L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Page 19

  Reactions to their arrival run the gamut from terror to indignation to sullen apology. No former patient keeps silent upon seeing the squid, though, and Li takes this as proof that the Doctor has been underselling the danger of her cures.

  Nowhere do they meet resistance. Nowhere, as far as Li’s hard evidence and sixth sense can tell, do they see any godpuppets at all. And nowhere do they discuss just what is going to happen when they catch up with the Doctor.

  They cross into the Dust, following cracked and broken roads through cracked and broken land. Winter deepens with the advent of November. The rising winds spray dry grit over the windshield, graying out the windows, and they sleep in the car within a hissing cocoon of sound.

  The last town on Boon’s list lies in what was once a small river valley. Now the river is a rind of frost on the ground and a few fractured panes of ice. Signs of hopeless tillage dot the landscape downstream. Glassing the town from a bluff to the east, Li considers the empty streets, the unguarded well, the broken yet unboarded windows of the pre-Spasm buildings. His teeth hurt, and a sensation not quite nausea gathers slickness in his mouth.

  “Well?” Boon says beside him.

  “Why do you want to find the Doctor? Personally, I mean.”

  “She’s a genius. Irresponsible, obviously, but a genius. The PRA needs people like that.”

  He shifts the binoculars to focus on the decaying chapel on the far side of town. “No, that’s not it.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “Because we can either make a detour and keep after the Doctor for king, country, and mad science, or we can take the time and risk to do the right thing here.”

  To her credit, she wastes no time asking how he knows. “How many?”

  “From the fields and the number of buildings in some kind of repair, I’d say about fifty.”

  In the town below them, doors swing open. A small crowd gathers around the chapel. One figure steps forward, facing the church doors, and seems to offer a speech, hands moving with a strange and perfect grace.

  “We’ve got survivors,” Li murmurs, lowering his voice out of reflex. “There, in the church. No way to know how many. I count forty godpuppets. You?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “How’s your shooting?”

  “Excellent. Why? There are too many of them.”

  “No. No, there aren’t.”

  Would you like to be saved?” the godpuppet asks as they roll into town. In life, it had been a middle-aged woman, traces of an old and practical frumpery visible in her dress and hair. As a puppet, it has a severe, drawn beauty, perhaps how the woman had always wished she could look, and little flickers of silver lick at its lips. “We have found things small and entire. There will be punch on Tuesdays—Tuesdays are lovely—and a hymn-sing.”

  Boon, aiming out the rear passenger-side window, swings Li’s old Winchester 94 into line and drops the godpuppet with the first round and levers another into the chamber. Li floors the accelerator and draws a long curve of dust as the Delray slews around, aiming back the way they came. In rearview mirror miniature, a form sprawls on the ground, a question mark dotted with gray and red and the brightness of wet metal.

  Then the howl goes up around them, and the pursuit begins.

  Forty-two is a small outbreak. There’s no meaningful collective intelligence, nothing beyond an enhanced facility for barn-raising or maybe tug-of-war. In the sudden, mad reaction to the loss of one of their own, the godpuppets use no strategy. They just chase, strung out and reaching with hands and wire, coming into range one by one as Li finesses the accelerator.

  It’s murder, pure and simple, and he can hear Boon realizing it, hear the little hesitation creep into the rhythm of her shooting, hear it creep back out as she substitutes mechanical proficiency for awareness. She counts under her breath, her voice flat. “Fifteen. Sixteen.”

  And so on until she says it’s finished and Li lets the car coast to a stop.

  It’s murder. The only question is whether they committed it, or the Doctor the previous month. Li has given up trying to decide.

  “Can we drive back a different way?” Boon asks.

  For a moment disgust floods him, and he almost tells her she can walk back to town alone, can linger by each body, can get a look at the ones that were just kids, or that were old but phasing weirdly back into a kind of youth and were still caught in the delight of it. But he sees her face and just wishes there were something, anything, they could do but what comes next.

  “No,” he says softly.

  Comprehension dawns, and with it revulsion. “The squids,” she mutters. Shaking hands pack the last of her ginger into her mouth. “We’ve got to kill the squids.”

  Li draws his revolver. “I’ll do it.”

  “We’ll do it together.”

  “Keep a six-foot distance. One of those wires tags you, you’ve had it.”

  She doesn’t even bother to look insulted. She just opens the door and goes to work.

  To the survivors barricaded in the church falls the burial of the dead, as if anything in that wind-scoured wasteland could stay buried. They spill everything, say they gave the Doctor the names of a few halfway honest innkeepers and arms dealers on the Turnwell border. Li puts the odds of finding her at over fifty percent.

  The town is dead. Maybe it was never alive. There are enough bicycles and dried stores for the twelve survivors to make a run south for warmer climes. On an impulse he can’t quite explain, Li gives them a half-dozen little blue pills packed in nitrogen. It’s a small fortune, an emergency fund Li liberated from a man with more bravado than situational awareness. If they can make it to Austin or El Paso or even Louisville, it will buy them a fresh start, or would, were such things more than empty fantasy.

