“They’ve got all kinds of machinery,” Firescape volunteers. “Trucks and hoes and cats and jeeps and some stuff I’ve never seen before. And these big cranes on tank treads. And they got weapons that’d make your eyes bug out. They gotta have way more fire power than these things.” She bounces her AK on her hip. “According to the rumble, the Potreros took these goons on somewhere along 16th and they shot up the place with lightning bolts. Oh, and they got winnebagoes. Dozens, of ‘em. In working condition.”
“Maybe they’re refugees from somewhere. Gypsies.”
“With heavy machinery, serious firepower, and a fleet of winnebagoes?” my wife asks doubtfully. “They don’t act like refugees. They act like an invasion force or at least like guys on a mission. They knew exactly where they were going, as in bee-line. And this is the chiller-diller: smeagols say they came in over the Bay Bridge.”
This is a chiller-diller, ‘cause the Bay Bridge has been less of a bridge and more of a barrier for a muy long time. This is because in the third year of the reign of Levi Menorah, son of King Jerry Steinmetz, there was a quake that did some damage to all and sundry, but mostly to the Bay Bridge which had fallen into general disrepair. The then king of Treasure Island, who liked to call himself Blackbeard for literary reasons, helped things along a little with a hefty charge of dynamite. I’m not sure whether he wanted to keep T-Islanders from coming into the Gam Saan or if he wanted to keep the Gam Saan from coming out, but two collapsed sections of deck did the job pretty well either way.
The significance of all this is that these alien guys had to have fixed the Bridge before they could come across it, which says stuff about their techno-power I don’t much like. It also means there could be a whole mob of truly angry T-Islanders in their backtrail. We have not had much in the way of contact with the Island for more years than I’ve been around, so I got no idea what to expect from that quarter.
Great. Another Big Unknown.
Firescape watches all of this flicker across my face like a message from our sponsor, then says, “Deadend’s got smeagols posted on the Bridge. Just in case something else decides to come across. There’s a squad of Wharfside knighties up there with.”
“These aliens,” I say, not without some quivering, “what are they like?”
Lou shrugs. “Just guys. Folkth. A few women, I think. Hard t’tell from a far away. But they look like people, pretty much. They’re drethed funny, though — like for skulking.”
He stamps his right foot and yanks at his hair. Dust flies.
Firescape nods.
“You’ve seen them, too?” I ask her.
She nods again. “Me and Deadend saw them coming down the Potrero side of the Slot. I got knighties out skulking STAT and told Deadend to mobilize all smeagols. Then I came looking for you.”
“So Deadend hasn’t talked to His M?”
“He scrammed. Like I said, I told him to get out smeagols and he don’t generally procrastinate on a direct order from a superior officer.”
Here I am, chasing some invisible dude in plum silk, while funny-dressing guys with winnebagoes are taking over the Dolores. And me the last to know. I got it backwards again as usual: I’m scopin' the Peach Pit, when I should’ve been keeping an eye out for the Nails.
Damn. And why, I gotta wonder, didn’t the Dolores say anything? Here their stomping grounds are being overrun and they go all clammy on me.
Then my dream washes back over me and I get this horrible feeling that the Dolores did say something. They told me I had to save the world from Wiwe and now it looks like Wiwe has driven his winnebago right down the Bayshore into the heart of the Gam Saan.
Suddenly I realize I’m confused and scared — a truly dynamite combination. I look at Doug. His boughs are droopy and quivering all at once. He must be as scared as I am. Not a good sign.
“Firescape,” I say, “we gotta head back to the Palace to reassure the Majesties and begin a plan of action. I’ll need you to call in at least half a dozen of your best knighties and a couple of Deadend’s slinkiest smeagols. We got some serious scopin' to do.”
Fifteenth: Aliens, Ghosts, and Unquiet Spirits
The news is grim. According to the best reports of Deadend’s smeagols and other eyewitnesses, the Mission Dolores is now home to bonafide aliens who are not above taking serious pot-shots at the natives with guns that shoot lightning bolts.
