Kill The Monster, Chapter 18

XVI. DINNER WITH THE GENERAL

He opened his eyes. He could see patterned ceiling tiles. He felt warm.

"He's conscious." The voice was American. It could, however, be the cunning Chinese playing tricks.

A face moved over the light, gigantic, blond and blue-eyed.

"Mr. President? Try not to move, Mr. President, sir. You'd had quite a shock. We're treating you for the effects of hyperbaric hypothermia. You're immersed in warm distilled water. It'll absorb any excess salt."

" - couldn't breathe -" He heard his own voice, but was not in consciously in control of it.

The face had a paper mask and Lieutenant's pips. "You weren't supposed to. Those Chinese escape suits stop you breathing on the way up using compressed air bands to constrict your ribcage. Otherwise you'd breathe in high pressure nitrogen and get the bends. You popped up on our sonar like a ballistic missile launch. We were all set to deploy countermeasures. The Captain made a decision to trust the emergency transponder signal you were giving out. He runs a good ship, sir."

Yeah, yeah, and the fact you think so has nothing at all to do with the fact he produces ten times as much turannone as you do.

"Runs a good ship", he parroted.

"When you came up, the First Officer was all for using the point of your appearance on sonar to launch a final stick of charges and take out the hostile trace altogether. But the Captain overruled him on the basis of our current mission instructions -"

Thereby allowing the leader of the Resistance to escape.

"He's a good man." The American version of the hypothermia treatment tank was more like a moulded clear plastic sarcophagus. Pre-placed medical diagnostic units were clamped around his body below the neck. He could feel electrodes working the muscles in his feet and fingers.

"I don't know how you got out here, sir, but we're lucky to have found you. We received a Committee instruction on a level twenty coded channel to proceed to these coordinates at full steam and start lobbing depth charges. Then we saw the Chinese sub on our smart sonar. If we hadn't been this close, she'd have slipped straight past us -"

He remembered suddenly who, where and why he was.

"Which ship am I on?" He was in control of the voice now. He could make it say things.

"The USS Todd Beamer, sir. Lydon class ABM control ship. Best ship in the fleet."

Ain't they all. But I remember approving the specs for that class two years back. I may be a shit economist, but by God, I'm a good war leader.

I got to name the class, too. I'm not sure Johnny Rotten would have agreed with the assignation of his name to a warship, but hey, I'm High Primate. What I say goes.

"Your ship has an S-15 ASW swing-wing aboard, Lieutenant. I need it. I must get back to Reykjavik a.s.a.p."

The Lieutenant's professional concern struggled with the turannone contained in his bloodstream. "Sir, I must caution you that we're treating you for deep-level hypothermic nerve damage. It's highly possible that you might lose an extremity if you cut the treatment short."

He shook his head, with difficulty. The movement was less like a human being expressing negation than a shark making threat gestures. His neck still hurt. "I have to see my son. I have to get back to the restaurant to see my son, in Iceland. He'll be wondering where I am."

The Lieutenant hovered indecisively, like a chess computer stuck in an almost infinite recursion. Sean had seen men driven to psychosis by such situations. He admired the young doctor's devotion to his oath. It had to be powerful to lock horns with a leve thirty-three turannone source.

"Son, I ask young men like you to take risks like this every day I'm in office. The least you can do for me is accord me the courtesy of allowing me to take the same risks as my men. Now get all this medical spaghetti off me."

The doctor sprang to life like a man released from an enchantment. He tapped a control on a wall screen. The diagnostic gear retracted from Sean in one movement, like launch gantries falling from a launching moon rocket. He heard the hiss, and felt the cool caress, of water draining from the space around his body.

"I'll prime the pilot immediately", said the Lieutenant. "It will be a great honour for him, sir."

***

The swing-wing came down in the centre of the car park, raising a heat haze in the centre of a blasted circle of snowmelt. Cars had been hastily cleared in a circle round the exact centre of the park, and the tops blasted off streetlights with PETN. By now, the Pearl would surely represent the queen's chamber of an anthill of armed readiness, with rings of soldiery radiating out in all directions. Any failure of the IFF transponder on the aircraft, and it would have been blasted out of the sky whether the pieces fell on a nunnery or a nursery. One of the perks of dictatorship, Sean assured himself, was that, when you were lost, the whole world pitched in to bring you home. The base of Oskjuhlið was a mass of dim glistering fire that Sean knew well; thousands of inhabitants standing outside in the cold with votive candles, praying fearful in the dark for the return of their dead leader. In much the same way, prehistoric tribes had gathered at midwinter to moan for the return of the dead sun.

