“What’s a Cyclogeneron?” Linda asks.
More irritation at her unending trouble with the obvious. But facts are as boundless as their unassuageable underpinning. The more they give to her, the more they have.
“It’s this humongous metal ring . . .”
“More of a torus, really. A doughnut.”
“I’m sure. A galaxy-sized metal doughnut. Give me a break.”
“Arm or a leg?”
“And it’s lined with these awesome hyperelectric solenoids that accelerate these subatomic . . .”
“And truly brutal cosmic forces come shooting out the other end.”
“End? How can a doughnut . . . ?”
“Beezaholi tried to tell the ’Dromedans about it. But that Rathgor, who’s got control of the Planetary Radix . . .”
“Not just Rathgor. All the Phagolytics. It’s like they simply don’t want to . . .”
“The whoozy-whats?”
“Rathgor,” Beezaholi says, “you must listen. If we don’t begin at once to redirect the energy we squander on Amorphicoms into the construction of . . .”
“Did he say ‘Amorphicom’?”
“They’re like these immense private jets. . . .”
“I thought they could transport themselves.”
“The vehicle part is just a fringe bennie. They’re really these ultra-cool live-in pods that you connect yourself to for the most intense . . .”
“Give up our Amorphicoms, Beezaholi? You’re joking. Why, the mere mention of the idea at the People’s Council would . . .”
“Right on, R. No way! The Amorphi is the coolest thing this side of . . .”
“And why should we give them up, you bellowing old fool? Just to humor your delusions?”
“Beezy’s right. They need the Cyclogeneron, or it is Heat Death City. The end of M-31 as we know it.”
“Our people will never surrender the pleasures they have struggled so hard for centuries to secure. People will kill for the possession of an Amorphi. To bodypilot is the most rewarding experience known to . . .”
“They are wickedly wasteful,” Jorge concedes.
“And addictive as sin,” adds Roberto, Jorge’s twin and sometime needle sharer.
“A massive drain on the Grid.”
“The Grid?” Linda whispers.
“It’s no use. Even if I managed to win over the whole Planetary Radix, we still wouldn’t possess more than a fraction of the energy we need to manufacture the Cyclogeneron. The entire tappable Grid wouldn’t provide . . .”
“Could someone tell me why he needs an accelerator the size of a . . . ?”
“Man! You get particles to that speed and collide them: you can Do It All. Make a new star. Create new forces. Name it.”
“Only—one hope—left. Must—renew interplanetary contact—with Heliotria.”
“I give up.”
“Heliotria. The other world.”
“That’s it! I knew it. Bishop Perpetuus. The Touring Monks. The Ikonankh.”
“Sure, Mr. Massive Brain Case. I could have told you that a half hour ago.”
“Much has changed since Andromeda last made contact with Heliotria. The good Bishop Perpetuus must have died generations ago.”
“Will somebody please rescue me?”
“Shh! A long time ago they hyper-tapped this other planet, where these monks went about in robes chanting all the time and the head abbot gave them this jewel thing. . . .”
“More like a little metal statue.”
“And so long as they had this figure from the monks on Heliotria, the Andromedans could open up the space-time fabric between the planets. Only that was in the past, and now it’s the distant future.”
“I must return the Ikonankh to Helio . . .”
“Don’t risk it, dude. You’ll never get the thing back.”
“. . . where it will act as a powerful beacon, drawing into our galaxy, across the space threshold, all those with special abilities. The ones the Heliotrions call . . .”
A minor emergency with Suzi Banks’s new hardware precludes Linda’s witnessing the polychrome passage of the Ikonankh through the opening it tears in space. She returns just in time to exclaim, “Oh, lo-lo-look! See what it’s doing! How come the thing is only going after kids?”
“Because”—the shortcut Methuselah at last condescends to address her—“that’s the core commercial market for this kind of bullshit. Real adults don’t waste their lives watching this Gerber drool.”
“Well, you’re still hanging around.”
“Dodgers don’t start for another two hours,” Nico says, with the barest giveaway glint. “Quit. You tickle me, lady, you die a slow death.”
“Wait a minute.” Linda breaks off the brawl. “I just got it. They’re all ancient there in M-31, aren’t they? They have no . . . ?”