“Not so much phasers as photon torpedoes,” says a smeagol who calls himself Berk. “‘Course, not exactly torpedoes either, seeing as how they ain't aqua-nautical, but they’re enough to make a person seriously deadjim, or so’s the rumble. Potreros are fleeing like someone stood up and yelled ‘bath!’ I’m telling you, your merlinship, this is serious shit. It’s a pogrom.”
“A what?” asks Cinderblock, whose studies in history were, I suspect, slim-to-none.
“The end of the world as we know it,” says Berk the Smeagol, and I want to rap him upside the head for saying this stuff in front of our watchful and impressionable Majesties.
Berk thinks everything is a pogrom.
“It’s not a pogrom,” I say. “We don’t know what it is yet. So at the moment, it’s just a visitation by-by — ”
“Aliens,” says Creepy Lou, soberly, “in winnebagoes.”
“Armored winnebagoes,” adds my wife. “And some righteous weaponry. Recon says eaves were falling along 16th. If we have to fight these jakes, our best bet is a joint military action.”
“Joint,” repeats His M. “How joint?”
“I recommend we dispatch envoys, Majesty,” I say, picking up the cue, “to all monarchs, elected or otherwise, in the Gam Saan. Whether our response must be military or diplomatic” — here I pause to glance at General Firescape — “remains to be seen. But even diplomatic measures will be best taken in multilateral harmony.”
“Sounds like a friggin' choir!” snorts Squire. “You don’t stand a chance in a billion of getting cooperation out of those bozos. I say we deploy all our knighties and blast ‘em.”
“Oh, right, fish-head,” says Cinderblock most scathingly. “Our measly AKs and handguns against their Trek-tech. In case you hadn’t noticed, the last of our winnebagoes is home to a family of five over on Geary.”
“Yeah! They run a hot-dog stand out the back window,” adds Creepy Lou with enthusiasm. “Great dogth!”
“They got two dozen winnebagoes, Berkowitz,” Cinderblock continues, ignoring Lou. “Plus the jeeps, also armored, and the trucks and the earth-moving equipment. What’re we supposed to do, shoot out their tires?”
“There will be no shooting,” I say, “unless and until we’re sure they’re hostile aliens. They might just be...tourists. Tourists were once wont to travel by winnebago.”
“Were they also wont to carry ray guns?” asks Squire. “I’m with Berk, Majesty. I say we take them out before they take us out.”
“You’re not listening, Squire,” says my wife. “I’m not sure we can take them out. Especially not if there are more where they came from.”
“What’s the news from Treasure Island?” asks His M, to which Deadend replies, “No news, Majesty. Nada peep. No one’s set foot on that Bridge since the aliens crossed over.”
Hismajesty has a peculiar look on his face, which I recognize and don’t much like. He is thinking.
He says, “So far these alien guys have just moved in on the old Mission, right?”
“Yes, Majesty,” I reply.
“And they haven’t set one little alien foot inside the Embarcadero, right?”
“Yes, Majesty. I mean, no, Majesty, no feet.”
“Then, they’re all part of the SEP field, my merlin. It’s Simply Elvis’s Problem. Let him deal with it.”
Squire and his cronies break out in suck-up laughter, and Hismajesty looks pleased with his dispensing of wisdom and waves his hands as if to zhou us out.
“You’re all dismissed. I expect our smeagol corps to keep an eye on things, but don’t offer provocat
ions. We’ll see if old Elvis can sort this out.”
“And if he can’t?”
This comes from my wife, who is surely thinking that our liege has something like egg foo yung between his royal ears.
“Then Elvis is stew meat. Or maybe Elvis comes running to Ours Truly for help. Either way, Elvis is out of the alcaldé business. Who’s to say our new neighbors won’t be better than the old ones? Now, you’re dismissed. Except for my royal merlin,” he adds and my heart skips three beats or so — not enough to kill me.
“First of all,” Hismajesty says when all and sundry have left, and it’s just him and me and Tree, “why didn’t you foresee this alien inroad?”
Truth is, of course, I did, but didn’t know I did. Truth, in this case, is bu hao.
