Plus, the truth is you can’t really say no to the returned Scion of S’hudon, the Sultan Who Might Swat You, the Jovial Genius, the Man Behind the Curtain for Earth’s Future. So, “Yes, sure, I’d be delighted,” is her answer. And that earns her a hug from Twoclicks and another from the pint-sized Perfection, Treble, and then, some pretty decent chicken for dinner, which Twoclicks makes a mess of, but Treble carves and eats with aplomb.
So they’re going to shoot around her for a few weeks on the set, and off she’ll go with the kid to show him around, starting in L.A. at the S’hudonni Consulate and then heading east to D.C., then on to London and Paris and the rest. Social stops all the while, admiring the scenery and the weather, nothing political, visiting famous places from the London Zoo to the Eiffel Tower and finally, two weeks later, to Cape Town, where Treble will get a chance to frolic with some real Earthie wildlife.
Which, looking back, seemed like a good enough idea at the time, Chloe will tell famous rumormonger Gayle Gadfly three months later in a live interview from Chloe’s home in Malibu on the very day of the very premier that recalls the excitement that went down like this:
“We saw these at the zoo in London!” Treble said in perfect English, excited to see the cute little Cape penguins waddle along a sandy path to the beach. He saw no resemblance between himself and penguins that ran along the path ahead of them, though in fact he was a little taller but otherwise, when he mimicked their walk, fit into their flock more or less perfectly.
Chloe laughed at that for the cameras and flyeyes and drones and the rest that were capturing it all live for the global billions, the Hollywood star and her little pal, traveling the world so everyone could meet and be charmed by the princeling, Treble.
Who had, in fact, turned out to be pretty darn charming.
Chloe really liked Treble, and he liked her. He’d taken to calling her Aunt Chloe and she’d smiled at that and didn’t say no. Sure, traveling with him was wearing and while she was enjoying all the hoopla and appreciative of the numbers; really she just wanted it to end. She was nervous all the time, worried over who might be planning to kill or capture The Perfection and, oh by the way, make a major splash by doing away with Chloe Cary at the same time. A few more days and it would be over, Twoclicks had promised just this morning. He was in touch nearly hourly, fretting over his child apparently.
For now, here Chloe stood, on a boulder at the back of a beach near Cape Town, South Africa, with Treble holding her hand as Anodiwa Pinaar, the hottest item in the stable of Cape Visions, the fifth-largest media entity on Earth and a sister studio to Chloe’s since both of them were owned by Totalcom, showed them around.
They’d started with a tour of Cape Visions, which made movies when it wasn’t making military tech to export in the great tradition of South African arms merchants. Lots of studio tech, high and low, and then, the pièce de résistance, the BCI work with animals, where a human wearing a headset could direct thoughts to an animal wearing a receiver, and the animal reacted. They weren’t ready to try it yet in moviemaking, but the military apps were all over it, said Anodiwa, and she showed why as she sent a tasty thought to a lab rat and it sped right over to its food tray for a nibble. She made the rat sit up, turn in circles, play dead, and then dash through a maze. Treble was duly impressed. Chloe could almost see the wheels turning in the kid’s head. Maybe these humans weren’t so backward after all. Thought control. Cool!
Most of the touring had been more ordinary, pleasing the crowds and signing autographs and waving at the flitterbys and spyeyes and the drones and the old-school paparazzi holding actual cameras. Chloe was glad to see it. After a year of no one caring about her, worrying over the paparazzi made her oddly happy.
Early in the day, Pinaar had stood with them on the bluffs overlooking False Bay and showed them where to look for whales. There were none in sight, to Treble’s great disappointment. Then they’d come down off the mountain and driven for an hour to reach Cape Agulhas, the southern tip of Africa. There they’d stood next to the stone marker with the line down the middle and the words Indian Ocean in English and Indiese Oseaan in Afrikaans, with the arrow pointing left; and Atlantic Ocean and Atlantiese Oseaan, with the arrow pointing right. You could look out from there and see where the lighter blue of the Indian Ocean met the darker Atlantic.
