The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage

by Selznick, Matthew Wayne

  Schwippe shrugged, and knobby shoulders rolled under his baggy dress shirt. “Got it! ‘Course, that doesn’t mean I won’t be talking to you. It’s too long a flight to just sit here and space out, right? Besides, I forgot my book.”

  Schwippe held out his right hand. The fingers were long, the knuckles like walnuts. His fingernails were so black and glossy you’d think they were painted, but Marc guessed they probably weren’t.

  “So as I was saying,” Schwippe said, just slightly more seriously, “my name’s Eddie. Pleased to meet you.”

  Marc turned away from him and locked his focus on the back of the seat directly ahead. He still couldn’t help peripherally seeing Schwippe pull his hand back, slowly.

  “Really?” Schwippe clicked his tongue. “And to think I went to the trouble of filing my nails. They weren’t always like that, you know. I mean, I was always a little…awkward-looking, if you want to put it kindly…but after Declaration Day…”

  His sigh carried the hint of a whistle.

  “I just…blossomed. I’m going to see if the Institute can help me figure it all out.”

  The insistent, winking enthusiasm returned to his voice. “Why are you going to Missoula, Marc, Mister Teslowski, I wonder? Hmm?”

  Marc said nothing. Schwippe left him alone while the stewardess ran through the pre-flight safety demonstration and the airliner took off. Maybe the freak finally took the hint.

  Marc watched the plane turn over the Pacific Ocean before angling east and north while the earth dropped farther and farther away.

  He was going. He would be there. Today.

  He was doing something, something real. Nobody liked it, and it was putting him into some serious debt, and it would eat every hour of vacation and sick time he had left, but he couldn’t let any of that matter. He was taking action. Taking responsibility.

  Finally.

  “I love flying, too,” Schwippe quipped.

  Marc hadn’t realized he’d been smiling. He tamped it out.

  “So, seriously,” Schwippe went on. Marc realized his break from the freak’s fun-time poking was over. “I’m sincerely curious. Why are you going to Missoula, Mister Teslowski?”

  Why not? Nothing and no one could stop him now. He might as well tell the Sovereign beanpole. Call it practice when he had to talk to a whole freaking compound of them.

  “I bet you can guess.” He glanced at Schwippe.

  Schwippe’s alien black eyes popped. He jumped in his seat a little, a show of being startled. “Well, I’ll be! I get an audience, after all?”

  Marc scowled at him. “You’re a sarcastic little shit, aren’t you.”

  Schwippe looked down at his long torso and at his legs, which were bent sharply to fit in the space between seats. “Little, I’m not. The rest…well, a guy’s got to find a way to get by.”

  Marc snorted at this. “By being an asshole.”

  Without an ounce of venom, Schwippe said, “Hey, look how well it’s worked for you, right?”

  Marc turned in his seat to face him. “What the hell do you know about me?”

  “Seriously?” Schwippe looked all the long way down his nose at Marc. His eyes narrowed and he smiled wide. “And I quote: ‘Why don’t we have all those freaks rounded up and locked away?’"

  For the millionth time, Marc wished he’d never agreed to do that goddamn TV show, and not because of what he’d said. “Good for you. You watch TV.”

  Schwippe’s Uncle Remus impression suffered from his croaking, high-pitched delivery. “Just like a reg’lar ol’ human bean! ‘Magine dat, Misser Marc, sir!”

  Marc got the message. He thought it was bullshit. “Except you’re not. Your boss made sure we all know that.”

  Schwippe blinked. He sat back and tilted his head back on the seat. “Wow.” He shook his head. “I don’t get how you do that.”

  “What.”

  “How you can turn it off and on like that. Be so selective.”

  “What,” Marc repeated, harsher.

  “Your bigotry.” Schwippe’s voice was casual, but most of the humor was replaced by a bewildered tone that was somehow just as insulting to Marc. “You know you don’t make any sense, right? Does it just not matter to you?”

  Marc pushed the words out with as much disgust as he could muster. “You don’t get to tell me what to do or how to think, freak.”

