Miss Brandymoon's Device: a novel of sex, nanotech, and a sentient lava lamp (Divided Man Book 1)
Page 3
Bishop said, “Party ended a little suddenly. Not too subtle, you know.”
Fin replied in a mocking singsong, “Wasn’t it miraculous?” and reached for his cigarettes.
Bishop declined the offered pack. “You might want to perform some miracles that are less easily mistaken for sheer gleeful obnoxiousness. Most folks can’t make the distinction.”
“Well, if I only attracted disciples who are smart enough to learn, I’d be the most effective messiah so far.” His Zippo sparked.
“No, you just wouldn’t have any disciples.” Bishop sat back and watched Fin exhale smoke through his nostrils.
“You know what? I’m sick of talking about it.” Fin made a show of searching for an ashtray.
“Look Fin, I’m not trying to say you need to take responsibility for the way people interpret your actions. I am saying you could capitalize on it, instead of shooting yourself in the foot. Which, by the way, brings up my real concern.”
“My limp?”
“You don’t remember what you did.” It wasn’t a question.
Fin’s expression went blank.
“Look at your right arm.”
On his forearm Fin discovered a crude bandage, held in place by adhesion to whatever was underneath more than by the tape wrapped around it. He quirked one eyebrow as he tugged experimentally on the gauze, pulling more boldly until he’d peeled the whole messy pad from his skin.
Congealed blood partially obscured the design, a solid black circle surrounded by undulating shaded bands. An eclipse. All blackwork.
“What the?” Fin’s eyebrows moved in opposite directions as he held his arm up and twisted it for a different view. “Who did this?”
“You did.”
Fin pondered. “It looks good.”
“Certainly does, considering. I thought you’d rather have a finished tattoo in any case, so I didn’t interrupt you. You wouldn’t let me clean it up, though. You have Bacitracin?”
Fin nodded. “Got some today for the eyebrow.” He examined the new ink for another few seconds, and cocked his head to look at the game. He pulled the knight away from its pursuit of the bishop, then resumed admiring his tattoo.
The knight move stunned Bishop. Such a change in Fin’s tactics was unprecedented. While Fin picked at the dried blood on his arm, Bishop analyzed the new direction of the game. Shortly he concluded he was toast. The game was Fin’s to lose.
But Bishop had known Fin to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory before. His feud with Kyle being the prime example. In the short time since he’d moved in, the rest of the house learned to ignore Kyle. That seemed simple enough. Of course, none of them had known that Fin and Kyle had a history. This obsession, in Bishop’s view, caused the entirety of Fin’s misery. He squandered his resources, and when he did capture a piece, such as the pawn tonight’s disrupted party represented, it came at too high a cost. Kyle was an unworthy opponent, so all the better to play with skill and have done with it.
Bishop moved his queen, a desperation maneuver but his best choice. Then he remembered that the game had been intended as a pretext to get Fin talking. Fin seemed hypnotized by his new tattoo.
“What do you think it means?” Bishop asked.
“Probably something like, ‘I’m really cool ’cause I did this.’ What do you think it means?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. You should be asking better questions.”
Fin rolled his eyes.
Bishop sighed. “A month ago you were a grimy hedonist. Now you’re thoroughly squalid. The fun is gone.”
“Squalid, and no fun. Ouch. At least I have a cool tattoo and an eyebrow ring.”
“I’m dead serious. The change is alarming. You need to spend some time with Fin, Fin.” He saw Fin’s distaste at the idea. “You’ve been avoiding him, when you’re not sticking needles in him.”
“So, a good heart-to-heart will fix me right up?” Fin sounded amused.
“No, it’s just a start. There are some things a person needs another person for. Even you.”
Fin made eye contact properly for the first time in days, and smiled. “Relax, Mom. I have a date on Wednesday. With a girl.” Fin moved his rook. “Checkmate.”
