by Jaspre Bark
"Nodule Head?" he repeated, frowning.
The short descent from the entrance passageway was simple enough. Iron rungs had been hammered into the crater wall and a knotted rope trailed beside them.
Johnny took his time, carefully testing each rung beneath his feet. He knew there was more chance of being spotted this way, but with luck, the Salvationists inside the base would be as overconfident in their ability to remain hidden as the hunters outside. Even if they saw the telltale distortion of his chameleon cloak, he hoped they would mistake him for one of their own guards. So long as he kept his movements unhurried, confident, natural.
He knew the plan made sense. He knew it was the best they had. But still his nerves were fraught, screaming at him that he had made the worst mistake a warrior could make: he had turned his back to his enemies. He felt exposed and his neck hairs prickled with the sensation of imaginary eyes upon him. He felt he had been climbing down this ladder for an age, and that it extended a greater distance still below him.
He wouldn't even hear them coming over the din of the turbine. The first he would know about it would be when he was struck down with an arrow in the back.
Then, at last, his foot touched stone and he was on firm ground once again. He allowed himself a quiet breath of relief before casting a furtive glance around. Nobody was waiting for him. He couldn't see anybody at all. He turned to his left and slipped behind the nearest hut.
Middenface stepped onto the ladder a moment later. Johnny watched him until he, too, had reached the bottom without incident. He looked around, caught sight of Johnny, and pulled back his cloak to flash him an "OK" gesture, his thumb and forefinger touching to form a circle. Then he crept off to the right and out of sight.
That was the easy part over with.
Johnny skirted around the edge of the hut and scuttled across a narrow gangway to the next one. He could hear low voices now and he made his way towards them. Five norms were sitting around on packing crates, swigging beer from cans and swapping jokes. Johnny was just in time to hear the punch line of a particularly bad one about a mutant, a nun, and a hoverbus driver. It hardly bothered him that the mutant was the butt of the joke; he was used to that. But after the bomb attack that Nose Job Johnson and General Rising had described - the one that had claimed a bus driver's life - the joke seemed especially inappropriate.
The norms, however, laughed uproariously. Only belatedly did the slender, blonde-haired woman stifle her giggles and appeal for quiet. "We don't want the Consoler to hear us, do we?" she said with a conspiratorial grin.
"Don't care if he does," grumbled an overweight man with a square chin and heavy brow. Johnny recognised his baritone voice as that of the joke-teller. "He ought to know how we feel. Then maybe he'd do something about it."
The blonde woman sighed. "That's not fair, Jim. We're all impatient for change, but the Consoler can only do so much."
"Jim's not good with patience," said one of the other men. "If he had his way, we'd march on the palace tonight with torches and pitchforks."
"Damn right!" The overweight man slammed a fist into his crate. "I'm sick of these hit-and-run tactics. The longer we sit around here, the more time we give them to prepare."
"Security has got tighter since McGuffin was killed," someone else pointed out.
"And we're getting stronger," asserted the blonde woman. "Our numbers are growing all the time. We will make our move, but it has to be the right one at the right time, or all the good work we've done will be wasted."
"If you ask me," said the overweight man gruffly, "every day we let that scum Leadbetter stay in power is one day too long." He pushed himself up from the crate and marched away, his fists clenched and his head bowed.
For a brief moment, Johnny had a good view of his back, and he was startled to see a short, thin tail dangling over the waistband of the man's loose-fitting trousers. For the second time in as many hours, he had mistaken a mutant for a norm.
Deep in thought, he moved on.
A baby was crying.
The sound came from inside one of the huts, insistent and penetrating. Middenface had ignored it at first, thinking that whatever was happening in there, it was nothing to do with him, but now the sound was playing on his nerves. The child was obviously in distress. He found himself drawn to the hut's back wall, wishing he had Johnny's alpha vision to see through it. Fortunately, the building was not very well constructed, and he found a gap between two planks that afforded him a restricted view of its interior.