It was all too good to resist for Treble, so while Chloe and Anodiwa—not to mention the global audience—watched and worried, young Treble dived off the rocks at the end of Africa and took delight in the chance to swim in two oceans almost at once, swimming through the demarcation line between the Indian and the Atlantic, unworried about the great white sharks and orcas that hunted there and, instead, hoping to see and play with the humpback whales. No luck with the humpbacks, but no harm from the sharks or orcas, either, much to the relief of the watching two billion or more, not to mention Chloe and Anodiwa.
They’d seen plenty of other things in Cape Town, too. They’d taken the new zoom lift to the top of Table Mountain. The lift encased them in that glass bubble that rose up the side of the mountain. At the top they’d had lunch at The Table, the restaurant that seemed to be suspended out over the nothingness, with the city to the left, the ocean in front, and the shoreline curving away into the distance to the right. You could even see Cape Point from there.
Then, after lunch, they’d come down from the mountain to take the studio limo to the TruNature park entrance and walked into the interpretive center, where they’d helped Treble put on the modified sweep receiver so he could sweep a caracal, those handsome mid-sized cats with the upswept ears. The sweep helmet meant Treble could feel like he was inside the cat’s sensory input as it stalked and hunted.
They’d slid the altered helmet onto Treble’s conical head and attached the ear buds, the taste buds, the smell tips, and all the rest. It wouldn’t be the same experience for him that it was for humans–his hearing extended into both higher and lower ranges, for starters–but it would give him a good idea of what Earthie animals sense and how humans received those sensory inputs, and that was the point. Chloe’s myBetty helpmate turned out to be indispensable for the software connectivity. She was linked in with the Trebnet servers at Twoclicks’ consulate in Los Angeles and those servers had the answers to myBetty’s questions. In five minutes, Treble was hooked into one of the wandering caracal cats for the better part of an hour as it roamed the scrub brush and fynbos looking for a meal of guinea fowl or mongoose or, yummiest of all, a dassie, those chubby critters the size of a small groundhog. Chloe and Anodiwa both wore headsets, too, as spectators.
Somewhere along the way, sensing it all through her own headset, Chloe realized that Treble wasn’t just watching, he was guiding the cat’s actions, turning it left and then right, having it sit, then getting it up and moving. It was fascinating, and worrisome, to watch. When the caracal stalked and killed a young dassie, tearing and chewing, tendons and muscles and bones all cracking and the blood flowing as the cat fed on the warm meat, it was hard to know whether cute little Treble had been at the controls or the cat had been acting on its own.
When it was over, Treble took off his helmet and said, “Aunt Chloe, that was awesome!” in his best colloquial American. Chloe laughed politely then looked at Anodiwa, who was looking back at her. They both knew what had just happened as they watched Treble walk off, hand in hand, with the park director, to see and do even more exciting things.
Anodiwa looked at Chloe and shook her head. “Not possible,” she said. “That’s a receiving set only that the kid was wearing. There is no possible way for that little princeling to have controlled that cat.”
Sure, thought Chloe, absolutely no way. And yet he did. There was no question. “We both saw it, Anodiwa,” she said.
Chloe had to wonder what Daddy Twoclicks thought about this. He was tuned into myBetty and no doubt to Anodiwa’s helpmate, too. That was a constant live feed, so he’d seen it all. Wasn’t he curious about his son’s abilities?<
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“No,” said myBetty, chiming in unbidden. “He’s not curious. And he wants to talk with you.”
It occurred to Chloe that she’d been thinking that the only time she wasn’t being eavesdropped on by Twoclicks and probably the whole damn world on this epic journey with the princeling was when she was thinking to herself. And now, she realized, not even that was true.
“Ho! Dear friend Chloe!” said Twoclicks into the tiny bowl amp in her right ear. She walked away from the others for some semblance of privacy, as silly as that now seemed.
“Not ssilly at all, dear friend Chloe!” said Twoclicks with his usual exuberant lisp. “Right now almosst private!”
Oh Christ, she thought. “Almost” couldn’t be good.
“All right, Twoclicks,” she said. “Almost just the two of us? Good. So tell me, does Treble have this ability? To control things with his mind?”
“Yess!” Twoclicks said. “The Perfection is one ssmart cookie!”