Well, they'd moan no longer. Ra had returned from lighting the fields of Hell.

The Pearl's lights were still blazing. Reykjavik had most likely been subjected to a brutal house-to-house search in the last twenty-four hours. Doors would have been kicked in. Resisters would have been shot. Almost certainly any Icelander who had been compliant in the Presidential kidnapping, and possibly many hundreds who hadn't, would now be in Presidential custody.

Where the swing-wing crumpled into the tarmac, however, there were only two unobtrusively armed Committee men standing by the restaurant entrance. One of them tapped a communicator at his breat to let some third party know Sean had arrived. Both men were staring at Sean curiously, almost uncomfortably.

Where are the APC's? Where are the mobile field interrogation centres and helotone emitters?

"Up here on your own?" he said the the man who held the door open for him. The man looked as if he'd seen a ghost, which was, at least, encouraging.

"Uh, you issued instructions that Oskjuhlið was to be kept clear, sir", said the Committee man.

"You're Adam Hamed's son, aren't you? Abel?"

The Committee man nodded.

"I consider myself personally responsible for your father's death", said Sean lamely.

The Committee man swelled heartbreakingly with pride.

"Is my son in there? I radioed ahead that he was to be there." I can explain things to him. Even if I'm not there in person to back me up.

Hamed's expression changed. "Uh, yes, sir. He's in there already. He's been there for over twenty-four hours. Uh, with you. Although", he admitted meekly, "you gave instructions that you were to be admitted to see yourself."

Sean pushed through the reception area. Chefs were barking instructions in Scandiwegian to kitchen porters staggering under the weight of what looked like an entire walrus carcass. A small knot of doctors was standing around long-facedly examining sheafs of what looked like biometric data. One of the doctors caught sight of Sean; his own biometrics would have borne interesting examination at that point. When one of the kitchen porters glimpsed Sean, the entire group swayed, stumbled and nearly dropped the meat course. A chorus of fawning gott kvölds followed. Sean waved them away as he he hurried into the main restaurant. Huge numbers of empty bottles, many of them bearing very expensive labels, stood uncleared on chairs, tables and bar tops. Military doctors, possibly bussed in from the base at Keflavik, were tending to vomit-stained casualties on the periphery of the carnage. Further in, Sean passed a nude Asiatic transsexual juggling knives while drinking a yard of ale. A ten-man bum chain of nude homosexual dwarfs rollerskated past, beautifully tesselated. A space had been cleared among the side tables, and an ostrich was cock-fighting in a sand pit with a white Siberian tiger. So far the ostrich appeared to have the upper hand.

At the centre of the maelstrom, conducting it like Mickey Mouse gamely attempting to bring ever-increasing numbers of motile broomsticks under magical control, was exactly who he expected.

"ME!" boomed a voice ravaged by all things a body should not put into itself. "How splendid to see me! Come in, sit down, pull up a woman."

Sean was unhappy, though unsurprised, to see that he had gained weight. He was intrigued to see that both himself and Mickey were seated on devastatingly beautiful, silicone-breasted women who had arranged their own bodies ingeniously into the shapes of human armchairs. Sean's other self was dressed as a Latin American dictator, with rows of medals, gold-braided epaulettes, and waxed Daliesque moustaches. Mickey, meanwhile, was wearing skis, ski gloves, ski goggles, and a heavy woollen scarf. Sean was alarmed at a third figure, dressed in a cravat, top hat, tails, and nothing else whatsoever apart from a circular plastic collar attached to an electrical cable. The third figure was seated on comedy larger-calibre models of more generous proportions.

"Craig?" said Sean.

The third figure jerked its head reflexively towards him, and immediately convulsed as if worked by an invisible wire. Sean saw sparks coming from the collar. The collared man's face was haggard and line-worn; his eyes had sunk deep into his head.

"Caught him in Lhasa, the little toe rag", shouted the General. "Trying to pass himself off as a Bön monk. Kept saying padme om instead of matre muye sale du. Lacked the most basic knowledge of Tibetan monastics."