“That’s right. Nobody knows how it came about. It’s always been that way.”
“Oh.” The monosyllable comes up out of her throat, a bit of phlegm wrapped around an acid lemon drop that went down the wrong pipe. She will choke on it, on the image of this bewildered Thursday afternoon class, huddled around the fable-fire for whatever feeble electron-beam spark it might still emit, whatever slight stay, its half-hour postponement of heat death. Not one of them knows. Look: look now, what the primitive metal casting does. It stands still while Heliotria’s ravenous fads slither past in reflex after-spasms, faster than she can track. It draws toward itself hands still raw from thumb sucking, gathering them up with the crisis touch, catapulting them, adding their increment of ergs to swell the eternally just-insufficient Grid.
The Ikonankh swims in front of her to fill the screen. She watches as the summoning trinket burrows through the tube’s phosphor trail and lands in this room. It materializes, pulsing, beating its metal wings, come to recruit a last-ditch rescue for the universe’s doomed omnipotents, to enlist these ignorant psychics, robust in their innocence, to put them to work assembling, arresting, assisting in the most desperate invention necessity ever mothered.
MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER galaxy just around the bend, Kraft is performing sloppy seconds on an emergency repair cobbled together by Plummer on an eleven-year-old male who was riding semifigurative shotgun in a car that a couple club brothers had taken out on community loan. Ably assisted by a cordial that subsequently registered all kinds of exotic blood concentrations, the driver power-skidded the vehicle into the rear end of a tomato-motif, twenty-four-hour pizza delivery van. The kid cohort happened to be picking his teeth with a wooden skewer at the moment of impact.
His cruising buddies would give no name for him aside from “the Rapparition,” a title they claimed he’d legally earned in brilliant public battle. The boy was past interrogation, so that was the handle that went down on the ER paperwork. Plummer’s initial repair consisted of removing the larger bits of toothpick from their resting place in the boy’s soft palate. The Rapparition’s first slurred words upon swimming up from under the anesthetic were “The movement lives on; you can’t slash it down. You can’t even long to make it gone.”
The scrape of the sutures makes him wretch, but the Rapparition gets the words out. By the time Kraft inherits the kid for all the rest of the patchwork, he’s become Carver’s blessed peacemaker. When Tony the Tuffian and that Rib Fix from the Crack Pack go tearing each other’s sutures out in a territorial blood dispute, the Rapparition interposes himself between them, declaiming,
This is a plea
For u-ni-ty
Between the He and the We
And the Me and the She.
We’re on a mission
Here, so don’t start dissin’.
Ya got to listen to the Rapparition:
Use your God-given powers of analysis!
We got to break through this crip-pl-ing paralysis.
Kraft could not have put the matter more succinctly. Today’s follow-up procedure is aimed at repairing a bit of the damage Plummer’s stopgap palate patc
h-up has done to the Rapparition’s dactyls. Nothing life shattering. In fact, almost opera buffa fare compared to much of what society has been shoving under Kraft’s blade as of late. But it is, nevertheless, a long, grueling, painstaking, delicate transaction of considerable consequence to one who has chosen speech over any of the deadlier assault weapons in aggression’s arsenal. A constructive bit of craftwork, placing it in the decided minority of piece labor assigned Kraft in this place.
Still under the influence of the Rapparition’s cadence, half desperate to convince himself of the feasibility of a Lindaesque lightness in the face of wounds beyond fusing, or maybe just punchdrunk with overwork, Kraft notices an upbeat, potato-chip rhythm using his cerebrum as electronic drum pad while he closes. The pernicious little beat goes: Let’s have a jammer (uh), I said let’s jam (rest, rest, rest) in the slammer. And mixed in there, like undercoatings of old wallpaper forever unsteamable unless one is willing to gouge out half the drywall along with it, the phrase’s Renaissance counterpoint: Lulla lullaby, my sweet little baby. What meanest thou to cry?
