by James Axler
Balam nodded his great, bulbous head once again, the human-hybrid girl still clutched in his arms. “I was beginning to wonder when you would ask me that,” he said in his strange, lilting voice. “There is a problem, one that you should already suspect.”
Lakesh drummed his fingers on the desk for a moment before inspiration struck. “The interphaser should be able to access an Annunaki stronghold,” he realized, “but you would have already tried that.”
“Essentially yes,” Balam agreed. “In fact, no parallax point was ever established in the Ontic Library, for the knowledge it contained was considered too great to be left vulnerable like that.”
“Aw, no,” Grant espoused, and Kane and the others turned to him in surprise. “We’re going to have to swim, aren’t we?”
Balam smiled. “Make friends with the undertow. I’ll proceed in drawing a map.”
While Donald Bry produced a map of the West Coast and the ocean beyond on which Balam could add his notes, Brigid took Lakesh aside to discuss something preying on her mind.
“What concerns you, Brigid dear?” Lakesh asked.
Brigid glanced behind her, her eyes drawn for a moment by the curious way in which Balam clutched the pen he had been given with which to mark up the map. Around the pen, the six long fingers of his hand seemed less like a man working a tool than like a boa constrictor grasping and crushing the life from its prey. She dismissed the thought, turning back to gaze into Lakesh’s crystal-clear blue eyes. “Not here,” she said, her voice low and filled with meaning.
With a nod of acknowledgment, Lakesh led the way through the door and out of the room. As if sensing something was wrong, Kane took the opportunity to follow them, and the three made their way back to the observation room at the side of the interrogation chamber where Reba DeFore watched the scene playing out in the interview room.
“We need to find out what these mollusks do,” Brigid began once Kane had closed the door behind him.
“From what chrome dome was saying in there,” Kane said, gesturing to the one-way glass, “us hairless monkeys aren’t capable of getting it.”
Brigid’s eyes flicked to Kane, like twin emeralds in the semidarkness. “Those kids ‘got it,’ Kane.”
“They were tripping out, Baptiste,” Kane reminded her brusquely.
Lakesh looked from one to the other, until Brigid quickly recounted the story of the teenagers they had found out in Hope beneath the pier. “So what do you propose, Brigid?” Lakesh asked.
“Somebody needs to ingest one of these things,” Brigid said, “to see what it really does.”
“Ingest?” Kane repeated incredulously. “You mean eat it? Are you crazy?”
Brigid turned to him, and Kane saw then that her expression was deadly serious. “We’ll be going into this Ontic Library based on hearsay, Kane—all we have is what Balam’s told us,” she said. “We need to know what it is we’re getting into.”
Lakesh nodded. “Forewarned is forearmed,” he agreed. When Kane glared at him, he added, somewhat self-consciously, “It’s a cliché, Kane, but it’s a cliché for a reason.”
“So, what are you proposing?” Kane asked Brigid. “That we cook ourselves up a side of mollusk au gratin and trip our brains out?”
“Not we,” Brigid said. “Me.”
Kane muttered something under his breath, shaking his head with resignation. “Always the same,” he finished.
Reaching forward, Brigid placed her hand on Kane’s arm. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “Those kids we met were whacked out, but there were no aftereffects.”
“That we know of,” Kane corrected her.
Brigid fixed him in her gaze, peeking through the curling bangs of her sunset-colored hair. “I’ll be fine,” she repeated.
Kane took a deep, steadying breath, tamping down the angry words of concern he wanted to express. He and Brigid were anam charas—soul friends—whose emotional bond ran deeper than merely that of colleagues. There was a mystical aspect to their friendship, one that spoke of an eternal love that traversed time and space, a bond that had existed in them in times past, when they had worn different faces and been known by different names. The full nature of the anam chara link remained unclear, but it had proved the key to their survival in otherwise dire circumstances before now. They were not lovers; their bond was more like that of siblings. Whatever the nature of the anam chara link, Kane remained fiercely protective of Brigid Baptiste, a combination of his Magistrate instincts and that deeper, more personal bond.
