Olly ushered him to a back room crowded with props.
“We were gonna include Hosanna Freed but we had trouble with the face,” Olly said. “Almost no reference. Vitessa put the whammy on it. Besides, the big thing with him was his unit. We’re not licensed for genital nudity—but I had another idea. A year ago I met up with an old hombre I knew in Texas. He was fencing stuff this lab chick had boosted from a Vitessa facility in Dallas. He showed me this.”
The museumeer pulled out a long veranium cylinder with the diameter of a tea saucer. Olly opened an invisible seam down the length to reveal a nesting of moist umber foam that appeared to be alive. An empty space stared back like an open grave.
“There was a preserved human penis in here,” Olly said. “Huge but human. I’m certain it was severed from Freed’s body after the massacre thirty years ago.”
“It’s gone!” Clearfather whistled.
“Stolen,” answered Olly. “Two months ago, this cat who claimed to be the personal procurer for Wynn Fencer came to me. Very odd. Like he didn’t have bones. He’d heard I had the organ—I’d gotten drunk with Meese and shot my mouth off at a party in 20th CenturyLand. He asked if I’d sell. I’m like no, I have plans for it. He said Fencer had gotten into black magic—I could name my price. I naturally got suspicious. Told him no. Couple weeks later another character shows up. An old black dude pretending to be blind. He says he runs a big mojo store and mail-order business in South Chicago. Sells gris-gris bags—goofer dust. Makes me an offer, too. I start thinking there’s more to the penis than meets the eye—so I lock it up in my floor safe. Couple days later I see Edgar Allan Poe wandering around back here and I think . . . how can the eidolons leave a projection area? Well, it wasn’t Ed. Knocked me cold and skedaddled with the dick. Brought his own container, too. Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” Clearfather agreed, trying to figure out what it meant.
“I’m convinced the penis was Hosanna Freed’s. Don’t know whether those dudes worked for Fencer—I doubt it. But they cleaned out everything I had on Freed.”
“Do you know anything about the woman who stole the penis from Vitessa?”
“My buddy just said she was a lab rat.”
“So it had been in Vitessa’s possession all those years?”
“Looks like it.”
“What makes you think it belonged to Hosanna Freed?”
“The size! Plus the way it was stored. And that it was found in Texas—a lab that Vitessa bought up when they coalesced. What’s your interest in all this?”
“Doing research.”
“You sure do look familiar. You any relation to Freed?”
“Maybe,” Clearfather answered coyly. “That’s why I’m doing research.”
“Well, be careful what you find. And who you tell.”
Clearfather thanked the museumeer and went to retrieve Kokomo, who now looked very pale—and ill. He was so intrigued by what Olly had told him and so concerned about Kokomo’s change in appearance he didn’t notice that the apparent eidolon of Senator Joseph McCarthy left immediately after them, following them down Brando Street.
The panhandlers were becoming more deformed and insistent. (There’s nothing worse than having someone in your face who doesn’t have a face.) Clearfather hustled Kokomo along. Not wanting to cross through the gardens, they headed into a maze of markets that reeked of shashlik and fajitas. You could buy an Ecuadorian cretin or barter DNA. They settled for Hokkein noodles. Big Joe kept close.
Back behind them the robotic structures conducted their stylized Noh theater transformations—the giant rides like the Wyziwyg and Zero G blinking—monolithic Easter Island heads announcing PRIME RIB SPECIALS. They came to a burgeoning campground full of cargo cultists and Ghost Dancers. Out beyond the perimeter, Clearfather saw an intricate reticulum of ponds and trenches full of organic-smelling sludge. Huge robotronic bulldozers were at work, pushing hulks of cars and rubbish into the ponds. Underneath all the other noises he could hear a low bubbling sound.
To drive the LosVegas engines of entertainment and illusion required extreme energy resources that tapped the ingenuity of the species. Tidal, solar, hydro, wind, and orgo-molecular generation combined to keep the juices flowing—creating a heat island like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. It was just fortunate that a bioexploration division of Vitessa had discovered, deep in the remains of Burundi, a form of algae that could ingest refuse metal and plastics. This life-form, on the threshold between the plant and the animal, literally ate the excretions of American consumer society and produced oxygen—and still more money for Vitessa. People called them the Goblins and the name stuck.
