by James Axler
“Not even from within?” Brigid asked. Then she shook her head. “I keep forgetting that you’ve only been here for a day, Domi, hardly any longer than we have. You seem so...at home.”
“I am at home, Brigid,” Domi told her. “What possible reason could make me leave?”
Brigid’s gaze left Domi and turned to the falling water of a fountain designed to look like a charging centaur. The centaur’s feet were lost in the mist of water where it struck the fountain’s base, while light reflected across its flanks to suggest movement.
“Brigid?” Domi prompted. “Why don’t you stay with me? The people here have made me so welcome. I’m sure they’d be only too happy to have a mind like yours here, contributing to their bank of knowledge.”
Brigid smiled at Domi’s words. What she said was probably true—King Jack and his people seemed very welcoming to newcomers. They hadn’t once asked for Brigid and her colleagues to justify their reasons for being here. However, what had most struck Brigid was not the words, but the fact that they were being uttered by Domi of all people, the most taciturn and withdrawn member of the whole Cerberus operation.
Her plea was not just heartfelt; it was eloquent—more eloquent than she had ever known Domi to be. Brigid looked around the vast room, scanning for something she could not put her finger on. Could it be that there was something here, in this room or in the palace or perhaps even in the whole of the floating city that was boosting Domi’s intellect? And was it affecting all of them?
* * *
AT THE EXACT moment that Brigid Baptiste was marveling at the tranquillity of Authentiville, Wertham the Strange stepped onto the landing pad of the prison complex with Ronald floating beside him in his automated motion chair. Ronald’s private air mule was waiting at the end of the landing platform, a hundred feet above street level. Square in shape with windows all around, the compact vehicle was reminiscent of an alpine cable car.
As Ronald made his way to the air mule, Wertham halted a few steps beyond the open doors of his prison, taking in the view of the golden city, breathing in fresh air for the first time in seven hundred years.
Ronald turned back. “You like what you see?” he asked.
Wertham nodded. “The question is, do you like it, Doctor? Is it what you want?”
“You know me, Wertham,” Ronald said, opening the door of the mule with a wave of his hand. “I’m a simple man with simple tastes. A kingdom of this size will be more than adequate for my needs.”
“Which leaves me with the surface world,” Wertham mused.
“If you are able to tame it,” Ronald reminded him.
Wertham laughed as he stepped into the mule with Ronald. “Oh, I’ll tame it all right. When I’m done, Earth will bear my face on its largest continent, and every living person will know only one word, and that word shall be my name.”
At the vehicle controls, Ronald toggled a switch and set the mule to rise from the landing platform. In a few seconds, the private vehicle was passing through the sky above Authentiville. It cut an effortless path between other vehicles as Ronald guided it to one of the vast parks that dominated the ground level.
“The city looks smaller than I remembered,” Wertham observed as he stood before one of the mule’s panoramic windows. “Funny how things become bigger in one’s mind over time.”
A moment later, the mule touched down at the edge of Pacifist Park, which covered almost three acres of land. Surrounded by a golden barred fence, the park featured softly undulating hillocks and just a few trees; perfectly trimmed grass carpeted the whole thing in a swathe of green.
As the mule powered down, Wertham was pleased to see people were out enjoying the park, sunbathing in the rainbow glow of the vortex, children running around playing children’s games.
“A lot has changed,” Wertham exclaimed as he surveyed the park and the towering skyline looming behind it.
Ronald looked up at his associate from his chair. “You don’t recognize it, then?”
Wertham showed him that terrible smile, the one that spoke of inhuman genius, of insights that man was never meant to know. “They could only disguise so much,” Wertham said, twirling his silver rod in his hands like some sinister majorette. “Shall we?”
Ronald followed as Wertham stepped from the mule’s ramp and out into the green park. “They used the camouflage tech we found on the sky disks,” Ronald explained.
Wertham nodded. “I see.” He knew the technology that Ronald was talking about. The Annunaki sky disks had been equipped with technology that would adopt the color of their background, making them appear as just a shimmer in the air when they flew within the atmosphere. It was a way to hide them in plain sight. Though Wertham could not see it, he guessed that the same technology had been retooled to create the illusion of the beautiful park he saw before him. And yes, it was an illusion, formed of hard light.
Wertham closed his eyes for a moment, mentally consulting the circuitry within the silver-skinned rod he had secretly constructed during the years trapped in his cell. The old plans formed before him, a web of ancient catwalks that had not been trodden upon for almost a thousand years.
“Move left,” Wertham instructed, and Ronald guided his motion chair until he was in line with where Wertham was indicating.
Then, with a twist of the silver baton, Wertham tapped the hidden technology beneath its skin and felt the shimmer tech that held the park in place. Something winked out in his field of vision as a great plain of grass simply vanished to be replaced by a gap sunk into the earth. The people who had been on that patch of grass—fifty square feet of it in all—screamed as they began to fall, the hard-light hologram that had been holding them up winking out of existence. They tumbled down into the body of the thing that resided below, great cavernous lines of metal sunk deep into the foundations of the floating city.