“Well, Majesty,” I fabricate, “as you yourself so ably noted, the aliens invaded Potrero, not Embarcadero. I do not usually tune myself to Potreran frequencies, nor does the Fabled Tree. I did, as it happens, foresee an influx of some sort, but as it seemed to indicate no injury to our beloved homeland, I said nothing, not wishing to upset my Majesties after such distress in our recent past. The moment I see a clear threat to us and ours, I'll let you know.”
“Good enough. Now, here’s the second thing.” He leans way forward out of his throne and points a regal finger at me. “Get your butt over to the alien encampment and suck up bigtime. Establish diplomatic relations. Initiate trade. They’re here, maybe nothing we can do about that, but we sure as hell can see what’s in it for us. Like I said, we may like these new neighbors better than the old ones. Oh, and while you’re at it, get the skinny on their intent and their force. Any questions?”
“None, your royal sagacity,” I say, and scram.
oOo
We approach the Mission Dolores carefully. Doug is carrying a white flag, which I hope means the same thing to the aliens that it does to us. We appear to be alone, but we are not alone. There are knighties flanking us above, below, and on the ground. The walk to the Mission seems longer than usual. Fear has this weird effect on things — especially time.
Fidgeting, I dig my hands deep into my pockets and run into the Tin Hau note and the thing the old monk gave me. I bring the thing out into the uncertain Potreran daylight and look at it for the first time. It’s made of stone and shaped like one of the little arched niches in the sanctuary of the Mission Dolores. It has a symbol engraved on it, the same symbol that’s on the note in my pocket. On this hunk of smooth stone it doesn’t look at all Chinese, it looks Egyptian. I wish I’d paid more attention in Kaymart’s anthropology class.
Why would an old Chinese monk give me an Egyptian artifact?
Well, that’s a mystery I don’t have time to solve at the moment. I put the thing into my amulet bag and grimace at the sheer audacity of the Tin Hau’s so-called master.
Master Chen, the young monk said, was not a name, but a station. If that’s so, the master’s ego has gone seriously napoleon. Chen, for those who don’t know, means Great and Vast.
It’s weird, too, for the head of a religious order to trick himself out in plum silk. Like the monk said, monks do not wear silk.
Huh. Maybe Master Chen wasn’t a monk. But if that’s so, how’d he come to be the master of a monkish order?
We do not get blasted when we come up to the Mission’s front gate. This is a relief. The alien guards look at us funny and chuckle, but they let us in when I ask to see their leader. They look just like Embarcaderans, but their skin tones are a little more extreme — white and black mostly, with only some in shades of gold and brown. It’s kind of a kick to see alien Hispanics. I wonder if I seem alien to them.
Their clothes look like uniforms, but they’re the drabbest uniforms I’ve ever seen. The guards call another man, a very dark brown man wearing mirrored shades against the swift changes of light, to be our escort. He chuckles at us too, then leads us into the compound.
The Whisperers are still silent, like they been almost since this started. This is scary, ‘cause I been hearing them inside my head for close to ten years now. I hope Doug is having more luck tuning them in than I am. He’s here as sort of an instrument package, like those things tornado chasers dump out in the middle of cornfields. (Not the cornfields here, ni dong. We don’t have tornadoes in Embarcadero, just the occasional earthquake, some wicked winter storms, and the thirty-two known varieties of fog.) Right now, Doug’s every needle is tuned to the metaphysical; he is a Dolores radar.
We are led across the courtyard to one of the winnebagoes. Along the way, I notice much about the alien goings-on. The winnebagoes are parked all about the central courtyard; none are very near the fences or walls even though the aliens have put up a thick, tall chain-link fence where the walls and fence-o-spears are busted.
In the very center of the courtyard is a trailer platform with something on it. I can’t see what the something is, but it’s pretty big. Big as a car, maybe, not as big as the winnebagoes, which, I notice, are armored, like Firescape said, and have satellite dishes on top of them. These are for the purpose of catching rumbles out of the air, according to Hoot and the Wiz. We got some dishes here, but none of them work. The satellites won’t talk to them anymore. I gotta assume these do work and wonder what kind of rumbles they catch and from where.