“Sure,” said Chloe, wondering for a moment what kind of cookie Twoclicks had in mind.
“Ssugar!” he said, with that throaty cackle that passed for a good laugh. “Yess, dear friend Chloe. Treble has established linkss everywhere, it sseems. We are sso proud! For Treble, and for all of uss!”
Well, that’s good to know, thought Chloe. But it didn’t explain the mind-reading thing. Anyway, “Thank you, Twoclicks. I’ll tell Anodiwa. She was wondering, too.”
“She knowss now, too!” Twoclicks said, with a loud cackle of S’hudonni laughter.
Chloe looked up and there was Anodiwa, twenty feet away over by the viewing window for the huge main tank. She smiled, gave Chloe a thumbs-up, and Chloe shrugged and did the same. Damn Twoclicks. Damn S’hudonni. And what the hell was Anodiwa doing anyway? They hadn’t needed to be squired around by anyone special at any of the other sites. Was this being done just to boost Anodiwa’s profile? Yes, probably.
Chloe turned to walk back to the others, and noticed for something like the hundredth time that a total of four bodyguards seem to be involved in looking after them. And one of those was clearly a South African Special Forces type, so really watching Anodiwa.
Twoclicks, she thought, testing her newfound theory on who could read her mind, shouldn’t we have more security around us? The current level still seems very light to me. I’ve had more security than this for a trip to the drugstore in Malibu. Which wasn’t true, but made her point.
“Ho, good friend Chloe!” Twoclicks said in her ear. “We will keep you ssafe. We promise!”
“Thanks,” she said, and then tried to not think the thoughts that might have been less than gracious.
And on they went.
Eventually the busy day brought them here in late afternoon, to Boulders Beach, in Simon’s Town, some twenty kilometers south of Cape Town. To get here they snuck away from the usual gaggle of paparazzi and drones by renting their own car, a boxy Nistoy electric with tinted glass that they clambered into in Anodiwa’s capacious garage and then drove down the back alleyway away from the house and headed down the bay.
Away from the media for a precious hour or so, Anodiwa felt free to pull over in the empty parking lot at the beach. Treble headed straight for the water, waddling along a path with the penguins and laughing before he, and they, dived in, while Anodiwa helped Chloe don a wet suit, a mask, and a snorkel. Carrying the fins, Chloe led the way as they wandered down between the house-sized boulders and onto the grainy sand. She wasn’t worried about the swimming, she still did a morning swim often enough in Malibu, down the wooden steps to the beach, out and into the cold Pacific, and then straight out for a few hundred meters, left or right from there depending on the whim of the day, and then back for a good half-hour. Refreshing.
This was no Malibu, though. As she walked the path from the car park to the water, there were penguins all around, eyeing her suspiciously but unafraid. They were noisy as hell individually, and together they raised a great cacophony, calling to each with loud squawks. Chloe could barely hear herself think, and that seemed pretty damn ironic.
Anodiwa and Chloe worked their way through the penguins and then, as they reached the water, Chloe balanced on one leg at a time to reach down and slip on the fins and then stood to put on the mask and, five steps later, she was in the water.
It was marvelous. The water wasn’t any colder than Malibu, and had a lot less wave action, so she had no trouble snorkeling. She could see about twenty meters underwater, not great but not too bad, either. Even in that range there were penguins next to her and around her and beneath her as she snorkeled out to deeper water. She paused once to float and look around. A number of boulders were big enough to rise out of the water and one had a large flat area just above the waterline, wet and sparkling in the sun, crowded with penguins. It was a playground, she thought, watching the penguins as they seemed to leap out of the water to land on their webbed feet, standing upright on the flat surface. Then they waddled around for a few paces, apparently to take stock of one another, and then dived right back in. It was comical to watch.
Treble surfaced just a few meters away, a huge smile on that round face. He was having fun, a lot of it. “Race you to that rock, Aunt Chloe!” he said, and dived back in.
“myBetty, you getting all this?” Chloe asked her helpmate.
“Absolutely, Chloe. Looks like fun,” myBetty said.
