Distortion Offensive

by James Axler

  Tell me more, she heard herself yearn. Show me more.

  But no. Just as the presence of Ullikummis had threatened to destabilize this exceptional library and, in turn, the whole of the real, so, too, Brigid realized, could her presence here. It had seemed, in the idealized and dreamlike way in which she had witnessed it, that Ullikummis had caused the library to decay by his rapid movement through knowledge. In discarding a fact, an idea, he threatened to destroy it. Was this, then, the flaw in the library? Was it possible that the Ontic Library had been set up never to be accessed, that the knowledge of the gods was a dangerous thing? Every religious text in the history of man held that very warning, did it not?

  Or perhaps it was an attitudinal factor. That Ullikummis had come here seeking a specific branch of knowledge, and had sought it for a specific and malicious usage—might that have caused the library itself to rebel? Had her ejecting his presence been Brigid fulfilling the work of the library where all of its other defenses had failed? Could it be, in fact, that the library had been waiting for a protector in the form of an archivist, someone who comprehended things in the long-forgotten terms of shelf reference and cataloging classes? Had she been the library’s strong right arm?

  Brigid’s thoughts were so hurried they seemed almost beyond her own ability to interpret. Whatever it was that the library had done, it had engendered in her a thought process like hyperspeed. Hyperthought.

  Brigid clung to that as she sent the disengage signal to the library and felt it eject her through the different classifications and subclassifications that housed all knowledge to the rules that underpinned the universe. For a brief second she wondered if she might turn back, might look for some way to defeat the Annunaki and eject them from her world.

  To turn back would be a simple thing, the matter of less than a second, Brigid told herself. To look for something that might help the Cerberus exiles win in their terrible war against superior beings would surely be reason enough to stay, to risk the destruction of the real by her own hand, her own interference.

  To save Kane and Grant and Lakesh and countless others, all she need do was to swim against the tide, turn and create a path back into the rushing whirl of all knowledge.

  And then I could save Abigail, too.

  The thought struck Brigid like a slap. She was contemplating threatening all of reality simply in the hope she might be able to find a shortcut, a cheat, to destroying their foes and getting what she wanted. Even as she came to that conclusion, the redness in her vision turned to solid black once more, the background effect of the bleed fading away, and she sat upon the protruding arm of the towering, octopuslike hub in the center of the undersea complex, tasting the air around her like a newborn taking its first breath.

  Immediately, Brigid began coughing, the constriction of her lungs making her want to weep in pain. She doubled over, dragging at the air with such loud breaths that she sounded like a wounded animal caught in a trap.

  “Baptiste?” the voice came from nearby, but Brigid was doubled over and in such pain that she didn’t look up to see who it was. She knew; of course she knew. It was Kane. Always Kane. Her anam chara, ever at her side when she needed his protection and his support, just as she was ever at his.

  Brigid’s whole body shook as she struggled for another breath, breathing in through her mouth to get as much air as she could into lungs that burned like fire. It felt as if there was blood at the back of her head, and something sharp was jabbing against her forehead like the thorns of a rose. She reached forward blindly, her hand finding the thing that had attached itself to her head, ripping it away in a moment of mindless agony, tossing it aside. Vaguely she heard the thorn crown land upon the hard floor, sounding like an insect’s feet as it skittered across the coral.

  “Baptiste?” Kane asked again, and she saw his shadow at her feet as she sat there, her head on her knees. “Are you going to say something or aren’t you?”

  Slowly, the weight of movement feeling strange and faintly unreal, Brigid looked up and saw Kane standing over her, his face etched with concern.

  “Temptation lurks,” Brigid whispered, her voice hoarse.

  Irrationally, Kane smiled at her, looking almost as though he was holding back laughter. “I’ll take your word for it,” he said as he reached for something behind her. “You stay still, I’ll get you disentangled from this nightmare machine in a moment.”

