Fiddleback Trilogy 2 - Evil Ascending

by Stackpole, Michael A.

  A small tray slid out from the wall. A panel rose up like an alligator's upper jaw. "Put the card in here, please." The microphone and synthesizer made his voice tinny and mechanical. Rajani immediately felt the fragile link she had established with him crumbling.

  He needs to look at me again. She held the card out, then hesitated. The man's anger began to build, but the television distracted him. He waited with his hand on the withdrawal lever for the basket as tiny pictures flashed across his glasses. "C'mon, put the card in." Along with his demand came the first inkling of suspicion.

  Rajani fought down her panic and read his full name from his identification tag. "Bob Grant. Do you have a cousin named John?"

  Grant's head came up and their gazes met. "John? Yes."

  Suspicion continued to climb, but anger slowly backed off. Rajani caught fragments of memories from the Immigration officer. "I thought so. I can see the family resemblance." More images came through and she quickly sifted them for any solid sort of detail she could latch onto. "I knew him up in Taos years ago."

  A moment's confusion washed over the man's face. "Taos? But John never . . ."

  "It was a vacation. He was off on a lark. You know how he was." She smiled softly and looked down. "Only a week, but I'll never forget him." She pulsed sexual innuendo out with her statement, and got more puzzlement back in return. That confused her for a moment, then she sent Grant a revision of her image in which she sharpened her features a bit and let the hint of stubble dot her chin.

  Her quick sex change made Grant blush, and she felt an urge on his part to get rid of this evidence of his cousin's unnatural life-style. "Are you sure you want in here? Daizaimoku doesn't put up with any strangeness. They're very conservative here."

  "I know," she admitted as she looked up and softened her image again. "That was a time before I found out who I was and had my surgery." She smiled as she pushed a wave of confusion over Grant, then followed it with a quick one-two punch of exhaustion, and a vain hope that the damned reader wouldn't force him into preparing the card manually.

  Her assault succeeded in blasting Grant's rudimentary mental defenses into kindling. To him, she was a transsexual/homosexual who had not settled for just a sex change. She'd gone so far as to tattoo her body black and gold and have some alterations done to her eyes. She was definitely a weird one, which was just exactly what he didn't need, especially during the middle of the Sylvester Stallone Comedy Film Festival. Why my shift?

  Rajani took advantage of his vulnerability and pushed him. "I remember John talking about the time you went fishing and those dogs came after you. He said he was angry that he got bit and you didn't, but when that farmhand nursed him back to health and awakened him, well, he considered it a blessing in disguise."

  Guilt gushed from Grant like oil from a ruptured pipeline. Rajani sent a message back through the waves of emotion pouring from the man. I don't want this on my shift, she sent. She'll be trouble if she gets in, and I don't want that on me. Why couldn't she have come back during the day?

  The spark of an idea began in his brain and her assurances that he was brilliant fanned it to life. Grant smiled at her from his cage. "Look, because you're one of John's friends, I'm going to give you a temp pass. Once you're inside, you can get a card at a center. That way you can keep your old card just in case you head back to wherever." He winked at her to assure her that he was doing her a favor.

  "You are even more of a squared-away guy than John said, Bob." She palmed her fake card as the metal tray retracted into the wall. Grant hastily scrawled something on a sheet of paper, then shoved it into the tray and back out to her. She took it, nearly laughed at the illegible signature at the bottom, then winked at him.

  "Maybe I'll look you up when I get settled, okay, Bob?"

  "Sure. Drinks are on me," he smiled in contrast to the panic he was projecting. Rajani let his panic grow rapidly and sowed his mind with confusion. So much so, in fact, that it would be four days before he wondered why, after he gave her the pass, she wandered back out in the squatters' camp.

  The immigration officer at the east gate accepted the temporary pass and issued her an official pass with the click of a half-dozen computer buttons. "Leslie Grant" legitimately entered Flagstaff with her two step-children in tow. Dorothy took charge of the expedition once they passed through the outer wall. Mickey let Rajani hold his hand as they trooped through the streets after his sister.

  Rajani sensed Dorothy's disappointment as they reached the destination she'd directed them toward. "Dammit, they've shifted things again. This was our contiminimum block, but it's been changed."

  "Don't you mean con-do-min-ium?" Rajani looked at the building in front of which Dorothy had stopped. The exterior had been painted a standard khaki tan and looked as if it had some flat sort of metal siding on it. Each apartment was marked by a single window in the street end of the building. Along the side, Rajani saw ribbed siding that added some texture to the building, but no windows or doors on that side. She saw the start of balconies and railing on the back side and assumed stairs there provided access to each of the four floors.

  The building itself had no street number, but beneath each window, in foot-high letters, she saw an eight-digit number. "What was your address, Dorothy?"

  "We lived in #49337629." She pointed at the third floor and along to the third apartment from the far end. "It used to be there, but now it's gone. And, yes, I did mean contiminimum. You have to have these down in Phoenix."

