Symbiography

by William Hjortsberg

  Sondak attempted to conceal his elation with a show of indifference. “Well ...I hadn’t thought. It’s hard to set a price …”

  “Nonsense! If I were dealt four aces, I’d play the hand, not sit back and admire my cards.”

  “All right. In that case, make it fifty years and it’s yours.”

  “A little steep, Par, considering you’ll still get your usual percentages; but, I’m willing to gamble. In fact, have your computer get the modes ready for an agreement.”

  “How about a drink to seal the bargain? I have some brandy here of which I’m quite proud.”

  Two glasses were filled; Omar Tarquille lifted his in salute. “To the incredible Buick,” he said. The chime of touching crystal was echoed by the pealing clock. “I must be off, Par, the trajectory to the City takes at least an hour. To speed things up, why don’t you transfer the Nomad’s signal to the machines in my office. That would leave your studio free for dreaming, if the urge should strike you. In fact, it might be a good idea if you put all the modemat you’ve got on the waves to me right away; the sooner I get it, the sooner we can begin serialization.”

  “Don’t you trust me with the mixing?”

  “Par, why trouble yourself with technicalities? Leave the busy work to those without imagination. Take some time off and conjure up a good dream. After all, you’ve got fifty years to spare.”

  That night, Par Sondak was in no mood for the library. Reading was impossible. He couldn’t concentrate. His mind skipped from line to line until he was skimming pages like a child pretending to be literate. The ticking of the clock drove him from the room. He started on a restless walk through the flower beds only to turn back abruptly to the house before he was gone ten minutes. By giving up his modes, the Dreamer could no longer regard the interlude with Buick in the light of scholarship. It ceased being an experiment the moment he transferred the signal to the City. He could still monitor the Nomad in his studio but he hesitated to admit, even to himself, that the boy had become such an obsession. Only when he began considering the projection-booth as an alternative (holograms, the last refuge of the lonely) did he quit cursing Omar Tarquille for leaving him without an excuse and hurry to his studio.

  This time, he made sure to record a message with the computer stating that he was on a two-month dream-holiday and would be unavailable for conferences. The intravenous feeding schedule was programmed and instructions were left with the clinic for his daily inoculations. A man with fifty years’ credit could afford a little self-indulgence. In a few months, he would have to share Buick with a host of paying customers; but, for the time being, the public was uninvited. Par Sondak adjusted elastic straps and electrodes, slipping the crown of probe-receptors tightly onto his bald head before he climbed into the padded studio.

  Buick leaned against a window-ledge and stared into the night through wrought iron scrollery that encircled the stars in its tendrils. On the parapet below, a silhouette stood guard by the shadowed disk of a great gong, ready to take up the alarm at the first sound of the watchtower bells. Buick drew the folds of his robe tighter about his chest, shivering in the chill air. He knew that in a very real sense these rooms were a prison; the guard outside was his jailer. In spite of the victory feasts and elegant words of praise, Buick no longer trusted the Grand Dragon. The charm and flattery did little to conceal the manipulations of court politics. His power strengthened Kodak’s position and, for the moment, he was esteemed and honored. But the very nature of his strength made him a potential threat and Buick had heard enough of Brotherhood intrigue to know the fate of those who stood in the way of the Grand Dragon’s ambition.

  He must never relax his caution. He slept alone; the light-that-never-dies always ready in his hand. He bolted the heavy door to his rooms at night and was pleased with the thought that the same bars which kept him in also served to keep potential assassins safely out. Tomorrow, the servants who brought his meals would sample the food before he touched it. Kodak had his loyal tasters; why shouldn’t the Firechief be accorded a similar honor? Before the morning was out, the entire Brotherhood would hear the story. What better way to serve the Grand Dragon notice that he was prepared for treachery?

