Mercury Rises (9 page)

"Crying on command?" asked Eddie.

"Would you like to see?" asked Cody.

"Oh, uh, that's OK," said Eddie, who was secretly wishing he had asked about something higher on the list.

"Fine," said Cody. "I don't...really like doing it anyway. It tends to stir up some things that I don't...It's hard to talk about." She removed her sunglasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. They were moist and red.

"Hey, that's impressive," said Eddie.

"Thanks," said Cody, suddenly sanguine again. "That's gotten me cast as the grieving wife at least a dozen times. It's also handy in infidelity cases, you know, when I have to break the news about some cheating bastard. People love it when you pretend to care." She took a swallow of her drink and said, "So you're one of
them
. A demon."

This last caught Eddie off guard, but there didn't seem to be much point in pretending after his miraculous recovery from five gunshot wounds to the chest, not to mention the chocolate bullet thing. "Yes," said Eddie. "I'm one of them. But I'm not a servant of Ti...Katie Midford, if that's what you're thinking."

"Yeah," replied Cody. "I kinda figured that from the fact that you broke into her house. So what's your deal?"

Eddie told her about Wanda Kwan and his need to find the real Charlie Nyx ghostwriter. Cody laughed. "A screenwriter, eh? That's aiming a bit low, isn't it?"

"What about you?" said Eddie, a bit defensively. "What are you doing here?"

"I work for Katie. Or I did, anyway. Lately I've been trying to figure out what happened to her. She owes me twenty grand."

"Twenty grand? For what?"

"Heh, that's the funny part," said Cody. "You and I have something in common. She hired me to find out who the real writer of the Charlie Nyx books is."

TEN

Christine had been in the remote Kenyan village of Baji for three hours before becoming violently ill. She lay moaning in a cot in the back room of the rundown concrete building that served as the local headquarters of Eternal Harvest. On the wall across the room was the same poster she had seen in the former electronics store in Yorba Linda. It continued to assure her, despite much evidence to the contrary, that "YOU CAN HELP." It then went on, less certainly, "EH?"

So far she was proving to be a severe drain on the personnel and resources of the already strapped Eternal Harvest organization. Leaning over the edge of the cot, she vomited into a bucket, which was then spirited away and presumably emptied in some unhygienic fashion before being returned to her. She was under constant watch by two local women who doubtlessly had better things to do. Far from helping to make this godforsaken place more livable, she had actually managed, in the few hours she had been here, to detract significantly from the local quality of life. She could only hope that whatever malignant entity had seized her insides would kill her quickly, putting her out of her misery and letting the locals get on with their already miserable lives.

The EH facility was currently staffed by a total of six people, three men and three women, most of whom seemed to be volunteers. One woman had some medical training; the others filled a variety of roles from construction foreperson to nutritionist. Any overt proselytizing that occurred was secondary to the hands-on work EH was doing in the community. At least that was the impression Christine got from the materials she had read on the plane to Nairobi and the three hours she had spent touring the town before being overcome by nausea.

The next day she felt somewhat better, and was volunteered to assist Maya Keenan, the director of the group, in an errand: they were to drive to an agricultural test facility to pick up a shipment of surplus seed that Maya intended to use to help the locals produce more of their own food.

Barely recovered from her illness, Christine was experiencing a new round of vertigo precipitated by a jarring ride in an ancient Land Rover down a remote track in Kenya.

"Can we pull over?" she moaned. "I'm going to be sick."

"Again?" asked Maya Keenan, who was driving. "How can you possibly have anything left to throw up?"

Maya, a tall, wiry ex-Manhattanite, was a no-nonsense dogooder who applied to charity work the sort of drive that most people reserved for some combination of career, family, and dental hygiene. In short, she didn't appreciate impediments to efficiency such as unscheduled vomiting.

"I think my pancreas is coming up," moaned Christine.

"Stick your head out the window. We need to be back before nightfall. Can't stop now."

In fact they were barely moving as it was. What they were driving on wasn't so much a road as it was a vague idea of a road; a roughly linear stretch of ground littered with barely navigable rocks. Their destination was a mere twenty miles away as the crow flew, but they had been on the road for nearly an hour and they were only halfway there.

