by R. M. Koster
34
Alive and well in Ciudad Tinieblas!
The tune went tooting gaily round the planet, was blared at full volume, day and night, for weeks. Every outlet featured it. Every analyst warbled a background backup. Every pundit cut his own arrangement. It was bigger than Negresco’s waltz, bigger than the theme from the Coward Cooze story. It was Dred’s greatest hit.
Angela sang it over a nationwide hookup in her first presidential address. In her version Dred was the victim of political oppression. Granting him refuge was the course of compassion and honor. The assembly voted to waive all obstacles. The ministry of justice pronounced him a Tinieblan. The Supreme Court rejected an extradition writ. The chief executive agent flew back to Arizada, declaring the new base of operations secure. Mandeville issues reached new highs on all the exchanges.
And Dred? Dred lurked behind thick velvet blackout curtains, undead and zombied at El Opulento.
The top floor of the hotel was sealed by private guards flown in from Draco. A staff flown in from Zeno took up residence, manned their desks and phones, worked the rooms full of communications equipment. The northwest quadrant was sealed off for Dred. Only the guard that took his food in entered. He never left. He lurked behind the velvet curtains, among the flickering data display screens. They were fed directly from the transmitter on Mount Vervex, through a huge antenna set up on the hotel roof. Dred prowled among them peering, now and then picked up a phone to dictate a memo, or to speak with one of his satraps around the world. He managed his business interests, he ran his empire—with the same verve, the autograph style he’d always shown. But the will that drove him was Mandragon’s.
Mandragon’s will kept his bored organs working, kept his blood slewing wearily round and round. Mandragon’s will kept him breathing, though air tasted rancid and death-musty, though his lungs resented every breath. Mandragon’s will kept him feeding regularly, though he had no appetite, though all food was repulsive to him, though he chewed it in the sullen rhythm of a convict breaking stones in a deep quarry. Mandragon’s will sent his frail body tottering among the screens, forced his burning eyes to focus, goaded his reluctant mind. Dred’s mind knew what to do, it was long-practiced. It culled up ordinary scraps of data and formed them to intricate, unlikely patterns, made them dance elegant capers along the ancient theme of human greed. Reluctantly. All the joy was gone now from these creations. But his mind performed as masterfully as ever when sternly goaded. I lodged part of my will in Dred like a poisoned splinter, stuck it in and left it like a scorpion’s sting. It seared and prodded. It kept him on the job.
More convincing than an animated dummy. His moves and stunts were authentic. His voice on the phone was instantly obeyed. More compliant than a roboted sailor. He multiplied his holdings in Tinieblas, and poured in funds for development, and gave Angela power of attorney. He issued her new stock options. He transferred dizzying sums to her secret accounts.
She grew more lovely and more youthful. The options rosed her flesh, toned her firm thighs. The power of attorney smoothed the nascent wrinkles from about her eyes. The cablegrammed confirmations of deposits swelled her breasts and turned her riggish. And, specially, Mandragon’s light was with her. It made her more stately when she was in public. It warmed her to soft languor when we were alone. Mandragon’s power touched her.
From the evening of Dred’s press conference, which we watched on mirrorvision in her bedroom. We returned there directly from the funeral parlor, while Dred was on his way to the hotel. Angela collapsed on the bed, exhausted. I put the ballroom on her full-length mirror. We watched Dred’s entrance, his presentation, his brusque exit. We watched the journalists mobbing out to file. We caught Dred stepping off the elevator on the top floor, followed his silent march to the flickering gloom of his sanctum. He threw himself down at once and at once heaved upright, tottered to a phone, began calling his satraps, sang them his new tune, alive and well. After a bit he took a call, from his chief executive, who’d come up and was hovering nervously in the staff room. Dred scolded him very horribly which pleased my darling, as I’d thought it would. Then I had another idea.
“If there’s something you’d like him to do, just think of it. Make a wish.”
She closed her eyes tightly for a moment. When she opened them, Dred interrupted himself in mid-sentence to order a sum transferred to Switzerland. He named a bank, gave an account number. The other repeated the instructions, assured Dred they’d be carried out at once.
