by James Axler
A wise ruler, who acted in the best interests of his people, or a coward who let others take the risks? He could present it the first way to the people he ruled and be pretty sure that they would believe him. Why not?
But it was in himself that he held the canker of doubt. No matter how much he rationalized it, or no matter even how much truth was contained within that rationalization, there was still that part of him, deep within himself, that believed the real reason was that he was scared. Scared like a little girl…like his little girl. Probably more than she was, if truth be known. He could face down any bastard with a blade or a blaster. Take him hand-to-hand and he would fight anyone who was stupe enough to take him on, and know that he could best them.
But this shit? This was beyond his understanding and his control, and that was what really frightened him. He had been hiding away since the strange outlanders had taken the kids, planning vengeance and their return, as he tried to present it. Yeah, right. The simple fact of it was that he was running scared of himself. Those coldhearts had hit him down to the core. How could he deal with something that was so unknown and so alien to him? And if he couldn’t deal with that, then what the fuck else was there out there that could have the same effect?
K had ruled on his absolute belief in his own abilities. These were now shaken. And he was no fool. He understood that his ability to maintain command came from the power that he presented to those below him. His belief in that was central to discouraging any challenge. If that went, then any half-assed bastard could have a crack at taking down the baron. The truth was that these coldhearts who had come to the ville were way beyond anything that his own people could throw at him. But would he want to spend the rest of his days fending off challenge after challenge?
Screw that. He had to stop that before it could bloom. Get the kids back, make it look like his doing rather than the mercies, and assert his authority by slapping down any dissent as it happened.
But how to do that when he still felt this fear?
If time had seemed pliable like clay, then what else had been when the coldhearts held sway? If he could think back and work that out, then maybe he could understand. And if he could do that…
What had happened during that time? He sat in brooding silence, replaying the events and trying to sort out the jumble they made in his head.
After they had entered the ville, and he had led them to the center, they had soon been allocated quarters. The fat man had wheezed and grunted his way through an introduction that had seemed at the time to flow like honey from his tongue, despite the harshness of his voice as he tried to recover from the exertions of the long march. His words were like a serpent that snaked its way into their consciousness. The exact phrasing was something that eluded the baron as he tried to recall it. Why that should be was a mystery to him, especially as the import of those words was imprinted on his consciousness. Was it that the man had actually spoken very little, and that his meaning had somehow gone straight into their heads?
Maybe. He could recall that the fat man had told them that they were blessed, and that the sun was shining on them to have such delights in store. If they allowed the traveling players to rest awhile, and offered them food and shelter, then they would be rewarded with a show that wouldn’t only entertain them, it would also explain the whole reason that they were on this forsaken dustbowl that was called Earth. The mystery of why life was such a long, hard slog with seemingly little joy or respite would be unravelled, and their place in the great scheme of things would become finally clear. It would be a reason to go on, a reason to give themselves up to what had to be.
For fuck’s sake! K was disgusted with himself as, for the first time that he had dared to even consider what had happened, he realized what had been said. How the hell had he allowed himself to fall for such crap? Come to that, how come his people had likewise been duped? K only cared about what comfort and power he could get from the world around him, and he was pretty damned sure that the rest of his people felt that way. Life was too short to worry about other shit, and was soon gone.
Anyway, he would have to get past these feelings of disgust and disbelief if he was going to work out what had happened.
The strange party had been split up. There had been no shortage of the populace who had been willing to put them up and feed them, and this alone should have set all his instincts screaming. Normally, they would have moaned and bitched about having to share food, and not wanting strangers snoring, farting and shitting under their roofs. But on this occasion, the opposite had been true. It had been like some kind of bizarre slave auction. He had seen one of these once, over on the west coast, when he was running with a band of coldhearts who earned their jack by taking travelers and beating the crap out of them until they were scared of their own shadows. Then, when they would do anything that was barked at them, they were taken to a site where the rich barons of the coast bid big jack to buy these willing victims. They could do what they wanted with them—probably did, for all he knew or cared—and the pretty ones or the ones who looked like they could be blood sport fetched the biggest prices. When they came to the stands and were put on display there was a feeding frenzy as the rich barons surged forward, throwing wild bids to gain their favorites at all costs.
This had been more than a little like that, which was weird as there was no jack involved, and no obvious benefit to be derived from having the strangers in your shack, eating your food and sleeping in your bed.
But still, there had been places in the crowd where the people had almost come to blows as they vied for the favor of having the strangers stay with them. While this happened, and the baron’s sec men had broken up the fights and tried to restore order, the strangers had stayed aloof. Was it just with hindsight that it seemed as though they had stood there with smug grins on their faces? K was inclined to think so, yet couldn’t shake the feeling that they had been laughing at his people—and by extension, at him.