  Brigid watched Kane as he fiddled with the stuff that had connected to her, pulling at threadlike creepers and spiny protrusions, all of which had submerged themselves beneath her skin. It was like removing a splinter, only it was a thousand splinters, and each one was magnified a thousand times. Brigid ignored it, concentrating on the things she had seen within the complex of the Ontic Library, trying desperately to cling to the richness of knowledge she had seen there.

  To process everything required hyperthought. It was all so tangled, so clear yet obtuse, separate and interlinked all at once. And her ability to perform hyperthought was leaving her—had left her. Now she was only Brigid Baptiste, an ex-archivist from Cobaltville with the remarkable talent of a photographic memory, but with nothing left to remember, a camera trying to take pictures of the dark.

  And so, Brigid Baptiste—the ex-archivist from Cobaltville with the remarkable talent of a photographic memory—forgot.

  As Kane pulled away the last of the tangled threads that had reached into her, Brigid looked up at him with those beautiful green eyes and said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “For what?” Kane began, but the reason for Brigid’s apology became clear before he had finished the query.

  Having lost all the mental knowledge she had gained from her involvement with the Ontic Library, her whole system rebelled, and she vomited over Kane’s boots where he stood in front of her, purging her body as the library had her mind. With infinite care, Kane reached for the dangling strands of Brigid’s sunset hair and pulled them away from her face. And then he held her while she disgorged everything she had eaten for the past twenty-four hours until only saliva and stomach acid remained, dribbling from her mouth in a bitter-tasting stream.

  When he was certain that she had finally finished, Kane placed a comforting arm around her shaking form, and laughed. “Boy, Baptiste, when you lose it you really lose it.”

  “Thank you, I think,” Brigid replied.

  “Reckon it’s about time we got you home?” Kane asked his companion.

  Brigid looked around her, feeling washed out and slightly unreal. “Where is Ullikummis?” she asked, struggling to stand.

  “He’s gone,” Kane said. “You did it. He left the library.”

  “And you didn’t…” Brigid began, the implication clear.

  “I tried,” Kane told her. “But then something came up and I had to prioritize one thing over another.”

  Brigid frowned as she tried to work out what Kane meant, why he, the most relentless man she had ever met, would ever allow an enemy to escape when he had him dead to rights. Then sudden realization dawned. “You mean me, don’t you?”

  Kane smiled enigmatically in response. “You have to ask?”

  “No,” Brigid agreed. “I guess I don’t.”

  ULLIKUMMIS MADE HIS way out through the tunnel, uninterested in the wants and the needs of the few humans he had seen in the body of the Ontic Library. The humans were more like vermin than ever, spreading across the globe like a virus, infecting every inch with their prattling and their meaningless excuses for anger.

  He had recognized the one who had pushed him in the furnace, and he had seen the other, the one with dark skin—the man-bull—on more than one occasion. Ullikummis’s memory was long; he would not forget such foes.

  The Ontic Library itself had rejected him after five days immersed in its glorious data flow. He had all that he needed now, the rest did not matter. It had been sheer tenacity that had caused him to seek additional data on his father, drawn in by the seductive, velvety nature of hyperthought.r />
  The construction would come first, the camp where he could reeducate humankind, remind them of who their masters were. His father and the other overlords had been pathetic in their second reign on Earth, he had learned, establishing nothing but their own ability to squabble among themselves. When he left Tenth City, Ullikummis had created one dozen followers, each of them strong and loyal, each one gifted with the stone of his own body. Even now, those loyal followers were out there, recruiting others, new blood for his devotion, to do with as he willed.

  Utopia was coming, and all it would take would be the utter reeducation of humankind. His father had been a fool.

  WHILE GRANT TENDED TO Clem’s wounds, Kane helped Brigid stand and walk.

  “I feel dizzy,” Brigid said, her voice lacking its usual strength.

  Kane looked at her, that roguish grin playing across his lips. “Maybe the world just sped up,” he told her.

  “Must be it,” Brigid agreed, leaning against him.

  Apart from nursing a headache, Clem proved to be otherwise okay. “That fish packed quite a punch,” he observed, feeling foolish. “You wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark beach,” he added, looking around nervously.