Other people in the park turned at the sudden change, shouting and pointing at the eerie sight of the ground literally ceasing to exist. Down there, beneath the illusion of perfect grass, lay a great industrial structure, all hard lines and sheer metal. Wertham watched as another batch of people disappeared with another turn of the rod in his hands, plummeting down into the forgotten industrial complex. Behind him, the mule sat on what was now an island of grass between the ancient catwalks.
Ronald’s expression was fixed as he watched more people fall to their deaths. “You could have let them go,” he said.
“Why?” Wertham replied, a cruel edge to his voice. “They didn’t let me go—why should I do any different for them?”
As he spoke, another great swathe of the perfect grass winked out of existence, leaving in its place a chasm down into the guts of Authentiville. Sounds of shrieking filled the air.
Chapter 18
Its name was the Doom Furnace and it had lurked beneath Authentiville for almost a thousand years, like a sleeping creature of myth waiting to be reawakened. Wertham the Strange strode across its high catwalks to the song of screaming, staring down into the seemingly bottomless chasm that was the Furnace’s kiln. Around him, park-goers were still falling, dropping into its abysslike depths, unable to foresee where the narrow catwalks would materialize as the ground beneath them winked out of existence. Only Wertham saw that, thanks to the Devil Rod.
Up ahead, a child stood on the narrow walkway, staring down into the darkness, screaming for his mother.
“Your mother’s dead, child,” Wertham said as he approached. “But whatever’s left of her body will be recycled to make something new and wondrous, a whole new complexity of human.”
“Wh-wha—?” the child stuttered, unable to comprehend the man’s strange words.
Wertham sneered and slapped the child across the head, knocking him so hard that he slipped from the narrow walkway and disappeared into the dark. “Children,” he muttered.
“They ask for everything to be laid out for them, and yet they still don’t understand.”
Down below him, just a few hundred years before, fires had burned as weapons of cosmic destruction were forged and perfected. Great burning pools of lava had been tamed and utilized to make the greatest weapons that man would ever know. Each of those weapons had been based upon the designs that Jack’s people had found—great Annunaki warships and flyers, mobile cannons that used sonics to fell whole populations or to superheat water so that it turned to steam so swiftly that it burned the flesh from their enemies’ bodies in the blink of a now-lidless eye.
Like so much of Authentiville, the Doom Furnace was hidden beneath the streets, way down in the guts of the platform upon which the city was balanced. Through a careful manipulation of quantum mechanics, those guts extended almost infinitely, creating a tesseract of near-limitless space in which to house the great industrial complex on which the city relied. The food its citizens ate, the water they drank, even the air they breathed—all of it was produced beneath the city itself, vast plantations and moisture farms and air farms located beneath the streets and manned by the Gene-agers who never tired and never questioned.
But this part had been sealed off, all entryways blocked, disguised and covered by Pacifist Park and its illusory idyll. A hardlight projection of quietude paving over the glorious industry of war.
“How long has it been?” Wertham asked, taking in a deep breath of dead air. He asked the question of the skies around him, as if interrogating the cosmos itself.
“It’s a thousand years since Jack shut this down,” Ronald said. “He did it after his—”
“Yes, I recall why he did it,” Wertham interrupted. “To think that the man would halt the Doom Furnace like that, when so much could have been built here.” He looked down into the vertiginous chasm, spying the glint of smart-metal far below where the old warships waited, mothballed for a millennium.
Ronald watched as Wertham closed his eyes, consulting and manipulating those hidden shapes he had spoken of time and again, twisting the batonlike device in his hand.
Below them, deep in the bowels of tesseract space, a flame lit, igniting the ancient forge for the first time in ten centuries.
Wertham sneered as the great industrial machine came to life around and beneath him, the nightmare shapes of warships lit in bloodred by the burning flames of the forge, weapons of delusion waiting in the shadows. The Doom Furnace was operational once more, its song of war reverberating through the streets around Pacifist Park.
* * *
MINUTES LATER, RONALD’S mule pulled up at the service entrance of the palace to disgorge its two occupants. They entered the vast kitchen of the palace like a storm rolling in from sea, brushing past the cooks and waiting staff as they hurried toward their destiny.
Identifying the head chef on duty, Ronald guided his chair over to him and addressed him with authority.
“The king?” Ronald demanded of the head chef. “Where is he?”
The chef wore a towering white headpiece within which a thermal gauge constantly informed him of fluctuations in ambient temperature that might affect his culinary masterpieces. The information was fed from the hat straight to his brain, bypassing any need for him to look away from his hot and cold creations.
“Where?” Ronald repeated, grabbing the chef by his lapels and dragging him down to his level in the chair.
“The king left,” the chef stuttered. The chef always knew of the king’s movements, for it was his responsibility to feed the man—and some would say that this, in itself, was the most important job in the whole kingdom. “In the company of the visitors. I don’t know where.”
“And the queen?” Ronald snarled.
“In the throne room,” the head chef replied, wide-eyed. “She requested a small meal of nutritional exactitude, Your Honor.”
“I remember where the court is,” Wertham assured his accomplice. “Let us surprise her with a little dessert to go with her nutritional request. Something—semilethal.”
