by John Shirley
Sullivan chuckled. “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger on that one. Don’t know many who don’t feel that way sometimes.”
Harker nodded, too rapidly. “But there’s still some true believers, Chief. Like Rizzo. Wallace. Ryan, of course. That crackpot, Sander Cohen. Maybe McDonagh. ’Course, we lost some too—like Greavy…” Harker sighed.
“Yeah, shame about Greavy—too confident, strutting around like he owned the place. They nearly got Bill McDonagh too.”
“I dunno, I don’t have a good feeling about it, Chief. I’m grateful you got me this post. But I shoulda stuck around in the States and, I don’t know, gone into something else…”
“Me and you, we’re badges, pal. Too old to change.” He could see Harker was scared, plenty scared. “What is it? I mean—there’s something that’s got you off-balance here. Something in particular. Why’d you call me over here?”
Harker rubbed a thumbnail raspily over his two-days’ growth of beard and reached into the desk drawer. He took out a pistol, stood up, stuck the pistol in his coat pocket, and said, “I’ll show you. Come on.”
They went into the corridor. Karlosky was waiting out there, a pump shotgun in his hands. Sullivan kept the Russian close when the Great Man didn’t need him. Yesterday that pump shotgun had cut a spider slicer nearly in half—and saved Sullivan’s neck.
Karlosky nodded at Harker, who just grunted and brushed past him, stumping down the hall on his short, thick legs, one hand in his coat pocket on that gun.
The head constable led them around a corner, past a black guard who unlocked a hallway door to let them into the cellblock. They strode past a series of insulated, locked cells, all on the left-hand side, where splicers—low enough on EVE to be containable—babbled and begged for their plasmids. A feral-looking woman, her face etched with plasmid lesions, spat at them through a barred cell-door window as they passed.
This place was grimier and crazier than Persephone. The “isolation facility” wasn’t full of splicer crazies, anyhow. Just political eccentrics.
At last Harker stopped near cell 15, where a hulking constable with nervous blue eyes and a leering smile leaned on the hallway’s metal wall, a tommy gun cradled in his arms. “Howdy Chief,” Cavendish said.
“A little over an hour ago,” Harker said, in a low voice, as Sullivan and Karlosky caught up with him at the cell door, “we bring in an unconscious splicer, right? Half-naked, lotta plasmid deformities on his face and all. Well, when we found this cocksucker he had some kind of fish-gutting hook in one hand, all covered with blood. And in the other hand he has a woman’s head. Her head—cut off her body, you get me? Sliced off just under the chin! Slick as a whistle! A brunette. Mighta been a pretty woman. I think maybe I saw this chippie dancing over in that strip joint, in Fort Frolic.” He licked his lips, glanced down the hall toward cell 18. “Well, this splicer, he’s kinda squeezin’ her head to his chest, looked like a kid hugging a baby doll. And he was sawing logs, this guy, snoring! Pat Cavendish there gets him cuffed and tries to wake him up, but the guy’s too sacked out. So Patrick gets some help, brings the son of a bitch up here, puts him in cell seventeen over there. We got the broad’s head in the freezer, in case you want to ID her.”
“Okay,” Sullivan said, shrugging. “Not the only homicidal splicer we’ve had. Pretty crazy, but lots of ’em are. He must’ve run outta EVE, got tired, plasmids needed recharging, took a snooze … so now you got ’im. Ryan’s talking about turning guys like this over to Gil Alexander for his … experiments. We’ll get him to a judge in the morning—”
Cavendish gave out a sniggering sound of contempt. “Boy-o have you got it wrong!”
Sullivan didn’t like Cavendish’s tone. But he didn’t like Cavendish at all. One of the bad eggs. Half Irish, half Suffolk Brit. Grin like a wolf. Liked to beat up prisoners. But a good man in a fight. “He ain’t run out of anything,” Cavendish went on. “Drank himself to sleep, I figure—that’s what it smelled like. Woke up still charged. He was in eighteen, last I looked.”
“What do you mean, last you looked?”
