“I don’t even need to read this.” I said. “I have bullied and dogged and harassed this asshole across seven cities. What, am I supposed to off him now too?”
“Naw. This is real low-key, under th’ ray-dar type a deal. No rough stuff.”
“Strange that we had to do Von Dredge and that we have a ‘no rough stuff’ order for Wolfram. He’s talked more smack about the nobles than any sixteen workers’ guilds I know. I can’t believe that it’s taken him this long to gore the ox of the Dry Men.”
“Nothin’ wrong with stickin’ it to the nobles, as long as it ain’t us. Guess he just been lucky so far. Sorta like you, boy.” I started scanning through the mission. “Long and short of it, we cain’t let the public read his new ex-pose ‘bout Operation Screech Owl.”
“…danger of uncovering the massive intelligence infiltration of all forms of Provisian media…” I read. “So we have spooks feeding the press stories?”
“’Course. Yuh done looked at a map, lately, boy? Provisia may s’well be the whole damn planet. We done control ev’thing ‘ceptin’ those rogue states like Kargivia an’ Burial and such. Yuh want to control land, yuh’s got to keep the news friendly. S’prised yuh never stumbled upon this in yuh past life.”
I thought back to the old days. Granted, it had always been mostly about living fast and getting sky high while I scooped a story like a Trash Junction Tyrant removing an eyeball. But of course, there had always been heepish journalists too. There had always been people who would obey their contract with Provisian Broadcasting Corporation to the letter, and stay up late worrying about if they misquoted someone or got a pimple before a broadcast. The kind of people who loved having contacts that did their work for them so they could get their beauty sleep.
And then there were people like Wolfram.
3
Plutocrat’s Palace, the night of its opening. It was my first and last ever gig for The Vocal Villager. Wolfram and I had been assigned to investigate. He didn’t remember the snide rejection letter he wrote when I submitted my novel to his father’s publishing house, and I needed money so badly that I was willing to bury the hatchet and dig it up later when I could afford a shovel.
We were there to look for mob connections. Gild owned the casino, and no one trusted him for the simple reason that he was obviously an unrepentant narcissistic sociopath. Back then, it was unimaginable that he would attain Provisia’s highest elected office, and his political ambitions were far in the future. After bankrupting his last six projects, even stupid peasants couldn’t believe that this thing was on the level. I was strapped for cash, and as I approached the door, I had every intention of taking the assignment seriously. The greeter pumped my hand.
“Gods!” I said. “I know you! You’re the Puppet Piledriver from Provisian Pitfighting League!”
He laughed. “That was a long time back. You two enjoy your stay, and just holler if you need help with anything.” That was the first crack in my resolve; one of the greatest fighters ever to grace the octagon of the PPL practically offering to carry my luggage. But the crack widened and the great iceberg of my resolve cleaved apart once I stepped inside.
It was a phantasmagoric palace of corruption and greed and sex. Roulette wheels levitated, tossing black and white balls that seemed to joust in midair. Pulsing music sat on clouds of cigar smoke like a mischievous God. Everything I saw was gold and silver and silicon. I had never seen so many fine women in one place before. The chandeliers were lit from below so that they projected shimmering orgasmic holograms everywhere. Money, babes, servile celebrities, booze, drugs, violence, gambling—my depravity meter was sky high and I was instantly hooked. The place was like the wet dream of some violent member of a reactionary workers guild who always voted against his best interests. There was so much money and so little class. It was utterly beautiful.
“Such decadence.” Wolfram exclaimed, his eyes wide. That was when I knew for sure that I still hated this guy, the miserable sack of heepshit. “We better split up. You take the tables; I’ll see if I can get anything out of the staff.” Before I could say anything else, he was shuffling away on some righteous crusade.
“Hey there, stranger!” A flirty brunette greeted me. She appeared to be wearing a recalcitrant peacock on her head that Mr. Gild had punished by dipping in gold, but there wasn’t much else on her, so I didn’t mind. “This will start you off.” She pressed a chip into my hand. “Good luck!” She was leaving, giving me a lovely glimpse of a sequined thong. I drew her back. We were standing at a games table. I bought in, and she took the hint and blew into the dice in my hand. I rolled.
