“The Maker,” shrugged Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “can act via the most surprising of intermediaries.”
“And yet,” continued the hermit, his stick still levelled at Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s chest, “this divine intermediary has been attacked. Plotted against. Threatened with death, by the very family he has been protecting all these years.”
As if feeling heat on the back of his skull, he looked up to see Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus glaring at him from the doorway.
“Madam,” he said with the utmost sincerity, “I had nothing to do with your son’s death.”
“Was it not, then,” said Shun-Company, “your machine who killed him?”
The hermit lowered his cane, and frowned for many seconds.
“I will not try appealing to reason,” he said. “I feel I am no longer welcome in this house.”
“Nor any other house,” said Shun-Company, “Your Excellency.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stiffened as if swords had been drawn between his wife and the hermit. The hermit, meanwhile, only nodded. “Now there’s a title I’ve not been known by for a long while.” He frowned further. “The Dictator of Mankind, reduced to skulking like a dog.” He looked up at Shun-Company. “Don’t tell anyone, there’s a dear.”
“Or you’ll do what?” said Apostle from his mother’s side, making the fact that he still held a loaded weapon very obvious. “In case you hadn’t noticed, you no longer have a servant.”
“I have not forgotten your father’s deliberate complicity in that,” snapped the Anchorite. “Right now I am attempting not to let anger, rather than measured calculation, dictate my actions. Besides, I think you’ll find I still have more servants than you think.” He held up a hand, and a trio of emerald insecta flew onto it from various positions round the kitchen. “One of them, for example, has recently negotiated the loan of the Penitentiary’s most recent prisoner, whom I need for my own purposes.”
“Christmas?” Apostle was thrown off balance. “What use could you have for him?”
The hermit grinned without humour and licked his lips elaborately.
“Live bait,” he said. “By the way, Apostle, you have something on your jacket.”
Apostle turned and pawed at his chest. Despite his movement, a ruby red aiming pointer remained unerringly fixed to his heart. He jerked backwards, trying to shake the dot, which stayed with him regardless. Eventually, spluttering with simultaneous rage, fear and embarrassment, he stumbled to the window and drew the curtains before collapsing, panting, bent over the sideboard.
“It seems to have gone now,” said the Anchorite. “Seems,” he added pointedly.
He rose to his feet. Children were pouring from the Panic Cellar. One of them, Measure-of-Barley, ran to the Anchorite, yelling happily. The hermit reached down and patted her head, smiling. For the first time, a tear hung in the corner of his eye.
“Bless you, child.”
He walked on out of the house.
“What’s wrong with Uncle Anchorite, mother? Why is he so sad?”
“Because he knows he’s going to Hell,” said Shun-Company, and began to place her grandmother’s best china on the table for supper.
“She’s coming out of it.”
“Easy, now, we don’t know the transfer was successful.”
“Don’t let her get up—she may try to punch through a wall or leap out of a high window. It will take a while for her to readjust.”
The room was white as milk. Strange bright lights were shining down at her. The skin around her scalp itched. She moved to sit up, and felt pain as great as if one of Hades’ children had been chewing its way out of her from within.
“Easy, Mizz Llewellyn-Revilla. You’ve been very badly injured. We’ve patched up the damage as best we can, though your father has promised it will be made good as new on your return to New Earth—”
“Have I been wounded? I remember damage, extensive damage to my main power train,” she reflected, “whatever that is. Um, my name is not, ah, what you said,” she added.
“We are aware of that. There are very good reasons,” said the kindly male voice, “why your name now has to be Llewellyn-Revilla. It helps you, and it helps us. If you remember, you were, um, brought back to life in a body you disliked. That body was then…damaged. We have had to find you another. As luck would have it, an unfortunate young lady suffered an accident at the hands of a bad, bad man very close by, and although that lady lost so much blood as to suffer permanent brain damage, we were able to rescue and clone up enough new neocortex to be able to successfully transfer your own personality into her body. You must preserve the pretence that you are her. We will teach you all you need to know about your new body, about its family, its friends, its meagre list of social and academic accomplishments. Its friends and family are not aware, we must stress, of the accident that befell this body, and we would really like to keep things that way. I’m afraid the alternative is death. Legally, you see, you have no right to life, and the body’s family would realize this very quickly…”
She raised a hand—this was also painful, and she recoiled, curling foetally around the hand, which had downy white hairs on the back of its wrist.
“My hand looks like it came off one of the keltoi,” she gasped. “Am I a slave?”
“Far from it. You are in fact the closest living thing this world has to a princess.”
She snapped her fingers urgently. “Mirror.” A mirror was brought, by women who unaccountably wore masks and gloves like desert dwellers.
“Not bad,” she said cautiously. “I have often wondered whether it hurt the keltoi to have hair this colour. It seems not; I feel no pain.”
The man with the kindly voice was also wearing a mask for some reason, and had the deep brown skin of an Upper Egyptian. “Your hair is actually quite a deep and lustrous black. It has been dyed. You could always grow the dye out. In actual fact, you can change virtually anything about your appearance. Princesses of this time and place can do so.”
Her eyes widened like those of a small child given the most wonderful toy in the world. “Truly? Then this nose will have to go. Can I change the teeth and eyes? I want deep black mysterious eyes like Cassandras’s. And these lips make me look like I have some sort of vile kissing illness.”
“It’s called collagen, Your Highness.”
“And I want muscles like an Amazon. Though I think I’ll hold on to both breasts. Can you make me taller? Or perhaps shorter. What do you think?”