  Mickey pointed off along the street. "Uane!"

  Dorothy followed her brother's line of sight and smiled. "Yes, a crane. C'mon."

  Holding firmly on to Mickey's hand, Rajani followed Dorothy down the street. As they traveled, she saw a number of other apartment complexes that looked as if they had been built out of the same sort of materials as the first one they'd looked at, but these had a different shape. One was a pyramid and another had two holes in the center. While each looked to Rajani to be different in overall shape, each could be broken own into small, boxy apartment components.

  It's like dwellings put together from building blocks. Rajani saw the crane lifting a metal container and slowly lowering it into place on a new stack of buildings. They used to ship things in containers like this before I went into stasis. Now they cut a window in them and house people. As the box descended, two workers snapped power and plumbing connectors in place, linking the upper apartment with the one below it.

  "There, on the bottom row, that's our apartment." Dorothy started crossing a side street and heading toward the building.

  Rajani grabbed her arm. "Wait. They're still building there. Is it safe?"

  Dorothy frowned at her. "Of course it's safe. You ride for a while, then there's a bump and it's business as usual."

  "You mean you stay in the thing when it is moved?"

  Dorothy answered her with a withering stare. "You've never had a contiminimum moved on you?"

  Rajani shook her head. "No, never. Why would they move it?"

  The girl shrugged. "The Mormon Polys must have moved some folks in to unbalance this district." She pulled her arm free from Rajani's grasp and continued to the building. The man operating the crane shouted something at her, but she just flipped him off and walked up to apartment #49337629. Mickey tugged on Rajani's arm and led her across the street.

  The first thing that hit her about the apartment was the scent of stale beer and even more stale sweat. Its sharp odor made her wince and almost caused her to vomit. At first she thought something must have died in there, then she realized that impression came from the stench combined with the level of mental activity she sensed from inside the dark box.

  Mickey twisted his hand free of hers and went flying through the room. He hugged the shin of the slender, pale man sitting in a recliner. The light from the huge black-and-white television painted the man in cadaverous tones of white and gray. He clutched a beer can in his right hand and stared without blinking at the pic
tures moving across the screen. Though his left hand rested two inches from Mickey's head, he seemed not to notice his son, and made no move to greet him. The remote control remained in that hand as firmly as if it had been grafted on.

  Rajani looked up as light from a refrigerator splashed out into the room from the middle of the apartment. Dorothy bent over and stuck her head into the white box, then straightened up and cursed. "On the Coors diet again, eh, Dad?" Anger and concern mixed in her voice, and Rajani knew Dorothy feared the worst for both her father and her brother.

  Rajani choked down the lump in her throat. "This is your father?" Contempt filled her words and radiated out from her like sound waves from a tuning fork. Mickey's head snapped up. "This is the reason you wanted to come home?"

  Dorothy closed the refrigerator door, cloaking herself with darkness. "He is my father. We are family." She didn't say it, but Rajani knew Dorothy clung desperately to something that was bad because it was better than having nothing.

  The man in the chair stirred a bit. "Dot? Getcher pa a beer?" His right hand opened, and the can it held dropped out of sight. It clattered heavily into an unseen aluminum midden and, from the sound it made, Rajani knew it had not been empty.

  "Sure, Da." The refrigerator door opened, and a silvery can appeared in Dorothy's hand. "Incoming, Da."

  Mickey looked up to watch his sister arc the can through the air toward her father. The can rotated nicely, making for an easy catch, but the man in the chair did nothing to grab it. It would have slammed into his stomach, but Rajani crossed the three steps to the chair and snagged it before it landed.

  The cold can sent a shiver up her spine. Rajani looked over at Dorothy. "Go clean your brother up. Get him ready for bed." She set the unopened can down in the man's right hand. "Your father and I are going to talk."

  "Dot, getcher dad a beer," he mumbled.

  Dorothy started to protest, but Rajani's eyes narrowed and let her know that nothing could be done to win a contest of wills at this point. Mickey looked from Dorothy to Rajani and back, then slowly released his father's leg and headed off down the narrow corridor beside the kitchen. Reluctantly, Dorothy followed him.

  Rajani moved and cut off the man's view of the television. His left thumb punched buttons on the remote control, but nothing changed. He blinked his eyes once, then twice in rapid succession. The slack muscles of his face tightened, giving some shape to his stubbly cheeks. His mouth closed, then his tongue licked dry lips. "Whaaaa?"

  "What am I?" Rajani drove an axe blade of sheer terror through the man's mind. She chopped through his stupor and saw what memories arose in response to the fright she projected into him. She raced past his fear of failing his children, the despair from the death of his girlfriend and the pain of losing his wife. What she wanted was deeper and more primal. She sliced down in until she blew by his adolescence and touched the memories he recorded when he was little older than Mickey. "That's right, I'm the Grimmand," she growled, co-opting the name of the bogeyman his mother used to frighten him with. "I've come to see what sort of man would sell his children before I rip him to pieces."

