Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart

by Steven Erikson

  “I’m gonna die free, bro. There’ll be hundreds of us, maybe thousands. Plenty of kool-aid. You got any brains you join in, bro, for the big day.”

  “Nah,” said Anthony. “Think I’ll do my time. Met a girl.”

  “Bony Tony finds a girl, yeah right. Whatever. Get out of my face.” Anthony shrugged, and then walked on. Okay, Sticks kinda clouded his day. Kinda pissed on it, in fact. But then, freedom couldn’t stay down for long. He still felt good, and he didn’t think he’d miss Sticks.

  There was a lot of talk about suiciding these days. Lot of people doing it. Drunks who couldn’t get drunk anymore. Addicts who couldn’t get high. Take that shit away from some people, and they got nothing else to live for. He’d heard a whole town in fucking religious-freaking Utah went and did themselves in. Tried to take their kids with ’em only that part didn’t work. Now the kids were orphans, but maybe that was better than having wing-nuts for parents. Hard to say on that one. But lots of grief going around.

  Which made it weird how good he was feeling.

  Angelina was hot. He’d seen something in Sticks’ eyes when he’d told him about her. Some kind of flicker. Like it hurt to hear.

  Anthony’s steps slowed, and then he halted. Watched the traffic rolling past, listened to the wind in the palms. “Aw, shit,” he muttered, turning around. Talk Sticks out of it. Or try, anyway. It’s what bros did, wasn’t it? If it worked, fine. If it didn’t, well, he bet Angelina would get all tender hearing about it, and that couldn’t hurt.

  “You back, bro? Changed your mind?”

  “No,” said Anthony. “But I just thought I’d tell you, before you off yourself, I mean. Paulo’s sister, she thinks you’re kinda hot.”

  “Like fuck she does.”

  “No, really, I seen her looking at you plenty of times.”

  “No way. You fuckin with me?”

  “No, for real.”

  “Fuck, bro, and she’s all right.”

  “All right? You kidding me?”

  Sticks half-grinned. “Well, yeah. I mean, she’s no Queen of the Tacos, is she? Steps pretty high, though, all that college shit.”

  Anthony shrugged again, turning away. “Just thought you should know, bro. She might shed some tears when you’re dead, I guess. That’s something, right?”

  He felt Sticks staring after him as he resumed his walk.

  Might have been enough. Or maybe that last bit, about her bawling, was the wrong thing to say. Not that it was true, anyway. Julia couldn’t stand Jimmy Sticks. Most people couldn’t stand Jimmy Sticks. And nobody’d probably miss him once he was gone.

  But none of that was reason to want him dead.

  Besides, he’d been thinking about Sticks spotting him with the bench presses and shit. Assuming they ended up in the same place.

  Fuck, this air smelled good!

  Tel Aviv, Israel, June 9th, 10:15 PM

  Ruth Moyen had a taste for Turkish coffee, sipping it through a sugar cube. Bad for the teeth, no doubt. She imagined herself in her sixties, a wrinkle-faced old woman, toothless and probably fat. Something about thinking like that, something about that old woman she’d one day become, left her feeling elated.

  She was out of uniform. Wearing sneakers, for crying out loud. Dressed in a white linen blouse that showed off her sun-darkened skin. Faded jeans. She’d gotten used to all the heavy gear, the belt riding her hips and the way it changed how she walked, and the way the M-16 hooked over one shoulder changed the look on her face. Amazing the things a girl could get used to. Checking out David Benholm on the sly, wondering when his ticket was up. Wondering when hers was up, and was there time to get him into bed? Just one serious, scintillating fuck. Not much to ask for in a life.

  That old woman, sucking coffee through a sugar cube, she didn’t exist a month ago, and that was the truth of it, the truth at the core of pretty much everything. Ruth never expected to live that long. The fear had burned away and what was left was the dull expectation of it all coming down. Bullet, brick, rocket, plastic explosive, some fertilizer car flipper on the street. Or five years down the road, after her service was up, the old barrel in the mouth. The list was long, and one of them was going to take her down. Or David. Or Bennie or Sarah.

