by John Shirley
White fire exploded behind Martin’s eyes, and it was all he could see for a moment—like gazing into the heart of a welding arc. Unfamiliar tastes, like random chemicals, passed in waves through his mouth. He heard his pulse hammering in his ears. And then a wave of relief came, a ripple of release, as the rigidity washed away in a rolling tide of living coolness. After a few moments he was able to move again and struggled to his knees.
“Now,” Cohen said, laying the empty syringe on the makeup dresser. “I’m going to drink mine—here’s the syringe for me—you do me! I mean, the syringe! And don’t try to use your powers yet! You might turn me into a block of ice!”
They repeated the process for Cohen, Martin injecting him in the rump, going about it mechanically even as he struggled for some kind of inner equilibrium. He didn’t feel quite real somehow …
Martin set the empty syringe aside and sat gingerly on the chair as the Artiste flopped about like a fish on the floor, the EVE merging with the ADAM, showing in alternating blue-red energies in Cohen’s body.
Suddenly Cohen went limp, sighing. Then he sat up, chortled gleefully, and vanished. There was an ambient sucking sound as a thump of air rushed to fill the sparkling vacuum where he’d been.
“Sander?” Martin’s tongue felt thick. It was hard to talk. His head pounded like a parade drum thumped by a cocaine fiend. But he felt good, profanely good …
A sucking, a sizzling, a Cohen-shaped sparkling, and there he was, materializing at the door to the corridor. “Ha ha! Look! I did it, Martin! I teleported! Ha ha ha!”
It seemed to Martin that Cohen’s face was rippling within itself, bumps rising and falling on it as if little pistons were pumping randomly under his facial skin.
Martin laughed—it didn’t matter, really, what was happening to Sander Cohen. Nothing mattered! The energy roared like a tornado in the room. The sinews of visible electric power stretched and snapped in the very air.
He looked around, expecting to see these powerful forces throwing the furnishings about, whipping things through the air. But nothing was affected. He was seeing these energies in his mind.
“Come, come, follow me, I have a special delight for us in the rehearsal room!” Cohen crowed, whirling about, dancing toward the door. “Come, come and see my guests!”
“Guests? What sort, Sander? I’m not sure I can deal with guests. I feel strange…”
“But you must!” Cohen insisted gleefully. “This is a test! I test all my disciples! Some shine like galaxies … some burn like a moth at the flame! Just remember: the artist swims in a lake of pain! Perhaps he evolves into something magnificent—perhaps he drowns! Will you drown—or will you come along?”
Sander Cohen went out the door, and Martin was somehow swept along behind him, carried by some powerful inner current. He was unable to walk slowly, unable to think slowly. He was a living dynamo of energy.
No wonder people get addicted to this.
That thought came, and he pushed it rudely aside. No raining on the parade! And the parade drum thumped frantically, pacing him down the hall to the rehearsal room at the rear of the backstage area. Cohen had already teleported ahead.
Martin felt like he was waterskiing, pulled along in a bracingly cold medium by a powerful engine. He burst through the door into the rehearsal room and found Sander Cohen stalking back and forth in front of three people, their arms spread in restraints. They were bound to three interlinked metal frames bolted to the small rehearsal stage …
It was all seen through a glass darkly, for Martin—a filter like mental sunglasses that made some bits shine out and muted others. It seemed unreal, almost two-dimensional, like it was all happening to someone else. Like a movie …
“Please!” said a busty, frowzy woman with flapper-style brown hair. She was pinioned on the left side of the practice stage. “Let me go!” Her eyes kept fluttering, perhaps because one of them was losing its false eyelashes. She wore a ripped black shift and one red pump, the other foot bare.
In the center framework, a middle-aged man with a tonsure of white hair shook in his bonds in rage and fear. His suit was torn and bloody, his nose was swelling and leaking blood, his left eye swollen shut. Cohen’s third “guest” was a young man in a T-shirt, with tousled blond hair and a little red-blond beard that, along with his green trousers, made Martin think of Robin Hood. He looked like he was drugged or drunk; he just sort of hung there in his restraints, murmuring inaudibly, eyes slitted, lifting his head now and then.