The head chef watched bemused as Wertham the Strange exited the kitchens via the service elevator, rocketing up through the levels of the palace to the royal court.
The head chef let out the breath he had been holding as Ronald left the room. He wondered not what this augured, but rather what meal would be best to serve in its light. But then, as a Gene-ager, the head chef was given to little in the way of free thought.
* * *
AT AMBER.
The color swirled around their bodies, running over muscles made tight by their time in the cramped cockpits of the Manta craft. It felt warm and relaxing, like the embrace of a familiar lover.
“You know, Your Highness,” Kane remarked, “this is just what I needed.”
“Me, too,” Grant agreed.
It was remarkable, really. Both men had seen a Chalice of Rebirth before—several times, in fact—but to find one so large and so readily accessible to any inhabitant of this incredible city was beyond their wildest imaginings.
The Chalice of Rebirth utilized nano technology to re-create tissue cells, replenish blood and otherwise repair damage to the human body. Kane had been dunked in one of the pools by accident not so long ago, and the effect had been to repair a gunshot wound he had sustained, as well as accidentally mixing his DNA with that of an alien chip of rock embedded in his eye. The experience had affected his comprehension for a while, leaving him with memory echoes of another creature.
Here and now, there was no damage to repair. Neither Kane nor Grant had been wounded; neither man needed this fix. Yet they had agreed to join King Jack in the pool as a show of solidarity.
Around them, at the edges of the rippling pool, a dozen Gene-agers waited patiently, ready to fulfill the orders of any Authentiville citizen without question.
“I try to take a dip once a week,” Jack explained. “Keeps the old aches at bay and helps the mind relax.”
“I dunno,” Grant said. “Seems to me you have a pretty relaxed setup here anyway. In the palace, I mean.”
King Jack looked at him, his clear blue eyes amused. “You’re still worrying about the Gene-agers aren’t you, son? They won’t hurt you.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Grant told him. “Any society predicated on slavery falls apart sooner or later. That’s a historical fact.”
“That’s your history,” Jack told him, “not ours. Things are different up here. We bred the Gene-agers to perform the tasks we require and they’ve done so for as long as most people here can remember. What’s more, they’ll keep doing so after you’re long gone. Things don’t change. We’re a captured sliver of time out here, away from the petty squabbles of the surface people. And that’s the way we like it.”
“Things always change,” Grant said, but he tried to make a joke of it, splashing the amber liquid over himself as he dunked his head under the surface.
* * *
THE ROYAL COURT was quiet, its functionaries going about their business in near silence. Queen Rosalind sat alone, staring into her hand mirror, tracing the age lines that marred her face. Using the Happening had taken a lot out of her, and neither she nor Jack had told the strangers how much of the user’s energy the Happening drained in its functioning. There were things one didn’t share with strangers.
Like much of the Annunaki technology on which it was based, the device employed an organic dimension that meant it needed to bond and engage with the user before functionality was achieved. Roz had been kept physically young by the pools of regeneration, but using the machine was truly a young person’s game. In future, she reminded herself, she should leave its function to the genetically manipulated staff who were grown to use it.
“It’s a terrible thing, getting old,” she remarked to herself. But it was something the people of Authent
iville need never fear, not with the Ageless Pools serving their needs.
It was at that moment that the figures appeared in the colossal chamber, flitting across the surface of her mirror as she brushed at her neon hair. She spun in her throne, turning to see who they were.
“Ronald—?” she began before gasping. The other figure was familiar to her, as well, and his appearance here brought with it a sense of dread.
“Well?” Wertham the Strange demanded, wielding the silver-colored rod in his hands. “Aren’t you going to welcome me back to the palace, Your Majesty?”
“Get out, Wertham,” Rosalind spat out, rising from her grand throne. “You shouldn’t be here. You should be...”
“What? Imprisoned?” Wertham challenged her. “Imprisoned for my expansive ideas? Is that how you remember it, even after all these centuries? Or perhaps it is the centuries that have made you misremember so much, casting me in the role of villain in your simple play.”
Around them, the people of the royal court were clearing the room, sentries marching to see what the fuss was. But before they could do anything, Wertham waved the silver rod he carried at them and, as one, they halted in place, their eyes losing focus.
Rosalind’s dark eyes fixed on the rod that Wertham was holding in his hands, and her heart sank as she realized what it was. “What is that?” she demanded. “You don’t think for a moment that you can...”
“Replace the king,” Wertham finished. “I’ve had seven hundred years to think on that fact, ever since your husband incarcerated me for suggesting we reach beyond the borders of this little idyll in the stars. And you know what? Yes, I think I can replace the king. But I won’t. No, I’ve promised that role to another.”
“Wertham, no,” Rosalind pleaded. “You’re unwell. Your mind...it’s...”
Wertham held up the proxy God Rod that he had created, tooled from the bar that held his bed together, worked with circuitry that had been smuggled into his prison over the period of a decade, stripped and repatched, so that now it worked in a manner only his fertile mind could possibly have conceived. “It begins this day,” he announced. “The Era of New Gods.”