Mickey's eyes boggled at Sean; he pointed, laughed, and poured more beer down himself. The beer was Japanese. What it had cost to ship it across two oceans, Sean could only guess.

"We have been waiting for you", the General admonished, raising a baton-like finger, "for over twenty-four hours. I have had to keep the boy amused."

"You seem to have brought your own entertainment", said Sean sourly, eyeing a passing chainsaw juggler hopefully, but in vain. The leaping saws turned and gyrated into waiting, perfectly positioned hands with each fresh passing second.

"I thought I'd give him a proper twenty-first", said the General. "Seeing as how you were incapable."

Mickey sat back in his chair and grinned with a mouthful of beer. A mouthful of beer trickled down his face. Sean judged him to be past the stage when a barkeep would have refused to serve him for fear of a homicide suit.

"He'll be perfectly all right", snapped the General. "Though he'll remember little of this." He turned his own absinthe glass around in his fingers thoughtfully. "And possibly neither will I." His own speech was so slurred as to be almost unrecognizable; he reached over and patted the rump of a heavy-breasted African girl. "Sit down, please sit, do."

Gingerly, Sean eased himself into place. The living chair shifted slightly to accommodate him. Unlike even his favourite armchair at home, it was warm. He had doubts regarding the logistics of its use, however, and wondered if he should voice them.

"They piss in place", said the General bluntly. "It trickles down their legs and goes into the carpet. They have special dispensation for Number Twos."

"Are these from Vegas?" said Sean.

The General shook his head. "Alexandria, 100 AD. The slave markets there are just divine, one can pick up the most terrific bargains."

Sean's face had, over the years, developed chickenwattle jowls, port-wine nets of blocked capillaries on either cheek, and snow-white eyebrows that signally failed to match his hair.

"Hi, dad", gurgled Mickey, pointing at Sean with huge irony.

"I told him I would be arranging a lookalike", said the General. "Someone had to pretend to be you while you were out getting yourself clumped on the head like a you-know-what. I had to give special instructions to make sure your plane wasn't sploded out of the sky, mark you. Have you any idea what the effect would be on a hundred thousand 'toned-up soldiers of two Pastor Lambs showing up simultaneously? The troops would have gone round the twist while looping the loop. The triple-A batteries in Reykjavik would have fired on your plane because they knew the real Pastor Lamb was already in the Pearl enjoying dinner, and every ship in the fleet would have fired back because they knew the real Pastor Lamb was in the plane. It'd be Lambert Simnel all over again. But you never think of these things, do you? It's always left to little me." He sipped at his absinthe in an imperatorial huff.

Long-redundant punching muscles tensed in Sean's arms. "You are sixteen years older than me. How can he not be able to tell the difference?"

The General smiled. "One, he turned up half drunk to dinner to begin with, and three hours late. Two, have you looked in the mirror lately? You really haven't been taking care of myself." As he said this, his face turned a livid green. He clicked his fingers twice, and his chair of piss-soaked femininity crabbed clumsily across the floor to an ornate silver wine cooler over which the General leaned and vomited copiously before wiping his mouth with his cuff.

"Ahh, that's better. Did you know, horses don't have a vomit reflex? Stupid animals. It is the ability to upchuck that separates us from beasts." He looked up at Sean. "You're still agonizing like a big gay girl over whether she got out and escaped to China, aren't you? Well, curb your whining. She's fine. She lives to make sure millions of good Church soldiers die." Flecks of vomit vibrated venomously on his lips as he spoke. "If it hadn't been for her, we'd have taken China overnight. A few major cities dead, the Red Army in turmoil, all Second Artillery facilities taken out using matter transmitters to move up ABM units and Special Forces to their exact location as soon as our early warning grid detected a launch. But in the end, they never launched a single missile. They put the goddamned warheads inside lead shielded international freight containers, equipped 'em with inertial navigation systems so's they'd always know where they were, and shipped 'em." He looked up at Craig. Craig's attention was as riveted on him as a mouse's on a swaying cobra. "The first warning we ever got of an attack was when the bombs went off. And they went off while the freighters were still in international waters, directly between London and Rotterdam, Venice and Trieste, Seattle and Vancouver. No customs officials ever got to open a single crate to look at it. Someone arranged all of that. Someone organized it." He picked up his glass and suddenly, without warning, hurled it at Craig's face. Craig jerked away, scuttling crabwise to keep his collar level, but still received a jolt which sent him flying. He rearranged himself quickly into the same bolt upright posture, tears rolling down his cheeks.