“We shall call these three Winken, Blinken, and Nod!” declared Cohen, parading around them, clapping his hands.
I was right; it’s a movie, Martin thought. It’s not real, none of it. He was in the audience and in the movie at the same time. It felt good to watch it and to be the hero of it.
“Please, Mr. Cohen!” the woman wailed. “I wasn’t holding out on the tips! The other girls all keep the same amount!”
“The constables Hector and Cavendish caught these three for me, Martin,” Cohen said, taking a cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his smoking jacket. He tapped a button on the case so that a cigarette popped out of a little hole; he lipped it up to the lighter, puffed, and blew smoke in Blinken’s face.
“Cavendish!” Blinken snarled. “That crook! Supposed to be the law! You bought him off!”
“And isn’t that always the case with the best policemen?” Cohen said, putting the cigarette case away. “That Sullivan is such a square. Won’t take a bribe. But Cavendish likes my little gifts … doesn’t he, Blinken?”
“That’s not my goddamn name!” the older man shouted. His remaining eye blinked furiously as he struggled with the tight leather restraints around his wrists and ankles. He went angrily on, “You know damn well who I am! I worked for you a good six years, Cohen! I did a hell of a job in that crappy little casino of yours!”
“Oh, but you were skimming the winnings, old Blinken,” Cohen said, his voice oily. He toyed with the cigarette lighter.
“Ask anybody in Fort Frolic; I was completely on the level!” Blinken snarled. “I was totally—”
He interrupted himself with a long, pealing scream as Sander Cohen put his cigarette out in Blinken’s remaining eye.
Cohen made a face at the man’s shrieking—and then came that sucking sound, the thump, the sparkling, and Cohen had vanished.
… Only to reappear close beside “Nod.” Cohen reached out and stroked the young man’s blond hair. “The problem is an artistic one, a compositional question,” Cohen said, raising his voice to be heard over Blinken’s cries. “Shut that one up for now, will you?”
“Sure.” Martin was glad to do it. Blinken’s screams were distracting him from the movie. He strode over to him, took him by the throat—but instead of squeezing, something else came from his fingers. Not quite intentionally.
Ice. It spread out from his fingers onto the man’s neck, his head, and clickingly up over his chin. It covered his face like a helmet. In another second it had coated his shoulders, his torso—the man was caught in a carapace of ice.
“Stop!” Cohen barked.
Martin stepped back, unsure as to what had happened at first—then realized that he’d used the plasmid. The power of the specialized ADAM he’d been given had sent a current of entropy from his fingers, slowing molecules, drawing water vapor from the air—coating Blinken in ice.
“If I hadn’t stopped you,” Cohen said, playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off, “you’d have frozen him right through in another second. This way he’s in a pretty cocoon of ice, for now…”
It was true. Blinken was wriggling in the sarcophagus of ice. A little melted water, mixed with bloody foam, slipped about his face, his cries were muffled; one wild eye was bleeding, the other rolling under its blackened, swollen lid …
Martin marveled that he felt so little, that he was so distanced from what was happening this close in front of him. But the rolling hotness, the transporting s
weetness of the plasmid high was still upon him, dominating him, and nothing else was truly real.
“Please, Mister, don’t do that!” the woman shrieked. “No no noooo!”
Martin turned to see Cohen flicking the lighter under her ragged clothing, her hair. Setting “Winken” on fire.
“We’re almost ready, Martin!” Cohen crowed as she writhed, shrieking in a growing plume of flame. “You must capture her in ice when she’s in just the right posture for the composition! We’re making a glorious tableau, a lovely triptych of tragedy: the human condition! I shall entitle it, Three Souls Revealed! If only Steinman could see this glorious transfiguration!”
Martin could barely hear him over the woman’s shrieking. Most of her hair was gone now …
What was this movie he was in again? What was the title? Martin couldn’t remember …
“There!” Cohen shouted, leaping with excitement. “As she arches her back and howls and spreads her fingers! Now! Freeze her! Just point at her and freeze her right there!”