The couple found their way back to the Synapse line. Two long stops away they spotted a vandalized statue of Lionel Richie. Clearfather hailed a rickshaw pulled by a young white guy—an English major. He recommended a place called Noah’s Park. “It’s not the cleanest or sanest in town—but the owners have their hearts in the right place,” the rickshawer said.
The owners turned out to be Bob, who ran the motel side of the operation, while his wife, Kayleen, looked after the animals—performing animals that had once been stars downtown. A sourpuss cougar wallowed in a hammock between two kumquat trees, ignoring a disgruntled pair of snow leopards that lay on recliners—while the pool was dominated by a pygmy hippo named Bernadette and an obstreperous family of trained seals called the Osmonds. This wasn’t the kind of accommodation I was thinking of, Clearfather thought to himself. But it was cheap and, like the rickshaw kid had said, it had a good vibe. Kokomo went straight to the heart-shaped bed in the clean but simple Room 6 and lay holding her head. Clearfather grew more anxious about her. Her distress or discomfort was his. He tried offering her a cool damp cloth but she didn’t acknowledge him. The red light on the old phone by the bed lit up.
“Someone’s at reception for you,” Bob said. “Should I send her along?”
CHAPTER 14
Reverse Theology
When Konrad Kriegsspiel, the Now West Coast director of Vitessa Intel, had a particularly difficult assignment, he turned to Cyrilla Lundquist. It was she who’d scoped on Clearfather and Kokomo at the Amazonia and tracked them to the museum, where she’d changed her disguise to follow them as Big Joe. When she’d established their location at Noah’s Park, she morphed out of the Hallucinarmor.
Her mission was to gain Clearfather’s confidence or, failing that, to inspire uncertainty—to buy time. After the humiliating events in Texas, a great trembling had shaken the Vitessalith. Here was a new weapon, materializing out of nowhere, without a clear suggestion of who was behind him or to what purpose he’d been deployed. At the same time, Dooley Duck and Ubba Dubba had torn loose from their technological moorings and were leading other creations astray. Cybersimulated characters were appearing everywhere—having sex and preaching anti-commercial rebellion. Carefully cultivated and coordinated micro-mental-illnesses were destabilizing or disappearing. To top it off, Vitessa’s secret informant had gone quiet. Now the awful Dustdevil affair, instead of being a tip-off they could trust, was beginning to look very much like a setup. And what a slaughter! Millions of dollars in technology lost and no clue what they were up against.
All their attention now was focused on Room 6 in Noah’s Park, and yet somewhere in the labyrinths upon labyrinths that formed the liquidata molecular intelligence network of the Vitessa Central Nervous System, an alarm was ringing, like a tiny bell deep underground warning of a big wind. There was a monitoring system monitoring this system—and a monitoring system to monitor that—on up a chain. But the message was lost in the network’s own immensity. Someone had commandeered a satellite. Their secret informant was making his own play—a long-range sniper shot. And just as Keeperz was feeling so close to the fulfillment of his scheme, his new masters were cursing him for the doubt he’d created, doubt that now undermined them like an uploaded Scorpion.
Clearfather heard the rowdy splashing of the Osmonds, which made him thin
k of Mr. Meese. If only the quest could be behind him, all the secrets revealed and the magic ended. He just wanted to live as normal a life as he could with Kokomo. There were footsteps approaching. He pulled a thin blanket over his love and stepped outside.
“Good evening,” the woman said.
Clearfather’s eyes vacuumed in details. A svelte Krav Maga disciplined figure, shoulder-length topaz-tinted hair, and synthetic eyes that had the disorienting luster and density of Broome pearls. She wore a palladium-colored all-weather bodysuit seductively unseamed to reveal fine full cleavage precisely tanned to complement the metallic sheen of her outfit. On her feet were black chrome stilettos.