  She grabbed the beer can in her right hand and punched her golden nails through the front of it. Beer sprayed out over his face and torso, then she tossed the foaming can down into the pile beside his chair. "Greed, sloth, gluttony or the greatest sin—stupidity. Which was it?"

  The man stared at her wide-eyed with terror. "Not sold, not sold . . ."

  "Don't lie to me!" Rajani yanked free the memory of his handing Dorothy and Mickey over to his brother Andy.

  "Get a good price for her, and whatever you can get for him!" She made those words echo again and again inside his head. She used them to shatter his self-image and in her anger it took her a second or two to realize how easily it had collapsed. Within the shards of a heroic granite statue, she discovered a wailing infant and, as she watched, it regressed in age to the point where it could no longer survive.

  He's dying. He has no will to live. He's been killing himself by inches since they left. She projected herself into his mind and scooped him up into her arms. «No, you cannot die on me. Your daughter needs you. Your son needs you. You will live for them.»

  The infant looked up at her with an ancient weariness in its eyes. Its mouth opened, but its tiny lungs couldn't power out a scream. Its little fingers grasped at nothing, silently signing its inability to succeed at anything. «I am worthless. Let me go!»

  Rajani shook her head, and a golden lock curled through the premature baby's right palm. The fist closed on it, and the baby clutched at it with all its failing might. Rajani knew he wanted to pull on her hair and hurt her, but he could not. Still, she used that desire to slowly bring him back. «You cannot hurt me. You are less than either of your children, and they could not hurt me. Not yet, anyway. I am safe from them, and safe from you.»

  The child in her arms aged rapidly. He plumped quickly enough that she had to set him down. In the half-second it took her to do that, the child's legs had become strong enough to support his weight. He rapidly progressed from infant through toddler to his son's age. The child looked down at his body, then up at her. "What is the use? The world was hell when I grew up. It was worse when Dorothy was born and worse again when Mickey came. I have failed them. I failed their mother. They are better off without me."

  "No, they are not."

  "Others will care for them, do better for them."

  "But your children don't love others. They love you." Rajani aimed a solid stream of thoughts at the child. She poured into him her memories of the trip, including the things his children said about him. She forced their father to see himself through the eyes of his children and to know how much they loved and depended upon him. His bond with them was more than as someone who obtained food for them and maintained their shelter. He was the core of their reality, and Rajani drilled that point home over and over again.

  As the memories filled him, the child grew into a man. He fought against the transformation, staring at adult limbs as if they were unwanted growths. He scraped at the whiskers on his face and raked his fingers across his hairy chest. He slumped down to deny his height and hugged his arms around himself to make himself seem smaller. "No, I cannot take responsibility for them. I am not strong enough. It is too difficult."

  Rajani reached up and grabbed his upper arms. "You have the strength. No, you will not change the world, but your children can. They are strong, and they have done incredible things to return to you. You owe them. You know there is only one way to escape what haunts you, and that is to ensure that you and your wife are immortal by providing your children the foundation for their success."

  "Can I?"

  "By simply surviving, you will be that foundation." Rajani backed away from him. "With a little bit of effort on your part, they will excel beyond your wildest dreams."

  She withdrew herself from his mind and straightened up over his slumped form. He looked up at her, then his eyes closed. For a half-second she thought he might have slipped away again, but then a loud buzzing snore sounded from him, and Rajani smiled.

  "He always did sound like a chainsaw." Dorothy leaned against the apartment wall. "You're not from Phoenix, are you?"

  Rajani shook her head. "No, but I am heading there."

  Dorothy looked right through her. "Are you even human?"

  Rajani stiffened. "Human enough to know what it is to lose your parents." She looked down at Dorothy's father. "He'll be okay now, I think. He knows what he means to you and how important he is to you. He lost that somewhere, when your mother died and the pressure got too great. He's found it again."

  "Are you going to stay? We have room."

  Rajani smiled confidently in the face of Dorothy's fear and hopefulness. "Don't worry, Dorothy. You are more than strong enough to see to your brother and father. You don't need me here, neither does your father." She hugged her arms around herself. "I would very much like to stay, but what I have to do neces
sitates my making it to Phoenix. In fact, I should probably head out tonight."

  Dorothy crossed the room and hugged her tightly. "Thank you, Rajani."

  Rajani returned the hug, then broke it and blinked away tears. "Give Mickey my love."

  Dorothy nodded and sniffled. "I hope you find what you're looking for."

  Rajani winked at her and retreated from the apartment. She let the sound of the crane's loud engine pound into her and blank her mind as quickly as possible. She lengthened her stride to get away from there fast, but something tugged at her. She turned and took one look back.

  "Ouah-ah, ajni," Mickey yelled to her from the window. His broken smile lit his face and conjured a smile on her face.

  She waved at him. «Good-bye, Mickey. Be safe.»

  «You, too, Rajani. Good-bye!»

  She stared at him, then they shared a silent laugh and Rajani wandered happily off into the night.