Martin stretched out his arm and willed the plasmid to emanate from his fingers—he felt the chill of it passing out of him, saw ice crystals shimmering in the air in front of his hand. Suddenly, the fire around the dying woman was snuffed out.
She was instantly frozen solid, her eyeless sockets—the flame had melted her eyes—filling with pockets of crushed ice. Her mouth agape around a chunk of ice, her singed-away hair replaced by icicles …
Martin felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He was starting to see that this was real. These people were real …
Cohen vanished, teleporting—then reappearing near Blinken. Who was just starting to crack out of his ice cocoon.
“As soon as he breaks out, when he opens his mouth to shout at us—freeze him!” Cohen ordered. “Freeze him solid!”
At least that would end the man’s terror, Martin thought. The thought making him feel sick in itself. This is real …
He emanated the entropic power of Winter Blast—and the plasmid quickly froze the man through and through. And Martin shuddered, as if he was frozen himself.
“Ha haaaaa!” Cohen cackled just before he vanished—reappearing close to the groaning young man hanging slack in his bonds. “Only one panel of the triptych remains! Come, come and play with Nod, Martin!”
Martin found he was drawn to Nod, that his hands went easily to him. He was a very pretty young man, after all. Cohen took out an elegant little straight razor …
Medical Pavilion, Aesthetic Ideals Surgery
1956
J. S. Steinman was bemused and distracted. Admiring the eyeless, limp face he had so deftly removed from the woman’s skull, holding it up to the sea light from the windows so that he could see the deep blue of the North Atlantic through her empty eye sockets, Steinman thought: Aphrodite, your light is entering my eyes …
And then the visitor buzzer razzed intrusively at him.
“Damn them, why won’t they leave genius to be genius!” Steinman muttered, hanging the detached face—complete with her nose and eyebrows—over the lamp beside the operating table. The electric yellow lamplight came prettily through the sockets, but the blood emitted an awful stench in contact with the hot lamp.
The buzzer buzzed again.
“Wait here, my dear,” he sighed to the faceless woman lying on the operating table. Of course, speaking to her was pure whimsy: she couldn’t hear him. She was dead. She’d been a rogue splicer he had bought from a constable, who’d shot her in the head when she’d tried to decapitate someone with a fish knife. The bullet had left her alive—anyway, she’d lived until a few minutes ago—but paralyzed. So Steinman hadn’t needed anesthetic or restraints to keep her quiet during the carving …
He left the operating theater, climbed the stairs, and went through the operating suite’s door, locking it behind him. Absently toying with a scalpel, he crossed the small lobby and opened the outer door.
Steinman realized he should have cleaned up a bit before answering the door. Frank Fontaine and his bodyguards were standing outside the Medical Pavilion, staring aghast at his blood-splattered surgical coat and the bloody scalpel in his hand. The booster plasmid he’d been using was starting to make him a bit abrupt, careless perhaps. He had gone three nights without sleep.
“We didn’t realize you were, um, busy, doctor,” Fontaine said, rolling his eyes at his bodyguards: a thuggish sort in a tatty suit and a grubby long-haired man who looked like a dirty Jesus.
Steinman shrugged. “Just some anatomical investigation. Work on cadavers. A trifle messy. Do you wish to schedule some—”
“What I wish to do,” Fontaine interrupted sharply, “is to come in and talk in private.”
Steinman gestured with the scalpel—his movement was preternaturally brisk so that the scalpel made a whipping sound as it cut the air. The bodyguards reached for their guns.
“Take it easy,” Fontaine told them, raising a calming hand. “Wait out here.”
He stepped into Steinman’s lobby, and closed the door behind him. But Steinman noticed that Fontaine had his left hand inside the flap of his coat. “No need to be reaching for that gun,” Steinman sniffed. “I’m not some … lunatic. You just caught me at a bad time.”
“Then maybe you could put away the scalpel?”
“Hm? Oh yes.” He stuck it in his jacket pocket so it stuck up like a comb. “What can I do for you?”