  Schwippe’s head tilted. “Wha’?”

  Marc leaned forward. “That’s your whole thing, right? Set the terms, show up and tell the rest of the whole damn world how we’re supposed to treat you, how we’re supposed to act.” He forced himself to keep his voice low, conscious of the tight quarters and the dozens of people in the seats around them. “To hell with you, Sovereign.”

  “Hold the phone, there, buddy.” Schwippe seemed to roll his eyes, but it was hard to tell where those glossy black balls were pointed. “I’m just a skinny dude from West LA with a next-to-worthless metahuman bag of tricks and a cheap tailor. I can’t make you do anything, Marc, and you’re even more delusional than I thought if you think I can.”

  “Delusional!”

  Schwippe took a breath, glanced around and seemed to find the same restraint Marc had a moment before, and huffed through his narrow nostrils. “Listen, man: your son is a Sovereign.”

  Marc leaned quickly back against the window. “Bullshit.”

  Schwippe’s laugh held disbelief. “How can you say that?”

  “Just because they took him doesn’t mean he’s one of you. There’s no proof of that. Just their word.”

  Schwippe’s shiny black eyes fixed on Marc. He tilted his head to the left and tapped a long, knobby finger against his lip.

  “I’ll give you that one,” he said. “Technically. But…why would they lie?”

  “To give them a reason to hold my son captive for the last eleven months.” Marc relaxed slightly. “Of course.”

  “But…” Schwippe kept looking at him. “But…why? Why your kid? What for?”

  Marc had no idea. There had to be a reason, though. Something to do with the business between the Charters family and Tyndale Labs, maybe. That whole ugly mess last year. There had to be a reason.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I’m sure you’ll be able to ask them.”

  Schwippe laughed. “Oh, sure, what, during the weekly Sovereign poker game?”

  Marc didn’t laugh. He imagined strategy sessions—had the vague idea of a war room, like in that movie with the Pink Panther guy and Slim Pickens. The image gave him a bad feeling.

  Schwippe said, “What if your kid…Byron, right? What if he just…wants to be there?”

  “He wouldn’t.” Marc’s voice was flat. “There’s nothing there for him. He’s a prisoner—don’t you get that?” He kept his jaw tight to avoid yelling. “Your…you freaks…are holding my kid a prisoner. That’s the kind of p—" He stopped himself. “The kind of trash you’re running to. Get it?”

  “Boy,” Schwippe said with a small smile, “you have no idea of the kind of trash I’m running from. Seriously.”

  Marc fell back against his seat. Fucking freak.

  Schwippe didn’t say anything for a few blessed minutes. Marc ground his teeth and tried to get his ears to pop. He wondered how much farther it was. How much longer he’d have to endure Eddie Schwippe’s company.

  “But…” Schwippe said.

  “Fuck. Give me a break, would you?”

  “But…seriously, even if he’s not a Sovereign—what will you do if he says he wants to stay there? What if he’s not a prisoner, after all? What if it’s something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Sake of argument.”

  Marc shook his head. “He’s a minor. He’s my kid. He does what I say. If—and I mean it’s a big fucking if—he’s just sitting up there…laughing at me and his mother…” Marc couldn’t deny the thought had crossed his mind. The kid might think he had plenty of reasons to get back at his dad. Marc wo
uld have thought the same at his age.

  He shook his head again.

  “No difference. He comes home with me. He doesn’t get to do what he wants until he hits eighteen years old and gets a job.”

  Schwippe’s eyes went wide. He stared at Marc and covered his mouth with a spidery hand. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he did his best to stifle a laugh.

  “Oh, right,” he finally said. “Eighteen. Totally.” A single laugh burst out. “That’s when us big kids get to do whatever we want. You bet.”

  Schwippe calmed down. He shifted in his seat, stretching his left leg into the aisle before slowly, apparently painfully, bending the hinged stick back in place.

  “Hit eighteen, the world’s your oyster!”

  He whistled another sigh, gave Marc one more crooked-head, glassy-eyed glance, and didn’t say another word the rest of the trip.