As Kane let out a long, slow breath, concern buzzing around in his thoughts, Lakesh added his own spin on the situation.
“I’ll join her,” the Cerberus leader said.
Both Kane and Brigid were taken aback by the statement that had come from the elderly scientist’s lips, but it was Kane who spoke first. “What did you say, Lakesh?”
“I’ll join her,” Lakesh affirmed. “I grew up during a period of immense change. I was in my twenties during the 1960s, when experimentation with mind-altering substances became briefly very fashionable among the intelligentsia.”
Kane and Brigid both accepted Lakesh’s words at face value—born two hundred years later, they had no frame of reference for what he was telling them.
“The phrase, if I recall it correctly,” Reba DeFore suggested wistfully, “urged that one should turn on, tune in and drop out.”
Kane’s lips moved as he repeated the phrase silently. “Drop out of what?” he finally asked.
Lakesh laughed, never more conscious than at that moment of how different his life had become in the two-hundred-plus years since their birth.
“The point is, dear friends,” Lakesh continued, “it is time for me to free my mind, as the hippies used to exhort.”
Bemused, Kane and Brigid looked at each other for a moment, then they shrugged. Whatever it all meant, the old cyberneticist seemed keen to follow this ancient advice, and clinician Reba appeared to be in agreement.
SO, PERHAPS I AM GETTING OLD, Lakesh told himself as he accompanied Brigid to the kitchen area of the vast redoubt complex along with their companions.
Here was something an old man could do—a field mission of the mind.
And perhaps that made Lakesh reckless, more so than he had been in times gone by. Would his precious Domi have allowed him to do this were she here? Would he have let her? Perhaps it was desperation, a need to prove himself still capable, still active and useful, and not some withered old desk jockey who gave orders like one of those terrible generals from history who had sent young men to their deaths but never dared set foot on the battlefield themselves.
All of this, perhaps, was true. But then, an awareness of one’s own mortality could do strange things to a man. And so it was that the normally levelheaded, sensible Mohandas Lakesh Singh led the way into an exploration of an unknown, mind-altering substance that had scared Balam, one of the most knowledgeable beings on the planet.
Danger be damned, Lakesh told himself. He would take the risks that he could, and let others judge him as they would.
But despite his rare intelligence, the one thing that Lakesh had overlooked was that, sometimes, when a man felt he had something to prove, he could become foolhardy in the pursuit of his goal.
Chapter 8
There were just two prison cells in all of Hope and each cell had a sign up by its great wooden door. One sign showed a man in silhouette while the other showed a woman, because that was the only reason anyone in Hope had ever thought that you might need two separate cells, simply to keep the men separate from the women.
Hope had been a fishing ville, a small community where everyone knew everyone else, and so there had been little need for cells and Magistrates and all the things that came with the towering, walled villes like Snakefish, Cobalt and Beausoleil. Although rarely used, the cells had housed a few people over their time, mostly drunks and occasional wife beaters and one time a guy who had been caught stealing fish out of old ma
n Walsh’s nets. Indeed, the local drunk, Ivan, knew where they kept the key, and it wasn’t unheard-of that he would lock himself up just so he had somewhere to sleep till his wife came to find him. Hope had been that sort of a place.
When the refugees had flooded in, the cells had seen more use in one week than they had in the whole of the preceding year. The locals had held a committee meeting where they had spoken about getting more cells, maybe starting a local Magistrate division, policing the ville to keep these new strangers in line. And while the who’s and the where’s and the why for’s had been discussed, the refugee population had grown and grown, and before anyone knew it crime was the second-biggest industry in Hope after fishing. Which was to say, the locals had somewhat underestimated their need for cells.