He saw the edge of a makeshift cot, and a flickering shadow that suggested movement inside it. There was no sign of anybody else.
The wailing continued so Middenface made up his mind. He marched around to the front of the hut and shouldered open the door.
It was dark inside the hut's single room. The only light came through a glassless window beside the door that carried in the halogen light from outside. A steam pipe ran along the back wall, and a pan of milk was warming on it. But Middenface hardly noticed any of this. His gaze was immediately drawn to the cot and to its occupant, which had to be the biggest baby he had ever seen.
It was six feet tall and as bulky as Middenface himself. There was no denying that it was a baby, though, with its scrunched-up features and its hairless head. It was wearing an enormous patchwork nappy which appeared to have been stitched together from scraps of curtain material. And it was still crying, as if it were in dreadful pain.
No wonder, thought Middenface. The cot was barely large enough to hold it. It was wedged up against both sides, the wooden slats straining to breaking point. The baby had to be uncomfortable.
And then the mutant baby saw him and burst into a renewed bout of bawling and shrieking, pedalling its feet with their stumpy, underdeveloped toes as if in a hopeless attempt to get away from him.
Realising that he looked like a ghost in his chameleon cloak, Middenface shrugged it off his shoulders. The sight of his mutated form, however, was evidently no less upsetting. Not knowing what else to do, he raised his hands and backed away.
"Um, there, there," he said awkwardly. "Dinnae cry. Ah dinnae wannae hurt ye."
He almost collided with a middle-aged woman in the hut's doorway. They both recoiled and stared at each other in horror. The woman was a norm so far as Middenface could see. She was grey-haired and stooped, and her face had been crinkled by lines that were probably caused by worry rather than age. He expected her to scream or to raise an alarm, and if she tried, he would have to knock her out, discomfited as he was by the idea.
But instead, she just asked in a quiet voice: "What are you doing in here?"
"Ah, um..." Middenface's features twisted in concentration. He was halfway through concocting an explanation for his unlikely presence in the Salvationist camp when he realised that the woman was only concerned with his presence in her hut. "Ah heard this, uh, bonny wee bairn of yours crying out, and ah thought..."
She nodded, seeming to accept that. She moved past him to see to the pan on the pipe. Middenface didn't know what confused him more: the fact that, here in the very lair of the norm supremacists, his mutation had passed without comment, or that the woman had hardly spared a glance for her crying child.
She caught his gaze with tired eyes as she filled a plastic bottle with warm milk. "I know it seems dreadful of me," she sighed, "but it never stops. Night and day... There's nothing... You become inured to it. That's why I came here. The Consoler... He's my only hope. My Little Billy's only chance for a real life."
Middenface's eyes widened. "Ye're getting him... Ah mean, ye've brought him here tae... Shouldn't that be the bairn's choice? When he grows up, ah mean?"
The woman fixed him with an odd look. "He's thirty-four years old," she said. "Oh, I've heard all the arguments about how he was born a mutant and how he should stay that way. It's what he is, and I love him, I really do. But we aren't talking about an extra arm or a tail or whatever. The doctors say my boy is in constant pain and ther
e's nothing they can do about it. Doesn't he deserve a chance? If I can end his suffering..."
"And the Consoler's okay with that, is he?" asked Middenface, sceptically. "He's happy to help ye?"
"He can't absorb the whole of Little Billy's mutation at once," said the woman. "It would overwhelm him. But he says he'll do what he can. He'll take it one stage at a time. He's a wonderful man."
Middenface didn't know what to say. He was more confused than ever. He settled on a mumbled "I'm sorry," but it didn't seem adequate. He turned and left the hut as the woman took the plastic bottle to her gigantic baby, which gulped at it greedily, still snuffling and grizzling. He took one final, forlorn look back over his shoulder, and was therefore completely unprepared for what awaited him outside.
Six norms carrying crossbows and longbows formed a semicircle in front of the open door, and Middenface cursed himself for having let down his guard.
