by Greg Cox
“My apologies, Herr Vogellieder,” Khan replied. Taking a deep breath to calm his fraying nerves, he rearranged his features into a more serene and inspirational expression, lifting his chin in order to better look into the glorious future he envisioned for the world, quite apart from the petty vexations of the present. Patience, he counseled himself, albeit with effort. Rome was not built in a day, and even Caesar sometimes had to put up with the fickle mob.
A golden turban rested upon his brow, shielding his superlative brain from the mounting heat of the morning sun. Although it was not even noon, the temperature in the garden already felt like it was climbing toward forty degrees Celsius; Khan’s meteorologists were predicting an unusually hot summer this year, and so far their projections were looking right on the money. Khan glanced longingly at the tempting shade of the leafy mango trees sprouting in the lush outdoor garden, which was nestled amidst his private apartments at the rear of the palace; alas, the painter preferred direct sunlight for his labors.
At least Joaquin was able to take advantage of the dusky coolness offered by the verdant trees. The bodyguard watched Khan pose from the comfort of a wrought-iron bench situated in the shadow of a fruit-laden bough. Having largely recovered from the grievous injuries he had sustained during September’s earthquake, Joaquin had wasted no time resuming his duties as Khan’s personal guardian. Khan valued Joaquin’s loyalty more than ever, especially with the discontented howls of the rabble ringing in his ears at this very moment.
“Open your eyes, Khan! Khan, go home!”
For this official portrait, intended for the palace’s formal banquet hall, Khan had chosen to pay respect to his Sikh ancestry by wearing the traditional karra, or silver bracelet, on his right wrist, as well as a kirpan, or dagger, on his belt. Although he had donned the kirpan for ceremonial reasons, he now wished he could use the curved silver blade to slice the unworthy throats of the protestors.
Khan’s mood darkened further as Ament emerged from the marble portico connecting the garden to the interior apartments. Lately, it seemed as though he and his once-trusted advisor seldom saw eye-to-eye anymore, particularly regarding foreign affairs. He found himself increasingly reluctant to share the details of his war strategies with her.
“Pardon me, Lord Khan,” she spoke, thoughtfully staying out of Vogellieder’s line of sight. “I am sorry to interrupt your sitting, but I fear that more pressing matters demand your attention.” She glanced in the direction of the shouting mob. “As you may have gathered,” she added dryly.
Khan was tempted to dismiss her out of hand. How dare she presume to tell him where his priorities lie? But cooler instincts prevailed and he rose reluctantly from the simple white cane chair he had chosen for the portrait. “Very well,” he assented, turning to address the busy artist. “That will be all for now, Herr Vogellieder. I will summon you when I am ready to pose again.”
“Yes, Your Excellency,” the German complied, adding a few last strokes to his canvas before commencing to pack up his brushes and oils. “Thank you, Your Excellency.”
Ament strolled across the garden to inspect the unfinished portrait. “An excellent likeness,” she commented. “He captures you at your best.”
Khan could not help but hear an implied criticism in her observation, as though he had not always lived up to that standard in her eyes. He bristled inwardly, but refused to be baited into a discussion of his personal failings.
“Well?” he demanded brusquely. “What is so important that you thought it necessary to disturb me?”
She cocked her head toward the sound of irate men and women venting their displeasure just outside the fortress. “I would have thought that would be self-evident.”
“That?” he said scornfully. He walked over to a waist-high sheshamwood table where a pitcher of iced chai had been laid out for his refreshment. He poured himself a glass and calmly took a sip before speaking again. “What have I to fear from the senseless yowls of a malcontented minority?”
Ament followed him over to the carved wooden table. She did not ask for a glass of her own and he did not offer one. “This is not the first such demonstration,” she persisted, “nor is it likely to be the last.” She spoke in Hindi to avoid being overheard by the departing painter. “Your popularity is slipping among the general populace. Inflation and unemployment are rising throughout the Punjab, as well as the rest of India and Pakistan, yet the common people fear that you no longer hear their cries, that you are preoccupied with other matters.”
“I am fighting to save the entire planet!” Khan protested vehemently. The spicy taste of the tea turned to bile in his throat. He downed the last of the chai in a single gulp, then placed the empty cup back down upon the table. “You know that as well as I.”