  Li and Boon sit up all night in the church, wrapped in blankets, drinking what the locals said was coffee. The wind is a long whine punctuated by creaks and pops and the rattle of detritus against glass and plywood. For all that the survivors said everyone in town was accounted for among the living or the dead, every small discontinuity of sound or trick of shadow is a godpuppet returning in rage or terror or strange lust with tendrils snapping out like tongues to unite itself with its enemies.

  “Do you know what ALS is?” Boon asks.

  “Lou Gehrig’s disease. Motor neuron disorder. Degenerative.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  Li coughs. “You still shoot pretty straight.”

  “Don’t say that. Don’t tell me that.”

  “Does the PRA know?”

  “No. I’ve been careful. And the diagnosis is less than six months old.”

  So that’s why she’s after the Doctor. He imagines brightness growing in Boon’s eyes, hears her spouting cheery inanities as the chips in her brain rebuild her body’s cellular machinery to cast silver paths for signals beyond all hope of human reckoning. A sudden picture, stark in the shuddering light of an atomic detonation, of her mouth opening to kiss him and spilling wires past his lips, down his throat, setting them to turn and quest in the very core of him.

  But he also sees her stumbling, then bedridden, unable to chew or swallow or draw a full breath. Clear eyes in a slack face, the sick one-way awareness of them, their life peering up out of a dead body.

  “You think the Doctor can save you?”

  “I think I have a ninety percent chance. That’s not so bad. And if it goes wrong …” She smiles in the darkness. “I didn’t bring you along because I need protection, or a conscience, or your attempts to analyze something I’ve spent my whole life studying.”

  Light grows in the windows. The rising sun is a pale, heatless eye. Li finds his voice, finds himself speaking without thought or effort. The words spill down, fluid and unstoppable. “There were fifty of us outside Burden’s Ford when it happened. We were
out clearing a lock downriver when people started turning, and we didn’t know. We came home, and there were our friends, our families waiting for us. They didn’t sound right, didn’t move right. I could see it wasn’t really them, sense it wasn’t really them, and then the others couldn’t deny it anymore.… A couple of us got to the armory, and then we won free to the river. But there were six hundred and twenty-four of them. Enough for some cleverness. Some tricks. They started talking in their old voices. Showing off memories. It was so clear, so perfectly clear that everyone we loved was still in there, in a way.

  “All twisted up, though. I heard Shengzhi’s daughter telling him the story of her own birth like she remembered it. Maybe she did, or God did; it had her mother, too, so maybe that’s where it got the details. And my sons were there.”

  This is the detail he hasn’t told anyone, the little crook in the story that warps it from tragedy into something small and cowardly and not even piteous. Boon’s eyes are bright but unreadable, fixed.

  “Shengzhi and I traded. You understand? We all traded. We would’ve worked it out on the back of a napkin if we’d had enough time, because they were crossing the river, all those friends and relations, and it was complicated. Thirty-seven of us left with hunting rifles and shotguns on the bank, and the town burning, and the full moon showing us just what we were doing, what we were allowing. We murdered each other’s wives, husbands, lovers, kids, parents.

  “The heroes of Burden’s Ford. That’s what three governments called us. So there’s my credential. There’s my expertise. I can kill my friends. Most of the others killed themselves, too, sooner or later. There. Was it better than reading my résumé?”

  Her voice is just above a whisper. “It shows I was right.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can trust you to do what’s necessary if something goes wrong. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. All that blood on your hands—what difference, in the end, would mine make?”

  A bar of sunlight eases into being in the dust of the old church.

  “Then there’s the matter of your self-loathing,” she adds, softly. “I don’t know why, but I’m almost sure that it means something.”

  As if from very far away, Li remembers that the Methodists served punch on Tuesdays in this very church, that it was someone’s favorite night of the week because her mother seemed to come alive in a mad whirl of activity involving casseroles and elaborate social networks and keeping the swarm of self-righteous do-gooders from quashing what was really a surprisingly good time. Nights like a bright string of pearls in a dim and abortive childhood, clutched long into the Spasm and the coming of the Dust.

  The town of Mercy stands on the western edge of the Dust in territory nominally Turnwell’s and practically the domain of anyone who can coax life from it. News comes over the shortwave that the PRA has declared war on Dixie and is pushing northeast. St. Louis has expelled the PRA embassy staff. In Louisville, the radio says, PRA diplomats are strung from lamp posts.

  It’s easy, in the end, and almost disappointing. Boon asks the townsfolk a few pointed questions, greases a few palms. Li gets the right man drunk enough to talk, then he gets himself drunk enough to feel nothing for a while. He wakes wrapped around a woman whose name he can’t remember.

  “Where were you when it happened?” he asks. In daylight, she seems gaunt. Her ribs show, and the sharp curve of her hip bones.

  A small, sleepy noise and a rank wash of morning breath. “How old do you think I am, mister?”

  He checks his eyes and mouth in the mirror. When the girl sees what he’s doing, she looks more confused than afraid. He finds nothing. Just a dirty mirror giving back a tired, windburned face.

  He finds Boon waiting downstairs. She looks as ragged as he feels, and he wonders how she coped with her own uncertainties. “I have the backhoe seller,” she says.