So eventually, the strangers had been allotted billets and had gone off for the night. The crowds had dispersed, and there had been dark mutterings from those who had been unlucky, and were left without a stranger in their house. Odd, but K couldn’t recall discussing any of this with his sec men after the crowds had cleared. He should have. Normally, he would have. But this wasn’t a normal chain of events, and although up to this point things were relatively clear in his mind, it was from here that it got really hazy.
He couldn’t work out exactly how long they had been staying before the dark day’s entertainment that was the precursor to abduction. It had to have been some time, as it seemed to him as though seasons came and went. And yet this couldn’t be, as the passing of the seasons was marked by convoys that came and went, if not by the changeable weather, and there had been no convoys passing that way, nor any that he and his men had gone out to hunt down. This, along with an inventory of the supplies held in the ville, had shown him that it was unlikely that the strangers had stayed more than a few weeks at most. Weeks that seemed to stretch out into a pattern of repeated behavior that was nothing more than a continuous cycle, one that could, feasibly, have extended until the sun finally bought the farm and faded in the sky.
That was how it seemed as they went about their daily tasks, watched by the seemingly benign eye of their visitors.
Wherever there was something to be done in the ville, it seemed that one or the other of the newcomers was there to keep a close eye on the activity. Farming, maintenance, the manufacturing of clothing and bricks for the buildings—all of these were observed by the tall men, who walked from place to place seemingly appearing from nowhere to stand and watch silently before moving away in an equally wraithlike manner, suddenly not there where just a moment before they had occupied space. And yet they had elicited no dissent from those they watched. If anything, it seemed that the people welcomed them, as though it gave them some ki
nd of comfort that they were under the protective eye of their new overlords.
Was that what they were? It had seemed that way to K at the time, and he had no reason to change that opinion now, even though the way he felt about that was completely different. At the time it had seemed perfectly reasonable to him, while now he marveled at the fact that he hadn’t simply taken a blaster and blown them all to hell.
That had to say something about the way in which they had gained control over his people and himself. The fat man had seemed to make it his purpose to stick close to the baron. His wheezing breath and grunts as he sat were so imprinted on K’s consciousness that he could feel and hear it as though the fat man were at his elbow, which was pretty much where he had seemed to be for the whole time. K ran the ville with a tight grip, and there wasn’t much that escaped his notice. Infractions of the laws he made were treated with no mercy. His sec men would bring the perpetrators to him, and under his questioning they would soon confess to their transgressions. If they tried to hold out, then he would use torture to extract the truth.
While the fat man watched, both the innocent and the guilty had passed through the baron’s hands. The fat man had watched impassively, the only indication of any feeling at all being an expressive nod and grunt of approval at some of K’s more inventive methods. That should have been an indicator of some kind, but K passed over it quickly, preferring not to dwell on the possibilities of this considering that his daughter was now in the fat man’s clutches.
The fat man had been irritating, looking back—though not at the time—but nowhere near as sinister as the pockmarked man who was laden with the dolls that formed a part of the marionette show that had presaged the blackout and abduction.
When K thought about it, he hadn’t really noticed the man that much when he had ridden out to meet the strangers on their approach to the ville. Standing among the immensely tall and the immensely fat, his coat seeming to make him invisible beneath all that he carried, he had been a man whose face had been nothing more than a blank space. It was only when K noticed him hanging around the young that he began to take note.
Despite the fact that the coat and the marionettes attached to them had to have been heavy and stifling in the heat of the day, the pockmarked man always carried them with him. He loitered where the children worked and played, a faint smile always hovering at the corner of his lips, his eyes darting from one to the other as though sizing them up in some way. Now—hellfire, now everything seemed to scream at him for his lack of action—he could see that the man had been assessing how they would transport so many young people, and whatever means of persuasion they would need. And at any other time he would have called the man a sicko freak and cut his nuts off before ramming them down his throat. Now he could see that what the man had on his mind was something far worse than any sexual abuse—if there was anything that could repulse the baron more. K was a coldheart bastard, sure, but one who had lines over which he would never go. That was where the chilling started for him.
It shook him to the core to realize that he allowed the man to watch the kids. Worse, when he recalled the way that they would sometimes stop what they were doing and talk to the man, ask him what he was doing, and then the way in which the man would stoop and talk to some of the dolls that hung off him, bending an ear as if to listen to any answer they might make, it made him feel as though he could puke. The bastard had been acting like the dolls had talked to him, enticing the youngsters to come forward and watch, to take part in his little game. He was winning them over so that when the time came, it would be that much easier to make them do whatever it was that he, the fat man and the others wanted.
Priming the whole ville so that when the day came, it was all so easy.
