Distortion Offensive (8 page)

Both Kane and Brigid were taken aback by the statement that had come from the elderly scientist's lips,
but it was Kane who spoke first. “What did you say, Lakesh?”

“I'll join her,” Lakesh affirmed. “I grew up during a period of immense change. I was in my twenties during the 1960s, when experimentation with mind-altering substances became briefly very fashionable among the intelligentsia.”

Kane and Brigid both accepted Lakesh's words at face value—born two hundred years later, they had no frame of reference for what he was telling them.

“The phrase, if I recall it correctly,” Reba DeFore suggested wistfully, “urged that one should turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Kane's lips moved as he repeated the phrase silently. “Drop out of what?” he finally asked.

Lakesh laughed, never more conscious than at that moment of how different his life had become in the two-hundred-plus years since their birth.

“The point is, dear friends,” Lakesh continued, “it is time for me to free my mind, as the hippies used to exhort.”

Bemused, Kane and Brigid looked at each other for a moment, then they shrugged. Whatever it all meant, the old cyberneticist seemed keen to follow this ancient advice, and clinician Reba appeared to be in agreement.

 

S
O, PERHAPS
I
AM GETTING OLD
,
Lakesh told himself as he accompanied Brigid to the kitchen area of the vast redoubt complex along with their companions.

Here was something an old man could do—a field mission of the mind.

And perhaps that made Lakesh reckless, more so than he had been in times gone by. Would his precious
Domi have allowed him to do this were she here? Would he have let her? Perhaps it was desperation, a need to prove himself still capable, still active and useful, and not some withered old desk jockey who gave orders like one of those terrible generals from history who had sent young men to their deaths but never dared set foot on the battlefield themselves.

All of this, perhaps, was true. But then, an awareness of one's own mortality could do strange things to a man. And so it was that the normally levelheaded, sensible Mohandas Lakesh Singh led the way into an exploration of an unknown, mind-altering substance that had scared Balam, one of the most knowledgeable beings on the planet.

Danger be damned, Lakesh told himself. He would take the risks that he could, and let others judge him as they would.

But despite his rare intelligence, the one thing that Lakesh had overlooked was that, sometimes, when a man felt he had something to prove, he could become foolhardy in the pursuit of his goal.

There were just two prison cells in all of Hope and each cell had a sign up by its great wooden door. One sign showed a man in silhouette while the other showed a woman, because that was the only reason anyone in Hope had ever thought that you might need two separate cells, simply to keep the men separate from the women.

Hope had been a fishing ville, a small community where everyone knew everyone else, and so there had been little need for cells and Magistrates and all the things that came with the towering, walled villes like Snakefish, Cobalt and Beausoleil. Although rarely used, the cells had housed a few people over their time, mostly drunks and occasional wife beaters and one time a guy who had been caught stealing fish out of old man Walsh's nets. Indeed, the local drunk, Ivan, knew where they kept the key, and it wasn't unheard-of that he would lock himself up just so he had somewhere to sleep till his wife came to find him. Hope had been that sort of a place.

When the refugees had flooded in, the cells had seen more use in one week than they had in the whole of the preceding year. The locals had held a committee meeting where they had spoken about getting more cells, maybe starting a local Magistrate division, policing the ville to keep these new strangers in line. And while the
who's and the where's and the why for's had been discussed, the refugee population had grown and grown, and before anyone knew it crime was the second-biggest industry in Hope after fishing. Which was to say, the locals had somewhat underestimated their need for cells.

While arrests had been made on an ad hoc basis, it was true to say that the cells had seen more people drift through them in the past three months than the whole of the prior decade. The band of stick-up artists who had tried to jack the remaining rations from the church hall had been slung in the cells by the local fire chief, with the help of three of his brothers, and left there to cool off. Those who needed medical attention had been seen to by Mallory Price, including the young man who had received a face full of boiling hot soup, while they awaited their final punishment.

And so, junior stick-up man Richie now found himself sitting against the wall of the cell he shared with his crew and some dozing old bastard who stank of liquor and shouted in his sleep, tightening the screw that held his broken spectacles together. He hadn't worn them on the stick-up job, hating the way they made him look, like some genius whitecoat or something. Instead the glasses had been in his pocket during the whole operation, and when that angry bull of a man had upended the table as he leaped onto it, he had fallen hard and the glasses had been beneath him when he landed. Now, the left arm was bent out of shape and the hinge wouldn't sit right so that, when he placed the specs on the bridge of his nose, they rested at a comical angle that did nothing for his temperament.