  Li slaps a hand-drawn map down on the table. “I have the graveyard.”

  Doctor Amelie Bourreau does not turn when they enter the cemetery. She zips the body bag closed on something nearly unrecognizable, stretches, and sheds her hat. A few strands of iron-gray hair float in the wind. The ancient backhoe stands beside the row of exhumed graves, all awkward angles and flaking yellow paint.

  “The puzzle,” she tells the bag in a light Creole accent, “is the people who do not change. Of course, there are no such people. Before the Spasm, there were notions of selective infection, as if the choice could precede the means of making it. And now, Alan, you treat infection as a random event: a roll of the dice, I believe, is your preferred metaphor.”

  Li watches her, watches Boon watch her, feels Boon watching him right back. A complex triad of attention and indifference. “Doctor,” he says, unable to think of anything else. The rage he should be feeling is nowhere to be found. Burden’s Ford plays out in his mind, but the memories are far away, drained of color and vitality.

  The Doctor ignores him. “Tell me, Jackie, why you think my otherwise excellent implementation of a strong encryption system began to deteriorate? Surely you noticed the sudden appearance of cribs, repeated settings, and other errors?”

  “I noticed,” Boon murmurs, staring at the Doctor with something between hope and desperation, her face that of a woman seeing home after years at sea, or seeing it burn. “I wasn’t sure what it meant.”

  “It meant I wanted to meet you. And him? What have you noticed about Alan Li?”

  “He’s good at killing godpuppets. They’re bad at killing him.”

  “And isn’t that odd?”

  Li finds his voice again. “We’re here to take you back to Austin.”

  “No, I don’t believe so. You’re here to kill me. Jackie is here for my help.” A pause. “I’m unsure either of you will get what you want, I’m afraid.” She tucks something metallic into a satchel at her feet. A pacemaker, or a high-splice neural sync. “Come along. We have much to discuss. And we’ll need a razor, I’m afraid.”

  Jackie’s come a long way for meatball surgery. “Not a scalpel? Standards are slipping.”

  The Doctor crooks an eyebrow. “For a haircut, Alan? If you insist.”

  The moment is tilting, sliding out of control. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He holds up a pair of handcuffs, trying to recover some trace of equilibrium. “How about we start with these?”

  The Doctor smiles beatifically. “If it makes you feel better.”

  “It does.”

  It doesn’t. It really doesn’t.

  His protests amount to nothing before the Doctor’s cool persuasion, and Jackie Boon shaves his head in the upstairs room where the sheets still need changing. He watches in the same mirror he used that morning to check his eyes, his gums, to keep his uncertainty at bay. The outline of his head changes by degrees in the mirror as she trades scissors for straight razor, working with calm, steady hands.

  From the chair in the far corner, the Doctor speaks: “I was fifteen at the Spasm. Eighteen when a GP and a neurosurgeon took me to apprentice. I took excellent notes on all our cases, I’m proud to say. Of particular note was a male child, age four, Chinese and mixed northern European ancestry, otherwise healthy, who presented with myoclonic seizures. Having ruled out febrile seizures and a handful of other possibilities, my teachers diagnosed him as epileptic, which means less than most laymen think; there are a host of possible underlying causes, most of them treatable only via high-splice or surgeries which are, regrettably, no longer possible.”

  A bit of hair has gotten into Li’s nose. It itches. The inside of his head itches too, horribly, as if something is squirming within his skull. His heart pounds. Boon runs a rag through the sweat on his brow.

  “We fitted him with a high-splice implant, admittedly an ethically questionable decision, but he showed no signs of mania or physical conversion. The seizures simply stopped.”

  A pause in the scrape of th
e razor. Resumption. He can feel a faint tremor through the blade, and warmth flows down from just above his left ear.

  “Now we come to a man who, by all accounts, has an uncanny aptitude for identifying godpuppets and, as they say, a knack for killing them. And around him, they develop a peculiar ineptitude. Why might that be, Alan?”

  His tongue feels like lead. “They want what’s in my brain. It’s why that one didn’t take the headshot all those years ago. They want my memories, or something I can do.”

  “Ego.” The Doctor sighs. “Yours is exceptional. No, Alan, I can assure you that God neither wants nor needs your memories.”

  Boon wipes away the blood and presses his shoulder until he turns and leans toward the mirror.

  The scar is faint, long-faded, a slim arc two inches above his ear punctuated by four small circles of roughened tissue. How many times did he comb his hair and not feel it? Did his wife ever trace the outline and hesitate while he remained oblivious?

  “God already has your memories, Alan. I imagine you have a few of its. What it wants from you is more … complicated. The difficulty is that God’s mind is the sum of so many beliefs, so many networked associations of things, that it functions rather like a language. And language functions like the unconscious. Fundamental drives surfacing as signs, signs refigured as fundamental drives. Do you see?”

  “No.”

  “Eros and thanatos: the motions toward life and death. So many of the people who make up the mind of God are no more than unstructured open space, a bulk of mental critical mass—today, subcritical mass. Parts of an unconscious, if you will, that holds echoes of the former being but could so easily be otherwise. And you, Alan, are the part of God that wants to die.”