CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The deck of the ship rose and fell against the glittering blue and jasper waves. Helen and Linda sat on reclining wooden chairs across from Evalyn and me. Captain Beldam’s face was shaded by the visor of his hat. He was smiling. We were coming into view of Champa and he was explaining, again, the situation.

          “I cannot put you ashore on the south coast. You understand you will have to climb into the mountains? There’s a guide who will meet you. There are steps, carved into the cliffs. She can take you up into the mountains. After that, you’ll be met by a local commander.”

          “But you’re going to marry us first, right?” I asked.

          “I brought the book. Come on. You can see my country.” He turned to the rail.

          “Oh my god, look at that,” Evalyn said.

          As the island, at first a smudge and then a lump, was growing into an enormous black volcano in the middle of the ocean.

          “I thought we were gonna fight in some place nice,” Helen said. “That don’t look nice.”

          “The other side is quite beautiful. Like every picture you have seen.  Unfortunately, Inanian forces helped a sadistic little shit to take over the Cham military. That’s where they are. We got the rocky side. Your gonna have to fight your way in.”

          Evalyn hoisted a glass of champagne. “As long as there are no decapitations.”   Linda laughed weakly and coughed. She looked thin and tired, but the sun had given her color and her smile was back.

          “O.K.,” Captain Beldam bellowed out. “Stand up here by the rail.”

          Dolphins swam alongside the boat. Flying fish zipped across the waves. There was a wind, but the sun was high and bright. I took Evalyn’s hand and Linda took Helen’s.

          “Do you, Helen, take Linda to be your wife?”

          “I do,” she said.

          “And do you, Linda, take Helen to be your wife?”

          “I do.”

          “Do you, Jack, take Evalyn to be your wife?”

          “I do.

          “And do you, Evalyn, take Jack to be your husband?”

          “I do.”

          “Then by the rights and prerogatives traditional to captains of sea worthy vessels, I pronounce you all married.”

          Then Linda and Helen kissed and Evalyn and I kissed. He poured champagne all around. Linda held up her glass. “To Champa.”

          We clinked glasses and watched the waves crash into the stone cliffs of the coastline. You could smell gun smoke on the breeze.

The End (9/15/2009)

          “How’s Linda?” I asked.

          “Alive,” she said, looking around at the glass walls. When her eyes landed on a head she stuck her tongue out and barked, “What is this place? Is that a fucking head? Is it real?”

          “Yeah, it’s a head.”

She shook hers. “Linda don’t walk good yet, but she’s o.k. When we getta a plan, I’m takin’ her with me. We been staking out David Watts for weeks. It took a coupla hours to convince him to cooperate, then finally I just told him I’d train his troops if he led them into battle. We drilled the motherfuckers on the lawn, and he planned and executed the raid.” She looked at David Watts on the floor, all contorted, his teeth clenched and eyes squeezed shut and head mostly severed. “With us for back up.” She poked one of the corpses and it squeaked back and forth on its hanger. “The brave men of General fucking Watts.”

Smoke filled the crystal lobes. The technicians were in a panic. On the lower levels they were cutting each other’s heads off and falling in bloody heaps. Their screams bit the air like the blade itself and bounced around the tunnels. Their blood pulsed into the water system. It covered the walls and floors and ceilings and the light was shadowed by red. And where the glass had broken, bloody water pumped out and flooded the shards. Without St. Claude they didn’t know what to do. A few went out the tunnel.

We didn’t have a lot of time. Stronghole was slumped over, sucking on his fingers. Evalyn stood off by an intact wall, hands spread on either side of her crimson face, crying.

Helen said, “Is there another way out besides the front door?”

“Yeah, all the way down and out. There’s a tunnel that lets out on a beach. Then it’s a hike to the harbor where there’s a ship.”

“I vote we do that now.”

The shrieks came only as echoes from the deepest level. Heads had become dislodged and one was wedged in between the floor of our level and the ceiling of the one below.