As Richie worked, a shadow cut across his sight and he glared up to see what—or who—was blocking the
light. The who in question was Hunch, another member of his little crew who had helped out at the failed robbery. Inevitably, Hunch's head was bent at an angle as he watched Richie work.

“Hunch,” Richie growled, “you want to maybe get the fuck out of my light, already?”

“Sorry, Rich,” Hunch murmured, taking a few steps to the right until he was over with the other members of the gang, his head still held at that odd angle that he seemed to favor. The others were passing around a joint as they stood or sat around the lone old table, its paint scabbed over like a wound.

Seth, Richie's older brother and the brains of their street gang, peered up at Richie's outburst. “And what's got you so pissy, little bro?”

“What do you think? That bastard fucked up my glasses, Seth,” Richie explained. As if his brother couldn't see what he was doing!

“You should wear those when we're out,” Seth said helpfully.

With a snarl, Richie put the glasses on his nose. They perched there for a moment before sliding down on the left side until they hung at a ludicrous angle. “Should I, Seth? Should I really? Fuck.”

Seth got up from the paint-peeled table and padded slowly across to where Richie sat in the cell, his face held in that serious I-know-better way he adopted whenever he was about to lecture his kid brother. “Why don't you just calm down,” Seth said when he reached Richie, keeping his voice low.

“Calm down?” Richie spit, thrusting his broken glasses up to Seth's face. “They're fucking ruined, man. I look like a fucking retard.”

Seth crouched on his haunches, bringing his face
roughly to the same level as his little brother's. “We'll get you new glasses once we're out of here, Richie,” he said calmly. “Now, just bring it down a notch, okay?”

Richie shook his head, bearing his teeth angrily. “I'm going to beat the crap out of—”

“No, you're not,” Seth cut in. “We're all going to play nice and get ourselves out of this cell and back on the streets. These people here, they're weak, man—they're idiots. They'll talk rehabilitation and all that shit and then we'll be home free, and no one will care about you or your glasses and that's exactly what we want.” He looked at Richie, locking eyes with his brother. “Isn't it?”

Reluctantly, Richie nodded, his head moving so slowly that it looked like a colossal burden on his neck.

From a darkened corner of the cell, the old sot began coughing, an ugly hacking thing that ended in the spitting of a glistening hunk of phlegm.

“Dirty bastard,” one of Richie's crew snarled before turning back to his colleagues for another drag on the joint.

The old man ignored the comment and wiped spittle out of his beard before pushing himself up from where he lay on the wooden bench. Slowly, still wiping at his tangled beard, he shuffled across the gloomy cell, his feet barely rising from the floor.

As Richie went back to working at the hinge on his glasses, he became aware that the old man was standing nearby, watching him with glistening blue eyes beneath beetling brows. “Can I help you, old man?” Richie challenged. It was definitely a challenge, not a question.

“You boys know what a utopia is?” the old man said, his voice little more than a mutter.

“A you-what-i-pa?” Richie snapped, irritation clear in his voice. Richie had never been known for his patience.

“A utopia is like heaven,” the old man explained, clearly needing no encouragement. His breath and clothes stank of alcohol even now, Richie noticed, even from this distance. “Like the best of everything a man could possibly want. Sounds good, don't it?”

Richie just glared at the old man, wondering whether he'd be able to get away with knifing the bastard here in the cell. He figured probably not.

“This place,” the old man continued in his murmuring, muttering way, “was kind of like that once, a utopia. The ville, I mean. They called it Hope because it was something special that came out of the awful times that had come before. Didn't need Magistrates—the people took care of themselves.”

“Sounds like shit on toast, Granddad,” Seth said from where he sat with the others of the gang. He had been watching the oldster warily, distrustful as he was of strangers.

“But that weren't really utopia at all,” the old man explained, turning to Seth and his other cell mates, warming to his rambling story. “See, utopia is finding that paradise, that reward that gives you everything right here on Earth. I'm a traveler like you—came south from old Canada. I came here to find it.”

Already irritable, Richie had had enough. He stood up, his wiry frame looming over the bent form of the elderly man, clutching his broken glasses in one hand. “What the hell are you jabbering about, you old fool?”

To Richie's surprise, the old man didn't seem intimidated by him. “If you accept it, utopia will come,” the
old man stated. “I'm going to tell you guys a word—a name, in fact—and I want you to repeat it. That is, if you want to take the first step in tasting heaven here on Earth.”

“You're crazy,” Richie growled, stepping closer to the old man, his empty fist raised threateningly. The other members of his crew had stood up now and were surrounding the old man like jackals around a lame antelope.

“That name is Ullikummis,” the old man said, “and he shall be our savior.”