He had walked into an ambush.
Johnny paused for thought by the side of the steam carbine in the crater's centre. He had been here forty minutes now, and all he had seen were norms and mutants apparently mixing peacefully. Had Rising lied to him? Had he misjudged the Salvationists' motives? Even if he had, he thought, the threat they posed seemed real enough.
He was still standing, wondering which way to go, his bones rattling in sympathy with the carbine's deafening rhythm, when they came for him.
One second, there was nobody. The next, he was surrounded. He didn't even have time to draw a weapon, not that it would have done him any good. Johnny couldn't understand how they had done this, how they had got the drop on him so completely and so suddenly. Somehow, he reasoned, they must have known his exact location despite his cloak. He wondered if they had been aware of his presence from the start.
Johnny weighed up his options. If he let them take him, he was as good as dead. If he fought, he was still dead, but at least he might take one or two of them down with him.
As if reading his thoughts, one of the bowmen said: "Don't try anything stupid. The Consoler only wants to talk. We're to take you to him."
"The Consoler?" repeated Johnny, nonplussed.
"You're looking for Identi Kit, aren't you?" said the bowman. "Well, the Consoler has some information that might interest you."
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CONSOLER
Johnny winced. Middenface swore. The Consoler merely laughed. It was a warm laugh, full of understanding and humanity.
The laugh shamed Johnny, but it also put him at ease. He and Middenface had both grown up around deformity and mutation. They had not only come to accept it in others and in themselves, but they also felt more comfortable in its presence. It meant they were among their own kind, away from the prying eyes and accusatory stares of the norms. But neither of them had ever seen anyone quite so hideously mutated as the Consoler. Not even President Ooze came close.
It wasn't any one particular feature that made him so grotesque; it was the agglomeration of so many different ones. Johnny would have found himself hard-pressed to give a precise and accurate description of the Consoler. Even a genetic specialist would have had a hard time documenting all his manifest mutations. There were eyes, noses, legs, arms, and some unidentifiable limbs sprouting from the most unlikely parts of his body. His skin was a vast patchwork of colours and textures. Mutation was piled on mutation to create a whole new set of hybrid deformities. There were parts of his body that were so mutated that Johnny had a hard time even visually registering them. His brain could just not take in what his eyes were seeing.
The two guards who had accompanied them into the Consoler's living quarters knelt in front of him, and the grotesque mutant placed a ceremonial hand on each of their heads. The guards stood, bowed slightly, and withdrew to join the others gathered outside the hut. Johnny couldn't help thinking it was a strange way to behave around prisoners.
"Please, do have a seat," said the Consoler as he sat down on a faded cushion and motioned to Johnny and Middenface to do the same.
The Consoler's living quarters were sparsely furnished. The floor was covered with matted reeds. There was a bedroll and a few blankets in one corner, some cushions scattered on the floor, and a writing table against the far wall. Apart from the armed guards outside his door, there was nothing about the dwelling that suggested he was being held against his will.
"I am sorry for asking you here in such a forcible manner," said the Consoler. "I hope my men did not mistreat you."
"Yer men?" exclaimed Middenface in surprise. "Ah thought ye were a captive."
The Consoler chuckled. "There are many stories told about me by those who are opposed to our aims. However, I assure you gentlemen that I am most definitely here of my own free will, as is every other member of our camp."
"Whit aboot the guards?"
"They are there for my protection only, not to ensure that I don't escape."
"From the way you talk, it sounds like you're the leader here," said Johnny.
"I provide guidance and tactical advice to the Salvationist cause," said the Consoler. "So in that capacity I imagine many would see me as a leader, yes."
"The Consoler is more than a leader; he is an inspiration and a saint. He suffers for the redemption of the whole of Miltonia," said a voice - or rather, two voices - from the doorway. Johnny turned and saw that another mutant had entered the room. He was quite short and slight, and carried himself in a very officious manner. He had a second mouth in the centre of his forehead that was identical to his first. When he spoke, both mouths voiced the words. The mouth in his forehead had a slightly higher register, however, giving the impression of two people talking in unison.