  The man lying on the ledge under the taut spread of camouflage netting paid no attention to the sunrise. He was not the sort to be distracted by natural beauty. His mind never strayed from the job at hand. That was the secret of his success. He wore a skin-tight, one-piece survival suit, the kind used in space, and by aquanauts, thousands of feet below the ocean surface. His lithe, muscular build suggested a man of action. In the center of his forehead swelled the slight subcutaneous bulge of an implanted mini-probe.

  The man was busy with his equipment. He was a professional and didn’t waste time. He adjusted the image on the portable viewscreen. It showed an empty stretch of road, three kilometers distant. No sign of his client yet. A turret-lens mounted in his orbiting rocketsled kept watch automatically. He checked the road below again through his magnascope. The angle was perfect, thirty-eight degrees. The range was seven-hundred meters. One of the minidisplays on his console showed a six kph increase in wind velocity, coupled with a twelve degree directional change from S-SW toward due South. The man checked these figures with his calculator and a new trajectory was plotted. The calibrated knobs on the telescopic sights were adjusted accordingly. At that moment, the viewscreen showed a lone rider approaching at a fast trot.

  The man settled his shoulder comfortably behind the tripod mounted weapon and rested his cheek against the wooden stock, squinting through the 10x scope, but not yet touching the foregrip or the trigger. The strangest thing about this assignment was the weapon: a regular museum-piece. The man believed every assignment was strange in its own way. This was as close as he came to a philosophy. Either it was plastic surgery and play-acting, or he had to do something freakish, like use a knife or even his hands. It didn’t matter. He would use a boomerang if the pay was right.

  The antique ballistic weapon had been issued to him along with his instructions, but he took it in stride like a pro and spent two full days practicing on the desert until, at this range, he could put ten rounds cleanly through the center of a target and cover them all with a playing card. A glance at the viewscreen showed the client at the mouth of the canyon and the man double-checked the wind velocity. He rubbed his hands and waited, watching the bend in the road far below.

  A rider came into sight. The cross-hairs in the scope centered on the red numbers on his shirt: 66. It was the client. The man inhaled, holding his breath as his finger bent around the trigger. A distant blunderbuss-boom of musketry brought his head up. (“Ambush?”) His client’s horse reared and went down, smoke rising like puffs of steam from the bushes on either side of the road. A viewscreen close-up showed the client thrown free, huddled against the belly of the dead horse, spots of blood beginning to blossom on the white tunic. Then: a dancing ribbon of flame; the boy had a solar-torch set at full power. The bushes along the roadside caught fire. “What kind of circus is this?” the man wondered.

  “Never mind,” said an unfamiliar voice within his head. “Finish him. “

  “What about the other ones?” the man was thinking.

  “Forget them, just finish the job.”

  The man did as he was told.

  There was a moment, sprawled in the dust, hurt and confused, when Par Sondak almost forced himself awake enough to push the disconnect sensor on the studio wall. Buick’s instincts took over; surprise and fear cleared his mind of shock, and he crawled for the cover of the horse, his painful wounds only tinder for his incendiary hatred. Sondak shared the boy’s furious energy and he postponed awakening like a man delaying an orgasm, wanting to taste just a little bit more of the thrill.

  How satisfying to spray the underbrush with fire. The agonized screams of his enemies brought on a sensation almost like joy. Buick never heard the distant echoing shot that sent clouds of birds wheeling into flight from the sides of th
e canyon. A 250-grain, hollow-point bullet caught him under his upraised arm with enough force to flip him over backwards. Sondak felt the blow, saw a final rushing moment of blue sky; but when the body hit the ground, mouth and nostrils spewing a bright froth of lung-blood, the recording modal on the Dream Syndicate machines went blank and the Dreamer lay open-mouthed in his studio, his goggling eyes glassy with death.