Richie had had enough. He had been cooped up in this crap hole of a cell for eighteen hours, and he damn well wanted something to hit. And so he swung the first punch, his right fist powering through the air at the old man's nose, forcing Richie to miss him entirely.

What happened next, Richie would swear, was impossible. This old drunk, this shuffling pile of rags that stank of gin and piss, somehow stepped through the arc of Richie's punch.

Driven by his own momentum, Richie staggered forward, his feet scrabbling across the cell floor as he struggled to regain purchase there. He turned then, scowling as he tried to comprehend what it was that he had just witnessed. It had been a blur, a thing not fully seen. Noiseless and impossibly quick, the old man had taken a half step to his left, a fraction of movement but enough that he was entirely free from the path of Richie's thrown punch.

“What the hell?” Richie growled, turning once more to face the old drunk, shoving his glasses into the pocket of his grimy jacket. “What the hell kinda trick is that supposed to be?”

All around him, the other members of his gang
moved closer to the old man to ensure he couldn't get away from their colleague. They need not have bothered. The man just stood there, a beatific smile showing beneath his gray whiskers.

Richie's second punch was low, aiming for the old man's gut, and he followed through with an immediate left cross. Once again, the old man effortlessly avoided the blows, stepping through them with such speed that he was like a ghost or something made of smoke.

“What's the game?” Richie snarled, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a small switchblade he had secreted there. The local authorities had taken his blaster from him before tossing him in the cell, but Richie always had something hidden on him. The knife's blade was barely three inches, but it would be enough to teach this grinning buffoon a lesson in respect.

“No game,” the old man replied calmly, and Richie smelled the reek of alcohol on his breath once more, alcohol and something else—disease.

“Hold him!” Richie ordered and his crew obeyed.

Hunch hooked an arm around the old man from behind, and the man just carried on smiling, as if he didn't have a care in the world. Two others snatched at the drunk's arms, holding them out from his rag-clad body, while another gang member stepped across to the cell bars, checking that no one was coming.

Seth stepped forward then, warning Richie that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. “He's just an old drunk, Richie,” Seth elaborated. “They find out you stabbed him and—”

“They won't know,” Richie insisted, anger reddening his face. And without another moment's hesitation, he leaped forward and drove the blade at the old man's gut.

In the ineffectual light of the cell, the blade seemed to disappear into the old man. But when he pulled it back there was no blood. The man was wearing several layers of clothing, Richie realized; the abbreviated blade couldn't have cut through.

With a curse, Richie slashed the blade at the man's smiling face, driving it into his cheek—fit to carve his initials there if he had to—as the old man stood and took it.

The thing that stuck with Richie and the gang members who witnessed it was the sound that the blade made as it snapped. It rang like the sound of a small bell, tinkling in the silence as the blade broke away from the hilt and clattered to the hard floor.

Sometimes we don't really see the things we do in anger and other times we see them all too clearly, the adrenaline giving us the ability to recall an event in far more vivid detail than we normally might. Richie's anger embedded every nanosecond of that moment on the lobes of his brain.

The point of the blade hit the old man in the left cheek, in line with where his top gum would be, two back from his upper canine tooth at the second premolar. It was fleshy there, and the blade should have pierced the man's face with ease. Long gray-white whiskers of the old man's shaggy beard clawed up to hide that part of his face, and Richie's blade cut cleanly through two of them as it swished toward the wrinkled skin of his cheek. And then, impossibly, the blade had snapped in two, the point splintering away as a separate part to the main blade, which itself broke from the knife's little plastic handle.

Richie's fist carried on through the arc, still clutching the useless handle of the knife as its shattered blade
dropped toward the ground in two twinkling parts, and his fist connected with the old man's face with a glancing blow.

The moment passed, and sound and vision resumed normalcy as Richie leaped back, howling in agony as he clutched at his fist. Where he had hit the man's face it ached with such a raw fury that Richie wanted to hit a wall in some illogical, primordial urge to make it stop.

Seth saw his brother fall to the floor clutching at his broken hand and weeping, and he turned on the old man. “What the hell did you just do to my brother, you old fuck?” he yelled, bringing his face just inches from the drunk's.

The old man didn't raise his own voice when he responded, nor did he show any outward signs of fear. “All you need do is say the word,” the old man explained.

On the floor, Richie looked up with pleading eyes at his brother. Seth could see that his knuckles had been skinned, and there was a trickle of blood running between the joints of his small and ring fingers. “It was like hitting stone, Seth,” he muttered. “Like hitting a fucking wall.”

Seth turned back to the old man where he stood held in place by the other members of the gang.

“What's this word you're babbling about?” Seth demanded, his fists bunched as he wrestled with his urge to try striking the man himself.