Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)
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“I do get run down more often than I used to,” Irene said conciliatorily. She patted him on the shoulder for additional reassurance.
“I’ll just set it out of the way until you need it,” Rumfeld said. He carted his contraption into the next room.
He strolled out a few seconds later holding the latest broken device. “I suppose this is worth saving.”
“What’s that thing?” Aggie asked, sounding more afraid than curious.
“It’s the dog-de-hairer. Ensures you never have to sweep up another scrap of pet dander.”
“The sheikh does love his hounds,” Irene said. “Possibly the only English thing about him.”
“It wins the raffle, then,” Rumfeld said. Happy, he sauntered off to his garage—now that the latest order of food had filled up his work area adjoining the kitchen, owing to a miscalculation. Irene’s vision tended to blur with her sugar surges, which led to quantities ordered off her work lists in the wrong measure. Rumfeld’s love of her did not appear the least daunted by having his personal workspace evaporated better than what a bomb could have done to it.
The second he was out of earshot, Thornton said, “When’s someone going to tell him we filled up that room with the ‘miscalculated’ food order to drive him out of the house?”
Frumpley answered for the others who merely lowered their eyes in shame. “The very instant we tell him the reason the mistress banned pets from the house was that de-hairer was leaving them so traumatized they were running around the estate eating trespassers to the bone, and then gnawing on the bones until there was nothing left. The only reason we’re not all in prison is that Parliament decided it was a more cost-effective way to deal with its unrepentant murderers.” He turned the page in his newspaper.
“You mean the animals are still out there, eating people?” Aggie said, her face twisting into a mask of horror. She bit into a tart green apple, using it as comfort food to steady her nerves.
“My only complaint,” Frumpley said, “is they’re so high functioning they won’t touch anyone living on the estate, only nasty criminal types broaching the barriers. They can smell the intruders’ intent. Anyone happy to be out there, they leave alone, like those sales urchins Ermies dumped on us. Some of those wolfhounds are so big, the horses are afraid of them.” Frumpley sipped his coffee, which always accompanied his reading of the newspaper; a comforting ritual in an uncomfortable land.
Aggie took another nerve-sedating bite of her apple.
“They’re a bit redundant now that we have humans living out there whose sole purpose in life is to eat people, aren’t they?” Thornton said snidely. He continued grooming his nails with his nail clipper and file, part of a Swiss pocket knife he kept in his pocket.
“Tell me you’re joking!” Aggie exclaimed.
Frumpley sighed. “Were that he was.”
“What does the de-hairer device do to the poor creatures?” Aggie asked. “Does it just drive them mad?”
Frumpley pranced into the next room, where Rumfeld kept his work-in-progress contraptions, and brought back a super 8 projector, already loaded with the film. He dimmed the lights in the kitchen.
“Pass the popcorn, Irene,” Thornton said.
Irene handed him the bowl of popcorn on the counter. “You’re both bigger dogs than anything running around this estate.”
Aggie stared wide-eyed, put her hands up to her face demonstratively in advance of actually seeing anything for fear of what came next, as the wolfhound—admittedly one hairy beast—stepped into the plastic bubble of the machine. After the machine was turned on, the hound howled and ran helplessly like a hamster in a running wheel. But the sphere, mounted above the ground by the calipers which held it in place, could spin to accommodate the dog no matter how fast it ran without actually going anywhere, and without interrupting the suction being applied to the animal.
Frumpley realized it wasn’t a vacuum device, however, so much as a static-field generator. The magnetic fields made the dog’s hairs stand up until they were ultimately uprooted form the animal, leaving savannahs of exposed flesh amidst small oasis-like clumps of hair when it was through.
The dog looked and acted rabid when it was pulled out of the machine. Rumfeld opened the transparent sphere on the animal, watched it run barking into the yard, saying, “I think some minor adjustments ought to do it.”
Thornton cackled. “How many minor adjustments has it been, Frumpley? You’re a better scholar of history than I am. Of course, you’re more motivated to keep score.”
“Twelve, all told,” Frumpley said. “The man is out of his depths with electromagnets. We’ll come in here one morning, and the dogs will be wedged into solid objects, like that failed Tesla experiment in that movie, what was it—
“Those poor animals,” Aggie said.
“He’s been driven mad at the thought of winning over Irene,” Thornton said. “He used to be a decent mechanic. Now he fixes unfixable things, makes them worse, more deadly, with each iteration. I agree with Frumpley. We’ll walk in here one morning, and the kitchen will have condensed into a black hole, and we’ll pop out on the far side of the sun. Something has to be done.”
“You could put him out of his misery, Irene,” Frumpley said. “Kindness is no tonic here.”
“You two take a message like blind men take to hand signals.”
Thornton laughed. “Run the film again. I haven’t finished my popcorn. Too busy laughing the first time around.”
“Don’t you have work to do?” Frumpley said, turning the page on his newspaper.
“Fine,” Thornton said, taking the hint, and exiting curtly.
“Says here the Croats and Serbs are going at it again,” Frumpley uttered, perusing the article in the paper.
