Bear Head

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  That growl from Boyo, as low and quiet as could be, stilled the talk of everyone in the room. The studio people didn’t look. Boyo made them nervous, but then the big dog-model Bioforms were supposed to make you nervous. They were still mostly military or private security by trade. A man like Thompson walking around with Boyo loping at his side, the very sight was supposed to deter people. Not just madmen with axes or pistols, either. Deter people who might try and confront him, to argue with him when he didn’t want it; deter people who might throw something embarrassing or shout a slogan. Warner S. Thompson liked to control when and how he debated. He liked his home crowd advantage.

  Grubb removed his hand and put some welcome distance between them. They went back to watching Thompson. The debate had moved on to the next talking point. The stooge was ashen, no longer taking much of a part.

  “Jesus,” Grubb said again. “He can’t.” But ‘Can’t’ was a word a lot of people used about Thompson, currently frontrunner for the Alabama-Virginia World Senate seat. Can’t, and yet he always did, and then apparently it turned out he could all along. You couldn’t argue with him, because he never put himself where someone could score a point; never quite built a complete windmill you could tilt at. He suggested, he denied, he made outrageous statements that contained so many layers of nested fabrications that you couldn’t ever unpick them all; you ended up tacitly accepting three-quarters of the lies he told in your quest to undo the other 25 per cent. And then the dust settled and everyone loved what he had to say, even though he hadn’t quite said it.

  They were on to Collaring now, Grubb’s personal favourite topic, and Thompson had switched modes from the hard aggressor to the reasonable ‘everyone knows that’ man. “Sure maybe they needed the help back then, but. Hard for a man to feel safe when. I know a lot of Bioforms who really. We feel safer, they feel safer. Knowing that they won’t.” And that ‘won’t’ went nowhere, but in the minds of those at home it went to all manner of fears and worries about what a Bioform – a ton of angry bear, half a ton of ravaging werewolf-lookalike, a monstrous reptile, an angry swarm of bees – what they might do if they got mad enough. Because the people at home, the people who tuned into Fortress America to find out what was threatening their liberty today, they were angry, bitter and scared, but they were only human. What if the Bioforms were just as angry, bitter and scared? When John Smith got drunk and mad and slapped his wife or punched some stranger in a bar, well, soonest mended. When Rover the Bioform got mad, that could mean a trail of torn-open corpses. Sometimes, hidden deep within the trap of ‘They’re not like us’ was the terror of ‘What if they’re just like us, but stronger?’ Sometimes the fear came because you were scared of looking into the eye of the monster and seeing your own reflection.

  “Why I’ve got my own dog, who.” Thompson was saying, all wry raconteur now, smile gone into that satisfied expression that was his other stock in trade. “Nobody had a more. Boyo loves to know that he’s. Loves the Collar, wouldn’t be without. Safer for him, for everyone, prevents any.” Any rampages. Just killing people in the street like an animal. Carole looked back at Boyo, whose eyes were fixed on the screens, watching his master’s face. Boyo was black, brown about the underside of his muzzle, pointed ears, pointed snout, not as big as a lot of bodyguard dog-forms but fast and intelligent. And quite, quite capable of going on a rampage, but only if Thompson told him to. She wondered what he thought, hearing his master talking about him. She could read love in his doggy eyes, and probably it was love, servant for master. The Collar helped with that, but then Boyo had agreed to it. Right now it was only voluntary, although that was high on the list of laws that Thompson was promising to change. The fight for the right of Bioforms to own their own minds had been ongoing ever since the first dog had padded off the production line. Right now, thirty years after the big emancipation laws that had come in the wake of Rex and the Morrow revelations, the pendulum was on its way back and Thompson was riding it.

