by Mick Farren
As the side panels of the C87 were removed and the containers were slid from the plane's interior framework, Mansard realized that he was actually getting his own small slice of the pie. Jimmy Gadd felt it, too.
"It's goddamn Christmas. I've never seen so much stuff. I didn't know there was this much hardware in the country."
"Our leaders move in mysterious ways."
"Half this stuff is technically illegal."
"Exactly."
A laden, olive-green forklift hooted at them, and they stepped out of the way. A walker followed with a redheaded corporal effortlessly providing the motion base for its gargantuan arms and legs.
"Those things always remind me of the old Toho monster movies. Godzilla heading out to eat Tokyo, remember? Shall we follow it into the hangar and watch the presents being unwrapped?"
Inside the big military hangar, soldiers were swarming over the containers from the C87, reducing them to their smaller components, which were then loaded onto waiting trucks for the second stage of their trip to the construction site. They would be trucked to Hoboken and transferred to pontoons, finally to be floated downriver to Liberty Island, where the enormous floating projector units were being assembled. The island had been closed to the public – not that it saw many visitors anymore. Access had been limited ever since the Daughters of Islam had tried to blow up the statue in '04. For Mansard, it had been turned into a full-scale military camp, complete with patrol boats, helicopters, and a floodlit perimeter. He had become king of his own island and he was loving every minute. His behavior had become shamelessly Napoleonic, and the military, in its turn, appeared to lap it up. Jimmy Gadd had his own explanation.
"The poor bastards probably welcome any diversion from being shot at by Zapata Legion snipers with those nasty little Cucaracha missiles."
Supply sergeants pulled cases off the line at random and checked that the contents matched the manifest and had arrived intact. Mansard and Gadd strolled toward one of those inspections. The lids had been removed from four aluminum coffins. Inside, four Sony DL-70s nestled in beds of blue foam rubber. Jimmy Gadd blinked in surprise.
"Those are DL-70Cs. We've always been lucky to get the basic model. They don't have these anywhere in South America yet."
Mansard laughed. "Are you suggesting that our holy leaders are doing covert business with the heathen japper?" A thought struck him, and he looked sharply at Gadd. "You do know how to operate these new wonders from the rising sun?"
Gadd grinned and shrugged. "I can read a manual with the best of them."
Mansard looked askance at him. "Christ, no wonder I'm an alcoholic."
"You're losing your sense of humor."
"That's hardly surprising."
Gadd was looking at his watch. "Listen, things seem to be running smoothly out here. Why don't we head back to the site and see that my guys aren't getting in any more beefs with the army?"
Mansard nodded. The downside to all the technical largess coming to them via the military was that the production had been turned into a military operation. The disrespect and loose camaraderie that held together Mansard's team and turned them into a fiercely efficient unit when they wanted to be had clashed badly with the army technicians' concepts of organization and discipline. There was yet to be a fistfight, but screaming matches were a daily occurrence, and there had been one unfortunate incident that was already being referred to as the Donut Strike. One of the roots of the friction was that Mansard's people handled quality control and invariably had the last say. The military did not take kindly to being ordered around by civilians, particularly civilians who looked like hairy subversives. They were also not used to working with women. All women had been removed from the military in the first three months of the Faith-fid administration while Mansard had always taken a perverse delight in doing all the equal opportunity hiring that he could get away with.
Despite all that – and to Mansard's surprise – the work was slightly ahead of schedule. Those Christian soldiers seemed to get the job done if only by sheer weight of numbers. If nothing went weird on them and open warfare did not break out between soldiers and civilians, they could ground test the power rigs in four days. Charlie Mansard, despite his glib cynicism, was filled with a mounting excitement.
As they walked back to the limousine, Mansard started quizzing Gadd about the new Sony modification.
"What will it do to the color/light density?"
"Should beef it up."
"By much?"
"I haven't looked at the specs, but I imagine by quite a bit. This is Sony. They won't put out a new model just for the sake of it."
"So we could have ourselves an almost solid image?"
"Close."
Mansard clenched his fists gleefully. "Great. I've got real plans for this show."
Gadd looked at him curiously. "Do you know something that I don't?"
Charlie Mansard laughed. "Who knows? This is going to be the biggest sky image anyone's ever seen. We might just touch off the Day of Judgment."
Gadd snorted. "Your hired help have commented on how, these days, you seemed to think you're Hitler. We didn't think that you'd progressed to God. "
Mansard ignored the crack. "Nobody seems to have noticed that they're letting us play with dynamite. I mean, what happened when we put up the Four Horsemen?"
"There was a bloody great riot."
"I thought we were dead after that. I thought they'd close us down for sure and outlaw sky walkers as works of Satan. Instead, they hire us to build something four times as big. What they don't seem to realize is that we could get four times the reaction."
"The images will be out on the water. That should soften the impact a little."
