by Matt Ruff
Penzias was first into the hangar, carrying a long metal case that had been painted in a camouflage motif. He paused to examine the seventy-meter profile of the sub-killer; the Mitterrand Sierra’s deck guns had been removed to avoid alarming the Coast Guard, but its lines were still undeniably those of a combat vessel, merciless, swift, and lethal. “It’ll do,” Penzias declared, as the others entered the hangar behind him. With the captain taking the lead, they walked to the gangplank and boarded the ship.
Barely had they gained the deck when a cry sounded overhead. “Shit!” Najime said, flicking gull dung from her shoulder. Tagore laughed. A White Negro approached with mop and bucket to clean up the mess.
Troubadour Penzias tilted his head back and pivoted to track the gull’s flight. Stepping away from the head of the gangplank, he knelt and set the camouflage case on the deck. He opened it. Inside, a fifty-five-year-old hunting rifle lay in a cradle of contoured velvet.
Captain Baker, whose impression of Penzias had not changed since their meeting at the Scurvy Puffin, was immediately on the alert: “What’s that for?”
“Looks like an antique,” observed munitions wrangler Sutter.
“It’s a relic,” Penzias replied. “1968 Remington Model 760 slide-action rifle, 30-.06 caliber.”
“Sounds like an antique to me. Why a relic?”
“This particular 760 was originally owned by a Mr. James E. Ray. He only fired it once.”
Sutter still didn’t understand, but Captain Baker did, and didn’t like it. “This is the perk you were arguing with Vanna Domingo about?”
“This is the perk,” Penzias agreed. He lifted the relic from its cradle, licking his dye-bruised lips as he did so. The rolled steel barrel had been modified to accept a special sighting device; a side compartment in the gun case held a Remington Spot-On Electric Targetfinder, which Penzias affixed to the rifle. “Ruins the historical authenticity,” Penzias said of the ’Finder, “but what the fuck, I’m visually challenged.”
Captain Baker turned abruptly to Sutter. “You and the others go get busy with your chores,” he ordered. “The lemurs should be in a climate-controlled habitat below aft; check on them first, then get all the ship’s systems up and running as quickly as possible. I want to be underway by noon at the latest.”
“Aye, Captain.” As soon as the munitions man and the rest of the crew were out of earshot, the captain nudged Penzias’s gun case with his foot, not gently, and said: “Is this the reason you volunteered to help hunt Dufresne?”
Penzias, absorbed in calibrating the Targetfinder, didn’t look up. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Dufresne’s a black man. I take it that you have a problem with blacks.”
“I don’t have a problem with blacks,” said Penzias. “I have a solution for blacks.”
Captain Baker bent down and clamped his fist around Penzias’s VISION Rig, not tugging but gripping firm. Penzias went rigid instantly. “Don’t.”
“Let me explain my problems,” Captain Baker said. “I have a problem with lack of respect for authority, whether it’s an eco-terrorist in a submarine or a subordinate who doesn’t look at me when I’m talking to him. I also have a problem with putting a borderline psychotic in charge of fire control on my ship. You push it and my solution is going to be to rip this damn thing right out of your skull.”
He tightened his grip. Penzias hissed through clenched crimson teeth: “Shiva’s Cinder!”
“What?”
“Shiva’s Cinder! Let go of me, goddamnit!”
The captain let him go. Penzias dropped Mr. Ray’s rifle and raised both hands to the VISION Rig. His head swiveled around and the lenses of the Rig focused on a point just above Captain Baker’s clavicle. Perfect spot for an entry wound.
“Look in my eyes, Penzias,” Captain Baker said. “Talk to me.”
The Rig angled up another two inches. “Where were you during the War, Captain? Safe in the Gulf of Guinea, away from the shooting?”
“Strait of Hormuz. My ship was with the Saratoga battle group, keeping a stopper on the Iranian Navy. You were in Africa?”
“Resource liberation unit in the Niger Delta. Meat for the Cinder.”
“Shiva’s Cinder was a blinding weapon?”
“Indian,” said Penzias. “Some Hindu scientist designed it, adapted it from an old Russian prototype, but the North African Muslims bought it. We were warned. The Cinder was an automated laser system. It scanned a fixed area, tracked a low-power beam back and forth, up and down, looking for reflective surfaces: eyeglass lenses, binocular optics, telescopic sights. When it found one, or two right next to each other, it upped the wattage on the beam for a few seconds. Get the picture?”