  She had a cousin, five years older. Old memories painted a picture of a round-faced girl, smart and tough to make laugh—people had to work for it. A bit of an athlete, too, was Rebecca, light on her feet.

  After her stint of compulsory service, Rebecca was a different person. Fucked up in the head. Depressed. No more reluctant laughs for her. Just a chain-smoking, fucked up mess.

  Ruth wanted to look her up. Last she heard her cousin was living in a flat in the Old City, with about six others from her old unit. How did it feel, turning your life inside out all for what turned out to be nothing?

  Sitting at the curb-side café beside the bumper-to-bumper traffic, her eyes roving restlessly behind her aviator sunglasses—the old paranoia difficult to shake—she gestured for a second cup of coffee and then shook out a Marlie from the pack on the table.

  At the other tables there were a few couples, eyes only for each other. And old men hunched over a backgammon game. And some guy who looked like a journalist, probably French, squinting into his phone.

  Strangely, she’d lost interest in David. Just in the past day or two. As if some vital need had been snuffed out. Even stranger, she’d found a deep pleasure in sitting alone. The unit had been tight. That was a necessity. People had your back and you had theirs and that was a given, a fact, an anchor to sanity. But she didn’t need that anymore, so cutting loose had just more or less happened when no one was paying attention. The whole IDF was melting, coming apart. All that mobile armor so much junk—oh, they were mothballing the works, including the personal weapons and gear. Packing up the drones, the helicopters, the jets. Just in case things went back to how they’d been before the aliens.

  There was history in that caution, and she respected it. Understood it. But the thought of going back, into uniform, onto patrol, now terrified her. She’d had nightmares about it, in fact.

  The coffee arrived, delivered by a young smooth-faced gawky Palestinian, the son of the café’s new owner, she supposed. She smiled up at him her thanks and the blessed boy actually blushed before hurrying off.

  Old women could afford to be indulgent, being toothless and all.

  She wondered how Rebecca was dealing with all this. Then she wondered, with a faint start, whether she was any different from her cousin.

  Well, of course she was. Not depressed, not fucked up. Sitting here on the edge of who she’d once been—before the service—that teenaged girl with the knobbly knees always dropping things. A girl who would have maybe sneered at the Palestinian kid’s blush. On the edge of that, then, wondering if she’d end up going back—but no, that was impossible. Not once she’d seen and done the things they’d all had to do. No going back from that. Besides, the teenaged girl she’d been was, let’s face it, something of a snob.

  Life now felt more real. Still bitter-tasting every now and then. But she was breathing easier. No more tension.

  After all, one day she’d be an old woman. What a thought. She fished out another Marlie and settled in for her second cup of sweet, thick coffee.

  Above her, swallows wheeled and darted among the buildings with their opened shutters and billowing curtains, each flitting bird like a thought cut loose and plucked away by the warm wind.

  Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, June 10th, 11:15 AM

  Skirted by fishing dhows, a big tanker was making its way up the strait, likely headed for Zanzibar. The red sails of the dhows looked like the past catching up to the present, all scudding northward into the future. Casper Brunt had heard about an imam on the island, a man named Abdul Irani, from some venerable Persian family if the name was any indication. They called him the Laughing Imam, a true child of God. He’d made Zanzibar his home. He was talking about a new Golden Age, which made him somethi
ng of a rare beast. If Casper Brunt could be bothered, he could head to the rail and lean far over and squint into the northeast, and maybe see the island with that mystical, exotic name. Zanzibar.

  Instead, he remained sitting in the lone chair on the spacious balcony of his ground-floor flat overlooking the muddy waters of the strait. It was paid for, a worthy investment with all that blood-money he’d earned. He shared it with lizards, bats in the joiners and four dancing butterflies circling an overgrown lavender shrub in a cracked pot beneath the air conditioning unit.

  The air-con was on full blast, keeping the room behind him nice and cool. Water dripped from the unit onto the plant. Better than a cruddy pool of goo on the linoleum. He sat with a cold beer cradled in his hands, still in shade despite the climbing sun.