While arrests had been made on an ad hoc basis, it was true to say that the cells had seen more people drift through them in the past three months than the whole of the prior decade. The band of stick-up artists who had tried to jack the remaining rations from the church hall had been slung in the cells by the local fire chief, with the help of three of his brothers, and left there to cool off. Those who needed medical attention had been seen to by Mallory Price, including the young man who had received a face full of boiling hot soup, while they awaited their final punishment.
And so, junior stick-up man Richie now found himself sitting against the wall of the cell he shared with his crew and some dozing old bastard who stank of liquor and shouted in his sleep, tightening the screw that held his broken spectacles together. He hadn’t worn them on the stick-up job, hating the way they made him look, like some genius whitecoat or something. Instead the glasses had been in his pocket during the whole operation, and when that angry bull of a man had upended the table as he leaped onto it, he had fallen hard and the glasses had been beneath him when he landed. Now, the left arm was bent out of shape and the hinge wouldn’t sit right so that, when he placed the specs on the bridge of his nose, they rested at a comical angle that did nothing for his temperament.
As Richie worked, a shadow cut across his sight and he glared up to see what—or who—was blocking the light. The who in question was Hunch, another member of his little crew who had helped out at the failed robbery. Inevitably, Hunch’s head was bent at an angle as he watched Richie work.
“Hunch,” Richie growled, “you want to maybe get the fuck out of my light, already?”
“Sorry, Rich,” Hunch murmured, taking a few steps to the right until he was over with the other members of the gang, his head still held at that odd angle that he seemed to favor. The others were passing around a joint as they stood or sat around the lone old table, its paint scabbed over like a wound.
Seth, Richie’s older brother and the brains of their street gang, peered up at Richie’s outburst. “And what’s got you so pissy, little bro?”
“What do you think? That bastard fucked up my glasses, Seth,” Richie explained. As if his brother couldn’t see what he was doing!
“You should wear those when we’re out,” Seth said helpfully.
With a snarl, Richie put the glasses on his nose. They perched there for a moment before sliding down on the left side until they hung at a ludicrous angle. “Should I, Seth? Should I really? Fuck.”
Seth got up from the paint-peeled table and padded slowly across to where Richie sat in the cell, his face held in that serious I-know-better way he adopted whenever he was about to lecture his kid brother. “Why don’t you just calm down,” Seth said when he reached Richie, keeping his voice low.
“Calm down?” Richie spit, thrusting his broken glasses up to Seth’s face. “They’re fucking ruined, man. I look like a fucking retard.”
Seth crouched on his haunches, bringing his face roughly to the same level as his little brother’s. “We’ll get you new glasses once we’re out of here, Richie,” he said calmly. “Now, just bring it down a notch, okay?”
Richie shook his head, bearing his teeth angrily. “I’m going to beat the crap out of—”
“No, you’re not,” Seth cut in. “We’re all going to play nice and get ourselves out of this cell and back on the streets. These people here, they’re weak, man—they’re idiots. They’ll talk rehabilitation and all that shit and then we’ll be home free, and no one will care about you or your glasses and that’s exactly what we want.” He looked at Richie, locking eyes with his brother. “Isn’t it?”
Reluctantly, Richie nodded, his head moving so slowly that it looked like a colossal burden on his neck.
From a darkened corner of the cell, the old sot began coughing, an ugly hacking thing that ended in the spitting of a glistening hunk of phlegm.
“Dirty bastard,” one of Richie’s crew snarled before turning back to his colleagues for another drag on the joint.
The old man ignored the comment and wiped spittle out of his beard before pushing himself up from where he lay on the wooden bench. Slowly, still wiping at his tangled beard, he shuffled across the gloomy cell, his feet barely rising from the floor.
As Richie went back to working at the hinge on his glasses, he became aware that the old man was standing nearby, watching him with glistening blue eyes beneath beetling brows. “Can I help you, old man?” Richie challenged. It was definitely a challenge, not a question.
“You boys know what a utopia is?” the old man said, his voice little more than a mutter.