“Look, I gotta get St. Claude’s records. Otherwise we’re shit the dog won’t eat. I can parlay them for something.”

Helen stared at Evalyn a while and said, “She know the way out?”

“Evalyn, can you take them?” She nodded but didn’t look at me; her eyes were fixed on St. Claude’s body which had landed on a broken piece of glass and was soaked with blood and water. I said to Stronghole, “Come on comrade, get up. We’re going home.”

He lifted his head off his lap and stood. “I’m fine. I’m staying with you.”

“Just wait for me outside, I won’t be long.”

The three left and I started to search the Level 1. There was no one else on this level, just the lab and St. Claude’s quarters. I could hear their footsteps and their mumbled conversation as they descended the spiral stair to Level 4. That and the heartbeat and gargle of water coursing chaotically through the broken system of crystal cells. The lab was silent and the walls glowed a purplish blue. There was the store room with the cabinets of botrytis and chemicals and machines. I didn’t know what I was after, really. I pulled out drawers full of instruments, searching for some kind of records. But there was no paper, no books or binders, only drawers full of greasy black and grey bubbles. I assumed they were some sort of BioInfoBot. Other drawers were full of sponges and foam. There was no way I could carry this stuff. As I became absorbed in my search my senses withdrew and I became tense. It was a silence that wasn’t real, a silence of the self. I needed to hear the world around me. There were no more cries, no more gurgles. Air bubbles coursed up through the walls. Another head drifted by and became stuck. It was Clara Turback’s. She looked different, insensate. She was dead now, certainly. They all were. Whatever kept them alive was gone. They were just waterlogged sentinels with white empty eyes bobbing in blood and water.

Still, if I was going to sell anything to Laraby I’d have to figure out what he was after. I left the lab and headed for St. Claude’s quarters. His room was concealed behind a screen of light. I passed through it. It was dark, except for a single light above the bed which was embedded in the glass and looked like a burning ball, a little sun winking on and off. There was absolutely nothing in there. I headed deeper into the lobe, to the bathing area, which was awash in blood, and the kitchen, his own private area with a glass table and mica chairs. Uneaten on the table were a bowl of sprouts and a mushroom cake, and a half-glass of wheat grass. The only thing to do was head back to the lab and scoop up samples of the dome material, maybe find a living hydra and some of those black and grey bubbles.

It was hard to see now. The air was still and not as sweet, an off odor was diffusing upward from the stair, a stale, human odor. And then something else, something wrong, a sound, I wasn’t sure what. My eyes were stinging. I became convinced I wasn’t alone. It was a feeling of the place, always, of being observed. But as I turned the rounded glass corridor that led back into the lab I saw a shadow move, a figure distorted through the many layers of water and crystal. I took out my gun and walked very quietly forward, straining to see through walls and floors.

I entered the lab and there he was, his back to me. Laraby. He didn’t hear me at all. I walked up to him and leveled the gun at his back. I didn’t say a word. He was jamming his pockets full of the greasy little balls, greedily. He was looking around, his face both determined and nervous,  breathing fast, his skin purple and haggard. He was sweating, working fast, furtively. His gun lay on the table, within reach. I waited, listening for others, until he noticed me. He paused and without turning around, said, “Is that you Jack?”

“I thought I’d give you a hand,” I said.

“It’s a little late for that.” He reached for the gun, his hand like a claw.

“Don’t touch the gun.”

“What’s in it for me not to?”

“What’s all this stuff worth?”

He turned around and faced me, seething. “Worth? Not a goddamn thing while you’re alive. I should have known you for a traitor. You betrayed your country once, and that’s what you are Jack Bartell, a traitor. And you will burn for it. My guys, when they find you…”

“What guys?”

“Hubble Watts is still kicking. Juice and Stitch strapped Wanda to a chair and fried her brains out but they got caught with the bogus cash in Grassmere. Watts had them hanged in the public park.”