Ament declined to let the matter drop. “Perhaps, my lord, but the people neither know nor care about your secret wars against Hunyadi, Gary Seven, and the rest. They feel only the effects of your neglect.” She shook her head reproachfully, reminding Khan of a disapproving headmistress. “The loss of the Kaur alone cost us millions that might have been spent instead on new schools, hospitals, and industries. And then there’s the rocket base in the South Pacific, and Dr. Dhasal’s genetic experiments. . . .”
“Enough!” Khan exploded, throwing up his hand to staunch the hectoring flow of words. He glared at her balefully. “I will not be lectured to like an errant schoolboy.” His voice turned cold and dismissive. “You forget your place.”
A look of disappointment, and even sadness, passed briefly over the Egyptian woman’s immaculate features. For the first time, he thought he saw a hint of hurt in her striking amber eyes, although she quickly regained her customary sangfroid. “There was a time,” she reminded him pointedly, “that you welcomed my dissent.”
That was before I went to war against my brothers, Khan brooded unhappily. Before the dream of a unified planet, enjoying a golden age of peace and prosperity under the enlightened rule of a single ruler, was held hostage by clashing ambitions of those who should have been his allies. Before my lofty plans for humanity devolved into an endless game of strike and counterstrike, of espionage, sabotage, and assassination.
He found he had less use for a flesh-and-blood conscience these days, or perhaps that was simply a luxury he could no longer afford. “Leave me,” he told her curtly. “I am not in the giving vein today.”
“As you wish.” Ament exited the garden as gracefully as she had entered it, leaving him alone with Joaquin and the uncompleted painting. Khan stared bleakly into the reflective waters of a lotus-shaped lily pond as he wondered when exactly his destiny took such a darker turn. The strident chants of the demonstrators taunted him, filling him with dissatisfaction and resentment.
Fools! Peasants! Inferiors! Khan yanked the turban from his crown in frustration and hurled the wad of golden silk across the garden with all his strength. Can they not see that I have the best interests of them all at heart? They should be thankful that I see them as anything more than useful cannon fodder!
Alerted to Khan’s obvious distress, Joaquin rose from his bench and limped over to the lily pond. “Shall I have the palace guard disperse the protesters, Your Excellency?” He glowered murderously in the direction of the clamoring horde, at those who dared to challenge the will of his lord and master. “Just give me the word and they will be taken care of.”
Khan suspected that Joaquin had a fairly permanent solution in mind. “No, my friend,” he said. “Let them have their say—for now.” A rueful smile conveyed a measure of hard-won patience and restraint. Why risk a riot or a massacre? Khan remembered Tiananmen Square, and had little desire to sully his own reign with such a bloodbath, at least for as long as the remorseless tide of history allowed. Not that Hunyadi or some of the others are likely to show similar forbearance, he thought venomously. It would almost serve the croaking masses right to let them experience the tyranny of a truly ruthless superdictator.
“But, Your Excellen
cy—!” Joaquin sounded as though he could not believe his ears. “They defy you at your very door! We must make an example of them!”
Khan shook his head. “Others would simply take their place,” he predicted bitterly. “There are too many inferior, irrational people in the world. Too many primitive minds, keeping humanity mired in barbarism, thanks to their unmitigated ignorance and prejudices.”
He gloomily considered the sorry state of the world. War and portents of war everywhere he looked. NATO launching air strikes against Serbian forces in Bosnia. North Korea threatening to employ nuclear weapons against its rival to the south. Tribal warfare erupting in Rwanda after the assassination of its embattled president only five days ago. Massacres and terrorism in the Middle East. A violent peasant uprising in Mexico. Paramilitary death squads in Haiti. Civil war in nearby Afghanistan.
A wave of despair threatened to overwhelm him. How could one man, even such a man as he, eradicate all the chaos and savagery at large in the world today? There was too much turmoil, too many unengineered humans barely one step removed from a tribe of yammering apes. The continually impeded pace of his march to glory frustrated him beyond endurance, yet what was he to do in the face of never-ending opposition from man and superman alike? The unruly crowd outside represented only an insignificant portion of the many millions of fractious, close-minded primitives he had yet to bring under his benevolent control. Executing a mere handful would accomplish nothing, he reflected morosely; I would have to exterminate billions to crush such resistance completely.
