The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  Did the church know that private investigation firms could use out-of-state plates? It had worked its way into detective dramas on TV and holos, much to Joe's disgust. And Prudential was the biggest and most prominent investigation firm in California; it would be the logical place to start checking. The Colorado plates would have to come off, just in case. Because Thomas could be dangerous; I felt sure of it now.

  12

  VIC AND TORY

  The next day Tuuli and I drove to the Hollywood-Burbank Airport, and from there took a skybus to Sky Harbor in Phoenix. After a thirty-minute wait at Sky Harbor, we took the mail-stop shuttle that serves Wickenberg, Lake Havasu City, and places north from there. Places that didn't have scheduled air service in the days before AG.

  All to the good, right? Skybuses can be small and still economical to operate, which means you can have a lot of small ones with frequent departures. Also they're a lot cheaper to build than airplanes were. They land and take off vertically, make slow and almost silent approaches, and they're a lot cheaper, easier, and safer to fly than the big, clumsy, noisy, polluting airfoil craft of six or eight years ago. And they don't require roads, runways, or large fields. All in all they're like a clean, superfast bus service, which is why people started calling them skybuses.

  Almost no one today wants to go back to the old ways of travel. Or telephoning. Or going to the library or heating a building, or . . . You name it. The problem is, you never have a chance to get used to things. You learn a trade today, and it may disappear tomorrow. Not mine, but a lot of them. Forty or fifty years ago, a guy named Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock. I read it about the time—about the time my folks were killed, and it was old then. If he wrote it today, he could call it Now Shock. And twenty, twenty-five years ago, a science fiction writer named Vinge—Vernor Vinge—wrote about a future when things changed so fast that people—biological people—couldn't handle it anymore. Well, I'll tell you what. When the research in nanotechnology breaks through the barriers it's run into . . .

  Sorry. That's not what you're here to record. Blame it on the Veritas. So. Where were we? Oh yeah. Tuuli and I were going to visit the Merlins. Vic was waiting for us at the Wickenberg airport. He turned out to be a sprightly old guy. I'd have judged him at a lively seventy-five and been short by ten years. He was also taller than I'd expected, but thin: close to 6 feet and probably 130 pounds. But in jeans, a twill workshirt, and work boots, he looked lean and wiry, not frail. He shook my hand with a strong grip, and appreciated Tuuli with his eyes. I could tell she loved him right away.

  My first impression was, he'd never murder anyone.

  He led us to his pickup and we sped away from town, at first on a highway, then on a narrow blacktop road too minor to rate a center stripe. The air was dry, the April sun bright, and the desert had more vegetation than you might think. It was dominated mainly by what Vic identified for me as mesquite—broad, thorny, 6- to 10-foot shrubs—and in places by what he called creosote bush. There were also lots of spiny cane cactuses 3 to 5 feet tall with big pink flowers, and similar ones so thick with stiff pale spines, they seemed to wear a white aura. He called both kinds chollas. There was a scattering of saguaro cactus, too, some of them 30 feet tall. Vic said they were getting toward their upper elevation limit there. Graceful ocotillas were scattered almost everywhere. Shrubs I guess you could call them, thorny shrubs without twigs or branches, their leaves tiny and sparse, but bright green. Their spiny, sprawling, multiple green stems grew from a common base, to spread 20, maybe 30 feet across, each stem ending with clusters of vivid red flowers.

  I could get to like that country, at least in the spring.

  After a while we came to a mailbox that read Vic & Tory Merlin, and from there left the blacktop for a private road that obviously had never known an engineer or road grader. In about a mile of gradual climbing, we reached a range of hills that, farther on, grew to a long low mountain, and the road entered a small canyon. A little brook trickled down it, among rounded stones, with groups of distorted old cottonwoods along its banks. During the occasional storm, according to Vic, the brook could become quite a stream, though most of the time it was dry.

  About a mile up the canyon we came to their home, a low, pink-tan adobe ranchhouse with narrow, deep-set windows. Behind it, a windmill pumped water to a tank on a roof-high timber platform, the water supply for the house. They had a GPC-driven pump that did their pumping when the wind was down—gravity is always there, and as cheap as the wind—but Vic said they enjoyed having the windmill do it.