Angela stared into the mirror. Her face shone with happiness. I let the scene fade.
Angela shifted the pillows and lay back. Gazed up at me, lips parted. Lifted her arms.
Mandragon took possession of her.
My body entered her body. My mind entered her mind. My light filled her. I felt her pleasure as the warm radiance spread within her, her helplessness and terror as it flared and burst. Then she forgot herself. She stopped struggling and abandoned herself to Mandragon. She let herself be swept off like a swimmer borne out to sea in an undertow.
Later she said imperishable things, phrases grammared softly in caresses. That evening, other evenings, when darkness thickened round us like a bulwark. In her bed or on the balcony beyond it, tumbled in the hammock under the stars. She fashioned the most charming adorations, and performed them shyly, all at once unsure of her power to please—offered herself up to Mandragon with artless lavishness, then glanced from trembling lids to see if Mandragon smiled upon her devotions. She knelt in anthem to me: “You are magnificent!” She prostrated herself before me and called for the most abject mortifications: “Anything! You may have anything at all!” She revered and felt herself unworthy.
Best not dwell on it, recalling it’s enough. Not really much to triumph or take pride in. I gave a whore experience of love. The power in me touched her. It scourged her from herself, made her feel love.
Will she remember when I’m dangling?
Best not dwell on it. Abuse of power.
35
“Take it.”
The kitchen trusty, imp-faced, hog-round, squat. Nose and cheeks blossomed with pustules, narrow eyes like crab holes in soft sand. Pudgy feet overflowing ruptured slippers, sausage forearms bulging from prison shirt sleeves, paunch portholing prison trousers below the tie. He holds the metal mug out to me. “Don’t you want it?”
Shake my head. Tepid coffee dolloped with canned milk, paste of unstirred sugar at the bottom. Be squirting at the first swallow.
“Afraid it’s poisoned? Afraid it’ll hurt your tummy and spoil your day? It’s not poisoned. Look.” Has a good slurp of it, licks his lips and hums. “It’s good. Take it!”
I shake my head.
The guard takes another step into the sitting room.
“Just leave it on the table, what do you care?”
“Wait a moment. This isn’t correct. This isn’t the way. Hardly touched his supper last night, no coffee this morning. Special food and special service, but nothing’s good enough for Assholiness here!”
“Come on.”
Plops the mug on the night table but then turns back to me, goes on haranguing. Window paling to grey. Hardly time to finish my recollections, though they’re almost complete. Let the imp run clown, run out of venom.
“… still think you’re the Sainted Pigeon, the Big Pod!”
“Come on!”
“You’ll see, in a little while! No eres nada!”
Softly, to myself really: “I was the instrument of power.”
And at that word the prison quakes again.
Stronger than before, longer too. Guard and imp terrified, I should be too. Animal doesn’t want to be buried alive any more than be gallowsed, but the tremor brings me an odd calm.
• • •
Chaplain soothing Nightandmist, mumbling broken English.
Angela’s face contorted in her hand mirror, lipstick smeared along her cheek.
Cable noose swinging softly from the force of th
e tremor.
The mug has scuttered off the night table to the floor. Imp stares at the spreading stain. Guard murmurs, “Carajo! Hijo de la gran puta!” Then collects himself and shouts, “Vámonos ya!”
He turns, goes out. Imp scampers after him. The door locks behind them.
36
Earth going brittle underneath this country. Elsewhere likewise; weary, wearing out. Under all the vain and stupid prancing; empty clamor, turmoil, cruelty, waste. Fatigued to brittleness, and who can blame it?
Or simply nauseated. Earth heaves and shudders, longing to be cleansed.
Of vain and stupid people, of the vain and vicious rulers they have and deserve. Such as Angela de Sancudo and her consort Mandragon.
Mandragon was Angela’s consort seven weeks, as vain and vicious as your usual ruler.
