Five to Twelve (17 page)

He brushed away the tears and looked through the scope. His brain was cold and the question mark on the end of his hand was flexible. Victoria was still smiling.

The question mark tightened, and the smile vaporized. The horses reared. A few breastplates clanged deliciously on
the roadway. The cheering seemed to swell into an ovation. And, ten light-years away, on the roof of a building opposite, Leander Smith was chopping vainly with a laser pistol at the swarm of Peace Officers already jetting towards the top of the Cenotaph.

Dion did not move. He did not even want to move. He dropped the laser rifle and just stood there waiting.

He did not have to wait long.

Within thirty seconds he had been beaten into an unconscious pulp.

Within the same thirty seconds, Leander Smith realized that Dion no longer had any intention of jetting up to a rendezvous at ten thousand feet. But by that time he had left his own escape a little too late. Even as he began to rise, an enterprising dom burned off his jet pack with a lucky sweep from four hundred yards. He fell back on to the roof and broke his ankle.

He sat there waiting for them, laughing at the great shaggy assassination joke. Laughing quite hysterically at the inevitable prospect of grade one.

T
HE
room was small, white and bare. There were no windows. Artificial light with a greenish tint emanated from some source behind a circular metal grille in the ceiling. The metal door was magnetically locked. Two hard chairs were fixed magnetically to the floor. Dion Quern, hastily patched up from his impromptu beating, sat on one of them; and Leander Smith, nursing the tension spray bandage on his foot, sat on the other.

Dion was trying to recollect the morning’s events through a fog of pain and confusion. “I suppose I killed her?” he enquired at length.

Leander grimaced, and shifted his foot. “That you did, my son. Quite permanently. It is some small consolation in our present sorrow… Why the Stopes didn’t you jet?”

“I don’t know,” said Dion. Then he added as an afterthought: “Maybe because I knew I’d killed her.” He became angry. “What the hell, you great green gryphon! Why didn’t your lousy Lost Legion supply some more dedicated assassin? And in any crapulous contingency, it was not the task for a tottery twosome such as we.”

“Interesting,” mused Leander. “You have a tendency to alliterate in times of stress.”

“Stuff the alliteration. Now that the excreta closes bubbling over our cracked crania, your little Lost Legion will have to unearth other zombies its miscarriages to perform. That, at least, affords fractional consolation.”

“There is no Lost Legion,” said Leander sombrely. “It surrendered this morning.”

Dion’s mouth opened, but it was some time before the words came out. “What of the revolutionary army? What of the High Command?”

Leander smiled. “Little one, I was the High Command. You were the entire army corps—including cavalry and secret weapon.”

There was a further silence while Dion swallowed and inwardly digested.

“So
you
planted the bomb in my tin heart?”

“There is no bomb in your tin heart.”

“What about the homing device?”

“There is no homing device.”

“Then how the Stopes did you know where I would be? That time in St. James’s Park and then at Wits’ End.”

“Intelligence plus patience plus gullibility equals miracles,” explained Leander. “I knew you were at Buck House, so I simply waited and followed you when you left. It was time-consuming, but the stakes were high. As for your little grey house in the north, all I had to do was lock on to Dom Juno, so to speak—who, I may add, jets like one dispossessed…
Quod erat faciendum
, as one might say. Or perhaps
inveniendum
would be more appropriate.”

“At the Clinic you demonstrated that you could kill me.”

“Sweet child, I borrowed a servo-cardiac interrupter from a careless domdoc. They’re standard equipment for testing electro-mechanical hearts. The absolute range is, I believe, ten yards. And the absolute limit for induced death is forty seconds. After that time, the emergency pump in your tin heart takes over.”

“So it was all a con,” said Dion weakly.

“May I suggest that you conned yourself—with minimal assistance.”

“Why-for crysake?”

“Who knows?” said Leander, beginning to enjoy himself. “Who knows? Maybe you just wanted to be a zero hero.”

“Not me, grave-robber, you,” explained Dion coldly. “Why you? Why this Lost Legion ploy? Why this compulsion to recruit one Dion Quern as a protagonist in your private fantasy? Why paint doms purple, burn the Queen and set it all up for someone to stir the porridge in what passes for your brain?”