Fontaine ran a hand over his bald head. “I am going to need some work done. Some on me, and some on … there’s a guy who works for me. Kind of looks like me. I want you to make him look a lot like me.”
“Mmm, probably,” Steinman said, cleaning blood from under his fingernails. “I should have to see him to be sure. But you have a distinct face, and that helps. That chin. Yes. If you want, I might be able to do a face transplant! Yours on his, his on yours! Has never been successfully done, but I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“Yeah well—not a chance. No, just … a little painless surgery so I look … different. And so he looks like I do now. And I want nobody to know about it but you and me … And I mean nobody. Not Ryan’s people, not Lamb’s people, not even my people.”
“Lamb?”
“You haven’t heard? She’s got some kind of uprising cooking in Persephone. I don’t trust her—don’t want her knowing any of my business.”
“Mum’s the word!”
“So you can make me look different—in pretty short order? Painless? And not a freak like some you’ve been turning out. A good face. A face people’d trust…”
“Should be possible,” Steinman allowed. “It’ll cost you. I’ll need a free supply of plasmids and plenty of cash.”
“You’ll get it—but the plasmids come after the operations. I don’t want you crackin’ up all rogue when you’re working on me. You already look like you could use some sleep…”
Steinman waved airily. “I work long hours perfecting both my skills and my art.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll get you a nice deposit so you’re ready to do this at a moment’s notice. It will be soon … Remember—not a word to anyone. Not even to Cohen—he’s too close to Ryan…”
“Oh, I see. Fear not. I would not have mentioned it anyway. I am ever discreet. It’s part of my professional code.”
“Better be. Or you’ll find yourself going headfirst out an air lock without a diving suit.”
Now there was the real Frank Fontaine, Steinman thought. That icy voice, the even colder eyes. His true colors.
Steinman winked conspiratorially. Fontaine just looked back at him—then went out the door.
14
Fighting McDonagh’s Bar
1956
Chief Sullivan, Pat Cavendish, and Karlosky were waiting for Bill in Fighting McDonagh’s Bar. Sullivan was wearing a trench coat; Cavendish in his usual rolled-up shirtsleeves and slacks, no matter the temperature; Karlosky in a brown leather jacket that might’ve come from the Soviet air force.
; Bill carried a tommy gun Sullivan had issued him the night before—but he wished he didn’t have to carry it. He’d gone on bombing missions, but he’d never dropped the bombs himself. Still, it was beginning to look as if guns were going to be as much a part of life in Rapture as Jet Postal and bathyspheres.
It was early morning and the bar was closed. The wooden planks of the floor creaked under his tread as he came up to the group of armed men waiting near the window. Those planks always reminded Bill reassuringly of old pubs back home. A killer whale, big as a Cadillac, cruised by the window, slick black and white, in no hurry, a large eye rolling to peer curiously in at them.
“They ready down there?” Bill asked. He was wearing a deputy constable’s badge. He was even more uncomfortable with that than with the gun. Elaine had been right weepy when she’d heard he’d been deputized. It was only temporary, till they recruited more constables. Quite a number of them had been killed by splicers. It was risky—and it meant he was subject to the orders of Pat Cavendish, the new head constable, a right bastard if ever he’d met one.
Sullivan nodded. “They should be right outside the door of the wharf, keeping their goddamn mouths shut, I hope.”
“Where’s this hideout hiding out at?” Bill asked.
“Witness says it’s in a cavern under the fisheries. We think they bring the stuff into Rapture with a sub; then they take it in an unregistered bathysphere through a tunnel to their hideout. Right now the sub’s accessible to us in bay 2—word is, they haven’t moved the contraband out of the sub to the cave yet.”
“We going to be able to find the contraband on the sub?” Cavendish asked. “Probably hidden good.”
Sullivan scratched his unshaven chin. “We worked out that the stuff’s probably being smuggled in one of the fuel tanks. They’re refilling their fuel way more often than they need to. Meaning they aren’t carrying as much fuel as they should. Something’s taking up that fuel space.”