And rule I did, Mandragon ran the country. Possessing Angela enlarged my head wonderfully, more than enjoying her enlarged my parts, so that it throbbed mightily for public deference. Angela’s love squeals stabbed up at the ceiling. Her body heaved and shuddered, then lay still. Mandragon unquiffed and rolled off her, gentled his tumescent head onto the pillow, and at once began to muse on his magnificence and consider what posts and honors might become it.
Only the highest, of course. Tinieblas itself seemed a pitifully small and dingy setting for a jewel of my splendor. The whole world ought to acknowledge and pay homage. Angela turned to Mandragon, murmuring sweetly. He visioned multitudes applauding, kneeling, groveling. Sweet murmurs, soft caresses, Mandragon mused on.
A spanking new Mandragon, my last transformation. I’d never cared about applause as a performer, or exulted in the adulation of my tribe. None of that was really for me personally. I was power’s instrument and servant. Then I forgot the power that lived in me, abandoned it, served Angela instead, but at least I had a guide point and some ballast. Now I served only myself. Now I worshiped only my Mandragonhood. Nothing grounding it, nothing above it. Hollow, puffed with importance, swollen yet light. My Mandragonhood ballooned away on the pointless vagaries of auto-adoration, while I tried to fill it up with public deference.
Angela made no objection when I mentioned my hunger for high office. Much the reverse: she was enchanted. I’d proved a loyal and capable accomplice. Passing me her burdens of state would let her concentrate on squeezing the maximum pelf out of Zombito. But she would have been enchanted by any request. She was experiencing love. She welcomed any chance to please me. And the mechanism existed whereby she might. General Manduco’s constitution was still in effect. It gave her dictatorial powers, and the right to transfer them to anyone she wished. So in her first address as president—delivered at 7 P.M. the following evening, over a nationwide TV and radio hookup, from her thronish perch in the state office—after she’d thanked the Tinieblan people for accepting her, and the cabinet for its support and the Guard for its loyalty, and the functionaries of the three branches for their devotion; after she’d promised to revere her beloved husband’s memory (sniffling softly, producing two pearl-perfect tears) by adopting his principles, the foremost of which were honor and compassion, and proceeded from that to touch on the Mandeville question (denouncing oppression, urging asylum for Dred); after she’d vowed to govern as wisely and vigorously as God’s grace and her own strength permitted (clasping her fingers, bowing her saintly head), she confessed that her strength was, femininely, frail. She intended, therefore, to invoke constitutional privilege (waving the document, citing the pertinent text), to shift some of her burdens to sturdier shoulders, to cede her powers and responsibilities as head of government to a first minister, retaining only those of head of state. For the new office she had looked beyond the realm of politics to one dependent on no party or faction, one who had already done the nation service in a dark hour, and who (besides) had been a friend to her husband, their great leader, easing his pain and comforting his last days. Then she named me.
In the nick of time too, though I doubt she’d admit it now. She wouldn’t have lasted long without Mandragon. She had no following and no known qualifications. (All reference to her genius for gondola management had been snipped from the authorized version of her life.) As the shock of Alejo’s death faded, the Tinieblan people began to doubt she should stay in charge. The ministers had already decided she shouldn’t, and as the shock of her first cabinet meeting faded, they began to cabal, intrigue, scheme, conspire, and plot. So did the Civil Guard officers. So did the functionaries of the three branches. The Tinieblan government looked like a basket of lobsters, and Angela wouldn’t have stayed on top for long. Not long enough, maybe, to swing Zombisimo’s citizenship, or give him a proper squeezing, or avoid being shaken down herself. Too many pretenders, that was the problem. Not even Angela could have humped and gagged them all.
Not in time, that is. In theory she could have managed, but practical politics imposes stern time pressure. The lobsters keep clawing and scrambling. They don’t wait while you manage them one by one. Much easier for her now, thanks to Mandragon. Mandragon’s regime provoked a coup by the colonels—successful because my power abandoned me. They suppress all other rivals, and there’s only three of them to hump and gag. Angela can stay on and rule Tinieblas if she chooses, or decamp and live in luxury on her squeezings. Another story entirely eight weeks ago. Angela would have fallen; Mandragon prevailed.