Chapter Three
SURVEILLANCE
The universe has a purpose, which gradually technology allows us to see. Creation lies not in the past but in the future. The universe is unstable because it isn’t finished. It is a means, not an end. Most importantly, there is no God -- yet. The patterns of chaos have a purpose. You have a purpose. These are not the final days -- this is only the beginning! Technology leads God ever closer.
from TEF recruitment pamphlet
The silence is heavy, salty, and cold.
The bleak, colorless terrain is dunes, undulating, pocked with craters of all sizes. Occasional crags of black rock protrude from the sand. The grayness above darkens into impenetrable night, filled with fear and secrets.
Alarming and tingling, like lightning on the skin, comes the low vibration. Felt but not heard, like a signal using silence as a carrier wave. Sand dances to this tune in Byzantine patterns. Ripples stay behind, like crop circles, like writing.
Somewhere under all that sand is an important item, lost. Something small. It might be a charm of protection from darker mysteries. It might be a key.
Now, as the not-noise grows in strength, an enigma of ghostly pale green lights appears high overhead in circle formation. Descending. The disturbance becomes a maelstrom of sand as the illuminated visitor moves lower still, leaving its home darkness and entering the faint gray. The sand churns and swirls until only the ring of green lights can now be seen. The droning power of this invader numbs, overwhelms.
All becomes still. The sand settles slowly, softly. The massive invader hangs above the sand by a slender line, tethering it to the blackness. The verdigris metallic hull could be an enormous bulb of phosphorescent garlic, but for the limbs. Several delicate multi-jointed legs are affixed at its crown, and reach almost to the ground. Its sheer presence feels heavy. Its size is terrifying
One leg stirs about in the sand for a moment and finds a glinting prize. It offers this trinket, extending that menacing leg.
***
Fin rose early in the afternoon, which gave him ample time to stroll before the start of his shift. Before he was expected, at any rate. But he couldn’t enjoy playing hooky under the bland gray sky. It unnerved him, which in turn annoyed him.
At the store next to his workplace, he stopped short. He regarded the window display with a blank face and smoldering mind.
Marilyn Monroe languidly licked a lollipop made from a stop sign, except that it said POST. Armadillos of steadily diminishing size were frozen in asynchronous wobble as they passed by her, striving to reach the antique telephone and Victrola to the right. These relics were captioned ‘Modern’ in carved old-fashioned lettering. The background was something crude but not quite indecent entitled ‘Sistine Men’s Room Wall,’ consisting of a section of institutional-white ceramic tiles covered with faux Renaissance graffiti and a stick-figure parody of the famous God’s Index Finger portion of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
The Michelangelo rip was witty, in the way that works pretty well as a notion to describe indulgently at a party, but not as something you would actually carry out. The art lay in the threat of such tastelessness. Something so crass collapses under its own weight. Still, the artist’s audacity might have gotten a smirk out of Fin except that he himself described the piece in great detail about a month ago. Indulgently. At a party. Right down to which finger Adam was displaying to god, and the phone number for Gabriel to blow your horn.
He pissed on the mental coals to cool them and entered the store. Olaf’s was the best-stocked art supply shop for fifty miles. Sure, the prices were high, but in addition to being a supply store the place housed a veritable museum of objets d’absurd. Also, it was next door to Sycamore’s offices and open late most nights.
A quick recon told Fin there was nothing new among those treasures, so he wandered into the other half of the store. Olaf’s stocked arguably the most useless selection of greeting cards and postcards in town, but by far the most entertaining and educational.
While Fin was reading the caption on a postcard to find out what the hell the picture was, Dan walked in the front door. Could it be break time already, or had Dan been sent on a Fin-hunt? That chore traditionally fell to the newest employee. Dan was a good kid, but so painfully naive. He would mix better with the morning shift, whose personalities were free of rough edges. In fact, they were free of any edges whatsoever, and Fin couldn’t understand how they remembered all their own names.