  It was an odd thing, feeling utterly safe. Not a target for anything. He’d been an infidel with guns on offer, making for a curious détente when dealing with warlords and Muslim militants. Now that he had nothing to sell, he should have become a target for Third World wrath. Instead, he was just ignored, and that, too, was an odd feeling.

  Even shaking fists got tired eventually.

  Aliens. Still hard to believe, but then, he’d witnessed their capacity to interfere. The unseen hand that slapped down, tsk tsk, time to be a better man, son. Time to shuck off the old ways, the business as usual, the playground antics of brokering war. Sure, the causes remained. People were still aggrieved, still pissed off, still feeling cut out and dumped on. But even poverty had lost its teeth.

  He’d been hearing things, hanging out down at the almost-attached Firefly Bar with the half-dozen ex-pats and assholes on the run who inhabited this eyesore block of condos. Food like mana, water that purified itself, diseases that just went away. Eyesight to the blind, the works. The Serengeti off-limits and more animals than ever ranging the vast park. Elephants keeping their tusks, gorillas their hands and feet.

  And now some kind of construction project was happening in Malawi. That bit of news was a cause for alarm, to be honest. Were the aliens finally assembling their strongholds? If so, there was nothing anyone could do about it. The edifice was going up, building itself. The whole thing surrounded by one of those forcefields. Word was, it was going to be huge.

  Casper was curious, curious enough to maybe head down there to see it for himself. Still, why Malawi of all places? Mysterious doings indeed.

  He had no money coming in. His accounts were dwindling, his investments damn near worthless. He should be panicking.

  But that was the least of his problems. No, what was bothering him the most had nothing to do with money, or even a future in which his skills were irrelevant and unwanted.

  The endless gaggle of prostitutes and beauties for hire was getting stale. The misery of it was, he was lonely. Chasing the deal had been one of those all-consuming distractions, and it had been one that carved cold edges on a man’s soul. Being heartless had been a necessity, with a conscience nowhere in sight.

  But now it seemed that the landscape of his mind had changed. The bleak, airless wastes were in upheaval. He saw mountains ahead, monstrous and looming, and he knew he’d have to climb them sooner or later. Each step a slog through unfamiliar emotions. Guilt. Shame.

  Regret.

  These details told him the aliens had done more than just fucked with ecological preserves, food and clean water, diseases cured. They had somehow gotten into his head, tinkering with the cold machine of his self-interest.

  Or was it just a philosophical thing? The sudden shock of realizing that you were no longer the center of the universe, not even your own universe—that little sphere of ego that consisted of—mostly—the fucking voice in your head talking to itself day and night. A whole life of internal blathering away that probably ate up more energy than anything else you ever did.

  He had a vault packed full of precious excuses and rationalizations for everything he had done or would do. His own private hoard of justification.

  Worthless. Fucking worthless.

  The beer had gone warm in his hands. The butterflies were chasing each other, the same thing they’d done yesterday, the same thing they’d do tomorrow. Until they laid eggs or mated or some shit like that, and then died. If there’d still been a puddle under the air-conditioner he’d find them in it one morning, floating like dead flower petals.

  In the strait the tanker was angling out of sight, losing itself in the heat haze of midday. The dhows had found a school of fish to chase with their lines and hooks. The big Portuguese trawlers that had been looting this coast for European dinner plates had all left, sans nets and all the other stuff that didn’t work anymore.

  The local catch was showing up in the better restaurants, and then in the neighborhood dives and on market stalls. Bounty dropped the prices. Everyone was eating better. The whole shebang reeked of paradise.

  Supply was controlled by the market and the market was a global game. It mostly took from the have-nots and then gave it back to them at inflated prices, then hoarded the money earned to create a standard of living bubble that made rich people into gods. Need had proved a fertile field for extortion. He’d lived on the rich side of all that, or, rather, he’d planned on living on the rich side, after one more deal, one more windfall.

  He’d had his target. He’d been almost there.