He senses something expected of him, a rendezvous all arranged and penned into his agenda by unknown secretary. He feels it, the weight of specific disaster, of predetermined public breakdown settling in for the evening, locating the point of perfect parasitic attachment, homing in with all the inevitability of an earnest grade-school mathematician employing approximate roots to close in on an irrational decimal. Armies of omens assemble themselves, fall into the only formation he affords them these days—the short roster, the cursory catalog standing in for a more comprehensive account of approaching capitulation. Generic alphabets, glossaries of collective pathology you do not want enumerated at greater length.
What is this place? The lightest attention limns it: the evidence is everywhere, widening with the decline of light. Poverty in positive feedback. Cascade of chain-failing banks. Earnings not even enough to cover debt service. Volume discounts rewarding the spree mentality. Illiteracy passed down as the only family heirloom, actually cultivated by every trick in the marketing book, because merchandisers, like politicians, prosper from a maimed electorate. Ten-year-olds who can tell caliber and make of a handgun by sound alone, especially in the dark. Toxins trickling down into the aquifer, from which they can never be filtered. All the while, the index of leading indicators—wealth measured by the ability to wage disaster—doctors itself until its message is bearable, even downright rosy to the ears of the self-proclaimed best-informed people on earth. Of the two alternatives in the ancient grudge match, Thanatos clearly has more future in it.
Pale, cheap, and prosaic, this doomsday laundry list. Kraft feels it grow glib under his suturing fingers. He takes facile pleasure in confirming his worst fears, talking himself up onto the hospital rooftop in his bloodied surgical robes to wait for the arrival of this year’s all-obliterating comet. Anemic, stripped even of outrage. The bleakest symptom on his list is less than quotidian. They are easy, breezy, light conversational cocktail gambits sung to the swish of a vein-skewering swizzle stick. Thus all the more horrific. When collapse becomes aperitif, it must be here at last. When the end is announced in silence, in blasé acquiescence, then it must truly be the end.
Polyphony pounds through Kraft’s head as he shoves the point of the needle in and under, punching repeatedly through the drawn drumskin that lines the soft insides of the Rapparition’s mouth. Let’s have a jammer—uh! In the slammer. Lulla, lu la la, and lo, alas! Behold what slaughter he doth make, shedding the blood of infants all, sweet Savior for thy sake.
He can feel himself running aground on bone shoals that haven’t been named, that didn’t exist until he blundered against them with his field sewing kit. The voice-leading of his obsessive ditties grows too dense for him to keep the competing lines straight. His repeated, rustling whistles—a dozen notes at a pop, each ritornelloed perhaps a quarter of a thousand times over the course of this operation, alternating fragments forced through the tiny crack decades ago chipped in his central incisor that for some reason he’s never had capped—are getting on the nerves of his fellow team members something fierce.
He knows how much these cheerful, trilled flute-de-loops must be driving the whole surgical crew up the blessed institutional walls. But he can’t help himself. That’s the sound. Uh. That’s the sound. The sound of his horn, his oldest continuous possession aside from birth certificate, neglected, long unplayable, but still sitting at the bottom of the closet in that apartment standing in for a more permanent abode. The sound of something out of his own fading repertoire, a bit of musical past he impels himself to conjure up from the scrap heap. A tinny, treble, obbligato rescue me, pitted against the short list of inevitables. The idiot whistling is some reincarnation of saving playground charm. Or perhaps it just traces a random resonance, a tone-row association triggered by the accidental conjunction of prepuber repairs thrown at him as of late, of lulla, lullaby.
Recapping in miniature the general blackout between Kraft’s preteens and his thirties, the operating room vanishes. The set gives way to one of those membership discount stores, his city’s most distinguished contribution to world betterment. The place is crawling with self-proclaimed discounts, but only for those who put up enough grubstake to secure the photo club card. The fee is trivial—just high enough to screen out the underclass. The only illegals allowed within spitting circumference of the showrooms are hired under the table to swab the decks perpetually with blisterproof paint.
Closing the Rapparition, changing out of the scrubs, heading down to the subterranean lot, blasting his automotive escape out of Fortress Carver, negotiating the freeway, finding his way to this warehouse, and flashing yet another private badge to win entry: all these steps fade to a blur at best. He has a generic memory of the overall process, the recall of one who has read the crib notes but not the book. He flails at his belt to check for his beeper, but does not feel it there. All the same, he feels queasily certain that he must still be on call.