Dan was no zombie, just earnest and non-combative and unable to fathom the night shift’s tribal bent. Fin had to evade him. Dan would gather that Fin was loafing, and he’d try to understand.
Fin melted through the framing area at the rear of the store, while Dan asked the clerk the standard polite questions. The back room and workshop were accessible via a closed door only a few feet away. Fin froze, watching as the clerk gestured. Yes, tell him I looked at the sketch pads and textured paper, and you saw me over by the greeting cards. Dan looked around as if listening to Fin’s thoughts.
You’re a smart guy, Dan, you’ll head right for the cards, Fin guessed correctly. As a large tier of t-shirts and portfolios came between their positions Fin put his hand on the knob of the workshop door and discovered it locked. He still held the semi-obscene postcard, and slid it between the door and the frame. The door opened with only a slight noise, masked by Jane’s Addiction playing over the store’s sound system, and Fin slipped through and pulled it shut behind him.
It felt like being backstage at a play about museums. Canvases and enlarged photos and frames occupied over a third of the room’s floor space, set up on sawbucks and tables and hanging on the walls, mostly festooned with c-clamps and straps. He wasn’t sure which was a worse firetrap, this workshop or the basement studio he worked in next door.
There were people back here going about their jobs and so far not noticing Fin. Moving steadily so as not to attract their attention, he looked for the back exit. He spotted an open door with stairs going down.
Downstairs turned out to be the storeroom, and unoccupied. Turning back now would mean trouble well beyond talking to Dan, and while Fin and trouble had a more than passing acquaintance, they didn’t really get along. Fin scanned the room for his next move. Behind a huge overstock of metallic markers a vestigial window lurked near the ceiling. Fin stood on a box and tried to look through the glass. All he could see was a little bit of masonry.
The corroded metal window frame opened with a squawk. With the smudgy glass panes out of the way, Fin could see a coarse steel mesh grille mounted outside. It was bolted on, but the crumbly cement did not hold the bolts well. He had no more trouble with it than with the window. He contorted himself to pass through feet-first.
This nefarious, undignified shimmy would lead him into Dogstar, a used book and CD store specializing in blues collectibles and golden age sci-fi. No doubt there would be a treasure trove of a storage room somewhere, but the dampness indicated it wouldn’t be down here.
Lowering himself an inch at a time, Fin was eventually able to stand on the other side, but with one foot up higher than the other. Stairs. He could reach up to the ledge of the window, but doubted it would be possible to lever himself back through from this side.
The staircase ran down between the two buildings, and had been roofed over at some point. The floor joists above his head were full of spider webs. As he got used to the darkness, Fin saw the railing and the door at the bottom. He hesitated to try the knob. As long as he didn’t try to open the door, it could be considered an option. Fin felt a lot like Schrödinger’s poor cat, neither alive nor dead, or both. The finer ethical aspects of Schrödinger’s treatment of animals had never been clear before this.
In any event, he need not panic. Someone would hear him sooner or later if he started yelling. He could even be optimistic about the door being open, since it was not exposed in the alley. If it were it would definitely be locked. This way it was just probably locked.
His logic, sound or not, was vindicated. The knob turned. He opened the door and found an office set up on the other side. Four metal desks, a few cabinets, cheap carpeting, fluorescent lights. A map of the state on the far wall, bristling with pushpins of various colors. No steps going up to Dogstar. Three men looking like they walked out of a fifties hygiene film, but wearing headset phones. One of the men winced and yanked his off. Fin heard faint feedback. When did Mormons start telemarketing?
“Hey,” Fin began casually, “did Dogstar move their bathroom?”
They slipped each other sidelong looks. One of them was older than the others, mid-thirties. He spoke. “How did you get in there?”
Fin rapidly needed to decide between telling the truth and making something up. The truth had one major thing going for it. It was ready to be told, whereas a fabricated story would require fabrication. Also, the truth was he hadn’t been sneaking around in this office, which it occurred to him was one possible explanation the men might themselves happen upon, if left to make guesses.