“Hold your fire,” she said, and ran her tongue along her lower lip.
“What?” he said, hearing Kokomo tossing on the bed. “Come out here.”
Warily, he led the woman out to the patio. The Osmonds slid off their tiered platforms as if defending their territory. The woman picked up one of the colored balls and lobbed it into the pool. The biggest of the Osmonds gave her a flipper-smack of water.
“I don’t think they play ball,” Clearfather said.
“How annoying. What good’s a trained seal if it doesn’t play ball?”
The giraffe agreed, which prompted a chorus of grunting from the seals and some sustained splashing. Apparently, while the Osmonds were reluctant to cooperate, they still possessed the synchronized comic timing that betrayed a lifetime in show business.
“I’m Cyrilla Lundquist of Vitessa Intel,” the woman with the artificial eyes announced as she dabbed the projected moisture from her pert left breast. “Relax. No one’s going to harm you.”
“Is that because you’re not going to try again or because you can’t?”
The woman smiled and bit her lip—full and sensual, the color of a fine Bordeaux.
“Can we sit and talk? In peace?”
“You first,” Clearfather said, indicating two lawn chairs.
“I’m here to help you. I know you don’t believe that, but hear me out. You’re having memory problems. You don’t know who you are or what you’re doing. Right?”
Clearfather noticed that the Osmonds were harassing Bernadette the pygmy hippo.
“What you don’t realize,” Cyrilla Lundquist continued, “is that you work for us. You’re with Vitessa Intel.”
“What?” Clearfather asked and the zebra spun in its sling.
“You’re a secret Vitessa project that’s malfunctioned. I’ve been sent to bring you in for treatment and debriefing. I know this is difficult to understand. But you’re having technical problems. The military maneuver in Texas was a field test to find out how serious the problem is.”
“Did I pass?”
“Yes! But if the goal was to foreclose, you wouldn’t be here now. I’m here to bring you in safely. I don’t know all the details. I just know the Pantheon wants to protect their investment—and that if you don’t come peacefully, they’ll be forced to trigger the fail-safe self-destruct implant you have.”
The cougar gave a grumpy growl.
“Let me get this straight,” said Clearfather. “I come with you and I get treatment and reprogramming—”
“Debriefing.”
“—or someone flicks the switch and the lights go out. What would you do?”
The Osmonds began barking and splashing boisterously.
The Nourisher told him he’d come back from the dead. Now this smooth-talking woman was saying that he was a “secret project.”
The Osmonds waddled up the steps of the slide and whooshed down. Bernadette submerged. Cyrilla Lundquist remained unruffled despite the occasional spray.
“You have to make up your own mind,” she shrugged. “If we try to force you, the self-destruct device will activate. But I can promise you, you’ll soon have a breakdown. You wouldn’t want to end up hurting your girlfriend, would you?”
Clearfather flinched at this possibility—but then it occurred to him that the way she said girlfriend indicated they didn’t know about Kokomo’s powers. If he was really part of Vitessa Intel, they’d know about her—wouldn’t they?
“I can see you need convincing.” Cyrilla smiled. “I would, too, in your shoes. What can I do to show you that what I’m saying is the truth?”
“You could start by telling me who I am—what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Okay,” Cyrilla said and moistened her lips. She pulled from her breast pocket a quartz crystal and pointed it out in front of her. A hologrammatic image began forming, as if made of grains of light. A giant amusement kingdom in miniature.
“This is 20th CenturyLand,” she said as the miniature protective dome vanished to reveal a configuration of uranium silver spheres that trembled as if made of water. Tiny figures of people entered or merged with the spheres, which then projected a series of images: three-dimensional scenes that shifted from a bunker on Iwo Jima to the streets of Berkeley—to Saddam Hussein. One of the spheres she appeared to levitate with the crystal. It melted open to reveal leafy streets and a bucktoothed boy on a Sting-Ray bike in the midst of a paper route.