“The North Africans used this on our troops?”
“They didn’t dare. Oh, the religious leaders thought it was a great idea, smite the enemy, but the field commanders knew better. War is war, but blinding platoons wholesale . . . that’s inhumane. It’s begging for an inhumane response. Since we’d dropped the neutron bomb on Lagos they knew we were already more pissed off than they could handle. They had the Cinder, but they never would have turned it on.”
Captain Baker regarded the VISION Rig, still unable to conceal his revulsion for the prosthesis. “Somebody did.”
Penzias showed his teeth again. “That’s right, Captain, somebody did. I spent a long time in the dark thinking about that. Months in the dark, wondering. Who turned on the Cinder, Troubadour? Not the North Africans. After Lagos those fuckers couldn’t get back across the Sahara fast enough. They bugged out so quick they left most of their gear behind. We should have worried about that more. All those weapons lying around . . . but who was there to use them once the Arabs left? Plague killed all the real Nigerians.
“Except there were ghosts. A ghost tribe, a tribe with black skin and green eyes. Green eyes. The reports started coming in the same week we landed: unexplained sabotage, disappearances . . . Port Harcourt nearly burned down when the oil refinery caught fire, and from Zaire we heard the Afrikaners had a mech infantry battalion cut to ribbons in the jungle. Survivors swore it was blacks, but they couldn’t catch even one.”
“And you think it was these ghosts who blinded you?”
“I know it,” said Penzias. “They had it in worst for the Afrikaners, but Americans were second on their list. So when the green eyes found that abandoned Arab camp, with Shiva’s Cinder just sitting there, they must have decided to play a prank.
“My squad was doing a sweep of the forest around one of the oil fields. We were being careful but not careful enough, because we knew the North Africans had all cut and run. None of us was stupid enough to believe in ghost stories. I had point. I spotted the abandoned camp up ahead and took out my field glasses for a look. Shiva’s Cinder fused my corneas to the eyepieces. When the rest of the squad heard me screaming they got out their field glasses to see what was happening . . .
“It got six of us, out of seven. There was one F.N.G. named Fletcher who could never remember to take off his lens caps, which is maybe what saved him. But Fletcher panicked. Only guy with a working pair of eyes left, and he panicked. Tripped a Claymore mine in the brush, killed everybody but me.” The VISION Rig swiveled back to the gun case; Penzias picked up Mr. Ray’s rifle. “So is that good enough to get a spot on the crew, Captain? I know you lost a whole boat to Dufresne, and I can’t match that loss . . .”
“Dufresne isn’t an African, Penzias, He’s American.”
“He has green eyes. They all do. He can see.”
“If you want revenge, why not go back to Nigeria?”
“No. No.” Penzias took bullets from the gun case and began to load the rifle. “Africa’s too haunted. Eight hundred million ghosts, I can’t just face them cold. Dufresne, first; Dufresne’s only one, alone. Then maybe hunting in the Rockies next spring.” Shells clicked one after the other into the Remington’s shot box. “Tolerance has to be built up slowly.”
“I wa
s wrong about you, Penzias,” Captain Baker said. “You’re not a borderline psychotic at all. You’re committable.”
“Yes,” Penzias agreed, without sarcasm.
“And you still expect to be taken on this mission?”
“Yes.” He switched on the Electric Targetfinder. It transmitted a signal directly to the VISION Rig, in effect giving Penzias a third Electric Eye: he could now see through the Rig and through the rifle sight simultaneously, even if they were aimed in different directions. “It’s simple, Captain,” he said. “You need me on fire control to blow Dufresne out of the water. I need you to pilot the ship out to where Dufresne’s going to be. Each of us is a necessary evil to the other, and motives don’t matter.”
Still in a crouch, with the lenses of the VISION Rig focused once more on Captain Baker’s throat, Penzias pointed Mr. Ray’s rifle straight up into the air and pulled the trigger. A gull fell headless to the deck; a White Negro hurried over with mop and bucket. Penzias smiled vermilion and lowered the rifle.
“Don’t worry about my mental health, Captain,” he said. “Just help me close Dufresne’s eyes and we’ll get along fine.” He shut the gun case with a bang. “Now what do you say we take a look at the bridge?”