  “Not saying the Emancipation Acts were a mistake but.” Thompson was saying. “When you can’t feel safe in. People are telling me it’s. Due a change, don’t you? The American citizen can’t be expected to.” Conversational fog to hide the forging of chains. And yet when Thompson lifted his head and smiled just so, mouth tight, eyes almost shut as though blinded by staring into his own genius, something in that impenetrable self-confidence communicated itself to the viewer, to the listener. I’m right, it told them. I’m right, not just in this but in my very being. So that people followed him, lifted him up, put him on a pedestal. Not like a man, a human leader who might be weighed and judged and required to do concrete things, but like the icon of a god, placed above them by right, impossible to challenge or question.

  *

  He was all handshakes and smiles when he came out: the author, the host, a couple of others he’d singled out for cultivating. Carole took note of names, scheduled a time to call them, sound them out. That indefatigable certainty bullied into the room, took up all the available space, became the gravity people orbited around. He ignored the stooge, still pale and shaking. Carole wondered if she should say something, because it was getting harder to find people to play the voice of reason opposite Thompson, and the last thing he wanted was for someone with actual convictions to start a genuine argument, quote facts, bring up any awkward contradictions from past speeches. But Thompson didn’t really do subtext. Someone spoke against him, that made them the enemy, even if they were doing it to his order. He was a man who lived his cover; he didn’t distinguish between who he was and the act he put on a lot of the time. Carole thought that was what people reacted to. She’d gone over the polls and the surveys obsessively, all the qualitative analysis from a legion of consultants tasked to find out just how it was that maverick politician Warner S. Thompson had come to dominate the nation’s conversation. People thought he was genuine, he said it straight, told them the truth. Despite the fact that he never quite told them anything at all. In the moment when he smiled and shook your hand, though; in the moment when he looked straight at the camera and beamed at the audience, you existed for him, and because his world was tiny, just a single point that was his own being, that meant you’d been admitted into the Divine Presence. You were real, for the second he acknowledged you. She’d felt it herself. She saw it happening now. People fell over themselves to catch the edge of that spotlight that always seemed to be on the man.

  Then he had broken abruptly from the crowd, and none of them existed any more. He took his personal light with him, that was just in his mind but that he believed in so firmly he could make others see it. He was grabbing Grubb by the shoulder, what looked like a friendly squeeze but was obviously painful. “Tell me we got the Life Lobby, Pat.”

  “We got them, sir,” Grubb confirmed, legs going twice the pace of Thompson’s to keep up as the man strode away. “Carole’s got the details.” Because Carole always got the details, most of which were not fit for casual overhearing. Mostly it came down to filtering the information down to clear, simple statements Thompson could digest. Not stupid, that was a mistake a lot of his past opponents had made. Not intelligent, either, exactly. Not as the word was generally used. But very clever indeed in the way he needed to be, to shunt through human affairs like he did. A mind that worked in tangents and laterals, between the cracks of regular thought. But no patience for complexities, not when they didn’t serve him. He needed someone like Carole to tell him what things meant, rather than what they were. And Grubb was right in one thing. He did at least listen to her, because she’d spent years learning how to talk to him, the real him, the man behind the gilded bonhomie.

  They got shot of Grubb before they got to the car. He’d go make more calls, then end up in some bar where the Thompson interview was playing, telling people that was his guy, that without him Thompson would be nothing. Probably it would be word of that sort of thing getting back to the man himself that would see Grubb fired sooner rather than later. Thompson wa
s a self-made man. He wouldn’t share credit for himself with anyone, let alone a sagging panhandler like Grubb. She tried to look forward to when Pat Grubb wasn’t a damp presence at her elbow every day they were on the campaign trail, but it would only be someone else. America seemed to have a never-ending supply of middle-aged right-wingers ready to step into those soiled shoes. None of his predecessors had been much better; some had been worse. His successor would be another yard of the same cloth.

  The limo could have driven itself to the hotel but Boyo sat behind the wheel instead. Thompson really was worried about Distributed Intelligence entities, the current bugbear of world concern. It was something he’d spent a lot of time on, Carole knew. Or rather, he had a whole network of people working on it for him, feeding their results back up the chain and then to Carole, who chewed up the facts into a paste sufficiently malleable that Thompson could digest it.