  The burial platform of Buick the Firechief was a banner-decked wagonwheel set on a mast above the uppermost ramparts of the fortress. And when the vultures finished, the bones were brought down and ceremoniously interred by the Holy Brotherhood beneath the pavingstones of the Klaven Chamber. The Grand Dragon was bed-ridden with arthritis and did not attend these rites. Neither did five badly burned guardsmen, secretly hospitalized in an empty granary. The unrecognizably charred corpses of three renegade assassins hung from the crossbeam of the village gate.

  Upended cinders, scorned even as carrion, the mortal remains of this doleful trio endured longer than the Grand Dragon or his fortress: a fire started mysteriously, deep within the inner chambers of the central keep, and spread with demonic ferocity, igniting the powder-magazines even as the first alarm gongs were sounding. For months afterwards, mothers pointed the three burned bodies out to their children as clear evidence of prophecy, a sign of unspeakable evil harbored within the massive smoke-blackened walls.

  The picture-wall in Omar Tarquille’s office throbbed with the programmed chaotics of Lazalo Kingsolving’s Sidereal Motion Series: Apparition 4. On a pedestal in the center of the room stood one of the prizes of the Syndicate collection: Brancusi’s Bird in Space. It was a large office in a world where status could be measured in square meters: the extent of one’s wall-to-wall privacy. The view through the bubble-window opposite the entrance showed sergeant majors and queen angelfish gliding through a spiky forest of elkhorn coral. In the subsurface City, most of the population lived and worked at depths where, if they were fortunate enough to have an outer room, the only view was a hundred meters of dismal artificially lighted murk. His sunlit vista of the coral reef and the fact that he worked at home were other indications of Omar Tarquille’s considerable power. The Security Agent on the dream-table had been impressed. Tarquille guessed it was his first assignment upstairs.

  A tiny, tuning-fork hum woke the Agent. “Nomads?” he muttered. “Where’d you ever come up with an idea like that? You stand to make big points on this one, Mr. Tarquille.”

  The Executive dismissed the notion of personal gain with a careless wiggle of his fingers. “Hardly matters at the moment, I think. When I saw the report of Par’s death I was astonished by the coincidence that it was precisely the same instant as the shooting of our Nomad. Precisely. That’s why I got in touch with your Agency. “

  “And you say Mr. Sondak would sometimes monitor this transmission?”

  “Frequently, I’m afraid. His own work wasn’t going too well recently.”

  “I know, I had to sleep through all that unfinished stuff of his: pretty sad. We had it marked down as suicide; you knew his credit-rating was shot to hell, of course. We figured he’d worked out some tricky way of using the studio to have it look like a natural death. But, your theory makes just as much sense, Mr. Tarquille.”

  “That’s very gratifying to hear, especially if it clears up any clouds which have gathered around my friend’s name. Par Sondak was a great artist and should be remembered as such.”

  “I understand the Committee is having his library moved intact to the Public Reading Room as a memorial.”

  “Yes, except the Velazquez and the Turner watercolors go to the Committee Board Room.” Omar Tarquille had looked into the angles involved, but the regulations were clear: all of a dead man’s remaining credit and assets revert to the common trust. Committee members always plucked the choicest plums in the name of civic improvement. “I don’t know what the plans for the house are,” he said, “but it will be a long time before anyone has enough credit for a place like that again.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Tarquille,” the Security Agent said with a smile like a piece of bread buttered on both sides. “I expect you’ll be moving in yourself after you release these Nomad modes.”

  Again, the shrug of wiggled fingers. “Not a chance. You won’t catch me out in that wilderness, I’m too fond of people.”

  “Anyone with eyes can see that you are, Mr. Tarquille.” The Agent’s amiable chuckle resembled the eager panting of a poodle playing fetch. “You like people and people like you, and that’s a plain fact if there ever was one.”

  The Executive’s answering smile was a masterpiece of facial engineering. He pressed a sensor on the control panel and a pretty Syndicate hostess appeared to show the Security Agent to the door.

  END

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © by 1973 by William Hjortsberg

  cover design by Michel Vrana

  978-1-4532-4661-0

  This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media

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