Evil Triumphant

by Michael A. Stackpole

  The far end of the room had been arranged as a media center, but the stereo and monitors remained dark. Sinclair MacNeal stood at the little bar mixing two drinks, but he barely acknowledged me at all. His attention appeared focused on Rajani, the Yidam’s daughter. The expression on her face told me she had been informed of her father’s death and that she grieved for him. The feelings I read from her included more grief, but split between mourning her father and regretting their inability to rediscover each other as father and daughter.

  MacNeal brought her an amber drink in a small tumbler, then sat beside her on the couch. She took refuge beneath his arm. Beyond them, Crowley stood at the window and looked out. Jytte stood near him, then turned toward me as I entered the room. “I am glad to see you here, Coyote.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks as Jytte flashed a brief smile. I caught a feeling of relief from her, then a quick stiffening like a child realizing she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. That faded after a second or two, then Jytte crossed to an overstuffed chair and sat down. Her movements flowed naturally, not stiffly, making me wonder if somehow the Empress of Diamonds was controlling her as she had controlled Natch. Her outfit, an olive jumpsuit, did not look as sexless as other things I had seen her wear, but it had not been augmented with diamond jewelry, so I was left assuming other forces were at work here.

  I bowed my head to Jytte. “I am pleased to be here, Jytte. Rajani, I am very sorry about your father.”

  The black-skinned woman nodded once. “He used to be fascinated with the heroism that some people exhibited during wars. I know he died happily if what Mr. Crowley has described to me is the truth.”

  “It is, Rajani, it is,” Sinclair assured her with a hug.

  “It is,” I echoed him. “Jytte, did Damon tell you why I need to speak with you?”

  The blond woman nodded and crossed her long legs. “He said I have some information that is important. He suggested getting it might be unpleasant.”

  “It probably will be, and interrogation might get downright rough. I want you to know, though, that I respect you and would not ask this of you if there were any other way.”

  Sinclair frowned. “Maybe there is another way, Coyote. Jytte is really the core of this operation right now. After you left, she took charge and has been very good at finding solutions to problems through very innovative techniques. Maybe she can think of something that will save her from the third degree. Lay the problem out and we can see.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. Jytte, we need to know the location at which Pygmalion held you before your escape. You’ll have to lead us back there.”

  Her head came up, but her face slackened into the emotionless mask I had always seen before. In my absence, she had risen out of her shell to direct the effort against Pygmalion. In her capacity as our communications coordinator, she often organized actions and had done so for the group when I arrived back in the beginning of the summer. Now, faced with the prospect of having to return to the prison that stripped her of her old body and stuffed her into the new one, her shell began to close around her once again.

  Jytte folded her arms slowly and seemed to sink deeper into the white chair’s plush upholstery. “I remember nothing of the time before Coyote found me.”

  Even as she spoke, I knew she was lying. “Then start there, Jytte. Start at the moment Coyote saved you and go back one second at a time.”

  Stroking his goatee with a gray-gloved hand, Crowley turned from the window. “I can help you, if you wish.”

  Jytte shook her head adamantly, and her bangs slid down to cover the left half of her face. “No. I do not want anyone intruding into my mind.” Hostility rolled off her in waves that carried naked terror in the troughs. I saw Rajani shiver, and when she whimpered, Jytte’s emotional output dropped. “Forgive me, Rajani.”

  I walked over to Jytte and dropped to my haunches in front of her. “No one wants to intrude in your mind, Jytte. We know, or we think, Pygmalion has a base on Earth in this area. The fact that you were found nearby, that he dumps his failed experiments in Phoenix and the fact that he took Mickey from Flagstaff all point to it.”

  “Why don’t you get the information you want from Mickey?”

  I sensed in her question a desperation to deflect attention from herself, but I also took it as a sign that her defenses were beginning to crack. “We cannot because we do not know that he was ever at that base.”

  Crowley nodded grimly. “In addition, Mickey is only a child. His grasp of geography, distances and other details would be impossible to decipher into useful material.”

  “What if I was taken when I was Mickey’s age?”

  “It wouldn’t matter. You escaped as an adult.” Crowley seated himself on the arm of the couch near Sinclair. “There are things that you know which are valuable. You have nothing to fear.”

  “Yes she does.” Rajani set her tumbler down on the coffee table. “She has a lot to fear.”

  I looked at Rajani and frowned. “What can be more frightening than a Dark Lord being poised to take over the planet?”

  “Learning who and what you really are.” The Yidam’s daughter shook her head. “From what I have been told, Coyote, you should understand this better than anyone else. Imagine awakening one day with no knowledge of who or what you are. You don’t know anything about yourself, but when you come to, you escape out of a nightmare existence. What you come to realize is that you do not recognize the face in the mirror, the body you wash in the shower or the voice you hear when you speak. You are trapped in a prison created by someone else, and the worst of it is that any number of other people let you know they would willingly trade places with you.”

  “I do understand that, Rajani. I did wake up in a nightmare with no knowledge of who or what I was. I discovered things about myself, and I learned to live with who and what I am. I didn’t run away from my past.”