Aliens hustle all around, going here and there, carrying stuff, and there are piles of building materials lying about. I almost trip over myself when I see that a scaffold is starting to go up around the church and aliens are moving in and out of the broken doors. I see one guy with what looks like a video shooter. He’s videoing the guys who’re working.
What the hell are they doing?
At the winnebago, our escort pokes his head through the open door and says, “Hey, John. There’s a little guy with a tree here to see you.”
I’m surprised all over again that they speak a dialect I grok, though the accent’s a little oddball.
John proves to be a big guy with a red beard and electric blue eyes. He has unnaturally short hair, like most of the guys I seen since I got here, but his has this well-mannered little queue that dangles down his back like a Chinese patriarch’s. I take this as a badge of leadership, at first, then realize that other guys also wear the little queues.
Huh. Maybe it’s just a fashion statement.
I notice all this as he is standing in the door of his winnebago gawping at me and laughing with his buddy. Then the electric eyes are on me full blast and I realize he is addressing me directly.
“Who — ha — w-who the he-hell are you, little guy?” He glances down at his friend, who is leaning against the side of the winnebago, grinning. “Doesn’t he talk?”
“He was talking just fine a mo’ ago.”
“Apologies,” I say. “I’m Taco Del, merlin to Hismajesty, King of the next-door realm of Embarcadero. This is the Fabled Tree of Destiny,” I introduce Doug.
“The-the wh-what?” John is having trouble controlling his mirth. “What are you, some sort of an environmentalist?”
“I’m a merlin. This is the Tree of Destiny. My channel.”
“Your channel. Aw, and I thought he was a house-warming present.”
I’m on guard immediately, but calm myself when I see that the winnebago has no chimney.
“No, he’s the Tree of Destiny, a sort of cell-phone to the Almighty. God is partial to trees.”
The two aliens exchange glances and my escort says, “Local color, I guess.”
“I’m John Makepeace,” says the red-beard. “What do you want?”
Makepeace. I like it. An auspicious name. I relax a little.
“Hismajesty, King of Embarcadero, wishes to extend to you the hand of friendship, and inquires about your intentions towards the Mission in particular and this territory in general. (Okay, so I fib — I’m the only one who gives a rat’s tuckus about his intentions toward the Mission.) He also wishes to know if there are needful things we might provide to you during your sojourn in our land.”
“Needful things?” repeats John. “Such as?”
“Fresh produce and fish. Fresh water — there’s not much of that in Potrero-Taraval. Info. Guides...?”
“We brought our own food and water; yours would probably kill us. We’ve got all the information we need and we already have guides.” He squats in the doorway so we are nearly eye to eye. “Now, as to our intentions: we’re here to save San Francisco. Or at least to salvage what’s left of it.”
His eyes, which have been boring into mine, take a hike around the courtyard.
“Save it?” I repeat, my mind going to the Peach Pit and from there to the Tin Hau and to the Egyptian thing in my amulet bag. “From what?”
“From disintegration and decay. From rot and ruin. From you.” He pokes a big finger at my chest. “We’re going to put San Francisco back on the map, Taco. We’re going to bring it back to life one cultural treasure at a time.”
I’m confused as hell. “But it’s not dead. Well, sure, here seems a little falling down, ‘cause it is. But this is Potrero. It’s not like this all over the Gam Saan. It’s not like this right over there.” I wave north toward Embar. “Lord E Lordy’s alcaldé here. He’s a bit of a barbarian. Hismajesty’s working at improving that, though, through a strict regime of education and better hygiene.” I ignore the fact that they’re laughing at me again, and plow onward. “You picked a bad place to roost, John. You oughta see the Regency Palace, the Farm, the Wiz.”
“Oh, I’ll see all of San Francisco in due time. I intend to assess it very thoroughly. But right now, this is where we set up camp.” He puts this big hand on my shoulder and talks to me like I’m a little kid. “You see, I’m in the renovation business, Taco. Do you know what renovation means?”
I nod, but he defines it anyway. “It means to make new. That’s what I’m going to do to San Francisco. I’m going to take old run-down places like this and make them new. Then I’m going to make access to them easy and safe, and open them up so that people can come and see them every day.”
Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny Page 15