"Permit me to introduce my adviser, Doubletalk Daley," said the Consoler.
"I hope I am not intruding, Consoler," said Doubletalk. "I heard that you were alone with the pris... Er, guests, and I wanted to see if I could lend my support."
"You're not intruding at all," said the Consoler, tossing him a cushion. "Come and join us." Doubletalk sat next to his boss with an affected air of nonchalance that Johnny could tell was meant to mask his deep suspicion of the bounty hunters.
"How did ye know we were here?" asked Middenface. "Did ye find the guards we took oot?"
The Consoler turned to Doubletalk. "Did we locate the missing perimeter guards yet?"
"We found them behind an outcrop near the entrance to the main antechamber," replied Doubletalk. "We're attending to their injuries now." He shot Johnny and Middenface a hostile look.
The Consoler nodded and returned to Middenface's question. "I have been aware of your presence since you entered the camp. I wanted you to have a look around before I summoned you. Your thoughts were so full of suspicion and violence that I wanted you to see our community and the way it operates. I trust you did not find the den of extremists and murderers that you were expecting?"
"So ye read oor thoughts then?" asked Middenface.
"Not exactly. One of the benefits of my condition is the ability to form a psychic picture of my surroundings, somewhat similar to a radar. I am able to pick up an impression of the feelings and mental activities of any mutant within that area. Over time, and given a bit of practice, I can monitor an area as large as this camp. This is more effective than any surveillance system and provides us with excellent security."
"So, if you admit that there are benefits to being a mutant, and you're not a prisoner, why are you forcing innocent mutants to change against their will?" Johnny wanted to know.
"Everyone who comes to me," said the Consoler, "does so of their own free will. They ask me to take their mutations into myself, and I am pleased to oblige. Their reasons are many. Some, as you have seen, simply cannot live with the horrors that nature has inflicted upon them. Others have their appearances changed at my hands by way of a protest against the prejudice of their fellow mutants. You might be surprised to learn, by the way, that many norms also come to me because they wish to develop a mutation. Doubleta
lk here was one of them."
"And I was honoured that you agreed to minister to me," said Doubletalk.
"Our aim is to remove every boundary between the norms and mutants in our midst. To remove the barriers that set us apart and pit us against each other, in order that we can become consoled to each other's differences."
"That is why we named him the Consoler," Doubletalk interjected.
"It aw sounds like anti-mutant pish tae me," said Middenface.
"That's because you know little of what life is really like here on Miltonia," said the Consoler. "The regime we are resisting is little different from the one you fought against back on Earth."
"These men fought in the Mutant War?" said Doubletalk, both his mouths hanging open in surprise. "I thought they were Strontium... I mean, S/D agents."
"Forgive me, Doubletalk," said the Consoler. "I'm afraid I've been a little circumspect about the identities of our two intruders. This is the renowned Johnny Alpha and Middenface McNulty."
Doubletalk didn't quite know how to react to this revelation. He eyed Johnny with a newfound respect, seeming almost apologetic for his former suspicions. "But they look nothing like they do in the holo-progs!"
Middenface bristled at this and Doubletalk quickly changed the subject. "Are you here to collect a bounty, or do you intend to join our cause?"
Before Johnny could voice his contempt for the question, the Consoler tactfully cut in. "Mr Alpha and Mr Middenface are here under the auspices of the Search/Destroy Agency. However, you have rather indelicately expressed one of my own hopes. Perhaps if our guests see that our efforts here are for a good cause, the same cause, indeed, that prompted their struggle against Nelson Bunker Kreelman, they might throw in their lot with us."
"We didnae plant any bombs on school buses in the Mutant Army," said Middenface with a contemptuous sneer. "Or murder innocent muties."