  Jytte’s soft whisper silenced me instantly. “That is because you knew from the start that your skills and abilities gave you value. I had no such reassurances. You built on a foundation of strength. I have no such foundation.”

  “How can you say that if you have not tried to find it?”

  “I tried, but there was nothing to find.” Her hands gripped the arms of the chair in which she sat. “From the beginning, I learned things about me that frightened me. When Coyote found me, he had to clothe and feed me because I was unable to do that for myself. I was helpless.

  Coyote said it was because I was not used to my new body, but I knew he was lying to keep my spirits up. I could do nothing because I was nothing.”

  Sinclair raised an eyebrow. “I’ve seen you work a computer unlike anyone else, and I’ve seen the best. You’re better. Computer skills like that are more than just a gift — you had training and were very, very good. You weren’t nothing.”

  “No?” Jytte looked over at him, her voice filling out with the challenge in it. “At first I clung to my computer skills in the vain hope that it would help me puzzle out my true identity. I assumed someone of my skills would have been useful and, therefore, would have been noticed when she disappeared. Using my skills, I combed all the records — all the records — looking for anyone who even came close to matching my description. I came up empty — no computer geniuses had suddenly gone missing without an explanation published later.”

  The occultist’s green eyes narrowed. “Poorly defined search parameters for your hunt.”

  “Exactly. I started from another end and tried to decide how long someone would have to have worked with computers to gain my level of expertise. Even allowing for some inborn talent, I worked it out that I had been in computers for at least 20 years. The changes Pygmalion put me through made determining my age difficult, but I worked with an age of 30, plus or minus five years. That meant...”

  I nodded. It meant a lot of things, but primarily it meant she had been exposed to computers at a relatively young age. While it was true that most c
hildren did get to work with some computer equipment during their schooling, the only ones who got strong training were the children of privilege. There again, though, a close association with computers would have to be tempered by all the other things a child from a rich family would have available to him.

  Crowley filled the silence. “It meant you were a chip-child. Maybe.”

  Jytte nodded in resignation. “It meant I was born with congenital defects caused by bad genes or because one or both of my parents used chemicals without regard to the possible side-effects. It meant my parents or grandparents were of sufficient moral standing that an abortion was not seen as an option and of sufficient means that they could afford to make me a sacker.”

  The term sacker struck a resonant chord in me. The term originally came from the acronym for Specially Augmented Child, which meant the child had been provided with a whole host of computer-operated vehicles and appliances designed to promote independence. Through use of a computer driven by eye-blink commands or a simple touch on a simpler keyboard, a challenged child could make the machines do the things he could not do for himself. The derisive term sacker came from the way some children who were born with severe handicaps would be suspended inside one of their com-outer-controlled vehicles in a nylon hammocklike sack.

  “You don’t know that.” I shook my head. “You are supposing an existence that may not have been true.”

  “But the evidence is there, Coyote.” Jytte stared up at me like a hunted and trapped animal. “Mickey was a severely deformed child who Pygmalion made beautiful. There are scattered reports of similarly deformed children being whisked away — enough to suggest a consistent modus operandi for Pygmalion. He healed himself and now, it appears, heals others in his own peculiar way.”

  Crowley cleared his throat. “Even with this speculation about your possible origin, you found no report of anyone like the person you feared you might have been disappearing, did you?”

  “No.”

  Rajani shivered. “Which makes you think that you were seen as nothing more as a burden upon your family — a burden they willingly and happily had lifted from them when you were taken away.”

  Jytte nodded wordlessly.

  “You’re making one big mistake, Jytte,” I said softly. “A lack of evidence proves nothing. Yes, it could be that you were a chip-child born to a rich family here in Phoenix or up in Flagstaff. And, it could be that when you vanished they raised no alarm about it. But the lack of evidence more strongly supports the possibility that you are wrong, that you were not a chip-child, because a nonexistent chip-child would leave just as much evidence as the child hidden away by a callous conspiracy.”

  “But if I go back, if I try to remember, I might find the evidence I need to confirm my worst fears.”

  “What difference does that make?” I stood and started pacing. “Five months ago, I was an assassin in the employ of Fiddleback. My job, my avocation, was going places and killing people on command. Yet when Coyote stripped my memory from me, I became what you see now. That is the key.”

  Turning, I pointed a finger straight at her. “What you were does not matter. What you have become is what is important. It does not matter if you were missed or not when Pygmalion took you. We need you now. We value you now, both for the information you have and because of who you made yourself into. You are a responsible and talented individual, and nothing that you could possibly learn about yourself would change that.”

  Jytte gave me a quizzical grin that I did not understand until she explained. “I saw your lips moving, but I heard the other Coyote’s words coming out of your mouth. You are right. I am willing try to try to recover the information you want.” She shifted in her chair and tucked her hair behind her left ear. “Rajani, I may need your help, if you are willing.”

  The alien woman nodded her head. “I am honored by your trust. Yes, anything you need.”

  Jytte eased herself forward on the seat, then stood. “I think I can accomplish this better in my own rooms. I will be more comfortable there, and I have access to the types of graphic databases that I need to correlate things I remember with items in the real world.”

  I nodded. “If you need anything, let me know.”