  “We pretty much eviscerated them, Clem,” Grant assured the oceanographer as he helped him to his feet. “Though, based on previous experience, might be wise to get ourselves the hell out of Dodge before they reconstitute themselves all over again.”

  Clem nodded, wincing as the pain reignited in his skull. He saw Kane helping Brigid walk, and she looked like a woman who had just given birth, weak and stumbling, having given everything she could, no strength left in her muscles. Then he noticed the empty place where Ullikummis had been perched at the edge of the towering, alien hub.

  “Where’s Ullikummis?” he asked.

  “He woke up,” Grant said. “The rest—that’s a story for the ride home.”

  Clem smiled, gazing about the magnificent undersea chamber one last time. “You know, friends,” he said, encompassing Kane and Brigid as they neared, “we should consider ourselves very much honored to have been here, in this amazing facility. It’s doubtlessly the chance in, well, ‘a lifetime’ doesn’t cover it. The chance in generations, perhaps?”

  “It’s a big bad world out there, Bryant,” Kane told him, “and you’ll get plenty of chances to see the craziest of crazy. But let’s do that another day, okay?”

  Clem nodded slowly in agreement, his head pounding once more. Kane was right; one exceptional, once-in-countless-generations opportunity like this was more than enough for one day.

  Chapter 26

  A different ocean. A different day.

  Ullikummis stood at the deserted shore, staring out across the swirling blue of the Atlantic as night fell. He had paced across the land for three days since leaving the Ontic Library, the knowledge of what he had to do next clear in his calculating mind.

  Out there, as seagulls cawed their ugly cries and dipped at the ocean’s waves, there was nothing but sea. A nothingness so absolute that it reminded the Annunaki prince of the bleak solitude that he had called home for four and a half thousand years as he had spiraled through the outermost reaches of the galaxy. He needed no one, craved for no affection, no company. Even now, his loyal followers were dedicating themselves to his cause, and recruiting more and more to do his will when the time came.

  Thus, it was time to begin the second phase. When an individual, be he man or god, raised an army he had to have somewhere to teach it, to train it in the ways of combat and to instruct it in the nature of the new reality it was destined to create.

  Beneath the starry night sky, Ullikummis raised his thick right arm, the scars in the rock there where he had once lost the limb only to have it regrow thanks to the work of the Annunaki genesplicers. He was the master of the rock, and his will would be done. His lava eyes burned fiercely, twin coals amid the gloom, as he set to concentrating on his task.

  There, beneath the waves, lay silt and rocks, masses of debris that made up the bed of the ocean. He felt them in his mind, as a normal man might feel a cool breeze against his skin, felt them rumble as he touched them with his thoughts.

  One by one, the rocks began to hurry to the surface, bubbling through the waves in a rush of water. The first popped out of the ocean with such speed that it almost clipped a seagull’s white wing, the bird cawing in anger as the stone brushed its feathers before plummeting back to rest upon the surface of the sea. One by one, the rocks came, one by one then two by two. And then it was a cascade, a reversed waterfall, except where there should be water there was only stone, and where it should be falling it rose.

  Whatever it was that passed for a smile on Ullikummis’s ugly, misshapen stone-clad face appeared then, just for an instant, jagged and lopsided like his abused body.

  Out in the ocean, the island was beginning to form. The island of Bensalem, the training camp that would be his home.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE OLD province of Mandeville, Dylan, the first priest of the new order, stood before his congregation in what had once been a massive sports venue. The football field had been bombed out and never rebuilt, but its basic oval shape remained, with towering struts marking it out where even the nuclear ravages of two hundred years before had not quite been enough to utterly destroy it. Like so much in this brave new world, once you got outside of the protective walls of the villes themselves, all you found were skeletal monuments to a past long ago forgotten.

  Before Dylan, standing in what had once been the sports field itself, almost seven hundred people waited in patient silence. Some had been blessed with full ascension into the new order, while some merely craved to join, seeking something to save them now that the villes had fallen.