  Tory was on the porch to greet us, a small woman, not much bigger than Tuuli. Her hair was still red-tinged, though she was probably as old as her husband. Her eyes were chestnut brown like Molly Cadigan's, and just as direct and powerful. But her look was less aggressive than Molly's, more calm and—knowing is the word, I guess. I don't believe anything could flap her—not the arrival of the angel of death, not the end of the world. According to Winifred Sproule, Ray Christman thought Tory was as powerful as Vic. I wasn't sure what Christman meant by powerful—I wasn't sure what I meant by powerful—but it seemed to me that if anything she might be more powerful than Vic. And I got that impression just in the minute or so between being introduced on the porch and her going into the kitchen to check on the coffee. She seemed to me like someone who could pretty much control whatever went on around her, if she wanted to.

  The living room was big, the ceiling supported by vigas, rough-hewn timbers with axe marks on them. More than a century old, I'd guess. One wall had a wide adobe fireplace. Tuuli and I had taken seats on a comfortable benchlike sofa that might have been made of local cottonwood, upholstered with big fat cushions. Vic sat across from us in a wicker rocker that would have seemed old-fashioned to my dad, who was born in 1917.

  "How did you know about Tuuli?" I asked.

  He grinned at me. "We've got friends who keep up to date on psychics and who did what." He turned to Tuuli then. "We first heard about you after you took care of the poltergeist that Emmy Raye Crockett had trouble with, after she bought that mansion at Pacific Palisades."

  I looked at my wife. She'd never told me anything about a poltergeist! It must have been before I'd met her. And for Emmy Raye Crockett! Doing a successful psychic gig for a major, free-talking country-western star must have gotten important word-of-mouth promotion, as well as publicity in the New Age magazines and newsletters.

  "How'd you handle that?" he asked.

  Tuuli blushed, something I'd never seen her do before. "I'm not sure," she said. "Well, I guess I am now, partly, but at the time . . . When the dishes started to fly, and the ashtrays and books, my hair stood out like this." She held her hands a foot from her head. "So I admired it. I thought, you are amazing! Truly marvelous! And I meant it, because it was. It really was.

  "When I thought that, I could feel the change, from anger to something else—pleased pride. No one had admired her before! Ever! I say 'her' because she'd been a woman, I could tell; an old woman who'd lived unappreciated and scorned, and died neglected. Then she picked up a heavy glass tabletop and threw it in the fireplace. It broke in a thousand pieces! After that she stopped. Emmy Raye told me the ghost had never thrown anything heavy before. Mostly it hadn't really thrown things at all, just knocked things over and blew curtains—things like that. When it threw the tabletop, it felt to me as if it had already stopped being angry and was just showing off. I don't think it had ever admitted to itself how powerful it was."

  My hair was standing up just hearing about it. For a minute there, psychic felt really real to me. I didn't doubt it had happened the way Tuuli said. It wouldn't be like her to exaggerate. Until after I started dating her, psychic had never been real to me at all, even though the firm hired a psychic consultant now and then; that's how I got to know Tuuli. And sometimes we'd gotten useful information from them. Now I asked myself what kind of world she lived in, where you communicate with ghosts. What was it like to have dishes and books
and tabletops flying around? Tory had come back from the kitchen while Tuuli was talking. "Then what?" she asked.

  Tuuli shrugged. "After a few seconds the poltergeist went away, and that was the end of it."

  "How could you tell it had gone away?" I asked, "if it had already stopped throwing things."

  "She wasn't there anymore. I could tell. I couldn't feel her anymore."

  I let it go at that and turned to Vic, moving the conversation in the direction I wanted and needed. "According to Winifred Sproule, you're psychic. And you knew Ray Christman personally. Could you concentrate on him and find out whether he's alive or not? And where he is?"

  He laughed. "If you want information like that, ask Tuuli here. Or Ole. I don't compete with folks in the consulting business."

  His answer should have irritated me, but it didn't. I did wonder though whether he could but wouldn't, or would but couldn't. I changed the subject again, telling him what Sproule had said about his being the source of Christman's theology. That's the word I used: "theology." He grinned at it.