"He's been awake for over forty-eight hours now", said the General in satisfaction. "The poor bastard's probably seeing things by now. He probably wishes I'd kill him. Took me ten years to find him, though, so I'm not going to let him fall into the arms of Jesus quite yet." The General clicked his fingers, and a waiter materialized behind him with a fresh glass of absinthe. High class waiters, Sean reflected, seemed to have perfected the technique of instantaneous personal matter transportation many years ago.

"They destroyed Jerusalem", said the General, "but we are building it bigger and better in the ruins of London. Adrian Lamb's body is being entombed in a pyramid whose basal square will stretch from Woolwich to Docklands. We are having to reinforce the bedrock to build it. The river Thames will flow beneath it, carrying pilgrims on a voyage of symbolic death and resurrection through a shrieking underworld of animatronic devils and holographic lemures, beneath a triple-headed Cerberus that will devour every thirteenth passenger." He took a sniff of his absinthe. "The lemures are the Roman demons, by the way, not the rather pathetic evolutionary also-rans from Madagascar."

"That's the guilt talking", said Sean. "Is your own pyramid bigger or smaller?"

The General grinned. His teeth were oxyacetylene bright, showing no trace of the gap where Sean had belted out an incisor ten years earlier. "I never intend to inhabit a pyramid, dear boy. I don't ever intend to die. I have solid research in place on replicating dying brain cells, my surgeons can cure most of the debilitating conditions known to Man, and I can clone myself to produce replacement organs", he slurped up a mouthful of absinthe, "hence this callous disregard for my liver and kidneys."

In the middle distance, the white tiger had finally pounced on the ostrich, sending it crashing down in a flurry of feathers. Not content with just this one kill, it then turned its attention on the partygoers around it. Solicitous wranglers rushed in with automatic weapons. Sean heard a full clip of something being directed at it.

"Where's Sam?" said Sean. "Is Sam alive in 2020?"

The General nodded ponderously. "She was picked up in a Chinese seabed colony in the Bering Strait. She's in custody. But her magic won't work on you any more, Mr. Agnello. She looks old. She suffers from rheumatism, and she's lost a good few teeth. Her hair is pure white."

Sean remained calm. "Is she being well treated?"

A Great Auk waddled past. Tall thin glasses of absinthe had been strapped to its back on a silver platter. The General took up a glass. The Great Auk voided its guts fish-smellingly onto the carpet and barked cacophanously at the surrounding stars.

"Extremely well. She's a Level Thirty-Three. Her entire confinement facility has to be automated. If any 'toned-up human being were her jailer, he'd only have to catch a whiff of her musk to obey her every whim. Even with more Horse in them than Catherine the Great, human wardens only last so long."

"Where are you keeping her?"

"The old Cheyenne Mountain NORAD centre near Colorado Springs. She has a cell deep beneath ground level. Being a Thirty-Three, producing that quantity of turannone, is causing her circulatory and respiratory upsets." He paused to cough violently and wipe his mouth on the hair of a component of his living chair. "Doctors cannot easily visit her. Her health is declining by the day."

"Can I see her? Can I talk to her?"

The General nodded wearily. "If you must. I've prepared for the eventuality, of course." He raised a finger, and overalled technicians scurried in with a gigantic walnut cabinet bearing the legend Farnsworth. The front of the cabinet opened out to reveal an A5-sized screen.

"I take no responsibility", said the General, "for your disappointment."

The screen flicked on.

She was old. At forty-five, she had been a fading beauty. At fifty-six, precious little beauty remained. There was, however, a strength that seemed to make beauty irrelevant.

Behind her, he could see a large cell, entirely bare apart from a single cot. The cot appeared to be formed from a solid block of concrete.

"She's not allowed bedsprings", confided the General with some satisfaction. "She uses them to make digging materials and weapons."

"Hello, Sean", beamed the screen. "You told me you were coming. I feel like a doting grandmother." She patted the back of her head. "I let down my hair like a little girl. Do you like it?"

He could feel a tear stealing down his cheek. "Very much. Am I treating you well?"