  “People,” Dylan greeted them, his voice amplified by a jury-rigged PA system that was running off a chemical battery. As he spoke, the lights around the vast, open-air auditorium sparked to life, illuminating the field and the people within it. “You are the new utopia. You are the future of the world. Ullikummis will save us all, if we but let him into our hearts.”

  As one, the crowd repeated the name: “Ullikummis, Ullikummis, Ullikummis.”

  Chanting it with one voice.

  “If it ain’t Ullikummis,” Dylan announced, making up the speech as best he could, “I won’t be buying it. He’s our future. Not some clown baron—yes, clown—who never took the time to care about us, to look at how we live and what we need. To try to understand how we talk, how we act. Ullikummis is our future, as he has always been our future. He came from the heavens to bring heaven to Earth, and all you need to do is agree to let that happen.”

  Dylan took a breath, surveying the congregation before him. He had never played to such an audience—hell, a simple sodbuster from Canada, Dylan had never seen so many people in one place. “Do you agree to let heaven rule on Earth?” Dylan shouted, his voice doubling over the PA speakers.

  “Ullikummis, Ullikummis, Ullikummis,” the crowd replied.

  “Show us heaven, god,” Dylan shouted, caught up in the fervor of the crowd. “We are ready.”

  “Ullikummis, Ullikummis, Ullikummis,” the crowed replied once more.

  Everyone that was, except for one lone woman, with long dark hair, olive skin and brown, flashing eyes. She stood among the crowd, working at a cut she had made on her inner forearm, using a needle from her sewing kit to prize free the lump there. The obedience stone had budded again, Rosalia knew, another one flourishing in her system, trying to dull her mind.

  This one was free now, but there would be more yet until she removed every last insidious one. Beside her, her pale-eyed dog barked as he chased his tail, caught up in the excitement of the chanting crowd.

  “Ullikummis, Ullikummis, Ullikummis,” they cried in time with the priest who stood beneath the spotlights, struggling to turn his words into something that crowds would listen to.

  Later, she told herself, when the moment was ripe, she could stop this pretense and ge
t away from these blathering madmen. That was if the multiplying stone beneath her skin didn’t get her first. But for now at least, she had to fit in with these simpleminded fools as they spoke of utopias and heavens and saviors, as they chanted the name of their idol and dragged her along on their crusade.

  Amid seven hundred others, Rosalia raised her fist in the air, the thin line of her cut all but invisible. Let them think she was one of them. “Ullikummis, Ullikummis, Ullikummis,” she shouted in time with the crowd.

  AT THE CERBERUS REDOUBT, high in the Bitterroot mountain range in Montana, Brigid Baptiste was just getting out of recovery, having spent three days under observation following her mental ordeal at the hands of the sentient library. It had not meant to hurt her, she knew; it had merely overwhelmed her, like a kid who played too rough. Shortly after they had left the ocean bed, Brigid had fallen into a deep, trancelike sleep and it was only now that she was able to keep her eyes open for more than twenty minutes at a time.

  “She isn’t really tired,” Kane said jokingly. “She’s just missing my scintillating company. Can’t stay awake without it.” But he was worried, probably more so than anyone else.

  Eventually, when Brigid was up and about, she went to locate Kane, finding him at his usual evening haunt outside the rollback doors of the redoubt, gazing out across the plateau at the darkening sky overhead. The Cerberus facility was at the top of a mountain, and its location afforded some breathtaking views when the skies were clear. This night, however, a few heavy clouds marred that view, doing little to disguise the threat of rain in their intentions.

  “Kane?” Brigid said, knowing better than to sneak up on the ex-Mag.

  Kane turned, visibly admiring his trusted partner for a few seconds. She was dressed in one of the standard-issue jumpsuits, a white one-piece with a blue zipper running a vertical line up its center. Though the tight-fitting suit did much to accentuate the curves of Brigid’s athletic frame, she looked disheveled to Kane’s knowing eye, her hair a wild mess pulled hastily back in a ponytail.