I won.
I could feel it happening all around me; the alignment. There are times when there’s a sort of synchronicity, a feeling of order to everything in the universe. It’s like you’ve just put a head of pixie up each nostril and snorted, but you haven’t. Everything lines up, from subatomic particles to celestial bodies, and you can do no wrong. It’s something that usually happens to very bad people, because they are the ones who are most in tune with the fundamental wrongness of the universe, the Discord Eternal. We’re taught about the Gods from the time that we’re children, but no one mentions the Demiurges. The Church of Provisian Saints has it wrong. It’s not intelligent design—the name of the game is evolution, mutation. The uglier the better.
I repeated the dark ritual. I went all in. Lady Peacock blew into my hand. I rolled. The story was entirely forgotten with the victory. The rest of the night was a blur. They set me up with a posh suite and everything I could want so that the house could win some of its money back. Everything I did was magic and everything I said was clever, and whoever’s name was on this place, I was king here. I was about to make Lady Peacock and three other women carry the curse of the bark for the rest of their lives when there was a heavy knock at the door.
I was looking up into what looked like a bruised and purpled version of Wolfram’s face. He was levitating five inches off the floor between two muscled giants in white suits. “Mr. Mercy,” (nom de gamble) “Is this man an associate of yours?”
I looked deep into Wolfram’s eyes. He didn’t say anything, but his trademark look was gone. It was replaced by a communicative stare of immense significance, as he implored me by the fourth estate we both served to somehow spare him from death and dismemberment.
“Nope.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Scram.”
“Mr. Gild insisted that we check.”
“Are you deaf, man?” I opened the door wide so the three clowns could see the babes on the bed in various stages of undress. “Don’t I look like a friend of this establishment to you?” A cock crowed three times, and I remembered thinking that it must have been even later than I thought. They left after that. In the morning, I still had more in winnings than I would have made off the story for that rag. I learned later that one of the goons shoved a poker chip down Wolfram’s throat. He would have died, except the other one socked him in the gut so hard he coughed it back up. In fact, if the job had been left to anyone other than morons, he would have died. We were never on great terms after that.
4
“I don’t get it.” I said. “You guys have people that put shirts on tree puppets. You probably have lodges in every state, city, province, and prefecture.” I tapped my Dry Men ring, a gift that came with my second degree. “Why don’t you just flash the ring and kill the story?”
“She-it,” the Creep said disgustedly “Boy, you the one’s got experience in this field. How many stories can just be up and killed? You done watch the news lately? They’s been goin’ on about that Air Provisia jet that noseplummeted int’ the ocean goin’ on four weeks now. Always ‘Breakin’ News!’ The News is a business too. And it’s one that can’t be controlled if it gets hungry ‘nough.” He had a point. When the powers that be really wanted to hide something, they usually let it enter the news cycle and let the underground stream of apathy drown it like an e
yeless mole. But sometimes the world settled into such a miserable trawl of boredom that people would pay attention to anything, even the truth.
“So you’re saying that we have to let Wolfram break the story about Operation Screech Owl, but we have to be sure that no one cares? That people care even less than they would usually?”
“Ayuh. Intel says he’s got all the sources and doc’ments he needs, and the fact that a few squeaked under th’ condition of an’ymity ain’t gon’ scotch ‘nough of the cred’bility. Word is we got ‘til the end of the day.”
I leaned back in my lawn chair. Experience had taught me that you could get to the bottom of some of the most seemingly impossible challenges by ricocheting off either institutional corruption or public stupidity. But in this case the two were in a curious embrace, and the angles were all wrong. It seemed that there was no way to sink the shot.
It was getting on towards noon, and the rum hummed lazily in my belly. My thoughts turned into a dark, deep forest. I was immersed in that kind of arboreal super-sleep that’s the very best kind, when you’re so dead to the world that you know you’re dreaming but you’ve forgotten that there is such a thing as being awake.