Mandragon was (simply) better qualified, supremely gifted. To head the Tinieblan (or any other) government. He was (first of all) free of extraneous motives, high or low, honorable or dis-. He was not encumbered by principle or patriotism, by concern (imagined or real) for the people’s welfare, by worries about his eventual place in history, by cruelty, greed, or any of the other curbs and urges that sometimes distract practitioners from the essential payoff of political activity. All Mandragon craved was public deference, to be the one that people stroked and fawned on, the Sainted Pigeon, the Divine Heron, the Big Pod. He didn’t have to engage opponents singly—and sooner or later everyone here’s an opponent; elsewhere likewise, each lobster for himself. Mass bedazzlement was one of his specialties. Nor was he obliged to maneuver via sentiment or self-interest, or (like Angela) to establish a beachhead on the enemy’s groin and then slog brainward—an effective tactic but relatively slow. Mandragon could seize the cortical high, ground in a blitz, as he proved during his very first minutes in office with the commandants of the Guardia Civil.
Colonel Atila Guadaña, Colonel Lisandro Empulgueras, Colonel Fidel Acha: Mandragon’s regime began and ended with them. Since they were the sharpest-clawed crustaceans in the basket, he dealt with them first, immediately after Angela’s address (which they were present in the palace to witness) in the high-ceilinged, richly mirrored first-floor ballroom, henceforth for seven weeks the prime minister’s lair. They entered with the arrogance appropriate to military men in an area of the world where the sole enemy is likely to be a cringing and defenseless populace—confident stalk across the polished floor boards with chests puffed out and sneers firmly in place—though as they approached, their haughtiness was tempered a bit by memories of what had happened to Genghis. The spacious hall was empty of attendants, and of furniture, but ablaze from half a dozen chandeliers. At the extreme end Mandragon sat cross-legged on a large cushion, barefoot, in peasant garb, hands in his lap. He halted them ten yards off by raising a finger. He and his cushion rose abruptly until his head was just below the ceiling, provoking a powerful compulsion to prostrate themselves which he allowed them to control, though only barely. Then he punched up GUILT in the computing instruments under their grotesquely high-peaked kepis: the colonels looked up at Mandragon and saw their victims.
In the more or less normal course of their careers the three colonels had inflicted a good deal of pain and indignity on more or less defenseless members of the populace, without ever feeling the slightest twinge of guilt. But when they saw the citizens whom they had (variously) browbeaten, terrorized, degraded, tortured, or murdered assembled i
n the air above them—no longer cringing but glaring down at them in awful judgment—when they stood arraigned before this ghastly throng, all the appropriate guilt hit them at once. They quaked with fear of merited retribution.
Needlessly really. Mandragon wasn’t concerned with doing justice. No such extraneous motive distracted him. He had no wish to punish the colonels, or remove them, or even to make them mend their ways—so long as they paid him proper deference. And there they were beneath him, groveling. Mandragon held them in the absolute pit of guilt for thirty seconds (which was all they could safely take), and meanwhile rewired their cortices so that a vague vision of their victim-judges would remain with them constantly, properly associated with Mandragon. Then he stopped monkeying and dismissed them with a flick of his finger.
The three colonels backed slowly from Mandragon’s presence, heads bent, eyes lowered, all the length of the brilliantly lighted ballroom. Once out the door, they turned and left the palace, first at an ordinary pace, then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic, panicky stampede—through the patio and past the fish pool, bowling into visitors and guards. Hours later they were still green with terror, and their hands shook, and their teeth chattered, and their knees trembled. For as long as the vision persisted they showed Mandragon perfect deference, fawned on him in fact like triplet poodles, did his bidding, all but licked his hand.
How they will enjoy Mandragon’s noosing!
The ministers were even more fun and less trouble: they all resigned. Mandragon received them after the colonels departed—in the Cabinet Room and without any mystifications, no rising to the ceiling or other display, since they had only modest stores of arrogance, which they hid very cleverly, even from themselves. All decent men in fact till three days before, but Alejo’s demise had lobstered them severely. Each suddenly discontented with his spot; all scrambling frantically but trying not to show it.