Leander laughed. “Questions! Questions! Let us see if there are any satisfactory answers. One: the Lost Legion ploy. As an ex-poet, you will surely accept my plea of romanticism. Two: the recruitment of Dion Quern. Is it not enough, dear playmate, that I liked your face, to say nothing of your spirit? Three: why paint doms purple, etcetera. Gestures, my son. Less than magnificent, perhaps, but still gestures… I regret nothing. And on behalf of you, I regret nothing. We are as we are, and we presumed to be men. The meal was excellent, and now there is the reckoning. It would be churlish to complain.”

Dion did not know whether to laugh or cry. But he met Leander’s gaze, and the impulse to laughter won.

The sound of it reverberated harshly in the small bare room. Listening to it almost objectively even as he was convulsed in the act of producing it, Dion relished what would probably be his last boisterous guffaw at the mazy-dazy cosmos. But it was more than a guffaw and less than laughter. It was a heavily disguised cry from the heart. Eventually he calmed down sufficiently to realize that Leander was speaking again.

“I was quite a patient nihilist,” said Leander. “I moiled, toiled and boiled eleven years at the Trafalgar Square Clinic, waiting for the right kind of Lancelot to dive head first and with a wild shout into this plethora of dragons. Then you came along for time shots with a faceful of misery and a psychofile that showed three grade threes. I said to myself: this is the boyo. Here is a bright bouncy lad with an excess of adrenalin and enough imagination to swallow the totally absurd. How right I was. How wrongly right I was. You had just the combination of high intelligence and excessive stupidity to assume the posture of the Light Brigade when I said charge.”

“There were others?” enquired Dion.

“There were others. In the course of years, there were others. Some I expended on small pranks like livening up baby farms. Some I sent on fanciful missions to foreign parts—you know the sort of thing: sports of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your one-night stands… But you—you had genuine potential. You made the joke worth while. You had a touch of artistry that almost made it credible—even to me.”

“It could have been credible,” said Dion slowly. “It could still be credible. Somewhere there might be a magna-colour, stereophonic three-dee Lost Legion waiting for the final shout.”

“Dion, dear innocent, you were born a fool,” retorted Leander. “Kindly do not try to outdo nature. You have seen surely that there are no gentlemen left in England, and all the rest are now abed. For there are more beds than bodies in this demi-sec paradise. You cannot make a deaf-aid out of a silk kimono. Guts are obsolete. Pranksters play—viz. the late revels at Stonehenge—but no one fights. Fighting needs guts, and guts are as aforementioned. We
can prick the doms’ bottoms, but we can’t fight any more… Hell, Master Ridley, we can’t even light a decent candle, you and I. The cunning bitches have cheated us by throwing out capital punishment and keeping the death sentence. We shall wear our grade ones like clowns’ hats and collect a backside kick from every oat-fed eunuch… But,” he laughed, “the meal was excellent and the non-vintage wine had a briefly amusing presumption. Amen.”

There was a silence.

“I suppose there will be a trial?” said Dion, at length.

“A reasonable supposition,” returned Leander with some complacency. “Regicide is a dying art, but it still commands some small respect.”

Dion laughed. “Guilty but inane.”

Leander laughed also. “And that, sweet prince, is the verdict of us all.”

“You realize, of course, that I only wanted to live in peace, that I had found something worth having, that I’d made a world where the twenty-first century didn’t exist.”

Leander was unmoved. “I saved you from becoming a vegetable.”

“So that I could be transformed into another kind of vegetable.”

“Possibly. But there was also something I had to know. It seemed important.”

“What the Stopes could be that important?”

Briefly the mask fell from Leander’s sardonic face. “I had to know if we were men… And I did not want to be alone.”

Then they heard the sound of approaching footsteps in the corridor outside.

La reine est morte. Vive la reine.

Elizabeth the Third, having combined in her own superbly juvenile fifty-year-old body the joint persons of heir presumptive and heir apparent, succeeded the late martyr queen; and as her first public act attended the legal circus (one of the alltime highs of Intervid shows, with an estimated viewscore of nine hundred million) that was to dispose of those who had made her accession possible.