Irene sighed. “Where do people find the energy for war? Everyday life takes it out of me.” After bending down to reach the shelf under the butcher block table, she set the cake tins out as if she were laying the foundation bricks of the Great Pyramids; it seemed to take as much effort.
THIRTY-SIX
Robin stepped out on her bedroom balcony. She watched as a canvassed truck released a group of prisoners, all wearing orange. The truck drove off, the driver and the guards in back of the vehicle not waiting to see if the prisoners even made it to the woods for cover.
They didn’t.
Mangy-coated wolf hounds attacked and ravaged them.
Drew stepped onto the balcony beside her, eyed the same scene unfolding below. “You should really try to get into the spirit of things around here.”
“I confess, I don’t see the point in living life from moment to moment, seeing no further than your nose.”
“Well, you should try it. You’re becoming a real stick in the mud. How do you expect to free up enough psychic energy to keep reaching out to your Renaissance men if you can’t laugh at anything? Humor is the biggest re-energizer there is.”
“Re-read your Freud; jokes and their relation to the unconscious. I assure you, there’s nothing lighthearted about a good joke. There’s no connection between genuine humor and the simple silliness of these people.”
Drew sighed. “I honestly don’t know how you made it this far. I could sooner move a mountain to a new location one spoonful at a time than broach your defenses. You could give these incorrigible people pointers.”
Robin snorted. “Maybe. Still see no reason to sink to their superficiality.”
Drew took a deep breath, though he couldn’t imagine there was enough hot air in the world to float his spirits right now. “You may yet succeed with your agenda to shepherd the Renaissance types across the threshold to higher consciousness. The thing is: failure is a better teacher.”
It was as if the demon of self-importance had taken ahold of Robin and refused to let go.
***
“My wife’s pregnant,” Lord Grimley declared. “She’s sterile, mind you, but she’s pregnant. Do you find that funny, Minerva? I sure as hell do.”
“Three months to the day.”
“During your last visit here then?” Minerva smoothed the wrinkles out of the back of his jacket with the passing of her hand. The act might have been construed as sexually suggestive for anyone who didn’t know her better. She shouldn’t be attending to him at all; that was a footman’s job, but it was his request.
“What are you suggesting?” Lord Grimley asked.
“The vortex, sir.”
Lord Grimley laughed. “I declare, Minerva, you have that divine madness of artists and fools. I envy you for that. I have only duty, obligation, honor, and soporifics—which are needed in great quantity after a healthy dose of obligation, honor, and duty.” He turned to admire himself in the mirror and strike a statuesque pose.
He gestured for her to join him on the terrace, where he sipped his Arabian coffee in a small cup, getting in character for his meeting with the sheikh. “I remember when you had to go to Arabia to meet a sheikh. I suppose with China owning America, it’s only fair we do our part to sell ourselves to foreigners. The Arabs might add a desperately needed sense of color. The English are far too pale for their own good. You can’t negotiate peace while looking anemic, steals all your thunder. You can’t negotiate anything from a position of perceived weakness.”
“You talking about your wife’s decision to go ahead with the pregnancy?” She rotated the faces on his medals so they were all staring into oblivion at the appropriate angle.
“You’re better at getting inside my head than my shrink, Minerva. She’s having triplets, no less, did I mention that? The only way I can see myself through the mess is to marry them off to the Oswald girls. What a waste, you never expend an entire brood of men on one family when you could multiply your political influence by marrying them off to three different families. But the Oswalds would never recover from the sleight.” He took another sip of his bitter coffee and stared at the lavish gardens. “Triplets! Do you believe that?”
“The vortex, sir.” She twisted his buttons to line up their gold brocade patterns.
“You’re lucky I don’t believe in such nonsense, or I’d sue Lady Harding for undermining my future better than a career of political failures. You tell her I was doing rather well on my own without any help from her.”
“Don’t blame yourself for a world in tatters. Too many fools think enriching themselves at others’ expense is the path to salvation. God will get them.” She braided his shoulder tassels like doing a horse’s mane for a dressage tournament.
“Sadly, the Old Testament God and his vengeful wrath is out of vogue. The New Testament God with his commandments and prescriptive formulas for life is all the rage. People need rules to break, lines in the sand to cross over. It can’t all be chaos. Someone’s got to throw a baseball diamond over the whole thing, give people a mandala to focus their mind on.” He handed her his empty cup.
She poured him another demitasse full. He greedily took the cup.
“What the hell gives with that garden? You’re growing apples the size of honeydew melons and your pumpkins look like something out of a Grimm faerie tale.”
“The vortex, sir.” She ran her fingernails through the corduroy ridges in his scarlet jacket to clean them of fine particulates, enjoying her OCD break from reality.
Lord Grimley sighed. “Maybe I need to find a one-answer-fits-all solution. The world’s so damn complex, anymore, no one understands it. We have analysts that carve out the puzzle pieces, code writers that fit them into equations on computers, and we have to hope the computers are smart enough to fit the pieces together and can react fast enough to keep global civilization from imploding on itself from one nanosecond to the next. As close as humans can get to a big picture understanding is to get enough of those analysts in one room. That’s a Tower of Babel if there ever was any. I fear all is lost, Minerva.”