  "I did send him write-ups from time to time. I needed to write it down anyway, so all I had to do was mail photocopies. A lot of it there isn't words for, of course, or familiar concepts to frame it in, so he'd fly out here now and then to go over it with us. But a lot of it he never fully got, and what he taught, and the procedures he applied, were his own, not ours."

  "But wasn't your material the basis of his . . ." I had to grope for the word. "His cosmology? And his, ah, technical procedures? That's what Sproule said."

  He nodded. "Yep, that's right. When Ray first decided to start a church, he wanted us to go in on it with him. We'd be the spiritual leaders, and he'd be the executive director, in charge of management and promotion. But it looked to us like the wrong thing to do. For one thing, we'd lose too much freedom."

  "So what did you get out of it? If I may ask. What did he pay you for it?"

  Tuuli's sharp elbow dug hard in my ribs.

  "We never asked for anything; we didn't really need it. But when he came out, he always left us a check. Usually for twenty thousand." He turned to Tory as if looking for help in remembering. "That time he was here when we had snow on the ground, that was fifty thousand. And the time we took him up to visit the kachina in Mount Humphrey—" He looked back at me then. "Say three hundred thousand over the years."

  A lot of money maybe, but not much from an operation that according to an L.A. Times estimate had grossed more than half a billion by 2006. Which brought to mind the question, where was all that money? Even if a lot of it had been lost in the worldwide Crash of '96 . . . The church was listed as the owner of a lot of real estate, but supposedly that made up no great part of the total. The Times had compiled a chart listing the property values, and the church had never built a new building. Its specialty was buying properties from owners who were in a serious bind for money. It would offer them twenty to forty percent of the listed value in instant cash, take it or leave it. It was impressive how many had gone for it. Christman had gotten the Campus for only eight mil. The land by itself had been worth more than that.

  "Didn't that bother you?" I asked. "I mean, he made millions on millions, got a lot of recognition . . ."

  "Nope. We didn't need the money. I'd done pretty well as chief technical editor for Bourdon Electronics, and before that from Viggers Technologies in Maryland. And I'd helped finance a few small but promising businesses." He grinned again. "The owner of one of them introduced me to Ray. Before I was fifty, we were living off investments.

  "Now and then I'd do counseling on somebody with a lot of money, like Ray. One of them signed this place over to us; these eighty acres plus the buildings. Just gave them to us. The entire ranch is half a million acres, and he'd decided to run the whole spread from his headquarters over by Yellow Jacket. Actually I was still working for Bourdon then. Getting this place was what decided me to quit and work full-time on my research." He laughed. "Research, naps, and puttering around the place."

  "What kind of research?"

  "Nothing that science would recognize. I'd been a Noetie counselor before that, and before that I'd been interested in the mind and what the science fiction of that time called psionics. I'd had experiences that gave me something to work with, and training and experience in science and technical editing that gave me a viewpoint.

  "There were problems, of course. The experiences had mostly been personal, or even subjective. So I went into it subjectively. I couldn't see any other way. Sometimes I use the psychogalvanometer and ask myself questions, to get me into it. Other times I start out with meditation. Usually not like in yoga though; generally I meditate on something. Not think, just put my attention on it. Then, after a while, things are likely to happen; I follow where they lead me, and watch or experience the results. After that I do the best I can to sort it out. Put it in words and diagrams like the ones I gave Ray. It's not always easy."

  He gestured. "Tory gives me an anchor—Tory and sometimes the boys. Bails me out when I get in over my head." He grinned again, ruefully this time. "There were times, early on, when I foundered. They gave me an external viewpoint then. Seems like they'd get a sense of what was going on when I didn't." He paused. "Been interesting."

  He'd been leaning forward while he talked. Now he sat back. "No," he said, "we live the way we like, and like the way we live. We do what we want, when we want. And we don't do without. Sometimes we don't see anyone for a week or two, until we go to town. Our nearest neighbors live seventeen miles from here. Now and then one or both our boys will drive out from Phoenix with their wives for a weekend. Other times friends will drop by, with or without their bodies."