Drastic Measures
OK, so you couldn’t kill a shark by throwing a hair dryer in the water. In the twenty-first century, all plug-in appliances came equipped with liquid-sensitive power interrupters to prevent accidental electrocution, but how was Frankie Lonzo supposed to know that? People still fried themselves in the bathtub all the time in movies.
After ruining three extension cords—and nearly getting brained by a space heater that Meisterbrau batted back out of the pool with its tail—Frankie reluctantly admitted it wasn’t going to happen this way. He switched to chemical warfare, basting a block of Spam with rat poison and pitching it into the deep end. Meisterbrau ate the Spam, a pound of oven cleaner, and a broken cuckoo clock with lead weights and a radium-painted dial, all without any discernible ill effects.
“Why not just shoot it, Frankie?” Salvatore asked him, as he poured powdered lye into a row of hollowed-out Twinkies.
“You mean besides the fact that Echo would have my ass? Where do I usually keep my .38, Sal?”
“In your car . . . oh. Oh yeah.”
“’Oh yeah,’” Frankie mimicked.
The poisoned Twinkies didn’t work either.
Frankie slept on the problem; early Wednesday morning he had a nightmare in which Meisterbrau sprouted wings and attacked him in the breakdown lane of the Long Island Expressway. As Frankie fought to roll up his car windows, the entire vehicle turned into a box of Scout cookies. He woke up just as Meisterbrau was about to bite him in half at the waist. “That does it,” Frankie said, falling out of bed.
At the diner where he ate breakfast, he ordered extra coffee to make himself nervy. When he could no longer sit still or hold his hands steady he hailed a cab. “What’re you up to today, chief?” the cabbie asked. “Drastic measures,” Frankie replied.
The Aquatic Holding Tank Environmental Controls were housed in a locked panel box at poolside. A touch screen offered a variety of options; Frankie chose CHANGE WATER LEVEL. A pair of animated pictograms appeared on the screen: one, presently highlighted, showed a smiling guppy swimming in an aquarium that had been filled nearly to the rim; the other showed a frowning guppy floundering at the bottom of an aquarium that was almost empty. Frankie placed his thumb on the frowning guppy.
“I don’t know what happened, Echo,” he said aloud. “Software glitch, maybe. And Salvatore and me didn’t notice it in time because, well . . .”
Behind Frankie’s back, a fin broke the surface of the pool, then a snout. The cold doll’s eyes of the Carcharodon carcharias beheld the Italian fish-minder as he worked his mischief at the touch screen. The shark’s snout rose higher, exposing the threshing machine of its jaws; green and black mucus hung in streamers from its fangs. And then a claw reached out of the water, a mottled-gray, four-fingered appendage with nails like chipped slate. It stroked the lip of the pool deck like an off-season beachgoer testing the temperature of the surf. Not quite right, apparently: after a moment the claw withdrew. But Meisterbrau’s eyes did not submerge so quickly.
SENSORS INDICATE DRAINAGE IMPEDED BY FOREIGN MATTER, the touch screen informed Frankie. DO YOU WISH TO CLEAR THE DRAINS BEFORE PROCEEDING? This would involve physically entering the pool to empty out the drain traps. Frankie touched NO.
OUTFLOW PIPES OPENED, the touch screen said. ESTIMATED TIME TO EMPTY HOLDING TANK AT REDUCED RATE OF DRAINAGE: 11 HRS. 10 MINS.
“Molasses,” said Frankie. “What have you got jammed in the drains, you son of a bitch?” Not that it mattered. Frankie had no objections to a slow and lingering death for Meisterbrau, so long as Echo Papandreou didn’t come by for a surprise inspection of the Annex. Probably she wouldn’t; Frankie had a sudden premonition that this plan was going to work.
“Gotcha, you fish.” He locked up the touch screen and faced the pool; the water’s surface was smooth and as black as a smokestack’s gut. “Eleven hours, Meisterbrat. Time to say bye-bye.”
Bouncing a little on the balls of his feet, Frankie went inside to the TV room, dimmed the window, and sat down to watch the Wednesday Morning Movie with Salvatore. Sal was in a good mood too; he’d just gotten a new watch for his birthday, a Timex Philharmonic with sixty-four voices.