“There’s a new plasmid on the market,” Harker put in, almost whispering, eyes darting to the door of 18. “Only—it’s kind of black market. Fontaine hasn’t released it publicly. It’s supposed to make them extra crazy in record time, for one thing. For another—might be the most dangerous one around, if you think about it. Only, I figure these guys are probably too nuts to use it against the council. They’re all about goin’ with their impulses…”
“Use what?” Karlosky asked, impatiently.
“They can disappear,” Harker said. “And … go somewhere else! This guy, he comes in and out of that cell as he pleases. Pat—what do they call that plasmid?”
“Teleport.”
And at exactly that moment a sucking sound made them all look toward cell 18. Specks of free-floating blackness appeared in the air, sparkles of energy took on the approximate shape of a man—and the sound increased till it ended in a shoomp!—as a man appeared out of nowhere. He was a pale man, barefoot, naked from the waist down, wearing only a filthy, bloodstained work shirt. His hair was patchy brown; the angular face was hard to make out under all the plasmid excrescences. One of the growths had nearly blotted out his left eye. “Hey, you dog humpers is keeping me awake out here!” he snarled, spraying spittle past his snaggly yellow teeth. “I’m trying to finish my nap, for fuck’s sake! Well ain’t you the pips with your pretty badges! I want me one!”
Karlosky, Cavendish, Harker, and Sullivan were all bringing their guns to bear. A tommy gun, a shotgun, and two pistols—pointed at an empty space.
Empty because the splicer had teleported out of it. He still had plenty of EVE in him, and he had vanished—and reappeared behind Karlosky. He pulled Karlosky’s hair, hooting gleefully, and as the Russian spun toward him with the shotgun … the splicer vanished again, twinkling away …
Only to reappear, bringing a nasty smell and posing like a dancer, between Sullivan and the wall, yanking Sullivan’s right ear and cackling, “Hiya Chief!”
Bastard acts like one of them cartoons at the movies, Sullivan thought. He made a grab for the splicer—and felt his fingers pass through air that crackled with departing energy.
He turned to see the splicer grabbing the pistol from Harker with one hand, with the other tearing the constable’s badge off.
Sullivan got his pistol into play and fired at the splicer, squeezing the trigger a split second too late—the bullet passed through the place where the teleporter had been, ricocheting off the steel walls near Harker. The sucking sound came again, and then a flash of light from the cell window of 18.
Harker made a plaintive little eep sound, a noise you’d never expect from him—then he gasped as he slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood. He fell on his face, squirming, groaning. The ricochet from Sullivan’s gun had hit the constable, and hard.
“Dammit, Harker!” Sullivan sputtered. As if it were Harker’s fault. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Just…” Harker gasped again. “Get the fucker…”
Tommy gun raised, Cavendish was stalking toward the window of cell 18. He peered through the small barred window in the studded-metal door … and his head jerked back with the bang of a gunshot from inside.
Sullivan thought at first Cavendish was dead—but then he saw the constable was just missing part of his left ear, much of it shot away. Cavendish crouched down in the corridor, put a hand over his red-streaming ear, hissing with pain. “Fuuuuuck!”
A “tee-hee-HEEEEEE!” came from inside the cell. “Too bad I missed, could’ve improved your ugly fucking face to have a bullet hole through it, dog humper! I gotta recommend that one to Steinman!”
Sullivan cocked his pistol, moving in a half crouch down the row of cells. He ignored the bearded splicer in number 16, who taunted, “You see, if you’d given us our ADAM, we’d all be happy harpies, but now, right now, you’ve made us into saddy soddies, and sadness hur
ts, it hurts, going to hurt and hurt!”
It’s me that’s done the hurting so far, today, Sullivan thought glumly. He’d accidentally shot Harker. This teleport thing had him shaken. He saw now why Harker’d been so unnerved.
He approached the cell door obliquely, pistol raised, trying to peer in without making himself a target. There, the seminude splicer was relaxing on his back in a cot against the farther wall of the padded room. His naked genitals, spattered with dried blood, all too clearly on display. He had his left arm behind his head, his right arm up, and he was spinning the pistol on his index finger and singing a Rapture advertising jingle to himself, “Ohhh, the beer may be green, but it’s mighty keen; it satisfies a man, makes him feel grand; it’s Ryan’s own, Ryan’s own, Ryan’s … own … beer!”