“You and Watt’s are done for,” I said. “There’s nothing between you and a bullet.”

“You can’t kill me, Jack. I’m a clone.” He smiled, but the sweat rolled down off his head and into his eyes, making him blink.

“Drop the balls, Laraby. Set up a meet with Watts and get me ten million bucks for the goods.”

“Fuck you. Kill me and I’ll be back in 20 years. I’m all set to incubate. I am forever.”

“Well, if it’s all the same to you then,” I said and pulled the trigger. The shot missed. We were both surprised. He had been wincing and now his face relaxed. He threw the balls at my face and ran, bringing the gun, which he turned and fired, shattering a wall. Water and heads gushed across the floor.

I ran after him into the corridor and followed him down the spiral stairs. The way was dark and confused and my feet slipped on the wet glass. The light smoldered through the blood. Giant clippers lay abandoned in the halls, the blades stained and matted with hair and skin and bone, sprays of blood against the glass at each killing spot. Headless bodies were heaped together in clotting puddles. In the mining and forging rooms the air thickened and it was here that the smell of all that gore had settled, death and singed minerals, and fungus, and I didn’t want to breathe. He was just ahead of me, turning to fire. I couldn’t get a good shot. The dark was slowing him down. He paused then in front of a tank of hydras. Something about them seemed to hypnotize him.

“Laraby!” I shouted.

He faced me and fired. The shot went wild and I shot back. This time I hit him, in the corner of the head, and it took a piece of his skull off, shattering the wall behind him. I hit him again and again, twice in the chest and he fell back on a giant shard of glass. The gun was still in his hand.

Now I heard sounds above, of feet and weapons, distantly thudding. I ran down the tunnel behind the hydra tank, until the way became earthen, and a light was all that I could see. The walls were just beyond touch but they smelled like roots and soil and worms. There was a single board to walk on. The tunnel turned up and the light grew larger, into a doorway in a brightly lit shed, which was behind a line of sand dunes. I gasped air and climbed to the top of the dune to look out at the ocean. The sky was a dome of tarnished silver merging with the cold grey water at the horizon. Garbage lined the shore, and dead fish tangled up in rotten seaweed. The others were waiting. “We have to run,” I said. “They’re coming.” We stumbled along silently, about two miles to town.

Pine Point was just a few houses and stores around an old and virtually deserted industrial port. Weeds grew up through the train tracks leading down to the docks. There was no one around, just a bunch of seagulls scavenging the trash scows.

          The TetAteT was an old freighter, with a slightly rusty hull. We called up and no one answered, so we climbed aboard. Captain Beldam met us on the deck. He was a tall, quiet sort of guy, with a bent nose and a hard mouth. He was dressed in a crisp uniform. The large hat shaded his eyes. He carried a machine gun and a belt-clip of grenades.

          “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

          Evalyn stepped forward and said, “I’m Evalyn St. Claude, sir. Bromion said if there ever was a problem you could take care of it.”

          “You’re from the dome then?” He looked at us suspiciously. “Isn’t she a cop?”

          “Yeah, I’m a cop. What’s it to ya?”

          “Come on,” he said. He led us to his cabin. It was much nicer than the hull of the ship would suggest. It was paneled in teak and mahogany. An antique globe stood on a table bolted to the floor. Charts were spread on the desk. He gave us coffee. “What’s with this one?” he asked, pointing to Stronghole with his lips.

          “He’s been drugged,” I said.

          “They all were. Spooky stuff. But money is money and they were paying me. Do you know the deal I had worked out with him?” Captain Beldam seemed like a decent guy. “This ship is equipped to stay at sea for a long time. That’s how he modified it. But since the coup, my terms have changed. I have to get home to my country. I’m willing to take you with me, but I’m not stopping anywhere else, and when we get there, I expect you to fight in the resistance for two years. Those are my terms.”

          “I’m in,”said Helen.

          “Me too,” said Evalyn.

          “That makes three,” I said. “And you, Stronghole?”