"Yes. Quite well. Though I'm not allowed books in case I burn them. Instead, I have this big touch-sensitive screen. You're about six feet tall right now."

"I've been about six feet tall for a long time."

She grinned. Her teeth were yellow and crooked. Some of them were missing. He wondered if they'd been beaten out by prison guards.

She cricked her neck sideways to look over Sean's shoulder. "Is that Craig behind you?"

Sean nodded. "He's feeling rather sorry for himself. As he was watching Chinese intelligence torture me only a few hours ago with every sign of pleasure, I wish I could say I cared."

Her voice became peremptory. "Turn the volume up."

Grudgingly, the General gave a signal. A technician scuttled round the front of the device and turned a bakelite knob. Sam's breathing rasped in the speaker. Now that it could be heard, it was plainly not normal.

"Give me", gasped the speaker, "a line of sight to him."

Sean moved aside. Sam's face glowered out of the TV at Craig, who stared back, tears leaving salt trails down his cheeks.

"You're an asshole, Craig", said Sam. "I only ever went with you because I had to. Causality and all that."

Craig's eyes opened painfully wide; he sat statue-still, though he was forced to jump as a tear hissed on the electrodes of the collar. Only the eyes moved, extruding salt water like holes in the ocean.

"Now get him out of here, and either kill him or set him free", snapped the screen. "I've said all you want me to say. Don't be such a petty little sadist."

The General drummed his fingers on a blonde, and sniffed in huge annoyance. "Every well." He nodded to a waiter. "Take him and put him on an island somewhere. At least a thousand miles between him and land, and sharks; plenty of sharks. Feed them a few convicted adulterers first, let them get the taste. No trees on the island, but regular shipments of food, water, books, and writing paper; all paper leaving the island to be burnt. Shelter, as long as he can't make a boat out of it. And as many razorblades, sleeping pills, and paracetamol tablets as he pleases", he grinned evilly.

"You don't allow me razorblades", said the television reproachfully.

"You don't need to shave as often." The General winked at Sean.

"Thank you, in any case."

"He will be well treated. The man who lays a hand on him will die." He glared sternly at the waiter, who nodded solemnly and departed. Not a waiter, then, but Committee. Is it after the Chinese kidnap me that I get paranoid and surround myself with secret police?

Mickey was slumped back in his chair, a stream of vomit trickling out of the corner of his mouth onto the slender back of a heart-rendingly beautiful blonde who formed the chair's armrest. Where had she started life? Prehistoric Scandinavia? Roman Germany?

"How is Mickey in your time?" said Sean.

The General's expression soured. "Terrible! He is a bad egg just like his mother. After he stole the access codes to our first experimental dimensional translator and tried to kill you back in 2013, he went to ground in history. The Committee had over three hundred professional mediaevalists trying to track him down, searching manuscripts, scouring archaeological sites for instances of anachronistic technology. What we didn't realize was that he'd set the translator to dial a series of dates across a two thousand year period."

"Clever", said Sean.

"Our boy", said the General, swelling with pride. "He's been systematically holding back and reversing the course of technological progress since four hundred BC. It was him who convinced Roger Bacon to conceal the secret of gunpowder, you know. My boy did that. And the Burning of the Books in Qin China; that was one of his. The fire at the Great Library in Alexandria, that was another." The General settled in his chair, caressing the blonde and negro ends of his armrests. "We eventually discovered him in Italy in 1600, where he'd wormed his way into the council of inquisitors involved in the trial of Giordano Bruno." He wiped a tear from his eye. "My boy destroyed the ancient civilization of Atlantis."

"Where is he now?" said Sean.

The General glanced sidelong at Sam's image on the TV screen. He nodded briefly to a technician.

"NO, WAIT -" said the TV image.

"Where else but Colorado Springs?" said the General. "Ten doors along, the same place you used to hold Osama Bin Laden, Bill Gates, and Hilary Rodham Clinton."

Sean nodded. "The after-dinner conversations they used to have."

The General chortled. "You remember when Gates and Clinton held Bin Laden down and Clinton shat on his head?"

"Yeah. They got tired of the continual masturbating. The guy was a tramp in a turban. A disgrace to his faith." Sean looked the General in the eye. "Is Mickey being well treated?"

