by James Morrow
“No, Londa! Forget it! Absolutely not!”
“I see your point of view. I really do.”
In a gesture so cartoonish it was doubtless prefigured in some League of Londa splash panel, I strode toward her with arms raised, my fingers curled into talons. To this day I’m not sure what I had in mind. Did I intend to close my hands around her throat and threaten to strangle her if she didn’t surrender to the FBI?
She foiled the attack with her Godgadget, pulling it from her hip pocket and pointing it in my face. I froze, arrested by my vision of a rather different sort of splash panel: the Redux exploding, bright orange billows of flame and ash roiling outward from ground zero, a stark black KA-BOOM superimposed on the blast wave in onomatopoeic capitals.
“Back off, Socrates.”
I retreated two steps.
“Have you any idea how empowering this device is?” Her index finger danced above the transmitter, directly over the red plastic node. “At the press of a button, I can change the channel of reality itself, from Quotidian Central to the Armageddon Network.” She brought the remote to her lips and kissed it. “By my calculation, the threat of Enoch Anthem’s execution will inspire thousands of his followers to find their inner Samaritans. But perhaps my prediction will fail, in which case I’ll have to lynch Anthem and play the game all over again with a second hostage—Corbin Thorndike, say, or Ralph Gittikac, or your friend Pielmeister.” Circling back to her desk, she threw a switch on the intercom and delivered an order to Dagmar. “My lame-duck conscience has become impossibly annoying. Kindly instruct Major Powers to remove him from my vicinity.”
“Imagine you’ve borrowed my ax,” I said. “When I come to claim it, I’m obviously in a lather, and so you—”
“And so I defend myself by splitting your head open,” Londa said.
“And so you refuse to give it back.”
“Ah, yes, I forgot that step. The Wild Woman would be ashamed of me. I refuse to give it back, and then I split your head open.”
I cursed Londa to her face, specifying the precise ratio between her corporeal contents and shit, whereupon Major Powers appeared and casually imprisoned me in a half nelson.
“Your husband is dying of cancer, but a radium extract might save him,” I told Londa as the Valkyrie dragged me away. “You can’t afford the druggist’s outrageous price, so here’s the question. Should you break into the pharmacy and steal an ampoule?”
“Of course I should steal it,” Londa said. “And the next morning I’ll return to the store with my borrowed ax, and I’ll hack the pharmacist to pieces for the greedy Phyllistine he is.”
SHORTLY AFTER MAJOR POWERS brought me back down to D deck and locked me in my cabin, I arranged to prevent The Last Shall Be First from ever intruding on my awareness again. The procedure proved surprisingly simple, a mere matter of transforming a coat hanger into a metal rod and thrusting it repeatedly through the perforated ceiling plate. Each time my rapier pierced the paper speaker, I experienced a small thrill. To cleanse my cabin of Londa’s voice wasn’t the same as thwarting the vatling herself, but it was a start.
At the end of the week, I suffered two minor misfortunes when my wristwatch and my travel alarm both ceased to function. My immediate impulse was to ask Lieutenant Kristowski for replacement batteries, but she no longer came down to D deck—evidently Londa had decided to deprive me of all human contact. And so it happened that, with no clock at my disposal, no sun within view, and my food appearing at random intervals, I lost track of time. My dawns, mornings, afternoons, dusks, evenings, naps, dreams, and reveries forsook their normal boundaries, melting into one another even as my Wagner recordings and cheapjack monster movies coalesced into a surrealist German opera whose cast had been exhumed and reanimated by Victor Frankenstein. When at last a fellow being darkened my door, I could not say for certain if a week had passed, or a fortnight, or an entire month.
My visitor was Major Powers, crashing unannounced into my cabin and brandishing a pair of steel handcuffs whose intended destination was brutally apparent.
“You’re going ashore,” she told me. “Londa has arranged for you to meet with her new ethical adviser.”
“I’d rather see whether I Was a Teenage Frankenstein gets better the tenth time around.”
“The Wild Woman is expecting you,” Major Powers insisted, yoking my wrists together. “Sorry about the bracelets, but Londa says you’ve been acting strange lately.”
“Could I ask you a stupid question? It is morning, noon, or night?”
“Morning in New Delhi, night in London, noon aboard the Redux.”