“This is FamilyVille,” the sultry agent said. “It gives single people, older people, and childless couples the chance to hire children or parents of their own and delight in the fun of a more innocent era. There’s a hedge maze and a mohair ranch, and the Happy Hen Fun Farm. We tailor situations to people’s specifications. Like attending a beloved grandmother’s funeral or watching an ideal daughter giv-ing the valedictory address. This proved so popular it led to our Real Reality program in towns and cities like Moscow, Idaho. Seattle. Tucson.”
“Those are . . . theme parks?”
“They’re strategically designed and maintained recosystems aligned to fit specific cultural values and security parameters,” Cyrilla said and waved the miniature amusement empire away with the crystal.
“So you control . . . and all these places are . . . fake?”
“None of them is ‘fake.’ They’re as real as Youngstown, Pennsylvania. And we don’t ‘control’—we manage and guide. Our environments are dynamic. They evolve and change. Things even go wrong. Take the community of Shaker Heights. Under the apparent affluence, drugs and divorce are rife—sexual dysfunction through the roof. They even have crime. You can’t have high belief indices in authority structures without micro-instabilities. Which brings me to our most secret project. Code-named Green Pastures.”
Bernadette resurfaced with a snorky sound. It reminded Clearfather of Kokomo. He hoped she was all right.
“Green Pastures is on the surface that mythical small town that once lay at the heart of America’s dream of itself,” Cyrilla explained. “Got a shopping mall and a Lions Club picnic area. There’s even an eccentric woman who carves the busts of famous people out of cheese.”
“What’s so secret about it?” Clearfather asked.
“Because it’s really a psychiatric prison,” Cyrilla replied. “Almost everyone is a high-level criminal. There are hackers, jammers, and sandstormers—cops, politicians, and civic leaders—a whole townful of people who, like your seal friends here, wouldn’t play ball.”
The Osmonds began barking again, which woke up the two snow leopards.
“Not one of them knows they’re there. Or, they know they’re there. They just don’t know why they’re there—or more importantly who they are. All of them have been given a personality implant that overrides their true sense of identity. The beautiful thing is that this still allows us to tap into their minds—without their knowing. We monitor their subconscious. We track their dreams. We’ve been able to derive quite a bit of valuable counterintelligence this way. And in several important cases we are now ready to reinsert these people back into their old lives with more or less complete command guidance capability.”
“So where do I fit in?” Clearfather asked.
“Do you remember the name Parousia Head?”
“W-why?” He almost said yes.
“She
’s the most wanted criminal in the world. There are no records of her—no ID data. No one’s ever seen her that we can be sure of.”
“Then how do you know there is such a person?”
“We wouldn’t have so many suspicions otherwise,” Cyrilla answered. “But even if the woman I’m going to tell you about isn’t Parousia Head—she’s very worrisome. Calls herself Lodema Honeyflute. Has a questionably thin, clean file. Now she’s taken up a rather influential residency.”
“She’s moved to Green Pastures? How did she get in?”
“Anyone can get in and leave when they want. There aren’t any walls or bars except in people’s minds. The inmates think they live there. The personality implants give them only a few contacts outside, all managed by us. The rest of the residents we monitor. Sometimes there are problems, but not like this. Parousia Head or Lodema Honeyflute has become the leader of a religious cult.”
“A cult?”
“Calls her followers The Real People. Has a lot of witty slogans, like ‘The shortest distance between two points of view is the truth.’ Preaches in the Lions Club picnic area by the coin-operated barbecues. Her prophecy is based on the notion that the apparent reality of Green Pastures is an illusion and that behind the scenes lies a hidden reality. I think you can see how disruptive such a suggestion seems to us.”
“Yes.” Clearfather nodded.
“In what has been called ‘the Barbecue Sermon,’ she’s promised the arrival of a Messiah who will disclose to them the real reason why they’re there. She’s begun primitive deconditioning rituals to get people to remember who they really are.”
“What does this have to do with me?” asked Clearfather.
“You were developed to be the Messiah she’s been predicting. We couldn’t send in a neutralizer without the risk that she would become a martyr. That might give the cult the crucial ingredient to evolve into something beyond our guidance.”
Zanesville: A Novel Page 28