Beforelife

by Randal Graham

  Ian regarded it with interest.

  “Learn The Rules, you say,” said Carl, raising an eyebrow. “I suppose that could be a reference to the time of revelation, when the truth of the Great Omega is made known and her Intercessor bathes in perfect understanding. The fourth prophecy of Jerome — not strictly canon, of course, but almost certainly inspired. When the One has spoken the truth of the Omega, when the One has bridged the chasm, only then shall He gain perfect understanding, only then shall He —”

  “Learn The Rules,” said Ian.

  “Well, the prophecy says ‘lift the veil of ignorance,’ but if you want to get prosaic about it then I guess that ‘learn The Rules’ is as good a phrase as any. But yes, you’ll carry the truth of the Great Omega to our congregation, you’ll gain perfect understanding, and —”

  “HEAVE!”

  “Abe’s drawers!” shouted Rhinnick. “They’ll be here any minute. If the two of you are settled on mooting philosophical whatnots, you can include me out. If there’s one thing I’m certain about it’s that the Author can’t abide another bally fifteen pages of ‘what’s the bloody OM?’ and ‘Who’s the Chosen One?’ and ‘What the dickens does all this mean?’” He fired another angry barrage. “If the Author wants anything,” said Rhinnick, “it’s someone to push along the plot. And since the pair of you insist that yours truly is to be relegated to a mere supporting role in the Epic Saga of Ian Brown . . . well, kindly ensure that someone comes back for the body.”

  And with that, in a scene that really ought to have been shot in high definition, 3D, and slow motion, Rhinnick scrambled up the barricade. He reached the top, screamed “For Zeus!,” cried havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.

  Chapter 39

  This is the part where Tonto fights Socrates.

  This part should be a movie. Or a graphic novel. Even a looping gif would do. This is because no words, by themselves, can do it justice. Nevertheless, a number of them have banded together to give it a try. A few of them are “punch,” “kick,” “fire,” “dodged,” and “explosion.” They and their friends are right below.

  It started with a hail of bullets. Socrates wasn’t taking chances after his first meeting with Tonto. So when he saw her stepping back into Conron Hall, he opened fire.

  That’s when he realized this was going to be a bit tricky.

  Tonto dodged the bullets. Every one of them. It wasn’t magic. It was just that, by the time Socrates fired his gun, Tonto managed to be in a spot the bullets weren’t. Anyone present who hadn’t been an ancient Greek philosopher might have said this was impossible. Socrates knew it wasn’t. This had nothing to do with his philosophical training. He simply knew that this was possible for Tonto because it was possible for him.

  Socrates backflipped out of the rafters and hit the floor at a dead run. He closed the distance between himself and Tonto in less time than it took you to read about it.

  Next came hand-to-hand combat. Like virtually every other episode of hand-to-hand combat in recorded history, this one didn’t actually involve hands meeting hands. For one thing, that’s a silly way to fight unless your goal is to be a champion high-fiver. For another, Socrates and Tonto both knew that any skin-to-skin contact would, for reasons they didn’t fully understand, yield another inconvenient explosion.

  This would have been fine by Tonto, whose goal of protecting Ian could be furthered by blowing herself and Socrates into the next century. But Socrates had planned for this, and had turned up to the party thoroughly covered in body armour. It failed to reveal a single inch of Socratic skin.

  They proceeded to kick, punch, leap, grapple, throw, spin, and somersault their way through a blindingly fast routine that would have made choreographers weep. A boson whip sliced through several molecules of air before Tonto lithely danced to safety and pirouetted into a spinning kick that connected with the back of Socrates’ head. He rolled with the blow, rising beside Tonto and spinning toward her. He broke her jaw with a well-placed knee.

  Tonto staggered backward. Through watering eyes, she caught a glimpse of Nappy dragging the body that formerly thought of itself as Zeus through one of the exits, straining to pull the unconscious giant away from the eye of the storm.

  Tonto leapt back into the fray.