  Marc had no idea why that bothered him more than anything Schwippe had said or done so far.

  Marc Teslowski – Four

  Marc didn’t have any baggage other than the carry-on duffel bag hanging from his shoulder, but he couldn’t help stopping near baggage claim to gape at the display of a stuffed mountain lion chomping on the neck of a billy goat.

  The exhibit made him grin until his cheeks hurt. He was not in Orange County any more. He was in Missoula, Montana, unlikely as it seemed the closest city to the Donner Institute for Sovereign Studies.

  Tomorrow morning, he would be at the gates. By tomorrow night, he would be back on a plane for home, and instead of a chatty, sarcastic Sovereign freak in the next seat, it would be Byron, his son.

  Marc tore his eyes off the garish taxidermy display and turned toward the car-rental stations. On his way, he caught sight of Eddie Schwippe, the sarcastic Sovereign freak himself.

  Hard to miss. The Sovereign towered over everyone else, even if there were teenaged girls in the terminal who probably outweighed him.

  Schwippe was talking with three redneck-lumberjack types. Other Sovereign come to meet him, right out in the open? Marc’s lip curled, but as he watched, he realized his initial assumption wasn’t quite right.

  He was too far away to really make out what was being said, but it was clear the three guys around Schwippe weren’t very friendly, despite their smiling faces. Marc had used that same sneer himself to throw people off balance. It was almost a reflex.

  They crowded around him, gradually herding him toward the door. Schwippe seemed resistant to the idea, but he was going, all the same.

  One of the rednecks put a hand around Schwippe’s pipe-cleaner bicep. Marc could see a splash of red and blue on the back of the redneck’s hand. Jesus, a tattoo there would hurt like hell.

  The whole thing seemed weird. But Schwippe was a Sovereign, so Marc figured he could take care of himself. In fact, the idea Schwippe might cut loose made him a little nervous. What if the freak caused an earthquake, or started shooting lightning bolts out of those black-marble eyes?

  Marc didn’t want to be around for that. He started for the car-rental counter and hoped it wouldn’t take long to put some real distance between him and Schwippe.

  Last he saw of Eddie Schwippe were those wide alien black eyes aimed in his direction as the freak left with his pushy friends. Marc wasn’t sure if the Sovereign was looking at him or not.

  Andrew Charters – One

  Reality, as perceived by Andrew Charters, was more than the discriminate input of five senses. For Andrew, the universe was a torrent of metasensory, aggregate sensation that pelted him, from all sides, at all times.

  The dry soil delivered granular data through the soles of his filthy, calloused bare feet. He knew, in quantifiable terms he could not elucidate, how long ago the dew had burned off that day. He knew, from his impression of the relative warmth of the earth, how soon the ants would wake up from their winter torpor. If anything down to the mass of a rabbit moved anywhere within a fifty-foot radius of his crouched position on the ridge, he would feel the vibration like a superhuman version of the proverbial Indian with his ear on railroad tracks predicting the arrival of a train.

  The slightest breeze carried libraries of information to Andrew’s olfactory bulbs. Turning a slow circle, he could pinpoint the locations of edible plants, animals alive and dead, and their droppings with an accuracy that depended on intensity and distance but far surpassed the inherent sensitivity of any other living thing on the planet.

  Andrew’s hearing was equally discerning. If the rabbit fifty feet away happened to scratch itself, Andrew would, if he concentrated, be able to count the strokes of its leg.

  His eyes soaked up photons with such vociferous appetite, he could successfully navigate a china shop crowded with playing-card houses, with the shades down, on a moonless night, if called upon to do so. In full daylight, his visual acuity was, like his sense of smell, without parallel among life on earth.

  His sense of taste, tied closely to his sense of smell, was delicate enough that he could distinguish ingredients very nearly by their constituent long-chain molecules.

  Working together, Andrew’s sensorium plowed unending information into a brain that had failed to successfully adapt to the augmented, collective assault of sight, hearing, scent, smell, and touch.

  The overload had driven him crazy long ago.