          He looked at me. His eyes were dark and stricken but not weak. “You know I can’t. I’ve got Priscilla and Pringle and school to think about.”

          “But you would have thrown it all over before. Botrytis was that good?”

          “It was that good.”

          “That’s how good Botrytis was, yes.”

          “But now everything’s kind of slow.”

          “Ever since the war, it’s been slow.”

          “Where will you go?”

          “Out west. That’s where I’ll start my school.”

          That night, when a commotion in the halls woke me up, I thought, almost with relief, here we go. I had had a pretty good run of luck. They didn’t get me in the war, and the years since had been quiet enough, quieter than I expected or deserved.

          There were shouts and screams. I dressed and went for the gun but it was gone. I searched under the pillow by the bright light. I scrutinized the head. It smiled. A cold skin seized hold of me and I went out into the hall. Stronghole ran by and knocked me over with his elbow. He was shouting, “No one leaves!” I took off after him. He ran into St. Claude’s offices where Evalyn was seated on a cushion, St. Claude off to the side, sipping that green stuff. They had on tight faces, like we had surprised them arguing. They were not used people running around the dome.  

          “Stronghole,” St. Claude said, “What’s going on? Who’s out there?”

          Stronghole pointed to his neck and said, “I’ve served you long enough. I want it off, before it’s too late.”

          St. Claude put his hands to his lips and looked at Stronghole. “I can’t do that.”

          “Why not? They’ve launched an attack. Can’t you hear?”

          “Because it’s over, Stronghole. My wife has convinced me of that. We have to be rational here. It’s time to go to the ship and continue our work at sea.”

          Stronghole pulled the shears out. “Who has time for dreams like that? The heads want me now. I know it. Please. You know what it feels like, the loneliness. We haven’t got much time.”

          St. Claude took the shears. They glittered like cables in the rain.

          I thought, I have to stop this. But I couldn’t. Some strange inertia had taken hold of me. My ability to act was somehow bound up with the brain. And the brain wanted Stronghole. It wanted all of us. There was no use in resisting. Evalyn and I were like a little energy furnace, along with the sun and sea. Our purpose was to give desire to the thoughts. But this wasn’t enough for us either. I could feel it now in me. I wanted it too. I wanted to have him cut my head off, just to see how it would feel. I longed for the cold pinch on my throat. How much stronger was it for Stronghole then? He wanted it in the worst way. He wanted it as badly as I wanted Evalyn, because it was the same thing. It was slicing free from the pain. He would be weightless. He would live in a place where he never could hurt a thing again. He could taste the steel. St. Claude hesitated as he approached him, eyes trembling with uncertainty.     

          Evalyn said, “Stop. I have a gun.” St. Claude looked confused. He would not let go, but she stood him down. “I mean it, I’ll blow your head off if you kill him.” He lowered the shears but did not drop them.

          Stronghole fell to his knees and sobbed, “Please, I’m begging you to do this now.”

          “Evalyn, look at him. Where is your compassion?”

          “Compassion? Maybe patience! Bromion, you agreed to leave. The experiment is over.”

          There were gunshots and the sound of shattering glass. Bullets pinged off the crystal panels. The room filled with smoke. Stronghole lay curled up in a sobbing fetal position.

          “It’s time to go,” I said.

          He said, “I’ll never leave. They’ll just kill me, rip me apart for nothing, steal my work.”   Evalyn tried to touch him but he shrank away. St. Claude was imploding and he didn’t know what to do.

          That’s when David Watts came smashing through the wall, behind a big steel clothing rack, shouting, “Back, I say back!”

          St. Claude seized up with a surprising fury. “You!”   He raised the scissors. He looked like one of the heads, the whites of his eyes flaring.