  At the hotel, after the usual flurry of activity from the staff who wanted to make sure he knew just how happy they were to have him enjoying their hospitality, after the last bellboy had been shooed out the door of the suite by Boyo’s growl, it was time for the other Thompson. The private Thompson.

  Boyo lay in front of the door. In repose his frame seemed doggy enough that you just wondered who’d stuck that giant Alsatian in a suit. Thompson retreated to the bedroom and Carole followed, waiting for him to be ready for her to tell him things.

  He sat on the bed, jacket off, tie loosened, the lights turned low, and for a long time he did nothing. All that smile-and-gladhanding was gone from him, like a light had been switched off. His face had gone slack. Carole sometimes wondered if it was like this with the actual DisInt units, the people who weren’t people, just individual cells of a single split personality. Not that she would ever say that to Thompson. He’d be furious, and she’d seen him furious. The thought, the very suggestion it might happen, and she’d be the target, was instantly and unthinkably miserable. She’d do anything to stop him getting into that kind of state. That was why she’d spent so many years learning how to handle him. She was devoted to him, of course. Her fate was absolutely tied to his and, by now, she couldn’t imagine it any other way. But when he was angry she was terrified of him. Anything. She’d do anything.

  Looking into his empty face now, she met his eyes. Something was looking out of them at her, something that could make that face beam and brag and bluster, be the man all those people loved. Something that could go before the cameras and make the features and personality of Warner S. Thompson into a distorting mirror, in which everyone saw what they most wanted, their heart’s desire, something real and genuine and straight-talking.

  And again she wondered if this was what it was like with HumOS or any of the DisInt networks that had sprung up and were now being put right back down to where they could be isolated and controlled. Because what looked out past those loose features seemed almost like some separate detached thing sitting in his head and pulling the levers.

  “I want to play,” he said. Complete sentences, for her. Expressions of desire. And she’d made sure there was a place he could go, a table-full of poker players ready to oblige him. And ready to discreetly lose, because Thompson didn’t lose. He was a great card player, he always said so. Nobody could bluff him. Nobody could tell when he was hustling them. And she had a feeling he was probably right, in a way, because he was who he was and because he had such an individual relationship with the usual run of human codes and signals. But no sense leaving anything to chance so she’d briefed his fellow players very carefully. They were there more as actors than as gamblers. They were there to orbit Thompson’s star, because that was how he saw his life.

  But.

  “Work first, please, sir,” she said softly. “Important news.”

  “Play.” He scowled at her, not angry yet, just a child denied something. And if he was particularly wilful then it would have to wait, but it was her job to push as far as she could. To manage him as much as she could.

  “Word from Braintree, sir.” She almost held her breath, waiting to see if that would get through to him like it usually did, or if he was too far gone into his own desires.

  A spark lit up behind those dead eyes, though. “Good word?”

  “No, sir.” Bracing herself. “Not really bad, sir, but slightly bad.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The mom has gone to a lawyer.”

  “That bitch! That ungrateful bitch!” He was enraged instantly and she backed off all the way across the palatial floor to the door. Through it, she heard Boyo’s anxious whine in the next room. Thompson stood by the bed, braces off one shoulder, trousers sagging, bellowing at the ceiling, “She signed the papers! She isn’t allowed to talk! She took the money!” His burning gaze fixed on her and she trembled, waiting for him to stomp over to her, knowing she’d brought this on herself, she hadn’t handled him, handled Grubb, handled the situation properly, her fault, her fault… But he didn’t, just stood by the bed, face dead again for a moment as he retreated inwards.

  “What lawyer?” His voice still rolled with anger, but he’d got a leash on it for once.

  “Aslan Kahner Laika, sir.”

  “Get my lawyers. Get them to tell those sons of bitches it’s all confidential. It’s none of their business. Cease! Desist! I will break them. I will have them kicked out. I will destroy them and every damn client they’ve got. Tell them!”