“Forrest, don’t go in the forest!” My aunt nagged, without even a touch of humor. I turned from the trees and found myself standing by my aunt’s cabin. She was eying me suspiciously over her spectacles as she worked on the Blanket Eternal. “Young man, you will put me in the grave one day, I swear by the Gods on high!”
“Aunty,” I said, a bit confused but not as confused as I should have been, “I did put you in your grave. That’s why I ended up at the orphanage. Because I was such a handful.”
“Don’t you back-sass me, Forrest. I always work true and straight just like the stitches on this very blanket, and I will raise you just as right as my little sister would have wanted, Gods rest her soul.” She tapped the blanket, indicating the virtuous looking and sexless Gods and Goddesses in the blanket pantheon that it was her fate to weave. “Yes, you did put me in my grave, Gods rest my soul. You were such a handful. But I am always watching out for you. You’ve fallen in with some very, very bad men, Forrest. But it’s not too late. You can be shut of that cult and settle down with that nice Beth from next door.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this. You’ve been dead, what, twenty-seven years? You don’t know me or Beth anymore. You’re gone.” I was getting angry. My aunt had always had a way of making me feel like I was trapped in a deodorant commercial. She attacked my sense of nascent manhood as if by design, as if she knew just where to bite. “I’m out of here!”
Right on cue, I tripped on a tree root. “You’re not walking away while I’m talking to you! Do you want to give me another aneurism and kill me again? That root was put there by the Gods to trip you up! Look! Now you’ve gotten bark all over yourself!” She was right; my bark had been gone, but now it was spreading like mud all over me. I got up and darted into the forest to escape.
I ran and ran, eyes out for stray roots. Soon, my anger subsided. My blood went down and I started to feel calm and serene, the way I did when the dream had started. I walked. I was aware of the Dry Men and their deadline for my new assignment, but any sense of pressure or anxiety seemed far away. I was enjoying the solitude; but then I came upon a three-eyed toad contemplating me. This pissed me off, so I smacked him and watched him pop against a Provisian pine. Soon I came upon another one, with the same stupid tri-goggle look on its face. But when I went to hit this one, my hand struck something hard and smooth. I hadn’t hit the toad, only its image. The entire forest was made of mirrors. The frog started to croak, and I watched the mirrors bend and warp. They made me look even worse than usual. The serenity was gone. I was standing in a sleek nightmare world, a fake forest. Fake. Why do they worship everything that’s fake? Music was coming from somewhere.
I am still around
I’ll always wear this crown
I will rise ever so high
I will reign in your name
I would perish in the flame
Of your love, of your love, of your…
Mission Creep grunted with annoyance and switched the station, leaving Crystal Crowne’s longing pop for conservative talk radio. “…that Gild hasn’t gone far enough in routing the useful idiots and the levelers. But we have faith. He’s not going to slink away when the Kargivians cross a red line. He will show strength. Because that’s what these rogue states and Burialists and leftists understand. Strength. And I thank the Gods that Gild is leading the people with integrity and strength, that the downward decadent spiral of our civilization is finally…”
“I solved it.” I said. “I know how we can kill this story in the womb.”
5
“An Oneiromancer, ‘top o’ ev’thin’ else.” The Creep said. “That I call a lucky hand. She-it.” Mission Creep was under the impression that I had some sort of fabled ability that let me divine truths by sleeping. But I didn’t think he was jealous; he was just impressed that the answer to the problem had come to me in a dream. We were driving in his hotshot jingomobile, tearing up the TJSH at suicidal speeds. Of course, I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t really solved the problem—I had only felt the click, the mutant awareness when things align and the path fluoresces like a junkie lanternfish on his third hit of neon.