“Excuse me, my lord.”
Khan stirred from his doleful reverie to see a minor palace functionary standing a respectful distance away. Now what? Khan thought impatiently, displeased at being disturbed once more. “Yes?” he inquired crossly.
The servant, an assistant chamberlain named Atal, blanched at Khan’s ill-tempered tone. “A thousand pardons, Lord Khan, but there is a stranger who desires an audience with Your Excellency.” He watched Khan’s face apprehensively, fearful of incurring his master’s wrath. “He says he knew your mother.”
My mother? Khan regarded the messenger with greater interest. “A stranger, you say?”
“Yes, Your Excellency. An Englishman, I believe.”
Now more intrigued than irritated, Khan desired to know more. “Bring him to me,” he instructed.
“Your Excellency . . . ?” Joaquin sounded a cautionary note.
“Fear not, my friend,” Khan assured him. “Our visitor could not have come this far without being thoroughly searched by our security forces.” He confidently admired the high sandstone walls surrounding the garden. “You are my last line of defense, but hardly my only one.”
“If you say so, Your Excellency.” Joaquin’s hand hovered over the gleaming brass hilt of his belt-buckle knife nonetheless. He positioned himself in front of Khan even as the attendant left to fetch the unnamed stranger.
Khan doubted that the assassin existed who could overcome both him and Joaquin single-handedly. After all, Khan, too, was armed, with his ceremonial kirpan, so it was only natural that curiosity exceeded caution in his soul. An associate of my mother? he wondered in astonishment. After all these years? Sarina Kaur’s former colleagues had scattered throughout the world after the fall of the Chrysalis Project. Some had died, some had disappeared into new identities, while still others had been placed under lifetime observation or house arrest by their respective governments. Khan had made intermittent attempts to recruit some of the surviving scientists to assist Phoolan Dhasal in her lab on Chrysalis Island, but had ultimately concluded that the effort required more trouble than it was worth. The leftover geneticists were merely ordinary humans, after all; deprived of his mother’s visionary genius, it was unlikely that they could offer any skills or insights beyond that which Dhasal and her staff already possessed.
And yet, here was a purported compatriot of his mother showing up at Khan’s doorstep almost two decades after the first Chrysalis’s thermonuclear destruction. A mysterious Englishman, no less. Khan felt his pulse quicken with excitement. Who knows what new possibilities this unanticipated guest may bring? he thought hopefully, feeling his spirits lift from the dreadful malaise that had engulfed him. Did not the poet Homer teach, “All strangers and beggars are from Zeus” . . . ?
He waited long minutes until Atal returned with their visitor. At first glance, the anonymous caller proved a disappointment; Khan frowned at the sight of a short, dumpy, older man, whose disheveled and unhealthy appearance inspired little confidence. Bald and overweight, with sagging jowls and the flushed complexion of a heavy drinker, the pear-shaped stranger looked to be maybe seventy years old, and well past his prime. His ruddy face was slick with sweat, and perspiration soaked through the front of his button-down denim shirt as well as beneath the armpits of his rumpled khaki bush jacket. His shabby safari garb, reminiscent of the bygone days of the British Raj, made him look like a one-time Great White Hunter gone very badly to seed.
“Good morning, Mr. Khan,” he said, obsequiously clutching a dented pith helmet to his chest. He shambled across the garden toward Khan, wheezing with exertion. “Thank you so much for receiving me.”
“Lord Khan,” Joaquin corrected him sternly.
“Yes, yes, of course,” the man stammered nervously. “Lord Khan, naturally.” His breath smelled of tobacco and gin. “I don’t suppose you remember me, Lord Khan?” He peered up at Khan hopefully, grimacing awkwardly like a man having his driver’s license photo taken. “Dr. Donald Archibald Williams? Late of the Chrysalis Project?”