  The few assembled scholars who’d failed to escape the Hall now fled toward the exits, as though an auditor had turned up to review their research accounts. A few of them pulled a Lot’s Wife, glancing back over their shoulders at the mêlée. And while their relative salinity stayed unchanged, they were treated to a Sight.

  What they saw was the single most beautiful thing that anyone had ever seen — which is saying something, because everyone present had already seen Tonto.

  Tonto at rest was one thing. Tonto and Socrates fighting each other was something else.

  It was the martial-arts equivalent of a duet played by Mozart and Bach; or a Christopher Wren Cathedral featuring furnishings by Michelangelo, Donatello, and Rodin.

  It was to ordinary fisticuffs what the Taj Mahal is to an unmarked grave, or what the Detroit Philharmonic is to a jug band.

  Even if you’d been able to watch the spectacle in ultra-slow motion, you’d never have been able to say who punched whom, who dodged what, or what was fired at which part of whomever’s whatnot. But you would have been entranced. What you’d have registered was a sense of unimaginably fast movement and unsurpassable beauty — a sensation like . . . well, a sensation like Tonto and Socrates trying desperately to end each other. There weren’t many useful analogies. Possibly Mona Lisa trying to kill the David, or Euler’s Identity doing its best to mug the Pythagorean theorem.

  It called to mind the spiralling, fluidic beauty of funnel clouds, whirlpools, and your better class of vortices, and it banished any thought of the physical limitations that applied to human beings. Tonto and Socrates appeared to regard gravity, friction, muscle strain, and fatigue as things that happened to other people.

  Every attack was countered. Every blow was parried or dodged. Every dodged or parried blow flowed seamlessly into another attack.

  They met in a mid-air flurry of scarcely visible kicks, punches, elbows, knees, bites, a couple of hair pulls, and what looked to be some sort of excruciating noogie.

  They dropped silently to the hardwood, each one crouching on all fours. They circled slowly, ready to pounce.

  They twitched and suddenly seemed to move at relativistic speed. Socrates cracked his boson whip just as Tonto unsheathed a knife and flicked it into hurling position.

  The whip arced toward Tonto. The knife sailed toward Socrates. A sliver of a fraction of a millisecond later . . .

  They froze.

  They froze completely.

  The knife, the whip, the Socrates, and the Tonto. They froze in place as though some careless viewer had sat on the pause button right in the middle of the greatest action scene ever filmed.

  The weapons hung in the air, defying the sort of rules that feature prominently in your better class of physics lectures.

  It’s anatomically inaccurate to say that every muscle in both bodies strained to move. Tonto’s cardiac muscle, for example, wasn’t straining at all. On the contrary, it merrily pumped away in its usual manner. All of the usual peristaltic bits continued to peristalt, and various sphincters carried out their important work. But quite a lot of the pair’s muscles did strain to no effect.

  The muscles required for making puzzled faces at each other appeared to function normally.

  Silent puzzlement carried on for seven seconds.

  The mahogany double doors of Conron Hall creaked open.

  The City Solicitor stepped in. Isaac toadied along behind.

  The City Solicitor stalked forward and examined the frozen figures.

  “Hmm,” he said, in the way a lot of people would upon encountering frozen figures.

 
; “I believe we can conclude that your theory was correct, Isaac,” he said.

  “So it would appear, Your Eminence,” said Isaac, who stepped forward and tapped Tonto on the forehead. She went cross-eyed. “Through sheer force of will you were able to —”

  Isaac abruptly fell silent in response to the Solicitor’s raised hand.

  “And Brown can do this too?” said the Solicitor.

  “The data supports that hypothesis, my lord.”

  Tonto’s brow rose half an inch.

  “And Brown doesn’t know that he has this . . . talent,” said the Solicitor.

  “The data supports that hypothesis, my lord,” said Isaac, again.

  The City Solicitor circled slowly around the two, frozen combatants. Two perfect specimens. Two equals. Two opposing variables that cancelled each other out. He scratched his chin.