However long it was since they had arrived, the strangers were no longer strange. They were a part of the ville as if they had been there so long that the whole place had grown up around them. They passed unnoticed, and the populace seemed almost oblivious to their existence, except in those moments when it suited them to be noticed. It was such that it was impossible to tell when it was that they decided that their moment had come. The first that any of the populace knew about it was when the sun rose, and the people with it. Although they hadn’t noticed, they had started to rise earlier in the morning, and spend less time at night in the few bars that the ville had, getting wasted on the poor quality brew. Looking back, there was no reason for this sudden and strange abstinence. It just happened. Like so many things. The influence of the strangers was subtle and pervasive.
Maybe that was why K put up no resistance when he rose that morning to see that the middle of the ville had been cleared and transformed. Where once there had been the junk and detritus that went with the maintenance of the few wags that they owned, there was now a cleared and flattened space. The wags and the mechanics’ gear that had littered the ground had gone. In its stead stood a cabinet, a display stage for marionettes that was high, proud and alone. In the morning sun, it seemed to loom over the ville, with no sign of the man who had carried it into the ville, or those who had traveled with him.
The first few people who came to the clear space were those whose curiosity overcame them. K included himself in this, and stood in front of the cabinet, looking up at its seven-foot height with a puzzled expression. Somewhere deep inside he knew he should be pissed about this. In so many ways, it was an insult and a liberty. But all he could focus on was the question of what was about to happen next. The curiosity overwhelmed all other feeling.
“Ah, that is what I like to see,” the fat man wheezed as he appeared at the baron’s elbow. K shuddered. He hadn’t heard the man approach, and had no idea he was there until he spoke. “The baron should always lead his people from the front, don’t you think?”
There was an undertone to the fat man’s voice that should have made the baron want to smash his stupe face in, but instead he merely said, “What is this?”
The fat man clapped him on the shoulder. “The time has come,” he said, then chuckled before turning away.
“Come, come, my people,” he yelled. “It’s time for us to reward you for your hospitality. We’ll put on a show for you, the likes of which you’ve never seen before. This will be a show that will explain to you the mysteries of being. Come, come to the center of town, which will now be the center of the universe and the answer to every question you may ever have had.”
K looked around him as the fat man called the ville to order. From every direction, the ville folk started to swarm into the clearing. It wasn’t a large ville, but there were more people than could ordinarily be contained with comfort in such a space. Yet they seemed to fill it with ease. They were murmuring and muttering to themselves as they filed in, and yet were somehow strangely subdued. The strangers seemed to stand at every entrance to the center, looming over the crowd and grown to more than their normal size, ushering them in and directing them as though to some arranged plan. The only one who wasn’t immediately visible was the pockmarked man in the multicolored coat. As K looked around, he realized that there were no youngsters among the crowd, although a space had been left in a tight circle around the cabinet. It had one open side, yet he could see that the other three sides had hinged panels, and he had little doubt that these would fall for the delectation of those who were gathered at the sides and back.
Now, in recollection, he was astounded that this had occupied his attention. Surely the thought that the young were somewhere under the obvious influence of the pockmarked freak should have made his blood run cold. But maybe that was it. Whatever had been screwing with his head had found it convenient for him to be so easily distracted.
While he was still looking at the cabinet, the pockmarked man led the children in procession into the space around the base of the cabinet. He walked with a strange gait, strides of varying lengths making it seem as if he was dancing. Certainly,
it had the look of an old ritual move as he indicated to the youngsters that they spread themselves in the space left for them, and sit on the ground. This done, he disappeared into the cabinet, lost behind the faded panel of painted wood.
It was only at that point that K realized that the man’s coat had been flapping loosely, and for the first time since he had been in the ville, he wasn’t laden with the marionettes. K could only assume that they were already in the cabinet. But why would he take them off now?
Before he could dwell on that, his attention was taken by the fat man, who had seemed to sidle through the crowd and was at the front of the cabinet. No… Make that at the side, too… How was that possible? Just as there seemed more of the strangers than there had been a few moments before, standing at every juncture from the center of the ville, so it seemed that the fat man was standing on every side of the cabinet, facing the crowd and speaking in a voice that seemed to be fuller, deeper and carry more weight than the wheezing croak of a few moments before.
“My friends, you are here now to see how the world has worked, how it has always worked, and how it always will work. The truth of who has always ruled this universe, and the commands we must all obey if we are to see the light and live the eternal sunshine of their glow, in which we can only bask if we have the faith and ability to stand the pain and pleasure that knowledge of them must bring. Now, revealed to you today, my friend Mr. Jabbs will show you in marionette show how the history of the world had unfurled. When the bounteous knowledge that he bestows has been given to you, I guarantee that you will see the only way in which you can make that future yours, and will give of yourselves willingly.”