  “Nothing to worry about”, he said dismissively, leaning back and waving his hands in the air.

  “Child's play”, he continued. “It's like people selling oregano for weed. Only the ignorant would pay and it's completely harmless to boot. There won't be any inadvertent collapses of this galaxy, I can assure you, or any other galaxy for that matter. Subatomic particles are everywhere. You might say they are every thing. If there were to be some kind of shortage, now, that might make it interesting. As with blood, or livers, or fashionable leg bones.”

  “Leg bones?”

  “Or cheek bones”, if you prefer. “Some people will always want to upgrade their appearance. This is a trend that knows no limit. If it became necessary, they would swap their own DNA if possible. Perhaps it will be, someday”, he mused.

  Jones resumed his elbows-down posture at the desk, after brushing aside some papers and seeming to appreciate his reflection in the shiny black surface. I posed another simple question, this time about Root Turagu. Jones looked up with a broad grin across his face.

  “One of my faves”, he said. “A man after my own heart. I should like to be the first to sell someone their very own personality.”

  “I don't follow”, I told him.

  “Snake oil”, he said. T”he one thing your nanoptics and Turagu have in common. Or at least, it seems so, on the surface. Yes, it is so. No need to concern yourself. None at all. People will succumb, as they always do, to the shrewd and the crafty and the brilliant. Turagu is two of those. I myself am all three.”

  It seemed that our interview was over, as he stood, and guided me toward the door. I couldn't leave without one more question, however.

  “You once sent me something”, I began.

  “Yes, yes, a gift”, he replied. “You will be making use of it someday, I promise. I will let you know exactly when. Until that time, however, you'd best be keeping it in a safe place, out of the hands of children, or any other creature for that matter.”

  That certainly cleared things up! I left, with the definite impression that I'd been most carefully lied to, and that it wouldn't be the last time.

  Eleven

  We had some pretty fancy operations going on back in the day, especially in the "war on stuff". We called it the war on stuff because the stuff was always changing. At one time or another, pretty much every kind of substance you could absorb was declared war on, whether it was prescribed by a doctor or not. We were used to constantly revising the list of stuff, which we also called "the goods". If somebody had the goods, that was too bad for them!

  Law enforcement went to extremes when it came to the stuff. We had machines, we had tests, we had animals, you name it, we had it. One of the geniuses in that last department was a woman named Kiki Photescu. She'd come from Romania where she had a history of amazingly bad luck. She was originally a circus freak, able to twist herself like a pretzel. They said she could dislocate every single bone in her body at the same time, and pop them all right back into place on cue. Somewhere along the line she picked up some animal training, beginning with cats, if I remember right. She would have these cats distribute themselves randomly in the audience, then they'd all leap out and started yowling
at the same time, scaring the crap out of everybody in the building. Some people got scratched, and Kiki got canned.

  Now on her own, she moved on to birds - mourning doves, another unfortunate choice, because these birds were able to sniff out death. She'd let them go and off they'd fly through the city, coming to roost within a few feet of where a murder was about to be committed. The cops took to following the birds, and that actually saved a few lives, I think, but then the birds got specialized, and started to forecast "official" killings. The secret police were not too thrilled. Kiki had to choose between emigration or else.

  She ended up here in the great southwest where she worked for awhile on a rescue ranch, the kind of place where all the zoo animals get shipped off to once they're no longer useful. They also had some mountain lions relocated from La Honda, California, and some other exotic creatures too wily for mankind. This place was also used for some experimental purposes, and Ms. Photescu was welcomed into that little fraternity there, and got involved in the war on stuff.

  We always had drug-sniffing dogs. Everybody knows that dogs are good for pretty much anything. They're smart, they train