Unfortunately, the truth had gotten Fin into trouble before. Also, the truth was he had been sneaking around, albeit in a different office. Showing them the damaged window wouldn’t prove anything, except that he’d been breaking stuff.
“There’s a window out here. I came in through it because I was looking for a leak.” The illogical sentence began to grow stale the second it left his mouth. “Dogstar never pulled the ancient pipes and conduits when they remodeled and now something is giving them a problem.” The men remained impassive. Fin continued, “So I’m looking for the old vent traps, which are not anywhere in the finished space upstairs. I thought this area was unfinished space and I’m pretty sure the traps are in the ceiling down here.” All eyes flicked upwards for a second. A good sign. “And since I don’t see any water-damaged tiles, the traps are probably not the problem.” Doubtful, semi-credulous looks. Less openly suspicious. Time to put the cherry on top. “Do you ever notice any odd smells, like coolant or perhaps a sharp musty odor?”
The men looked at one another. The eldest drew a breath and spoke without looking directly at Fin, his brows pinching together. “No, no odd smells. There is no problem down here.” He stood, revealing himself to be even taller than Bishop, and motioned with his left hand, indicating the main entrance. On the back of the door hung a poster entitled ‘Public Appearance — Respect the Organization.’ It displayed two photos of Junior G-Mormons: one labeled Summer Attire, in shirtsleeves — the other, Inclement Weather, in a puke green Mr Rogers cardigan, holding a large fur hat in one outstretched hand, an oversized yellow umbrella in the other. Beside the door was a row of four pegs, three of them neatly holding hideous green cardigans.
Fin forced his eyebrows down and glanced back at the spokesman who finally made eye contact and said, “I ask you to leave now.”
Fin tried not to grin like a maniac, tried to maintain some semblance of nonchalance. He had just persuaded these three grown-ups he was an HVAC serviceman despite his ratty Hawaiian shirt, soviet army trench and the bawdy stolen postcard in his right hand.
Crossing the room, Fin noticed something that shocked all the sugar out of his buzz. A deflated basketball, with the skeleton of an umbrella stuffed inside, hung by a string over the desk of the missing fourth man. The umbrella ribs protruded at the top and drooped around the saggy ball. The whole thing had been sprayed with something to give it the sickly gray-green look of a glow-in-the-dark toy.
> Fin lifted his feet and placed them back on the carpet mechanically until he got outside. The model dangling above the unoccupied desk made him incredibly uneasy. A moment later he remembered the spaceship from his dream the night before.
Who the hell were these people?
The door slammed.
No identifying sign, not even a street number. From the outside, the door was easy to miss. It didn’t face the alley and the only way to get to it was to sidle between the building and an eight-foot cyclone fence.
Fin glanced nervously at the flat, leaden sky and shuddered. Even the glowing retrospective of past homecoming parades awaiting his attention at Sycamore held more appeal than this incipient dread.
He hurried out of the alley.
*** *** ***
Shaw stood gazing out his office window as his inner-circle functionaries dutifully filed in for the regular Monday afternoon meeting and took their seats at the large conference table. The weather was dreadful, giving the distant cathedral’s many facets only dark and drab tones to reflect. Shaw’s mood was much the same, but he marshaled an energizing grin before turning to face the group and take his seat at the head of the table.
“Reverend, would you begin please?” Shaw addressed Declan Spitz, seated to his right.
Spitz smiled, piggy face broadening. He closed his eyes and bowed his balding head. “Gracious Heavenly Father,” he exclaimed, each word expelled as if he were being kicked in the abdomen.
All other heads bowed around the table as Spitz recited a prayer, brief and glib, for wisdom in this important meeting of the board. Shaw’s was the last head to dip, and the last one to rise as Spitz pronounced, “Amen.”
“As per our usual Monday agenda,” Spitz steamed ahead, “I’d like to offer my congratulations to Reverend Shaw for another magnificent program yesterday.”