  She reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit and handed me a folded slip of paper. “Perhaps you can figure this out while we determine where Pygmalion lairs when he’s on Earth.”

  “What is it?”

  “A list.” Jytte smiled wanly as she and Rajani headed toward the suite’s front door. “A list of files that Vetha has been accessing in our computer system — files that are not connected to what we are doing.”

  I unfolded the paper as the door closed behind the two women. The file names had been typed in a double row and could have been as simple as a list of people to be invited to a party:

  Judas Iscariot Benedict Arnold

  Brutus Adolf Hitler

  Joe Valachi Kim Philby

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Aaron Burr

  Vidkun Quisling Alexander Haig Tycho Caine (DeepThroat)

  I refolded it and tucked it into my pocket. Sinclair shot me a puzzled look. “What is it?”

  “As Jytte said, it’s a list. It reads like ‘traitors-r-us’ and has my name tacked on to the end of it.” I folded my arms across my chest. “I don’t like it.”

  “What does it mean?” Sin asked.

  “It means I’m going to have to talk with Vetha.” I felt the world closing in on me. “it means I have to find out if she’s gathering information to figure me out, or if she’s trying to send me a message.”

  Chapter 22

  Vetha arrived in the Lorica Citadel a little over four hours after Jytte gave me the list of files, Crowley and Sinclair left to get sleep, but I used the time I had to call each of the files up on the computer in my suite and simply confirm what I knew from looking at the names. Each and every one of the individuals on the list had betrayed an ally or master during the course of his or her career.

  Finding myself included on the list did not surprise me at all when I knew Vetha had compiled it. I knew that Fiddleback viewed me as a traitor, but the feelings I had gotten from Vetha had never been strong nor particularly malevolent. In fact, the nastiest thing she had done to me was to include me on this list.

  Through the computer system, I sent her a message saying I wanted to speak with her. Within 15 minutes, she arrived via the private elevator from the executive visitor suites Lorica maintained for visiting officers from other companies. She looked exactly as I expected from when I last saw her, though the chitin on one arm segment did seem creased. As Crowley had mentioned, she had been hurt; I assumed that was a scar.

  The one thing that did surprise me about her arrival was the fact that she carried a board game with her. She set it down on the coffee table in the sitting room, then bowed her head to me. “It is good to see you well, Coyote. Your recovery has pleased our master.”

  “Your master, not mine.”

  Vetha said nothing as she seated herself on the floor. As if she were the hostess, she pointed me to the couch opposite her. Sitting down, I sat toward the edge of the couch. Vetha ignored me and proceeded to open the Scrabble box. She carefully laid the board out, then turned all of the lettered tiles face up. Holding one fingerlike appendage up before her mandibles, she cautioned me to silence, then plucked letters from the box and laid them out on the board.

  The sentence she laid out said: FBACK HAS NO TOLERANCE FOR GAMES

  I blinked.

  “Your move, Coyote.” Vetha looked up at me, her eight eyes filled with dark expectation. “You have seen the ruins of the camp?”

  I nodded. “I have. Did the two Plutonians you took back to their dimension survive?”

  “They did.” Vetha’s forelimbs moved quickly, rearranging and adding letters to those on the board. FB CAN MONITOR OUR CONVERSATION BUT THIS GAME IS BENEATH HIM

  “The chances of salvaging anything from there are nonexistent.” I
laid a message out as I spoke. YOU CAN SPELL WITHOUT HIM KNOWING

  “I concur.” TRANSLATOR FB NO GOOD WITH LANGUAGE “I believe that puts you 50 points down.”

  “The game is not over yet. Pygmalion has hardened his proto-dimension, but we have an angle we’re working on to crack it open.” I quickly put down a new message. FILE NAMES MSG FOR ME

  SI TRAITORS

  “That’s another 20 points for you. Good use of Spanish.” AM I A TRAITOR

  FB EYES YES NO TRUST “And 37 for you.”

  I KNOW HE DOES NOT TRUST ME I felt excitement rising in me as I fished for letters in the pile on the table. While I had not imagined the synthesis of the Myrangeikki race was voluntary, Vetha’s antipathy toward Fiddleback surprised me. I would have thought he would not have used her as an envoy if the chance of betrayal could present itself. Then again, I reminded myself, Fiddleback’s incredible arrogance had already failed him twice.

  U NO TRUST FB Vetha swept away the word and substituted another after I nodded in comprehension. U NO TRUST ME

  I removed some of her letters and smiled as I substituted others. I TRUST U

  NO DO NOT TRUST FB OR ME She looked up and I read the urgent pleading in her eyes. PROMISE

  DONE WHY U TELL ME THIS

  BEING ME IS SWEET DO NOT WANT U PART OF FB

  I hesitated. “That’s game, I guess. Best two of three?”

  “Yes.”

  Although I only had recently cobbled together my current identity, the idea of subsuming it within another individual did not sound inviting. To become part of Fiddleback, to become one of the creatures on whose misery he fed, was not something I desired for myself or anyone else. I’d sooner commit suicide than have that happen.

  Vetha went first. FB WILL BETRAY YOU

  HOW “Double-word score there.”