“You’ll feel better after you’ve stayed a day or two.”
“I always do.”
“It’s the vortex, sir.” She raked his back with all five fingers on each hand, tracing the grooves of the corduroy’s ridges.
He laughed. “I surrender. Let’s go find this vortex of yours. What do you use, a dowsing rod?”
“The forces are more concentrated at various locations in the house and throughout the estate. I don’t recommend you get any closer than you are now. You need to build up a tolerance for these things.” She stood back to admire her masterpiece, subtly conveying that Lord Grimley himself was a finished work of art. She could tell Lord Brimley appreciated her stern sober evaluation of her handiwork; he puffed his chest out.
“To hell with that. I’ve been married to my wife for twenty-three years, haven’t developed a tolerance for her yet. No time like the present. If it cures my headache, we’ll call the outing a success.”
“Yes, sir.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“I need a blue pen.” Dyspepsia slammed the ballpoint against the desktop. “I can’t fill out a grant proposal with a red pen.”
Li Wei—the Chinese ghost from an obscure province in China Dyspepsia couldn’t recall no matter how many times she asked him to refresh her memory—found the blue pen beneath her bed, and levitated it to her.
She grabbed the marker out of the air. Satisfied it was extruding just the right amount of ink, not too much to invite running, not too little as to force her to press extra hard or overwrite each word to make her words count, she pressed pen to paper with greater confidence.
“Why don’t you type it?” Li Wei suggested, his voice soothing, parental. “It’ll look neater if you type it.”
“Look, I’m sorry they didn’t have typewriters in your day so you could work out your fetish for mechanical contraptions during your lifetime. But I do my best thinking with my right hand. With both hands, I sound about as convincing as a pit of quicksand promising it’s going to cough up its secrets.”
“I’ve got to go,” Li Wei said, sounding curt. It wasn’t like him.
“Why?” When she got no response, she whirled around. She stopped breathing. Her mouth hung open. Minerva entered her servant’s suite, stood in the doorway, and beheld the same sight.
“Is that what I think it is?” Dyspepsia asked, refusing to move any part of her body but her mouth; she didn’t even blink.
“It’s one of the hairless bug-eyed aliens trying to invade us. They’re testing the vortex to see if they have a lock on the frequency. And once they have it, look out, full on invasion. Whatever you do, don’t acknowledge it. Don’t let him think he’s got a fix on your brainwaves. Or we will be ground zero.”
“As if I have any more room in my head for transdimensional beings. That’s what got me to this point in the first place. I won’t stand for any more distractions from my grant writing.” She swiveled back to face her desk. “Li Wei knows how to share space, give him that, senile codger.” Dyspepsia reprised her grant writing, focused on imprinting the paper with the words: “Our proposal will save Parliament sixty percent over other sanctuaries for special needs clients.” She spelled out the exact figure next to drive the point home: “One-point-five million a year for the size population we can house on the Harding estate.”
Minerva approached Dyspepsia’s desk, and took up a chair at the side of the desk, rearranged her skirt while keeping a detached eye on their visiting alien by way of the small mirror on Dyspepsia’s desk.
“I’m getting strange images popping into my head, Minerva. I think it’s trying to communicate with me telepathically.”
“Overwrite the images with shots of Tahiti, Sumu mud-wrestling, Geico commercials, anything, just don’t give him the satisfaction.”
Dyspepsia sighed. “Fine.”
“You and your ability to communicate with these creatures across dimensio
ns. You’d think it was bad enough just to see the damn things.” Minerva attended a spot on her dress. When she couldn’t eradicate it with spit and her thumb, she switched to makeup accessories to conceal the offending mark.
“Vortex or no vortex, this place is full of ghosts,” Dyspepsia said, effusively extending her argument on paper. She was trying not to overdo it, but was having trouble controlling herself. She had a lot riding on this grant proposal. She had wrangled for a promotion for three years and nothing. Everyone had been promoted except for her. The staff didn’t want any excuse to answer to someone who was forever seeing ghosts and all manner of exotic creatures from dimensions X, Y, and Z. Made it hard to take her seriously. With no upward movement possible, that left opening up lower ranks beneath her. This was her one big chance. Irene had a better chance at promotion than Dyspepsia. Rake would be elected prime minister before she saw a wardrobe change.
The exasperated alien, desperate to break through, tromped over to the desk, grabbed the pen out of her hand, and drew the picture he was putting in her head on the scratch pad. It showed a giant spaceship the size of Cincinnati crashing into the Alaskan tundra near a thicket of radio towers. “Alien Invasion,” he scribbled at the top of the picture.
“What did I tell you?” Minerva said excitedly. “Start singing Bozz Scaggs. Aliens can’t stand Bozz Scaggs.” In her best singing voice, which was genuinely horrid, Minerva sang:
Lido missed the boat
That day he left the shack
But that was all he missed
He ain't comin' back
At a tombstone bar
In a juke-joint car he made a stop
Just long enough
To grab a handle off the top
Next stop Chi'town
Lido put the money down
Let her roll
He say, "one more job oughta get it
One last shot 'fore we quit it"