  But the aliens were stepping around the market, ignoring the old rules of civil extortion (not that it was ever actually civil at all). All the guns and threats that kept people down didn’t work anymore. Seven billion restless souls were now shaking awake.

  He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. Most people were uneducated, ignorant, and at least half of them below the mean in intelligence—an obvious observation that still offended people.

  Casper had been happy enough preying on stupid people, profiting from them. He’d sold weapons to idiots who had little or no chance of ever winning. Whatever it was they wanted to win, and a lot of them didn’t even know what the fuck that was. Most of them just ended up liking all that firepower, warlords or warlords in the making. People who even if they had a religious cause were in truth more interested in the high that came with terrorizing other people than they were in making life better for anyone except themselves.

  The need to control others was probably at the core of it all, and that need came from insecurity, and the world was full of insecure people who’d defaulted to the delusion that making everyone think like them would quell that insecurity. It wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The shit inside never went away.

  He’d sucked them all dry. Made a career of it.

  Casper set the beer down. It’d gone flat anyway. He’d pack up his grab-all this evening. Tomorrow morning he’d book a flight to Lilongwe. Rent a car and head down to Zomba. Check out that alien construct.

  The Laughing Imam had announced a pilgrimage to the site. Casper wanted to beat that crowd, and be long gone by the time they arrived.

  By tomorrow that tanker would come back down the coast. Crammed full of pilgrims.

  Meanwhile, the butterflies could keep on dancing. The fishermen could keep on fishing. And all the wankers down at Firefly could keep grousing. The world had ended, but something was coming.

  Still, the lavender smelled good. A sprig of it to slip into the long hair of a beautiful smiling woman would be rather nice, too.

  He should be feeling worse, but he couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t and damn, wasn’t that a thing?

  Silver Steading Farm, Utah, June 14th, 8:35 AM

  It sounded simple, logical even. This planet was for sharing. It wasn’t a grab-all, wasn’t a global land-rush, wasn’t that horizon beyond which waited the promised land. Promised? Well, maybe that was where all the trouble started.

  The kitchen looked normal enough. The usual appliances and countertops. Dave sat in it no different from what a normal man would do, this time last year or the year before. Or even a decade ago. He was in a scene that Rockwell might have painted if he’d been s
till alive here in the bright Twenty-whatevers, and he’d fit right in, too.

  Nostalgia was god when the scene inside a man’s head showed a house on fire, bodies in the yard, and a sky full of smoke. But none of that internal world of strife bled out into this room, with its dripping tap, ticking clock, and all that stunning sunlight pouring in through the window above the sink.

  Then again, Dave considered, who knew what hid beneath those sweet brush-strokes of paint? Entire realms of regret, all the wounds of youth, all that innocence and wonder crushed underfoot by the grisly advance of years. So, even nostalgia ended up being nothing more than a cute mask hiding the brutality of the past.

  He needed to get out of his head, but all the ways of doing that didn’t work anymore. Well, maybe that wasn’t true. Evelyn was in the White Room upstairs, its house-spanning length fronted by glass offering up a scenic view of the backyard and the valley and the hills beyond, but she wasn’t paying any attention to that. No, her eyes were on the screen of her laptop as it filled her head with an entire world’s worth of panic, pointless speculation, fear-mongering and rumor.

  Crowd the skull with stuff and who needs drugs or booze? Information had no intrinsic value. Sufficient quantity made quality irrelevant. Information, Dave now knew, was its own drug, and the brain was an addict that could never get enough. So it could be then that Ev had found her own way out, so that their own story—here with their lost land and crushed ambitions—blended with all the other stories out there, until it sank from sight, taking the pain with it.

  They’d talked it out. They’d brought Mark and Susan in so it was a family thing. Explanations to put that look of fear into their children’s faces, because dread news always came from grown-ups and the helplessness of a parent was the last lesson a child would ever need.

  How much of a life was consumed by the sheer effort of coping? Day in, day out, doing all it took, whatever it took, just to get by. Claw your way through, like a drowning man fighting a riptide. Reach the beach if you can, there on that island called sleep. So the mind can run away for a while. Getting ready to tackle the next day.