  “I wonder, Isaac,” he said, “whether my talent can touch Brown? Can two who share this talent affect each other directly — through acts of will, I mean — or must we act upon each other by other means?”

  “Unknown, my lord. We lack the empirical data needed in order to —”

  “Very well,” said the City Solicitor. “Bring Socrates’ gun. Ensure that it’s equipped with Stygian rounds. If I can’t touch Brown directly, perhaps the Styx can claim his mind. He’ll serve as a useful test before we set our sights on higher things. And as for you, Ms. Choudhury,” he said, turning toward her. “I wonder if I could . . . blink you out of existence? I wonder if I could unmake you in the same way you were made.”

  Tonto’s puzzlement muscles worked themselves to a frenzy. She strained against the unseen force. A single tear managed to break free of the unseen force’s grip and trace a path down Tonto’s cheek.

  “You’re not real, you know,” said the City Solicitor, drawing closer.

  A quiet, respectful cough from the immediate southwest indicated that Isaac had something on his mind.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said Isaac, bobbing respectfully. “Strictly speaking, Your Lordship, your last statement was not entirely accurate — about Ms. Choudhury being real, that is. What I mean, my lord, is that although the mechanism for this young woman’s creation differed markedly from the traditional method of river-borne manifestation, she is, in point of fact, real in every sense of the word. The nature of your power is such that —”

  “I understand, Isaac,” said the City Solicitor.

  “I simply wished to convey that you are able —”

  “I get it, Isaac.”

  “Of course, my lord.”

  “I was making a point,” said the City Solicitor.

  “Very good, sir. My apologies. Please continue.”

  “I’ve lost it now.”

  “Dreadfully sorry, my lord.”

  “It was an excellent point, I’ll have you know.”

  “No doubt, my lord.”

  The City Solicitor sneered at Isaac before turning back toward Tonto.

  “Real or not,” he whispered, grasping Tonto by the chin and tilting her head to meet his gaze, “I need you alive. You’re connected to Brown, the same way that Socrates here is connected to me.” He turned her head this way and that, slowly examining every inch. “It’s so clear to me now,” he said. “I . . . I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. I see the weaving of it. The pattern. The connection flowing from you to . . . to . . .” He paused, and registered surprise.

  There it was.

  “How delightfully unexpected,” said the City Solicitor.

  Then he smiled.

  “Come, Isaac,” he said, gravely. “We have business to conclude with Mr. Brown.”

  * * *

  Ian and Carl were running down the hall as fast as they could. This wasn’t especially fast, given the fact that Ian was toting Rhinnick’s bullet-riddled body in what is generally known as “the fireman’s carry.”

  Rhinnick, always keen to collar the conversation, moaned groggily.

  They ran past an inconsequential number of office doors, around a series of corners, and straight into the entryway of a glass-walled laboratory containing a number of impressively shiny machines flanked by colourfully blinking, old-school, cabinet-sized computers.

  In the distance they could hear the sounds of pursuit, as those officers who’d escaped the brunt of Rhinnick’s Last Stand decided that the coast was clear and rejoined the chase.

  This fact wasn’t lost on Carl, who panted the words “they’re coming” before finding new reserves of speed that had been tucked somewhere deep in his I-Don’t-Want-To-Be-Shot regions.

  Ian managed to speed up, too, spurred on by a voice in his head that kept assuring him that The End was close at hand.

  Jackbooted feet drew closer.

  Ian ran.

  Rhythmic cries of “oy, oy, oy,” grew louder.

  Ian ran faster.

  A bullet streaked past Ian’s ear and shattered a trophy case.

  Ian and Carl didn’t bother looking back.

  They barged into a stairwell, rabbited through a twisting warren of brightly tiled halls, burst through a particularly uninteresting door marked 217, and ran past several academic grants’ worth of impressively shiny lab equipment.

  Then they stepped into a box and disappeared.

  During the final ninety seconds of the pursuit, there had been only one interesting slice of dialogue. It had happened when Ian had first caught sight of the box. It ended with Carl making a slightly disgusted face and saying, “What in Abe’s name are you talking about?”