  It was so much worse where people were, with their cars and televisions and phone calls and music and perfumes and talking and sweat and pheromones and smelly emotion. So Andrew preferred to spend as much time as possible in the wilderness, where the sensorium was not necessarily less intense, but the individual data, at least, were smaller and more…natural.

  Surrounded by dirt and trees and lizards and bugs and birds and furry things, he didn’t have to put himself through the painful effort of making room for thoughts, for words. He could just…be.

  The problem with this was, despite the extreme modifications and augmentations Project: Rancher had inflicted on his physiology, Andrew Charters had begun life as a human being and he was still a human being in several ways that mattered very much. Self-imposed solitude was all well and good until loneliness grew and ached and gnawed through him like a twisting feedback loop.

  That kept him from retreating too far into the wild places, literally and psychologically. He lived on the periphery, wandering all over the western United States, but most often staying no more than a day’s loping walk from Kirby Lake in the San Bernardino mountains.

  He’d been skulking around the mountain town last year, toying with the idea of breaking into his mother’s vacation cabin and enduring the deliciously melancholy impressions of history to be found there, when his uneasy balance of exile and need was thrown all to hell by the appearance of his son.

  He knew it was the boy before he’d actually seen him. The scent was too much like his own—but cleaner, newer, and yes, inhuman…but not so inhuman.

  The kid didn’t seem to have as much trouble with his gifts as his father. Andrew stayed upwind, and when he’d caught sight of Nathan’s face in the pale light of the cabin porch light, he understood. The scientist he had once been extrapolated on what he saw:

  Andrew’s own augmentation was forever in conflict with his human origins. The changes had been forced upon his genetic structure by the Augmentation Regimen.

  Conversely, those chimeric genes went into what made Nathan Charters from the moment of conception. Nate’s face showed that: unusually large eyes set in appropriately large sockets, with the bone structure to support it. A barrel chest to accommodate vigorously pumping lungs and heart, which were required to drive a metabolism designed to fuel the extra dense muscles of the boy’s body…and the extra neural connections in the boy’s brain handling the input of his senses.

  Trembling with fascination and yearning and regret, Andrew had watched his odd, tentatively graceful teenaged son that night and realized, correctly, that the boy would not equal the father’s remarkable abilities, being entirely half-human.

  Nat
han would be at least half again better at living with the abilities he had, though. With luck, the kid would never be more than a little crazy.

  Andrew found it hard to stay away after that April day nearly a year ago. It was a good thing, too—Nathan wasn’t crazy enough to deal with the augmented thugs Lester Brenhurst had sicced on him. Andrew was, though.

  He grinned, his snarled beard pulling back to reveal strong yellow teeth, and remembered how it felt to have the hot guts of one of Lester’s agents slap against him. That was a good day.

  But Andrew knew it was not so good for his son, or for Nathan’s mother. The complications presented by his very existence helped Andrew decide the best thing he could do was disappear again.

  Over the last eleven months, though, it had become difficult for Andrew to deny that running mostly only made things easier for him.

  Andrew saw newspapers in people’s trash. He watched television, when he could bear it, through people’s windows. He knew Nate and Lucille were going through a rough time.

  Andrew Charters – Two

  A delicious scent, tangy and warm, pulled him out of his reverie. Unconsciously, his whole body tensed. Crouched on the ridge, he balanced on the balls of his feet and the fingertips of his left hand. He right hand automatically curled into claws tipped with half inch long, filthy fingernails.

  Just down the ridge, maybe forty feet away, a field mouse made its way through the chaparral in halting, jerking bursts. Andrew couldn’t see it—yet—but between a headwind and the remarkable sensitivity of his ears, he could plot its position from point to point as it moved.

  It would make a fine little snack.

  Andrew let himself be whittled down to the input of his sensorium. It was easier to hunt—easier to live—when he subsumed thought and memory and feeling and let his body be guided by hunger and sport.

  He inched down the ridge. The breeze was still in his favor. He visualized the vector of the field mouse as if lines were traced on the ground ahead of him.

  A flutter, above.

  Andrew unlocked his eyes from the triangulated location of his prey and glanced up. A hawk circled.