The trial lasted three hours and forty minutes, including intermission and natural breaks. It had been carefully placed in the peak viewing spot, Standard Federation Time, and therefore ruined several million dinner parties and similar mild social diversions. Both prisoners pleaded Guilty but Sane, and both pleas were rejected.

The nominal jury consisted of seven doms, two sports, one squire and two infras, all good citizens and true, each being granted permanent relief from jury service thereafter and one half of one per cent interest in the vid rights, still-pix, dramatization rights and transcript sales for a period of five years. It had been estimated that gross earnings (an American dom had already bid a clear half em for the musical version) would touch one million lions.

Leander performed with his customary verve, and Dion made two short but moving orations on the rights of man. The actual verdict was unanimous: Guilty but Insane. And the viewdict, recorded by the Intervid computer showed:
Guilty but Insane, three hundred and forty-two million, two hundred and ten thousand, three hundred and seventeen; Guilty but Sane, nine hundred and two thousand and forty-three; Innocent, one hundred and four.

Donning her black silk shift, the judge directed that the prisoners be removed to a place of contemplation for three clear Sundays before being taken thence to suffer the blessed relief and total absolution of grade one analysis, together with the permanent suspension of time shots. Leander, protesting violently at being denied capital punishment, had to be removed from the court forcibly by four smilingly efficient doms who did not hit him until they were out of vid range. Dion blew a kiss to the queen, thumbed his nose at the judge—whose silk-covered breast was heaving rhythmically for the benefit of vid close-ups—and left the court under his own steam.

He did not see Leander again. They were taken to separate cells. Leander, declaring himself to be a devout Muslim, requested a prayer mat. He spent the next two days secretly unravelling it and fashioning a tolerably strong noose. On the third day, he hanged himself, thus registering in the strongest possible terms his complete disapproval of the abolition of capital punishment. He had cunningly timed his demise so that discovery would be too late to give the resuscitation doms a chance of retaliating with resurrection. However, his final gesture was neutralized by a vid release which claimed that he had suffered massive cerebral haemorrhage occasioned by agonies of remorse and repentance.

Neither Sylphide nor Juno had attended or watched the trial—for different reasons. The shock of the assassination and the capture of Dion was sufficient to cause Sylphide, still living at Wits’ End, to miscarry. Since she was only a
few weeks pregnant, this was, in purely physical and medical terms, a very small happening. But for Sylphide, whom Dion had taught to love and to be proud that she would one day bear a child that she could call her own, it was the end of the world. On top of Dion’s capture and imminent grade one, it became too much for her already overloaded neural circuits. She grabbed the nearest sharp instrument that came to hand (a pair of antique scissors that Dion had acquired to go with the antique world he was creating in his antique house) and struck out. Or, rather, struck in.

There had been a memorable phrase in an old book from which Dion used to read to her:
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee.

Her womb had offended. It had betrayed her, Dion and the future. So, in a frenzy of grief, she took the scissors and stabbed with hate and anger at the smooth white belly that had rejected her son. She stabbed until pain and anguish and the fog in her mind turned the world coolly and sweetly dark.

She would probably have bled to death—though, surprisingly, none of the wounds were fatal—if Juno had not arrived that same evening, having jetted up to Wits’ End to comfort her after the verdict had been reached. Juno found her lying in the bathroom, with the scissors still clutched tightly in her thin white hand. Fifteen minutes later, Sylphide was in the South Manchester Clinic with the domdocs arguing as to how much resection of the intestines there would be and whether a synthetic stomach was required. In the end, they managed to patch her up. Sylphide, without any knowledge of anatomy, had aimed well. A hysterectomy had to be performed.
If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out…

And now she lay in bed at the Clinic, recovering in body if not in mind.

And Leander lay in a plastic coffin, oblivious of the final joke. For his passage into the cleansing fire of the Greater London Crematorium (Alien Religions Division) was attended by thirty-one Muslims, two muezzins and a self-styled latter-day prophet.