"Quite the reverse. Remember, the barges will be moving. For those who are just busting a gut to believe in that kind of thing, it'll look like the Beasts of Revelations are advancing on the city. The final fall of Babylon-on-the-Hudson."
Jimmy Gadd looked at his boss suspiciously. "You're getting a little strange, Charlie. What do you think is going to come out of all this?"
For someone of his size, Mansard was almost coy. "I don't know. Maybe the fall of the government." Gadd shook his head. "You're working too hard."
Kline
Cynthia Kline was worried. It was four days since she had heard anything from Harry Carlisle. She was aware that a police officer might be called away to some situation in which it would be impossible to make personal phone calls, but there was something about his silence that did not seem to be quite right. She told herself, over and over, mat she was not simply being the kind of neurotic who needs a lover to phone her four or five times a day. It was some sixth sense, or maybe just an extension of her own instinct of self-preservation, warning her that things were taking a disturbingly odd turn. It had started with the predawn call summoning her to Astor Place. Harry had left first, and she had waited; she could not afford to be seen walking out with him. The drunken nights when she had been Longstreet's protegee had done enough to her reputation around the building. She had sat on the bed and smoked a cigarette before finally pulling on her topcoat and going out into the empty streets.
The scene at C86 had been one of near chaos. Laura, who had been appointed pro tern supervisor, explained that they were trying to contain a computer virus and sent her directly to her terminal. The monitor was flashing bizarre dialog boxes that insisted that she enter complex thirty-two symbol codes. She had never seen anything like it. She was simply some kind of interface. She had no idea what was going on. The monitors told her what to do, and she did it. She had no idea if the virus was winning or losing. For all she knew it might be the virus issuing her instructions.
It was the not knowing what she was doing that quickly killed any kind of excitement or sense of participation. There might have been an epic cyberfight going on, but since she did not understand it, she could hardly feel a part of it. Hers was but to keyboard. After an hour, she was profoundly bored and r
esentful at being dragged out of a warm bed and away from Harry for such nonsense. It was quite possible that the dialog boxes and her increasingly resentful responses were nothing more than computer make-work, part of some demented deacon exercise.
On her first break, she had run into Laura in the rest room, and the second oddity had occurred. Laura, who had been staring at herself in the mirror as Cynthia had walked in, glanced up.
"Weird night."
"You can say that again."
"Do you even know what a computer virus is?"
Cynthia decided that the best thing would be to play it like an airhead. "I'm not sure any of them really know what a computer virus is."
There was a pause as Laura worked on her makeup. She wore a great deal by the standards of the time and place. She looked at Cynthia's reflection in the mirror. "Are you still going out with that cop?"
"Uh-huh."
"You know it's not too smart, don't you?"
"I know that. I've been thinking of breaking it off, but I do kind of like him."
Laura was preparing to leave. "I'd look after myself if I were you. That cop of yours may not be around much longer."
Cynthia's head turned sharply. "What do you mean by that? "
Laura obviously realized that she had said too much. She was already on her way to the door. "Nothing, honey. I just meant that he has a knack of getting himself into trouble."
She was through the door and gone. Cynthia wanted to go after her and shake the truth out of her, but attacking even a temporary supervisor would put her in serious trouble. What had the bitch meant by he 'may not be around much longer'? Laura slept with that bastard Spencer. Had she heard something? People did, all too frequently, disappear.
Cynthia was still worrying about the remark as she went back to her terminal. In fifteen minutes, however, all thoughts of Harry were temporarily driven from her mind.
LOOK TO THE SKIES.
A cold hand clutched at her stomach. It was the signal. The green letters were pulsing right there on her primary screen. After maybe five seconds, they faded, to be replaced by a simple instruction.
PREPARE TO LOAD PROGRAM IN THIRTY SECONDS.
She had to stop herself from sneaking a glance at the security cameras. That was the most common method of giving oneself away. She had to be calm and load the diskette from the Lefthand Path as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
LOOK TO THE SKIES.
She already had the diskette concealed in her desk rack in among a lot of harmless subprograms. She removed it and placed it next to the input drive. No alarms sounded, and nobody seemed to have noticed anything.
LOAD PROGRAM NOW.
She clicked in the diskette and tapped out the code. 771-36971-2458-666. She had memorized the numbers. The screen went blank for about fifteen seconds, and then the meaningless dialog boxes came back. Everything was normal again. For a full half hour she waited for something to happen. She had half expected the whole system to crash the moment the guerrilla program was loaded, but there was not even a flicker, nor did anyone come and place a hand on her shoulder and take her away. She had done what the organization had asked, but she had no more idea of what had been achieved than she had about her work for the deacons.