On “beer!” the splicer stopped spinning the gun and fired it toward the barred window of the cell. The bullet struck a bar and ricocheted down the corridor. Sullivan ducked, though the bullet was already on its way by then.
He raised slowly up, only to hear that sucking sound and Cavendish yelling, “Down, Chief!”
He flattened belly-down on the floor—and saw, out of the corner of his eye, the splicer materializing over him to his right, the pistol pointed down to shoot him in the head.
A rat-a-tat echoed harshly in the corridor, along with the big thump of a shotgun—and the splicer was stumbling backward, stitched across the middle with blood-spouting bullet holes, right arm torn half off from a shotgun blast. Cavendish had gotten him square with the tommy gun, and Karlosky had clipped him good with the shotgun. Someone around the corner yelled in pain as part of the tommy-gun burst ricocheted down the corridor. Maybe the steel walls hadn’t been such a good idea.
Sullivan got up again, coughing with the gunsmoke in the small space. Yips and jeers and shouts of derision came from the adjoining cells. But the teleport splicer was twitching, gurgling in death.
“Well, we got him, but we lost Harker,” Sullivan muttered, turning to look at the dead constable.
“This is a whole new … how you say it? From baseball…” Karlosky said, looking down at the twitching splicer.
Sullivan nodded. “A whole new ballgame.”
Footlight Theater
1956
Frank Fontaine took his seat near the stage in the small auditorium of the Footlight Theater. He was here to see Sander Cohen’s new cabaret production, Janus—Cohen promoted it as “a tragic farce about identity.” It was actually an oddball collaboration between Sander Cohen and the surgeon Steinman. But Fontaine’s mind was elsewhere—he was remembering something Ryan had said. Even ideas can be contraband.
Settling into the plush seat, Fontaine smiled to himself. Ironically, Ryan had sparked an idea with that little phrase. Spread the right subversive belief, it could turn this place on its head—could dump Ryan at the bottom, lift Frank Fontaine to the top.
Feeling overfull from his dinner, a little drunk from the wine, Fontaine glanced over his shoulder at the audience crowding into the small theater. There was Steinman, the surgeon, overdressed in a tuxedo, playing “author.” There was Diane McClintock, standing at the head of the aisle, in the doorway; she wore a low-cut red-beaded black frock, carried a matching beaded purse. She was frowning, looking at her diamond-crusted watch. Waiting for Ryan, no doubt—she was Ryan’s fiancée as well as his receptionist.
Two seats were empty right next to Fontaine—this might be a great opportunity. He stood up and waved to Diane, though he scarcely knew the woman. He pointed to the two seats, smiling. She glanced through the door to the lobby, then nodded briskly, her lips pursed, and hurried down to him. “Mr. Fontaine…”
“Miss McClintock.” He stepped aside so she could take a seat. “I’ve saved a spot for Andrew too,” he said.
“If he even shows up,” Diane muttered, sitting down. “He’s … always so busy.”
He sat beside her. “I understand someone might be announcing a wedding soon…?”
She snorted. Then remembered herself. “Oh—yes. When he … decides the time is right, we’ll make the announcement.” She opened her purse. “You wouldn’t have a cigarette … oh bother … I seem to be all out.”
Fontaine noticed that most of the purse was taken up by a book. “I do have a cigarette for you,” he said. “Complete with Fontaine Futuristics matchbook. Very stylish.” He held the case out; she took a cigarette, and he lit it for her.
“You’re a lifesaver…”
“Looks like you’re carrying books around in that thing—does it make a better weapon that way?”
She blew smoke at the ceiling. “No need to be dismissive of a woman’s desire to learn. I’m reading a Fitzgerald novel from the ’20s. The Beautiful and the Damned.”
He thought, What could be more fitting? But, winking at her, he said, “One thing I’m not dismissive of is a woman’s desires.”
She looked at him with narrowed eyes, as if thinking of bringing him up short. Then she gave way to a titter of laughter. “Oh gosh. That kinda remark, ‘a woman’s desires’—makes me feel like I was back working the club where Andrew and I met…” She glanced over her shoulder. “You haven’t seen him here, have you?”
“Afraid not.” Maybe he ought to let her know, obliquely, that he might be available to squire her if Ryan gave her the brush-off. She could be useful. “If he doesn’t show up, I’ll heroically offer you my arm, ma’am, and escort you from here—all the way to the moon and back.”