“A you-what-i-pa?” Richie snapped, irritation clear in his voice. Richie had never been known for his patience.
“A utopia is like heaven,” the old man explained, clearly needing no encouragement. His breath and clothes stank of alcohol even now, Richie noticed, even from this distance. “Like the best of everything a man could possibly want. Sounds good, don’t it?”
Richie just glared at the old man, wondering whether he’d be able to get away with knifing the bastard here in the cell. He figured probably not.
“This place,” the old man continued in his murmuring, muttering way, “was kind of like that once, a utopia. The ville, I mean. They called it Hope because it was something special that came out of the awful times that had come before. Didn’t need Magistrates—the people took care of themselves.”
“Sounds like shit on toast, Granddad,” Seth said from where he sat with the others of the gang. He had been watching the oldster warily, distrustful as he was of strangers.
“But that weren’t really utopia at all,” the old man explained, turning to Seth and his other cell mates, warming to his rambling story. “See, utopia is finding that paradise, that reward that gives you everything right here on Earth. I’m a traveler like you—came south from old Canada. I came here to find it.”
Already irritable, Richie had had enough. He stood up, his wiry frame looming over the bent form of the elderly man, clutching his broken glasses in one hand. “What the hell are you jabbering about, you old fool?”
To Richie’s surprise, the old man didn’t seem intimidated by him. “If you accept it, utopia will come,” the old man stated. “I’m going to tell you guys a word—a name, in fact—and I want you to repeat it. That is, if you want to take the first step in tasting heaven here on Earth.”
“You’re crazy,” Richie growled, stepping closer to the old man, his empty fist raised threateningly. The other members of his crew had stood up now and were surrounding the old man like jackals around a lame antelope.
“That name is Ullikummis,” the old man said, “and he shall be our savior.”
Richie had had enough. He had been cooped up in this crap hole of a cell for eighteen hours, and he damn well wanted something to hit. And so he swung the first punch, his right fist powering through the air at the old man’s nose, forcing Richie to miss him entirely.
What happened next, Richie would swear, was impossible. This old drunk, this shuffling pile of rags that stank of gin and piss, somehow stepped through the arc of Richie’s punch.
Driven by his own momentum, Richie staggered forward, his feet scrabbling across
the cell floor as he struggled to regain purchase there. He turned then, scowling as he tried to comprehend what it was that he had just witnessed. It had been a blur, a thing not fully seen. Noiseless and impossibly quick, the old man had taken a half step to his left, a fraction of movement but enough that he was entirely free from the path of Richie’s thrown punch.
“What the hell?” Richie growled, turning once more to face the old drunk, shoving his glasses into the pocket of his grimy jacket. “What the hell kinda trick is that supposed to be?”
All around him, the other members of his gang moved closer to the old man to ensure he couldn’t get away from their colleague. They need not have bothered. The man just stood there, a beatific smile showing beneath his gray whiskers.
Richie’s second punch was low, aiming for the old man’s gut, and he followed through with an immediate left cross. Once again, the old man effortlessly avoided the blows, stepping through them with such speed that he was like a ghost or something made of smoke.
“What’s the game?” Richie snarled, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small switchblade he had secreted there. The local authorities had taken his blaster from him before tossing him in the cell, but Richie always had something hidden on him. The knife’s blade was barely three inches, but it would be enough to teach this grinning buffoon a lesson in respect.
“No game,” the old man replied calmly, and Richie smelled the reek of alcohol on his breath once more, alcohol and something else—disease.
“Hold him!” Richie ordered and his crew obeyed.
Hunch hooked an arm around the old man from behind, and the man just carried on smiling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Two others snatched at the drunk’s arms, holding them out from his rag-clad body, while another gang member stepped across to the cell bars, checking that no one was coming.
Seth stepped forward then, warning Richie that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. “He’s just an old drunk, Richie,” Seth elaborated. “They find out you stabbed him and—”