Now Lieutenant Kristowski appeared, according the handcuffs a quick scowl and an unhappy sigh. It pained her to see Masai Ambooloy’s prototype treated so harshly, but then her face softened, as if she’d just told herself, for the thousandth time, that Dr. Sabacthani worked in mysterious ways.
My reluctant wardens guided me out of my cabin and down the D-deck corridor toward the companionway. Although neither woman was in a talkative mood, I managed to elicit a few provocative facts concerning Londa. By Major Powers’s account, she’d recently vacated the ship and moved back into Faustino, relaying her commands to Colonel Fox via cell phone. Despite the “ostensible failure of Operation PG,” Londa had triumphed over her despair and was now brimming with “new ideas for curing the Phyllistines,” which was exactly what I didn’t want to hear.
The natural music of Isla de Sangre greeted our arrival on the boat deck, a polyphony of breaking waves, squawking toucans, screeching parrots, and gibbering monkeys. Colonel Fox was waiting for us near one of the Redux’s three remaining lifeboats, hanging from its davits like a baby’s cradle. As Major Powers and Lieutenant Kristowski prepared the vessel for launch, Colonel Fox made an ominous announcement—“Before you go ashore, Londa wants you to see something”—then propelled me through the deserted wheelhouse to the lookout booth on the starboard wing, a vantage that gave me an unobstructed view of the weather deck.
The rigging now featured a dozen nooses, each dangling from its own ratline. Was I surprised that Londa had gone ahead with her plan to turn the foremast into a gallows? Not really. What shocked me was the bodies, one suspended from the starboard shroud, the other from the port, both twisting in the noonday sun like exhibits in a butcher’s window. Vultures and seagulls made languid circles around the dead men, periodically swooping down and partaking of the feast their carrion god had spread before them. Judging from the pitted condition of his flesh, Enoch Anthem had probably been lynched several days before Corbin Thorndike—unless it happened that for a bird of prey a cleric is tastier than a CEO.
Seconds after my mind absorbed the grisly scene, my stomach registered it as well, and, leaning out the landward window, I vomited my breakfast into the Bahía de Colón.
“We’re not yet sure how many such executions the future holds,” Vetruvia Fox said, noting my distress, “but Londa is confident that the meek will inherit the earth long before we run out of hostages.”
The colonel took my hand and propelled me toward Major Powers and Lieutenant Kristowski, who in our absence had managed to ready the lifeboat for lowering, its elliptical form casting a sharklike shadow on the water. I must confess, ladies and gentlemen, that my first rational remark concerning the fate of Anthem and Thorndike was informed less by moral outrage, humanist sympathy, or even simple sorrow than by mere flippancy. Am I more of a cynic—and less of a Cynic—than I would like to believe?
“Those decaying corpses will look terrific on the cover of The League of Londa,” I told Lieutenant Kristowski. “Even at the height of its glory, Tales from the Crypt never had a grabber like that.”
Chapter 16
IN RECENT YEARS I HAVE MANAGED to acquire, against the odds and despite my bank account, a complete set of The League of Londa. Number 46, which I purchased on eBay, arrived in the mail only yesterday, and it indeed features a story about Londa’s inscrutable mentor, the philosopher-alchemis
t Dr. Masai Ambooloy. I even appear on the lurid full-color cover: superheroine and mentor standing shoulder to shoulder amid a fretwork of film noir shadows, cooking up a homunculus in a subterranean laboratory. The resemblance between Dr. Ambooloy and myself is so precise that were I a litigious man, I might sue the artist for appropriating my face.
But if I am to enjoy an exalted status in your eyes, ladies and gentlemen, let it not be as Dr. Ambooloy. Rather, let my mythic alter ego be that eternal friend of the human race, Prometheus. Does this mean I fancy myself a Titan, a son of Gaea, a ruler of the universe? Hardly. My point is simply that I was among those who gifted Edwina’s vatlings with the ambiguous boon of scruples. Like Prometheus, we acted out of compassion for our charges. You must believe that. We loved those children. If I had it to do over, I would surely have spared Londa the Beatitudes and shielded her from the Good Samaritan. But I would still have brought her the fire.