The next strange occurrence was at lunchtime. The deacons came for Laura. There were four of them. It seemed less as if they were arresting her, than as if they had some very bad news and were taking her somewhere to break it to her. They were formal and awkward. They seemed frightened to touch her. Deacons were never like that when they were making a bust. Laura did not come back. All afternoon, the rest room muttered rumors. It was something to do with Spencer. He was dead. He had been arrested. He had done something terrible and was on the run. There were photographs of him and Laura. Cynthia could not find it in herself to feel pleased.
Things slackened off in the late afternoon. The screens stayed blank for minutes at a time. Cynthia took the chance to call Harry. He could not be located. She had an immediate twinge of unease. The unease carried on all evening and through the night. When she arrived at work the next day, there was a message waiting for her from a PD captain called Parnell. On the tape, he sounded profoundly uncomfortable.
"Harry Carlisle asked me to give you this message. He's hit a difficult patch in an investigation. He's had to go to ground for a few days and he won't be able to call you. He doesn't want you to worry."
He doesn't want me to worry. So pick someone to deliver your messages who can lie effectively. Where the hell are you, Harry Carlisle? He was not the kind to dump her through a third party. Something must have happened to him. She caught herself in the middle of contemplating in anguish all the grisly fates that might have befallen him and reined in her imagination. Lusting after Carlisle might well be her downfall. He was a cop, and he was in the unit working on the Lefthand Path. The other and very logical explanation for his behavior was that he was on to her.
Carlisle
Harry Carlisle found it very pleasant to drift on the black lake. Thoughts slipped through his fingers like sparkling drops of water. He could not focus; he could not form sentences or string ideas together. Nothing made any sense, but that really didn't matter. He was in a place between consciousness and sleep where nothing really mattered. He knew that he was lying on a bed, although even that was, at times, far from certain. There were moments, sometimes moments that seemed to stretch forever, when the clean white sheets stretched into Arctic snow-fields or expanses of hot white sand. Always, in the end, though, they melted back into the comforting womb waters of the black lake. He knew that people came and looked at him. He was vaguely aware of the murmur of their voices. He knew that they were talking about him, maybe even talking to him, but he could not make out their words. His most frequent visitor was the figure in white. She came regularly, hovering for long periods at the edge of his vision. The word 'nurse' seemed to fit, although sometimes she was a lazily gliding sea bird or a floating cloud in the blue of a summer day.
Every now and then a bubble of danger would burst from the dark depths of his lake. Phrases would crowd in on him. There was. He had to. He needed to. Move. The world outside was.
But the phrases were wrong and they soon went away. The world outside was not, and he did not have to do anything.
Speedboat
Speedboat drank beer, watched TV, and wondered what was going on in New York. He watched a lot of TV to try to stop himself thinking about his own situation, but it did not work. His own situation was so profoundly disastrous that it refused to leave him alone for any more than a few minutes at a time. Even getting drunk, something he only rarely did in the normal world, was not much of a help. He was screwed, and there was no way to avoid facing it.
He had taken the creaking DC 15 to Buffalo. He had been so jangled by the clerk who had inspected his documents that he had gone through the process like a zombie. All he had wanted to do at that moment was to get the hell away from La Guardia; boarding the plane had seemed, at the time, to be the line of least resistance. Even when he had reached Buffalo, he had had no formulated plan. He had taken a cab and, on the advice of the driver, checked into a rundown motel not too far from the airport. The manager had taken one look at him and doubled the normal room rate. Later he was to find out that the manager was paid off to ensure that guests like him did not have their documentation looked at too closely.
He had left it for two days before he had called the number the clerk had written on the hundred-dollar bill, the number of the organization that supposedly might get him across the border. As always, he was looking out for a possible setup. Not that his caution seemed to have helped him so far. The woman who had answered had been noncommittal. She had asked him where he was, and when he had mentioned the name of the motel, she had laughed.
"We have a lot of clients who stay there."
She had told him that he would be contacted.
He had made a couple of forays into downtow
n Buffalo, but mostly he stayed in the motel. He had forgotten how things had become outside of New York City. There were women on the street in white linen caps and long black dresses down to their ankles, and men in baggy black suits and flat, broad-brimmed hats. They looked like the audience at a witch burning. Maybe that was what they did for fun on a Saturday night. He had copped ten greenies in the toilet of a beat-up, bad-neighborhood bar that looked as if it had once been a topless joint, but they had not even made a dent in his nerves. He had also inspected the border, from a healthy distance. It had looked even more formidable in reality, with its minefields, its wire, watchtowers, and steel wall, than it had looked on TV or in magazines. It required no effort to remember that the Herod gunships swinging low over the wide, bulldozed scar of no-man's-land would shoot at anything that moved. It seemed impossible that anyone could cross such a barrier of instant and automated death. When the Canadian border had first been closed and fortified, the White House PR people had tried to sell the country on a name for it: the Line of Truth. But that ridiculous name had refused to stick. A deacon car had come slowly up the road that overlooked the frontier. They appeared to be taking photographs of anyone who paused to look at it for too long. Speedboat had quickly made himself scarce.