“I think the future is a treasure-house of possibility, Highness. I have primed a hypnotic educator with the basic curriculum vitae of Madonnita Llewellyn-Revilla, the lady who you must henceforth pretend to be. It will be quite painless to take in—”
“I’m going to be taught? Taught things? I’ve often thought it would be nice to be taught things like the boys. Am I going to be taught military skills? Wrestling, and such? The very best sources say no education is complete without them—”
“Wrestling is not on today’s agenda, Highness, though there is nothing stopping you from completing your education with that discipline later. The first thing you must learn is that the world is round, you are being held to it by universal gravitation, the stars are not tiny lights in the sky but suns as big and bright as the Sun you are familiar with, the Earth goes round the Sun rather than vice versa, the other suns mostly also have Earths going round them, and you are currently not on the Earth proper but on one of those other Earths. It’s a deal to take in, I’ll grant you. To begin with, look into the light. The light will move about. Follow it with your eyes. You are feeling very relaxed. I am going to count down from ten to one. When I reach one, you will become the most relaxed you have ever been, completely open to suggestion. Ten—nine—eight—seven—”
*
Mr. Christmas woke up. He was heavier than he should have been.
The air smelt vilely, as if he had awoken in an anus, rather than a cavern bathed with soft white light from a tracery of fil
aments covering the ceiling overhead. Lichen covered the walls and rocks about him, but there was otherwise no sign of life, apart from the man.
The man was sitting on a lichen-grown boulder close to the heavy concrete-set pressure door that led out of the cave, seemingly into dense undergrowth.
“Good morning,” said the man, though Mr. Christmas saw no proof that it was morning. Already he was seeking to reorientate himself; after reorientation would come escape, if escape was necessary. “You recognize me, I take it. You have, I’m sure, seen me many times when you were hiding in that old abandoned ship. Waiting for your Twelve Days to begin. Counting down the days to yourself, more eagerly than any little boy. And then what? Unpleasantness. Blood and violence, meted out on those who are dear to me. But I bear you no personal malice. I have myself meted out a good deal of blood and violence in my time, and I realize that your mind is a broken thing. Bad things were done to you; terrible things, to you and to those dear to you.”
A tear trickled down the cold face of Mr. Christmas. He wiped his eye dry, and cast his gaze down.
A handgun landed in the gravel at his feet; a military-issue one, with an electronic targetting system.
“The reservoirs are full of compound. The action has not been interfered with. I wish you to have this weapon. I am giving it to you. The question you will want me to answer next is What Date Is It, am I right?”
Mr. Christmas picked up the gun and nodded, a second tear now trailing down his cheek.
“Well, you have been unconscious quite some time. Nine days, in fact. Twelfth Night was yesterday.”
Mr. Christmas nodded, almost in relief. He caressed the weapon’s activation lever.
“I believe,” said the man, “that you represent a risk to other human beings only for twelve days of the terrestrial solar year. I firmly believe that, for the rest of the year, you can be rehabilitated. We can work on those remaining twelve days together.” He gestured at the rock-strewn expanse of the cavern, in which, unaccountably, all the rocks had been arranged into lines, whitewashed, and numbered. “Go on, pick a target. I know you want to know whether the weapon will actually fire. I assure you it will.”
Mr. Christmas raised the gun with professional speed, sighted up on a rock, and fired; the rock exploded like a hand grenade. Flying off-cuts marked his cheek; Mr. Christmas did not even blink.
“You can see that the weapon works. I, meanwhile,” said the man, patting himself down obligingly, “am unarmed. I know you will not shoot me. I was advised so by Officer Rai of Spender’s Delight, who knows you well. He believes that if he had only turned up one day later to apprehend you, instead of on Twelfth Night, he would still be alive and living with his family.”
Mr. Christmas nodded his head in wooden agreement. The man smiled. “Excellent. As our first step towards rehabilitation, then, I would like you to walk through the door you can see on the other side of that chamber. I guarantee that I will not harm you in any way.”
Mr. Christmas looked at the man distrustfully, then shrugged, nodded curtly, and shambled off in the direction of the door. He passed the first line of stones; he passed the second. When he came to the third, he turned suddenly, his weapon sweeping round to cover the man sitting on the rock; at that movement, a gunshot barked and he collapsed, fetched out of the air, into a fan of his own entrails splashed out on the stone.
The Anchorite tutted, and stood up from his rock. “He’s getting stronger. He’s up to the third line now.” He stared at the closed pressure door in concern. “Those two former colleagues of yours, Didier, made it as far as the fourth and fifth lines respectively before he took control of them.”
A coat of living green rose from the undergrowth outside the cave’s mouth, disgorging a man bearing an over-the-horizon sniper weapon. The man’s feet clattered softly on the solid rock underfoot; they were metal-and-plastic talons, more dinosaurian than human.
The Anchorite kicked one of the whitewashed rocks irritably into the chamber. “Leave the body lying and go no further in. We have no proof he isn’t deliberately understating his strength. Seal up this chamber, and never come here in person again. Beg a robot off the Clinic staff. Send all meals in via that.”
He walked out of the chamber, muttering irritably. “Confine a flame without killing it, and an explosion is inevitable.” Didier loped after him in pathetic obedience.
The pressure door swung shut behind the two men, and multiple bolts the thickness of men’s arms thudded home into the jamb around it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominic Green has written several short stories for Interzone magazine, often in a satirical vein, and his story The Adventure of the Lost World appears on the BBC Cult TV website. His story Send Me a Mentagram was picked for the prestigious Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology in 2003, and The Clockwork Atom Bomb was nominated for a 2005 Hugo Award. Interzone published a special issue devoted to Dominic and his stories in July 2009.
Dominic graduated in English from St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and works in IT.
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