  “I’ll put a call in to your lawyers, sir.” And she would interpret Thompson to the lawyers just the same way she interpreted the world to Thompson.

  Again he went dead, sitting back down on the bed, air of a marionette with cut strings. “Want to play,” he said again, but she knew him well enough to sense that something had caught in his mind that wouldn’t just be shouldered aside. “Get me Fellatio,” and he snickered, same way as he always did, same joke as he always made, schoolboy humour.

  She requested a channel to Doctor Marco Felorian of the Braintree Institute. He knew her ID and knew not to keep her waiting. He sounded curt when he picked up. “How is he?”

  “He wants to speak to you.” She kept her tone neutral. Thompson was just sitting there, eyes looking at nothing, thoughts in a holding pattern. She didn’t know if he was going to explode at Felorian or not. Without another word she connected Thompson to the man.

  He scowled through whatever pleasantries the man gave him – Felorian, a tech genius and a surgeon, a biotech man. He’d been big in the Bioform trade, publicly big, and Thompson had been bankrolling him back then. Back when Thompson was all for the Bioforms, because that was what worked for him. Now Felorian did less public work, out in Braintree Penitentiary with a stack of felons at his disposal, but it was still Thompson’s money keeping the man in expensive suits.

  “I want to come see,” Thompson said, probably wedging the words into the middle of one of Felorian’s grandiose sentences. “Show me the model again.” He was scowling fiercely at the wall.

  Not chewing the man out over the lawyers then. Wanting to see the next step of the plan. And it was Thompson’s plan. He had decided on a thing he wanted, and then people like Carole and Felorian and plenty of others had taken those simple, determined pieces and made all the complex arrangements required to turn the ideas into a reality. It was Thompson’s genius, that: people wanted to make him happy. People wanted his smile and handshake. People were scared of his wrath should he be anything other than happy. Carole wanted him to be happy. She was devoted to him, like they all were.

  She got a signal that the channel needed her attention, a string of possible appointments at Braintree, awaiting her say so as to when Thompson would visit. Nothing but the best for him, as always. Felorian would bend over backwards to keep him sweet; to keep the money rolling in, yes, but more than that. It got so a happy Thompson was an end in itself. She chose the most convenient time, within the next forty-eight hours because if Thompson wanted a thing, he wanted it soon, then returned her gaze to her employer.<
br />
  “There’s a game waiting for you, sir,” she said. Those dead eyes were on her, though, neither the wall nor the inside of his head his focus any longer. His face hung from the front of his skull, no expression on it. She saw his thoughts had gone to another favourite pastime.

  “Take them off,” he told her. “Lie on the bed.”

  She felt the brief moment when she was going to say no, but she was devoted to him, after all. The word stuck in her throat. She heard Boyo’s querulous whine from the other room, the way he always did when Thompson decided he needed to get something out of his system by way of fucking his PA.

  And she undressed and lay there as he clambered on top of her, shunting and bullying his way in, the way he did everywhere. Lay there and knew she wanted to please him, just like everyone, just like Boyo in the next room who couldn’t ever not want to serve his master because of the Collar inside his head that made sure of it. Just like she couldn’t ever not want to, just like. Because Thompson needed a PA he could trust, and Doctor Felorian didn’t much care about the legalities. After all, once the operation was done, it wasn’t like she would ever tell anyone.

  And she lay there and made the right sounds and told herself over and over how devoted she was and how much she enjoyed making Warner S. Thompson happy and tried her best not to listen to the trapped little voice saying Get off me get off me get off, until he was finished and got off, zipped up and said, “Going to the game now.” And she sat on the bed and sent the coordinates to Boyo so the dog could drive him there, sent word to the other players that their benefactor was coming to take money off them that his own funds, via her offices, would underwrite. And they’d laugh at his jokes and tell him how shrewd he was. He liked that.