Christine couldn't recall a time when she had been more miserable. She was nauseous, tired, uncomfortable, and dirty, and part of her couldn't help wishing that the world had ended six weeks earlier. Maybe she and Mercury shouldn't have interfered with the plans of Heaven. Maybe the world was
meant
to end. Sure, the archangel Michelle had assured her that the Apocalypse was indefinitely on hold, but maybe there were powers at work that trumped even the best intentions of the most influential angels. Maybe Michelle was as powerless to stop the Apocalypse as she was.

But if the Apocalypse was still proceeding, wasn't there a whole lot of other bad stuff that was supposed to go down before the final act? Rivers turning to blood and a third of the moon falling out of the sky, stuff like that.

It occurred to her that she was thinking like Harry Giddings, a realization that actually made her feel worse. No matter how bad things were, she wasn't about to adopt Harry as a role model.

Was there even such a thing as destiny? There must be, she mused. If not, then aren't we all just bouncing around aimlessly like ping-pong balls? But if everything is predetermined, then what's the point of doing anything at all? Maybe Mercury was right: we're all just splashing around in the inexorable stream of fate. Of course, Mercury had ended up splashing a little too hard, and had nearly been pulled under by the weight of the Heavenly bureaucracy. Now he was God-knows-where, presumably still on the run from the powers-that-be.

Christine sighed. These sorts of thoughts weren't helpful. She needed to focus on the here and now, not on abstract philosophical notions. And certainly not on the late Harry Giddings or the vanished angel Mercury. She needed to focus on whatever good she could do here in Africa, for whatever time she had left.

At last they reached the remote agricultural testing facility, which consisted of a small aluminum building attached to a greenhouse about half the size of a football field. The entire facility was ringed by a twenty-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Inconspicuous signs identified the structure as "TRI-FED TESTING FACILITY 26." Maya pulled the Land Rover up to the gate and honked.

"What do they do here?" Christine asked.

"They test bioengineered crops," Maya said. "It has to be remote to prevent contamination with the local varieties."

"Remote?" Christine said. "We passed
remote
about ten miles back. This is...like...godforsaken."

A pudgy, red-faced man with an enormous head emerged from the building and unlocked the gate, swinging it open to let them enter. Thin wisps of pale yellow hair arced out from his gigantic cranium in a futile effort to block some minute fraction of the radiation pummeling his scalp. Christine tried to make out the name on the man's embroidered nametag, but the second half of the name was obscured by a sizeable scorch mark. What she could decipher looked like
Crisp
---an unlikely, albeit appropriate name.

"Drive around back," the man said. "I've got a pallet ready for you." He lumbered toward the rear of the building, his arms and legs splayed widely in an apparent attempt to prevent any one part of his body from contacting any other part. As they followed slowly in the Land Rover, Christine found herself transfixed by the sweat marks on the man's shirt. There was one big puddle on his upper back, another slightly smaller one on his lower back, and one under each armpit. The dark spots seemed to be growing before her eyes, and she found herself rooting for them to join together as one the one big, happy, sweat stain she knew they were destined to be.

The man, whose name was Crispin Guthbertson, was unaware of the sacred sweat communion about to occur on his back, but he was used to being the source of entertainment for those around him. It had been that way ever since he had arrived at Testing Facility 26. To say that Crispin was ill suited to live in the wilderness of Kenya was like saying that mayonnaise is an inadequate remedy for smallpox. Crispin was so physiologically and temperamentally unsuited to living in an equatorial climate that his own subconscious mind, in an attempt to knock some sense into him, caused him several times a day to nearly trip over an invisible line on the ground which some primordial part of his brain recognized as the dividing line between the two hemispheres of the globe.

Crispin had been designed, through six thousand years of careful inbreeding, to be perfectly adapted to live in the frigid low latitudes of Scandinavia. His body wasted no effort developing melatonin and other pigments to protect his pale, porcine flesh from a distant and ineffectual sun, preferring instead to manufacture copious rolls of fat that it systematically placed around the organs that it considered to be Crispin's most valuable components: his intestines, first of all, followed closely in priority by his stomach, liver, and kidneys. His heart and lungs were given a perfunctory wrapping of blubber, while his brain, in a forgivable oversight, was left out of the calculations completely.