“It’s even farther to the moon than it used to be, down here,” she said. But she seemed pleased.
“Me, I kinda hope he doesn’t show up…”
She glanced back at the door again and then stepped on her cigarette as the curtains parted. “Show’s starting,” she sighed.
It took him a moment to recognize Sander Cohen, as made up as he was—and with another face entirely slung on the back of his head. Cohen was dressed in skintight Lincoln green, had an absurd mustache and beard, and a feeble little bow and arrows slung over his shoulder. He pranced to mandolin music in front of a painted forest backdrop and broke into a song about how he “loved to be in the Greenwood with my merry men, oh, my gay and merry men, my oh so happy men, and then came along that dreadful bitch known as Maid Marian, and OH how paradise has fallen…!”
His “merry men,” looking more like nearly naked Greek wrestlers, came dancing out of the wood, waving arrows and singing the chorus with him.
Oh Jesus wept, Fontaine thought.
Then the King of England came along, wearing a lion-blazoned cloak, a gold-painted crown, and a red beard that was coming loose from his chin. He brought Cohen to his castle and set him to be the new Sheriff of Nottingham; “Robin Hood” lost little time in assassinating the king—merrily stabbing him to the beat of a song—and then switching the face on the back of his head around to the front. The mask resembled the king; he dragged the body off and took the king’s place.
The one-act musical mercifully ended to a smattering of applause—although Dr. Steinman stood up, clapped lustily, and shouted, “Bravo! Bravissimo!”
Fontaine helped Diane into her wrap. Maybe he could get her to a bar. After a few drinks, she might remember her cigarette-girl origins.
But suddenly Ryan was coming down the aisle, shaking hands with people, nodding—waving to Diane. “Sorry I’m late, darling…”
So much for that. But the evening wasn’t a bust. Despite having to watch Cohen flounce about, the play had given Fontaine an idea.
On the way out of the theater, he paused to gaze at one of Ryan’s earliest propaganda posters. “Rapture is the hope of the world…” it declared—over a picture of Andrew Ryan holding the world on his shoulders. Andrew Ryan as Atlas?
Looking to see that no one was watching, Frank Fontaine tore the poster down.
Bill McDonagh’s Flat
1956
Sitting on his sofa near the big sea-view window, Bill McDonagh wondered if keeping records of his “thou
ghts and impressions of life in Rapture” was really a good idea. He’d tried it for a while, but it didn’t come naturally. Ryan was pushing for everyone to keep recordings of their problems, their plans, for some kind of planned historical retrospective, and it was becoming something of a fad. But Bill was starting to wonder exactly how it might be used against a man …
The tape recorder was sitting on the coffee table by a mug of greenish beer. Neither seemed appealing. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Seven. Elaine would be home from Arcadia with the little one soon enough. If he was going to do this, he’d better get to it. He reached for the tape recorder, but somehow his hand found his way to the mug of beer instead.
He sighed, put down the beer, pressed the Record button on the device, and began: “Rapture’s changing, but Ryan can’t see the wolves in the woods. This Fontaine fellow … he’s a crook and a proper tea leaf, but he’s got the ADAM and that makes him the guv’nor. He’s sinking the profits back into bigger and better plasmids and building them Fontaine poorhouses. More like Fontaine recruiting centers! ’Fore we know it, bloke’s gonna have an army of splicers, and we’re gonna have ourselves a whole heap of miseries.”
He switched off the tape recorder. There was a lot more on his mind—but he was reluctant to make his doubts about Rapture a matter of record.
The phone on the coffee table rang. He answered the phone. “Right, Bill here.”
“McDonagh? It’s Sullivan. We’ve had another three killings in the Upper Atrium … and the council is calling an emergency meeting…”
Council Conference Room
1956
Andrew Ryan wasn’t sure he wanted this special meeting of the Rapture Council. But he was reassured to see Bill McDonagh and Sullivan come in. He still felt he could trust those two.
Only six people had shown up this time, and they were gathered around the oval conference table in the ornate, gold-trimmed little room near the top of the highest “air scraper” in Rapture. Anna, Bill, Sullivan, Anton Kinkaide, Ryan, Rizzo.