As Major Powers, Lieutenant Kristowski, and I took leave of that hubristic ship to which the Titan race had lent its name, the late Enoch Anthem continued to haunt me, and Corbin Thorndike proved equally pitiless. Their suspended remains broached my skull, split my brain, seared my visual cortex. Throughout our trip to Isla de Sangre, I sat in the bow of the lifeboat and moaned. The two Valkyries ignored their wretched passenger, concentrating instead on rowing us safely past the reef. It occurred to me that during our earliest lessons I might have fruitfully presented Londa with a role-playing exercise spun from the sinking of the original Titanic. “Imagine this scenario, young woman. You made it into lifeboat number five, which like most of the others was not filled to capacity. The great ship has gone down, and you can hear the screams of the less fortunate passengers, bobbing about in their life jackets as they freeze to death. The quartermaster commanding boat number five calls for everyone’s attention. ‘Raise your hand,’ he tells his forty-one charges, ‘if you believe we should go back and pull some of those screaming souls from the water.’ Now, here’s the question, Londa. Do you endorse the quartermaster’s plan? Or are you swayed by the argument that scores of panicky survivors will try scrambling into the lifeboat, capsizing it in the process?”
We came to rest in a palm-sheltered cove that, despite various overland explorations during my Blood Island sojourn, I’d never seen before. While Lieutenant Kristowski remained behind on the beach, guarding the boat, Major Powers led me along a labyrinthine path winding past mammoth plants from whose floral fecundity streamed turbulent swirls of red and yellow blossoms. On all sides fat vines formed graceful parabolas, macaws swooped from tree to tree, and dragonflies darted about like remote-control syringes inoculating the air against Phyllistine pollution. All during the journey, I repeatedly explained to Carmen Powers that while I was quite willing to speak with the Wild Woman of the Jungle, I would not listen to any glib rationalizations of the dead men on the foremast. The major had no reaction to this high-minded sentiment, but at one point she looked me in the eye and said, in a surprising spasm of candor, “As long as you were her conscience, there was hope.”
Our hike ended before a vast expanse of inland water, not the pristine Laguna Zafira on which I’d once lived but rather its aquatic opposite, dark, bleak, silent, and tide-fed, its shores fringed with mottled masses of algae. A decrepit and perforated wooden dock, free lunch for myriad marine invertebrates, extended six feet from shore. My immediate obligation, the major explained, was to stay here and wait for the Wild Woman. If the meeting between her ethical advisers went well, Londa would see fit to remove my handcuffs.
Carmen Powers slipped away, leaving me to sit on the dock and brood. The afternoon stretched into an orchid-scented dusk that soon became a shimmering tropical night bathed in amber lunar hues, even as the air resounded with the music of countless insects, a cicada for every star. A dozen jellyfish rode the tidal currents, their umbrella bodies glowing an iridescent blue. At length a female figure appeared on the water, wrapped in mist and limned by moonbeams, standing erect in the stern of a skiff as she poled her way toward the ruined pier. She was blessed with Londa’s commanding height, athletic build, and imperial poise. As this lithesome Charon drew nearer, my vatling’s lovely features emerged from the gloom, her green eyes piercing the fog like beacons.
“I’ve seen the bodies on the foremast, Londa,” I said in the most venomous voice I could summon. “The vultures have done their worst.”
Charon stood up straighter still, exuding a pale presence: white shirt, white slacks, white face—a vision that suggested alternately a June bride and a shrouded cadaver. “I’m not Londa,” she rasped.
“Okay, fine, and I’m not Mason, and those two corpses are Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Step aboard, Mr. Ambrose. Have a seat. My shack is on the far side of the lagoon. I’m not Londa.”
“Take these damn handcuffs off me.”
“Only Londa can do that. The key is with her at Faustino. Step aboard. My name is Edwina 0004. Londa made me. The child is the mother of the woman. We’re having steamed crabs for dinner. I caught and cooked them myself.”
AH, THE BRILLIANCE, the audacity, the recklessness of my vatling. The wanton genius. The transcendent cheek. So your original conscience isn’t willing to rubber-stamp your sins? Have no fear. Pas de problème. Simply drop by Torre de la Carne, reactivate the ontogenerator, reprogram the DUNCE cap, and bring your faux mother back to life. After all, the Übermom was always your greatest friend and supporter, and so Übermom II is certain to prove the perfect superego.