“This exit.” I said. The Superhighway gave way slowly to a backroads trickle, the artery of Provisian oligarchal capitalism giving way to slender capillaries. We passed a stretch of slummy hell, dive bars and trailer parks. These people weren’t peasants so much as post-peasants. Their parents or grandparents had probably had small tracts of pathetic land, but these had long since given way to dust bowls and harsh chemical fertilizer, toxic waste, mismanagement, banking sharks, and sheer dumbness. Some of them grew what pathetic food they could in pitiful hanging gardens suspended from the eaves of their trailers. The rest of their meager existence they coaxed and whored, bartered and stole. A wizened old man regarded us hatefully, his potbelly pushing the shotgun on his lap at an odd angle.
As we drove, the impoverished desperation gave way to destitute artsyness, a land of welded three dimensional collages in front of fashionably tiny homes and wind chimes made from recycled Provisium hydride tubes. We were almost there.
Beth was out front of her little home, which was built into a hill and covered with grass. The windows and door cut into it made a happy hippie face, but you knew this chick was cool. She was over the side of forty with bright green hair. Beth looked to be setting up some sort of art installation in her front yard. It was like a small but intricate maze, the walls about four inches tall. We hopped out of the car.
“Beth!” I exclaimed. “It’s been a while. How you been?”
“Forrest!” She greeted me, eyes wide and delighted. She was the kind of friend where you knew you could always pick up where you left off. She flounced over and gave me a hug.
“This is my friend Mission Creep.” I said, gesturing to the Creep. Beth frequently associated with people who had names like Snow Shout and Calm River, so she took his name in stride. I wasn’t ready to ask my favor yet, so I made some more small talk. I indicated the maze. “New micro-installation?”
“You could say that. This one’s going to be a bit more of a cash cow though.”
“How’s that?”
She didn’t answer, only pointed towards a big jar of amber fluid. I handed it to her. Mission Creep held his peace, his razor twang mercifully silent for once. He was broadcasting a nonverbal message that said “I don’ go an’ work my black ops black magic wit’ no uppity hippies, Forrest,! Yuh done copy, boy?” And so I used my body language to say “Relax, boss. I got this covered. I’m the oneiromancer, and if I say she’s cool, she’s cool.”
Beth knelt down, her shapeless skirt puffing out around her, her plump belly folded over as she started to pour the fluid into the maze. She pushed a strand of green away from her eyes, and suddenly I felt very sad
. She emptied the jar, making sure that the fluid evened out across the floor of the labyrinth. It smelled sweet. “Watch this.” She said.
We waited. After about a minute, a pixie landed nimbly on one of the walls of the maze. Like all pixies, it was about three inches tall, with wings, a stick body, and a head about the size of a pencil eraser. I could just discern the blissful expression on its stupid little face. It dropped down to the floor of the maze, where it seemed to become immobile. It collapsed; its wings giving one last weak flutter. “Nectar mixed with insecticide.” She declared triumphantly.
“Not bad. Do you think they’ll get scared off when they see the maze start to fill up with corpses?”
“I think they’re so Gods-damned stupid that they’ll only see a maze full of nectar that they can bring back to their little utopia hive or whatever it’s called. If they see dead pixies they’ll probably just assume they’re asleep. You get the revenue of the heads without having the hassle of maintaining a hive.” This was the Beth that aunty never got to know, because she died. She was steady and creative, but also calculating and countercultural. She was just the woman for the job. “What brings you here, Forrest? I haven’t seen you since the Questball Series a couple years back, when I made you up like an orc.”
She chuckled a bit. More pixies were starting to get stuck in the sweet poison. I grinned. “It’s funny you should mention that…”
6
We were inside Beth’s hippie hill home, and I was lying on my back on a table. It was as I remembered it. The cozy energy whispered through bead curtains, danced across hanging goblin-made blankets, and caromed off pyramids of orgonite. The air was sweet with incense. Mission Creep had finally come around, and he interviewed Beth with rapid fire questions. “What for all these metal rings an’ hoops?” He inquired, indicating the framework Beth was building around my stomach and chest.
“Orcs are fat, so we have to give Forrest some more width if he’s going to pass for one. I’ve never made someone an orcish woman before. What an odd request.”
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