  With or without their bodies! I wondered if he was serious. Tuuli thought so. She was listening intently.

  "Ole flies out from L.A. once or twice a year," Vic went on, "and now and then the Diaconos fly down from the Rim. It's a good life, and public attention would have spoiled it."

  I got the message, and believed it: the Merlins were happier without recognition. Another dead end, I decided, but I still might get some useful insights out of the trip.

  "Look, people," Tory put in, "I've got a big pot of coffee and a tray of chocolate-chip cookies in the kitchen." She looked at me. "Guaranteed not to add weight. If y'all are interested, we'll go out there and you can help yourself."

  We trooped to the kitchen behind her. Again there were rough-hewn roof beams, and a big adjoining pantry in which I could see a freezer. Besides freezer, fridge, electric range, microwave, dishwasher, and all the rest of the modern stuff, there was a tall 'dobe fireplace built into a corner, with two pot hooks for cooking! There were even two black iron pots on a mantel, and a woodbox to one side. With wood in it, I had no doubt. On the table, a glass cream pitcher was full of what looked to me like real cream, and the sweetener was sugar cubes, not low-cal powder in envelopes. The cookies had calories written all over them. I took three. They're not as fattening as Molly Cadigan's chocolate-glazed doughnuts, I told myself. They weren't cooked in deep fat.

  Back in the living room I asked, "What did you hope to learn from your research?"

  "Whatever there was to know. I was exploring."

  "Didn't you have a hypothesis?"

  "Two of 'em. That there was something to find—something to learn—and that I could learn it."

  "Such as?"

  He grinned again. "How the odds and ends of unexplained observations and experiences relate to one another, especially the ones that science doesn't like because they don't fit orthodox scientific paradigms: things like clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, psychic photography, firewalking. . . . I figured if you poke around in things like that, some of them might come together for you.

  "I ran into anomalies, of course, and things I could only see vaguely." He chuckled. "There was a time, twenty-five years ago, we thought we'd gone far enough, we could tie the rest of it up pretty fast. Have us a tight, inclusive theory; a sort of metaphy
sical universal field theory. That was after we debugged the surprise generator."

  I didn't know how to take that, especially the thing about a surprise generator. Metaphor I suppose.

  His laugh was relaxed and self-amused. "There were more barriers left than we'd imagined. Then Arne Haugen turned physics upside down without any metaphysical research at all. With just . . ." He paused and laughed. "Just his native inventiveness—the meeting ground of physics and the subliminal mind. And of course the engineering knowledge and money that made it work.

  "All we contributed here was, we'd debugged the surprise generator. Which had to make a difference." He raised an eyebrow. "That was up in your part of the country."

  Surprise generator again. I had no idea what he meant by that. Or how he knew, or if he knew, what part of the country I was from. Actually, his comment almost slipped past me. I'd started feeling groggy; something about the subject was getting to me.

  I straightened, pushing the grogginesss away. "Dr. Sproule told me that when Christman changed your stuff, she thought he screwed it up. Ole thought so too."

  Vic laughed again, as if that didn't bother him at all. "Ray's idea was to create a religion with it, train a lot of people to go out and help others to be freed beings. His problem was writing it up and teaching it. He felt folks had to understand it before they could know it; grokking it wouldn't do. And of course, he didn't understand it himself, actually, any more than I do."

  I stared at him. He got to his feet then, took a ruled pad from a big old-fashioned desk, and drew a quick diagram, then brought it over and, kneeling, showed it to Tuuli and me, pointing with his pencil and explaining.

  To me it was just marks on paper, and I got to feeling weirder and weirder. It was a little like when I was thirteen and climbed this big willow tree on a cutbank on the Hemlock River, at the edge of town. Bobby Latvala had spiked pieces of one-by-four on the trunk for a ladder, and you could jump off branches into the water. The highest branch you could get out on to jump was fifty-three feet above the river, measured by Jimmy Dobrik's mother's clothesline. The first time I went out on it to jump, it felt like my knees were made of water—as if I was going to faint and fall off. Physically that's a little like I felt when Vic was explaining his diagram—like I was going to faint and fall a long way. Nothing was coming through mentally at all.