What Crispin's head lacked in fatty deposits, however, it made up for with calcium. Crispin's ancestors lived on an island that had been cut off from the Scandinavian mainland, and the combination of an oversupply of seafood and an undersupply of leisure activities resulted in the primordial Guthbertsons spending a surprising proportion of their time attempting to bash one another over the head with sticks, rocks, and whatever other weapons they could devise with whatever undamaged brain matter that was left in their heads. As a result, an inordinately thick skull had become a significant survival advantage among his people: those with the thickest skulls tended to survive the bashings, allowing them to produce more offspring than their thinner-skulled rivals. These thick-skulled children were, not coincidentally, more than happy to carry on the skull-bashing traditions of their forebears, and thus both massive skulls and massive skull-bashing were passed down for dozens of generations, until it was every mother's dream that her son would grow up to have a skull so massive that he was unanimously elected to be the tribe's chief. The last chief of the tribe, in fact, had a skull that was so heavy that toward the end of his reign he required the assistance of several advisors simply to nod his own head---a fact which raised questions about undue influence of his cabinet and might ultimately have led to the end of his dynasty if his entire government hadn't been wiped out by a neighboring tribe that had developed an unquestioned military advantage by pioneering the use of rowboats and sharpened sticks.

Crispin's ancestors were absorbed into the neighboring tribe, who were equally large and pale, but possessed, on average, slightly smaller skulls and slightly larger brains. The massive-skulled people nearly died out completely, but occasionally, even thousands of years after the whole skull-bashing business started, a combination of recessive genes would result in the birth of a man like Crispin Guthbertson, whose albino features and frequent neck aches would have made him feel right at home with his prehistoric forebears.

These days, however, skull bashing was generally frowned upon and paid poorly, leaving Crispin with few career options in the field to which he was most suited. He majored in chemistry and then attended pharmaceutical college, but due to genetic programming that limited his capability to resolve conflicts without resorting to skull smashing, he was not particularly suited for customer service and ended up working as a lab technician for a small Danish biotech company. This company was then bought by a larger company, based in Germany, which then merged with two other companies to become Tri-Fed, one of the world's leading biotech firms. Tri-Fed closed its Northern European locations and relocated Crispin to a remote agricultural research facility in Kenya, thereby flouting 250 generations of breeding designed to make Crispin Guthbertson the ideal survival candidate for a near-sunless arctic village.

Crispin's official title was "site administrator," but he was essentially a glorified supply clerk for the facility. The Kenya facility, officially known as Tri-Fed Testing Facility 26, was sort of the redheaded stepchild of the Tri-Fed family; only half a dozen scientists worked at the facility at any given time, and most of them had been reassigned there because of some sort of personnel issue, generally a sexual harassment lawsuit. Most Tri-Fed locations were several hundred times the size of the Kenya facility, but an edict from senior management required that all research facilities use the same staffing guidelines, and according to those guidelines the number of "productive personnel" in Testing Facility 26 justified 0.125 security guards, 0.108 cooks, 0.281 clerical workers, and 0.333 other support personnel, totaling 0.847 non-scientific employees. Crispin Guthbertson was assigned to fill all of these positions and given a fifteen percent pay cut on top of it, to make things fair.

Mercifully Crispin was generally ignored by the group of sexual deviants making up the research staff. He spent most of his days reading mystery novels and doing paperwork in an aluminum trailer, which, thanks to the modern marvel of air-conditioning, often got as cool as ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit. One day he made the mistake of eating his lunch outside; he had fallen asleep in the shade but woke up drenched in sweat, the sun beating down on his blistered skin. Crispin was an amazingly sound sleeper; even the sunburn might not have woken up if it weren't for the fact that his glasses (which were nearly as thick as his skull) had slipped down his nose and focused the sunlight perfectly on his embroidered name tag, burning completely through his shirt, obliterating the
in
at the end of his name, and lighting his left nipple on fire. The burns had taken weeks to heal, and the incident had earned him the predictable nickname "Crispy" among the staff.