Khan probed his encyclopedic memory. He had been only four years old when his mother died, but he thought he vaguely recognized the debilitated Englishman from his early childhood at Chrysalis. Scouring backward through the veil of time, he dimly remembered seeing Williams in the company of his mother, looking only marginally younger and healthier than he did today. Khan found it hard to imagine that so pitiful a specimen of mortal man could have played any part in the creation of a new and superior breed of humanity, yet his fragmentary recollections appeared to confirm that his visitor was telling the truth, at least in part.
“Quite late, I assume,” Khan said coolly. To think that my mother perished at Chrysalis, yet this cringing wretch survived! He took an immediate dislike to Williams, but strove to hear the man out, for hospitality’s sake if no other. “How can I help you, Doctor?”
“Well, you see,” Williams began, wheezing strenuously. A fit of wet, violent coughing derailed his explanation, and he dabbed at his sweaty brow with a well-worn handkerchief. “Perhaps,” he suggested plaintively, after the coughing subsided, “if I could sit down somewhere, out of the sun?”
Khan nodded at Joaquin, who obediently assisted the feeble visitor over to the iron bench beneath the mango trees. Williams dropped gratefully onto the bench, his chest heaving. “Yes, that’s much better,” he gasped, clearly exhausted by his short walk across the garden. “Many thanks.”
Placing his pith helmet down beside him on the bench, Williams began rooting around in the front pockets of his bush jacket. Joaquin tensed, just in case the palsied Englishman had somehow managed to smuggle a weapon past the palace’s assiduous screening process. He relaxed only slightly when Williams produced a packet of cigarettes and a lighter instead. “Do you mind if I smoke, Your Lordship?” he asked, apparently anxious to inflict more damage on his already-blighted lungs.
“Yes,” Khan stated unequivocally. He was starting to question whether this decrepit Westerner was worth his time. He gazed down imperiously at his seated visitor. “Please get to the point, Dr. Williams.”
The wheezing fossil sheepishly put away his cigarettes. “Whatever you say, Lord Khan.” He looked up at Khan through watery, bloodshot eyes. “As I started to explain before, I worked closely with your mother back at the old Chrysalis Project, at our underground facility in Rajasthan.” He vainly searched Khan’s stony face for any trace of sympathy or softheartedness. “S
he was quite a remarkable woman, Your Lordship. A brilliant mind coupled with a positively indomitable will and sense of purpose. There would have been no Chrysalis Project without her, Your Lordship.”
“So I have always understood,” Khan stated flatly. His visitor’s fulsome praise of his mother did little to assuage his growing impatience; did this man have nothing to offer him except nostalgic reminiscences of bygone days? “Go on, Doctor.”
Williams seemed to realize that he was trying Khan’s patience. “Yes, right,” he said hastily. A nervous tremor shook his dilapidated frame. “Anyway, after everything went to hell in seventy-four, I thought it best to drop out of sight for a while. By then, the authorities had somehow twigged on to what we’d been up to at Chrysalis, and a number of my colleagues ended up in custody, or else disappeared entirely. I suspect that some of them got drafted into one covert government project or another, and that others were simply ‘retired’ permanently, if you get my drift.”
The geriatric caller ran a finger across his throat to clarify his meaning. “Me, I’ve been lying low ever since, keeping body and soul together by selling my scientific expertise under the table, as it were.”
Khan wondered, without too much interest, what manner of dubious enterprises Williams had been involved with. He had heard rumors of recent illegal cloning experiments, involving everything from human embryos to the Shroud of Turin. Whatever sort of illicit research the seedy Englishman might have been engaged in, Khan felt certain that it had been highly disreputable.
“Recently, however, through no real fault of my own, mind you, I’ve found myself in a bit of hot water with respect to a couple of my more, er, unforgiving clients.” Williams paused, clearly reluctant to elaborate, then jumped ahead in his narrative. “Consequently, a change of scenery seemed to be in order, and it occurred to me to look you up.” He fixed a calculating gaze on Khan, providing a glimmer of a wily mind within his wasted shell. “I must admit, I’ve followed your career with some interest, Lord Khan. Your mother would be quite proud of the heights to which you’ve risen, I assure you. It’s a pity she didn’t live to see you fulfill the tremendous potential she crafted for you.”