14
Club 33 is Disneyland’s secret club, the only place in the park where alcoholic beverages are served. It is so secret that many Disneyland employees don’t know it’s there, at 33 Rue Royale in New Orleans Square, near the Pirates of the Caribbean and just to the right of the Blue Bayou restaurant. It is identified only by the number “33” on an ornate oval plaque near the door. . . . The story is that Disney intended to live here and entertain dignitaries, so an apartment was built on the third floor. But Disney died before it was completed, and it was made into a private club. . . . Club 33 is wired for sound: Tiny microphones are hidden in the chandeliers. My informant asked a waiter about this and was told that Disney had planned to eavesdrop on diners’ conversations. The waiter also pointed out a china closet built to accommodate a hidden camera. . . you could say Disney got a little quirky in his old age. He apparently planned to talk to people through the moosehead in the Trophy Room. It has a hidden speaker.
—William Poundstone, Bigger Secrets
The Mother Huge Gate
A small fleet of unmarked trucks had parked at New Babel’s foot and was being unloaded by a small fleet of Electric Negroes. Under the direction of a white man in a spotless gray suit, the Negroes had formed a bucket-brigade line to transfer a lading of wooden crates—thirty or forty from each truck’s trailer—into an open manhole; brown hands reached up Automatically from underground to accept each crate in turn. None of the myriad construction workers, tourists, and other pedestrians passing to and fro paid any attention to this activity—first, because Negroes were generally beneath notice, and second, because even those few people inclined to curiosity were distracted by the vision of Babel itself.
Even Joan, who placed superskyscrapers high on her list of P.U. human endeavors, could not suppress a feeling of awe at the sight. Like one of those enormous European cathedrals that seem fabricated from a different reality than that of the dwarfen secular buildings surrounding them, Babel defied comparison or grouping with Manhattan’s other tall towers; its relative isolation at the northern end of the island only magnified the sense that here indeed was something unique, something not done or seen before, anywhere. Ziggurat: glass and steel, spiraling upward in boldly measured steps of ebon translucence, the sheerness of its scale difficult to grasp . . . and it was only half finished. To imagine it whole and complete, twice its already impossible size, that was the real mind bender.
“Don’t look so guilty, dear,” Kite counseled, noting the uneasy play of emotions on Joan’s face. “There’s no sin in admiring its beaut
y. You know Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to build one of these in Chicago in the 1950s. The Mile-High Illinois Building. . . . I remember the Baja Diario carried an artist’s rendering on the front page. ‘El Visión Fabuloso del Futuro. ’Gorgeous. Costly, impractical, and terrifying to most other architects of the day, but gorgeous. I’d have paid good money to stand out front of the real thing—or better yet, stand at the top—for just five minutes.”
“Yeah, well, but the thing is, Kite,” Joan replied, “being Harry’s comptroller for nine years, I share at least some of the responsibility for this monster. Indirectly share it, but still . . . when the shadow stretches across the Harlem River and eclipses the South Bronx, when the city has to drill the sewers wider to accommodate Babel’s effluvia, that’s my public opinion skills at work, partly.”
“Well,” said Kite, “if you bought the blame, you might as well enjoy the view.”
Ayn Rand was, as usual, unequivocal in her judgment. “It’s the most magnificent building I’ve ever seen!” she said. “It’s the most brilliant architectural triumph in human history!”
“Wait’ll you see the lobby,” Joan told her.
No sealed fortress, Babel’s broad foundation was girded by accessways of every kind—swinging doors, sliding doors, revolving doors, Electric Iris Portals—but the most obvious entrance was the great Gate marking the southernmost point on the foundation’s circumference. Referred to as the Mother Tongue Gate in early press releases and renamed the Mother Huge Gate by punnish editorialists, the Gate was just that: a pair of one-hundred-and-fifty-three-foot-high doors of gilded steel and black crystal, set back in a tremendous recessed archway. Shallow contoured steps of black marble flowed out from beneath the arch in simulation of a frozen lava stream—an elegant effect, though the unevenness of the contouring did cause a lot of people to trip and fall (the situation was exacerbated in winter, when tons of heated air escaping through the wide open Gate caused snow to melt and refreeze in thick sheets of ice on the outermost steps and the surrounding pavement; architect Lonny Matsushida was said to be working on a clever technological solution to this problem).