"Very well." The General held his arms out wide like an indignant Jewish tailor. "As God is my judge."

"But he's been tortured."

"We had to know exactly who his contacts were, what weapons he'd stolen, where he'd hidden them. He'd cached a fifteen megaton device in 1908 Siberia, and another smaller one in the Australian outback in 1993. The Resistance's labs bioengineered bubonic plague to spread faster, and with far greater lethality; they unleashed it in fourteenth-century Eurasia..."

"The Black Death", said Sean.

"Closed down national borders", nodded the General. "Prevented interchange of goods, services, ideas. Set back the pace of technological development a hundred years. Besides killing millions, of course. You and I have killed millions, but only because we know we kill millions and are forced to follow the script. Our boy, on the other hand, had been told repeatedly by Committee chronotechnologists that it was impossible to shape the past or present."

"But he didn't believe it", said Sean. "He assumed it was a lie, like all the Committee's other lies."

The General looked Sean frankly in the eye for several meaningful seconds.

"Our boy", he said finally.

"Treat him well", said Sean.

"What, you mean, apart from the torturing?"

"You tortured him, didn't you? You had to. You're the only man on Earth at a higher Level of Advancement."

"What would you rather happen? That I torture him, or that I order someone else to do it? Would that have been better? At least if I do it I know I'm doing a good job." The General held up a pudgy finger. "A good torturer never kills his subject."

"And does he scream every time you come near him now?"

The General ground his teeth together and put his hands in his lap. "Pretty much. But it has to be done. Church and State have enemies. We'll never be in a position to do good if we don't crush the cancer that kills from within."

"How strong are the Resistance today, exactly?" said Sean.

The General stared into his absinthe glass. "Who knows? How do you gauge the strength of an enemy you can't see?"

"You can see George Edward Wilson."

The General snorted derisively. "Wilson! Wilson's Resistance cell was entirely set up by the Committee. We knew it had to exist, so we created it." He stopped examining the louche in his glass and drained it. "We'll pick him up when he comes back in 2035 and give him the life of hard labour he richly deserves."

Adrenalin flooded into Sean's blood like icewater. "But you created him. You set him up to fail. How can you punish him for that?"

The General gripped the stem of his glass so hard that Sean feared for it. "When you've seen as many good friends die at the hands of Freedom Fighters, you stop believing freedom's quite so valuable." His head lolled onto his chest, like an animatronic sculpture someone had switched off, and began snoring stertorously. Waiters appeared and began to fuss about him. Many of them were holding syringes and diagnostic equipment.

A waiter looked up at Sean, though not quite enough to look him in the eye.

"You'll be quite all right, Pastor. You do this all the time. Accelerated turannone-spectrum synthesis has a side effect of increasing the body's ability to metabolize alcohol."

"Where did you get your M.D.?" said Sean.

The waiter bowed. "Berkeley, Pastor."

"Don't treat him too well. He ain't all that."

The waiter bowed. "Anything you say, Pastor."

Sean rose to his feet. An iridescent window opened in time behind him and disgorged a troupe of erotic dances with grafted-on ape faces. He wondered whether the process was reversible.

The tiger lay in orange furry pieces among shattered glass-and-steel furniture as he walked out. Waiters, technicians, and masked Aztec wrestlers were clearing away bodies. The ostrich was still thrashing feebly. A waiter walked up to it with a Browning and fired a single round accurately into its skull.

Outside, the night was cool and clear. An aurora had drawn across the sky like a fire curtain, or a curtain of fire. The world was between acts.

Over towards Hallgrímskirkja, a portable holographic projector had sent up a spinning Book Church icon onto a column of prismatic aerosols; flames could be seen belching up into the night. A Chinese restaurant, or an Indian one. The Committee's Mutable Truth section was doing a good job of stirring the West into a war-ready state. Asiatic citizens were already quietly being disappeared from streets, rejected for research grants, secretly chipped for tracking by friendly neighbourhood doctors. There were twelve months left to go.

Much to do, much to do. So many people to kill, so little time.

He trudged out into the snow, realizing that he was now a single man again, and wondered whether, after all the Church's good works, there was still such a thing as a loose woman in Reykjavik.

Well, if there isn't, there's always 1970's Amsterdam, the Rome of Tiberius, or a quick devotional at the Temple of Ishtar.