Memory loss: a thing that virtually every text Kraft has ever been made to memorize would unhesitatingly classify as No Goodish. More alarming, he can’t seem to get worked up about his brief disappearance. He’s willing to flow with the symptoms, string them along with the hope of staying supple for a potential shot at the broader diagnosis. And yet, how far is he going to get without a complete work-up, beginning with a decent history and physical? He’s become exactly the sort of patient he most dreads, the stuff of Plummer’s rolling burlesques. Childhood diseases? M-maybe. Any trace of this in your family? You mean, like, mother, father . . . ?
He hasn’t a clue in creation why he is here. Here in this store, that is, let alone any wider, more imponderable locale. At this point, he can’t even recall why he paid for membership in the first place, except to prove that twenty bucks would still buy him into some anesthetizing club somewhere.
Well, let it be retail then, the sheer, diversionary power of the stuff. And harbor the hope that here amid the available merchandise, one might find the best place to hold vigil against the quiet pogrom already under way. One or another clearance trough in this charnel house of bargains must cradle the ticket item that he’d been after when the lights went out. Track it down, kick its unholy can, freeze the statue maker, bluff the blindman, all-come-in-free-o!
Problem is, the commodity he is after could be anything, anything this heartbreaking, magnificent mess of a country marks down in today’s race to clear inventory. Perhaps he’s in pressing need of some processor or another—word, data, food, sound, trash, or love. Could be this here artificial-intelligence beer-can Thermos ring. Or this: a mock-membrane-pad simulation of a security alarm system to fasten to his front door, instant advertisement to smart-shopping, card-holding break-and-enterers that his home is in fact prostrate and defenseless. A key chain that comes when you whistle? A tape recorder that starts recording eight seconds before it is turned on? An own-yer-own, home version of some private-reserve cinema c
lassic, say, Seven Brides for Seven Samurai?
He figures it can’t be this last, as he’d have to buy a player first. He has so far failed to do so, knowing that whatever device he might settle on would be obsoleted (as the English-obsoleting term of the moment has it) ten minutes before he could tweak the thing’s pots. Nevertheless, home electronics alone keeps his speculative faculties happily suspended for over an hour. He stands gazing, in fascinated stupor, at a gargantuan image thrown up on a flat-screen, wrap-around, wall-sized, live-in, digital stereo television larger than his apartment, larger, in fact, than his entire bet-hedging, twitch-appeasing leisure existence. The eerie, green-shifted specter waltzing around up there seems weirdly familiar, despite the chromosmear. It moves when he moves, ducks, shadowboxes in perfect synchrony, and hey! Howdy, Dr. Kraft. I’m on TV.
His first thought is: How’d they know I was coming? And how’d they get me on video in the first place? Utter idiocy lasts long enough for Kraft to feel the sensation of dancing to yesterday’s ballet, as if he’s the mario-martinet doing the tag-along, aping his screen alter ego’s choreography class. Once he figures out it’s live, he almost twists his neck off trying to look directly at himself. Why can’t he get his eyes—either this or that pair—around and past the side of his head? The problem’s not with any obstruction in his face, any blockage in the old universal joint. It’s just that the screen is here and the camera is over there, and that’s why, he decides, every picture tells a story. And every story lies at right angles to itself.
He picks up the Handycam, fiddles with it. He points it around the store, at the other cameras, at a nearby mirror, holding the mimic at arm’s length and gauging the effects on screen. He points it at the screen itself. Big mistake. He loses another god-knows-how-many minutes of his life, image-mapping the edges of recursion’s all-devouring hellmouth.
A bank of demonic monitors runs along the back aisle and out of sight. Several hundred of them superimpose their simultaneous soundtracks into a cacophony that makes Ives sound like monkish homophony. The massed picture screens make up a mammoth grasshopper’s compound eye. They trawl at random for a half-dozen picture signals and flaunt these in assembled, inscrutable patterns. One block of picture beam, interrupted by another, resumes as an irregular trapezoid just down the plane. For Kraft, the channels congeal into a single, wide-gauge program whose theme any stringer pediatrician would recognize at once: children adrift, out of doors too late at night, too far from home, migrating, campaigning, colonizing, displaced, dispersed, tortured loose, running for their lives.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 20