  This had been in response to Ian saying, “Where do you put your hamster?”

  Two minutes later, Ian was face-to-face with a priest named Norm Stradamus.

  Chapter 40

  “Norm,” said Ian, dully.

  “Intercessor!” said Norm, beaming.

  “Norm. Stradamus,” said Ian, even dully-er than before.

  “Quite right!” said Norm Stradamus, bobbing excitedly, accosting Ian with one of those arm-quaking, double-handed handshakes, and giving the overall impression that he was about to burst.

  Norm Stradamus, High Priest, Principal Prophet, and First Prelate of the Mysteries of Omega (as he was known amongst his friends) looked exactly how you’d expect him to look, so long as what you expected was a slightly hunchbacked, heavily gristled, eagle-nosed headmaster, fully equipped with scraggly beard, wispy hair, and parchment skin. A black skullcap and dark green robe completed the picture.

  He smelled like liniment, old books, and the sort of person who spends a lot of time in caves, because he did.

  Rhinnick, Llewellyn Llewellyn, and Carl rounded out the rest of the local population. They were standing in what appeared to be a squat, man-made cave hewn from porous red stone. It wasn’t the roomiest cave in literature, falling closer to the claustrophobic, freight-elevatorish end of the spectrum than to the end typically favoured by brooding crime fighters who dress like bats. The air was heavy with the fug of too many men in too little space. The cave was lit by torches mounted on the unnaturally straight stone walls, and also by a single, glowing orb that bobbed in the air behind Norm’s shoulder. The orb darted this way and that, apparently governed by the direction of Norm’s gaze. When Norm turned his head the orb would swivel around behind it, causing shadows to carousel around the cavern in an eye-watering manner not recommended for queasy cave explorers.

  The orb gave Ian a headache.

  Everything was giving Ian a headache. His head had been pounding — justifiably — ever since he’d been trapped behind the Shoopy Cola wreckage and pinned down by enemy fire. What he wanted most was sleep. Well, that and Penelope. What he really wanted most was to find Penelope. But a comfy bed and an extra-strength painkiller claimed the silver and bronze positions.

  Ian pinched the bridge of his nose and looked away from the dancing
shadows. He settled his eyes on the one thoroughly unlit, non-migraine-inducing slice of local geography, which was a single man-sized passage leading out of the cave.

  Llewellyn Llewellyn activated a datalink and pressed a series of keys. The air in the cavern shivered and hummed, briefly falling out of focus as though someone had fiddled with the controls of a cosmic viewscreen.

  “Port suppression engaged,” said Llewellyn Llewellyn. “We don’t want anyone following you here. IPT systems can’t cut through the field,” he added, responding to Ian’s head-scratching expression.

  “Cool,” said Ian, who thought it was. A moment later he connected a series of mental dots and amended his statement with “Wait — what about Tonto?”

  “And what about Zeus and Nappy?” added Rhinnick, who up until this point had been remastering the art of standing upright, despite his inclusion on the injured list for being noticeably more bullet-riddled than usual. He was regenerating nicely. He leaned on the cave wall and picked a bullet from his right thigh. “How in Abe’s name is the balance of our cadre, or troupe if you prefer, supposed to make like Mary’s lamb and follow along without the use of an IPT?”

  “They won’t be coming,” said Carl, darkly. “We can’t risk it. The cops were right on our tail. Socrates too.”

  The group shared a collective shudder.

  “Tonto will stop him,” said Ian, reflexively, although he was biting his lower lip and wiping his forehead while he said it. From what he had seen in the last few weeks, Tonto had easily earned the label of “Irresistible Force” — but only if you ignored the explosion outside Detroit Mercy, which had been the result of her first encounter with the assassin. As for what a second meeting between the two would mean — Ian shuddered again. Tonto herself had said that Socrates couldn’t be stopped.

  “The big fellow’s been mindwiped,” added Carl, matter-of-factly. “Socrates shot him. Stygian toxin. There was nothing I could do.”