Slowly she poled us away from the dock, guiding the skiff through the alien jellyfish nation. I hunched in the prow and fixed on Edwina 0004, studying the moonlit elegance of her cheekbones, the graceful sweep of her jaw. The resemblance to Londa was at once disturbing and inevitable: the primal Edwina had been Londa’s present age when she died, so it followed that the Wild Woman and my vatling would mirror one another—indeed, Edwina 0004 lacked only her creator’s faint wrinkles and incipient eye pouches. A thirty-eight-year-old who’d yet to celebrate her first birthday, the present beaker freak axiomatically displayed no marks of the life she’d never lived.
Much to my surprise, she was prepared to discourse upon her Dasein, and by the time we reached the far shore, all my most burning questions had been answered. Unlike the species from which she’d arisen, an animal that in accounting for itself faced an unhappy choice between a groundless theism and a groundling Darwinism, Edwina 0004 knew how she’d come into the world. She fully grasped her ontological status—doppelgänger of a deceased biologist, puppet of the DUNCE cap’s algorithms, mother and mentor to the notorious Dame Quixote—and she radiated a sense of mission. The original Edwina had devoted herself to her triune daughter’s welfare, and Edwina 0004, if I could believe her, was equally determined to secure Londa’s happiness.
“At one time her happiness mattered to you, too,” the Wild Woman admonished me. “A golden age, Londa calls it. She hopes it will return.”
“Golden ages rarely return,” I said, “especially if they never existed.”
A coughing fit seized the Wild Woman, the guttural convulsions ringing across the open water, and I wondered whether this particular Edwina, like her predecessor, might be cursed with poor health. “Technically I’m as sociopathic as any newborn vatling, but so far I’ve committed no crimes,” she said. “I haven’t burned down Faustino, or pulled the wings off a butterfly, or sneaked onto the ship and slit Felix Pielmeister’s throat. This morning I came up with a theory. Want to hear it? My psyche or soul or whatever you call it—my program—it’s bursting with love for Londa, and this fount of affection keeps my depravity at bay.”
“Entirely plausible,” I said, though I doubted that a DUNCE cap program could provide its recipient with anything but the most schematic beneficence. Her depravity, I suspected, was merely biding its time, waiting to sponsor some atrocity or other.
Although the Wild Woman had called her dwelling a shack, it had obviously once been the mo
st picturesque of lakeside cottages, a virtue it might still boast had the jungle not laid claim to the exterior. Flowering vines enswathed the walls like veins coursing through aged skin, dark roots emerged between the porch planks like ebony piano keys, and the roof had become a feral Swinburnian garden of bougainvillea and Spanish moss.
“Back when I was the primal Edwina, this place was my secret world,” said the Wild Woman, leading me through a tidy kitchenette into a cozy living space dominated by a table overspread with the promised feast of freshly caught crabs, their cooked shells as red as my childhood wagon. “Here and only here could I escape the commotion of myself.”
“Speaking of escape…” I cast an indignant eye on my shackles.
“Even if I had the key, Londa wouldn’t want me to use it. She loves you, but she doesn’t trust you.”
I sat down and, through a series of gestures made oafish by the handcuffs, dismantled a crab. We ate in silence. Evidently Londa had stenciled some first-rate recipes onto Edwina 0004’s tabula rasa, because the meal left nothing to be desired. The wine, too, was admirable, a Chablis drawn from a rack in the kitchenette, though we had to consume it at room temperature, there being no refrigerator on the premises.
“Last night, while you and I were sleeping, thirty thousand children died of malnutrition,” Edwina 0004 suddenly declared, using a grapefruit spoon to extract a final tidbit from her crab shell. “We’re all guilty bystanders to that tragedy, but certain bystanders are more guilty than others. Some, in fact, are accessories to the crime.”
“I quite agree,” I said. “But that hardly gives Londa the right to murder those accessories.”
“Believe it or not,” said the Wild Woman, swallowing a morsel, “just hearing another person say my daughter’s name gives me a thrill. ‘But that hardly gives Londa the right to murder those accessories.’ Please, Mr. Ambrose, let me hear you say ‘Londa’ again. Any sort of sentence will do, just so it includes her name.”