“Okay, then. Here I go,” Chloe said, and ducked down into the water, went down a meter or two, and started porpoising her fins to maximize her speed. She couldn’t possibly beat Treble, who was already halfway there; but she’d give it her best shot. The penguins bumped her several times, which was somewhere between funny and frightening. But she worked her way through the crowded water to the flat rock and clambered up. Minutes later, sitting side by side on the rock, surrounded by pushy penguins, Chloe and Treble grinned at each other, then turned to wave to Anodiwa, who was on the beach, watching through a binocular cam that was getting good video of the whole thing.
Together with myBetty’s video through Chloe’s mask and the sweep that caught the tang of the salt air and the warmth of the sun on a cool, South African day, and the feel of the wet rock beneath her, this made for a great segment, and for a few moments, at least, they had it all to themselves, the playful young prince from S’hudon, with Chloe Cary and her glamorous bestie, Anodiwa Pinaar, and all those funny penguins.
The water, the cute little penguins, the stunning scenery; their numbers were good, at more than two billion, myBetty whispered into Chloe’s ear. That meant the paparazzi and the rest of the media knew where they were now and would be here in minutes, but, for the moment, it was peaceful and fun. All the world was paying close attention to charming little Treble and Aunt Chloe.
Treble hopped up to walk to the rock’s edge and pop into the water and come back out, emerging with a laugh the same way the penguins did, coming out so fast that he was able to land upright on the rock surface just like they did. Fun!
It took all of a minute or two for him to do that a half-dozen times while Chloe watched and laughed and applauded, and then, sure enough, things got busy as motorcycles and then cars and then open boots on the cars and, voila, drones of all kinds headed their way: flitterbys and spyeyes and gnats and even, in the case of two very smart paps, drones that were water capable. Toss them into the surf and send them on their way, speeding along on the surface or diving down below it.
So they were all there watching, and Chloe was sweeping, and Anodiwa was live with her binoc-cam, when it all came down, a Zodiac rounding the headlands to the south and coming right at Chloe and Treble, three men aboard, one at the helm, another with a mask around his neck and carrying a speargun, another with a rifle. The outboard in the rear was pushing them along in a hurry, moving them from onethousand meters away to nine hundred, and then eight hundred in one damn hurry.
“Chloe, get the two of you off that rock!” myBetty commanded, seeing the feeds from the others; th
e paparazzi and Anodiwa and even one, incredibly, from the prow cam on the Zodiac. The bad guys were keeping their own cam going while they tried to assassinate the princeling and the Hollywood star!
Chloe started looking around, but Treble didn’t seem to care and he popped into the water and back out again so everyone worldwide could see his new trick one more time. He even took a bow for the cameras. What a great kid, that Treble!
But then the frantic contact from myBetty and from Anodiwa finally fell on ears that were listening and Treble looked up as there came the pop of a rifle shot and a bullet struck the rock outcrop where they sat. The whole rock seemed to vibrate as it rang like a bell, and Chloe and Treble were, in an instant, in the water.
Chloe’s decision was where to go. Into deeper water? Treble could stay down for hours if he needed to, but not Chloe. She couldn’t protect him there, but he’d be able to swim away from any danger. Into shore? She could protect him there, and they would have help from Anodiwa. Yes, that.
But Treble didn’t wait for Chloe to decide, so no, not that at all. He stayed above the water line just long enough to tell her “Aunt Chloe! Get to shore!” and then he dived, disappearing from view. Chloe, her decision-making over, struck out for the beach, which turned out to be the longest minute of her life as she ripped off her mask but left the fins on and swam like a demon for the sandy shore, where Anodiwa Pinaar stood there waving, foolishly perhaps, and yelling at her to “Swim! Swim!”
Which she did, and very well. Chloe had won those medals at the Paris Olympics ten long years ago. She’d quit competitive swimming the next year, when fame and fortune struck her in the form of a what-the-hell-why-not audition that turned into her first starring role as the young Annie Oakley. But the body remembers, and the muscle-memory kicks in when you need it to, and Chloe Cary most certainly had her personal-best time as she plowed right through the low swells and the shore break and reached the beach in one damn hurry.
Monsters, Movies & Mayhem Page 22