          “St. Claude, I’m taking you down!”   David said, swashbuckling about the clothing rack, which had a dozen corrupted torsos hanging from the cross bar. St. Claude walked up to him with the scissors. “No David, you’re moving up.” His voice was gentle, full of pity. He opened the shears and closed them on David’s throat. The blades cut about an inch into the flesh and then blood sprayed across St. Claude’s face, slicking his baldhead with a dark red sheen. It splashed into my eyes. I wiped it away. David was jerking and hissing as the blades sank deeper into his skin. Then Evalyn fired three shots. St. Claude turned slowly around, staggered backwards, opened his eyes wide and fell dead. The blood welled out across his chest, soaking the white clothes black. The scissors were still embedded in David’s neck. He gurgled and lifted his hands then swung back into the rotten corpses. The dome was silent. Everything stopped. Then someone came walking down the hall. It was a deliberate walk. Every few footsteps it paused. At the entrance boots ground into the glass. Crunch crunch crunch. She walked into the room, dressed in leather, with a gas mask and a helmet. A light beam shined from the helmet, through the smoke. She looked us over before lifting the mask. It was Helen. Her yellow hair fell against the black leather. She tossed me a box of Lemon Drop suckers and said, “Hi.”

          “He’s using us,” she said.

          We lay in a double ess. The heat of our two bodies pressed together radiated into the room. My face was in her hair, my arm draped across her belly. “For what?”

          Evalyn sat up. “I’m not sure how, but it has to do with sex.”

          I stood and looked at the head. Its lips were parted differently, almost in a smile. I turned to Evalyn. “Who cares. I’ll take it. But this place is spooked. I feel it walking around at night. It thinks. Have you heard the sound? It’s barely audible. Almost like singing, but a murmur. I can’t figure it out. Am I hearing it or what? I feel it in my ears. And I know it’s a conversation. The heads and the walls are whispering back and forth and singing. And now it’s discovered a tune called sex. Well, I say let’s belt it out to them.”

          “That’s fine with me. What I can’t stand is not smoking.”

          “What about the drink?”

          Evalyn looked like she had bitten into something bad. “I just don’t care about it here.”

          “The way I see it, this is our best bet right now. It’s not a sure thing–any day now I expect someone to break in on us and start shooting. But at least in here we can defend ourselves. I got the gun, and we got a way out. Out there, Watts’ll grind us up into dog meat. He said as much to Helen Stark.”

          “I’m hungry,” she said. “Even those mushrooms would taste good to me now.”   She put her arms around me and kissed my neck. I was hungry too.

          We stopped off for a bath, soaked in the hot one first, then swam around the cool bath. In the waterfalls I washed her hair, and soaped up her body. Her skin was slippery with the soap, and she washed me. We embraced and kissed beneath the pouring water. It splashed into our mouths. The wet skin fused into one sensation. We dried off and went to Level 3 for breakfast.

          What I wanted was a plate of eggs and bacon with burnt toast and coffee. But what we had instead didn’t suck. There was some bread made of mashed sprouts baked in sunlight, a paste of ground up mushrooms, and a pile of those sperm sprouts St. Claude had been picking in the garden. I washed it all down with a glass of green juice.

          We bathed again and went back to the room. We weren’t there five minutes before we started to fuck. It was overwhelming, we consumed each other. When I went down on her it felt like I was drinking from a mountain spring. I kissed her pubic hair and between her thighs, I couldn’t get enough of it. It was like coming back from the dead and rolling around on the hot and sunny earth. She sucked the life out of my cock, and I sucked it back up again, inhaling her sweat, absorbing it off her tongue. Then the fucking circulated between us, growing stronger, more refined, till it started to transform us. When I first got there the walls glowed a dull apricot color when I walked by. Now they flashed suns whenever I passed. The brain had gotten hold of our sex energy and was circulating it through the dome. From there it seeped into the people.

          It went on for days like that, until it got so that when we walked through the labs the technicians would stare wistfully at us. People dropped things. Everyone in the dome amplified the sex and reabsorbed it. St. Claude was beside himself. Whenever he saw me he emitted a barely audible yip. He said, “I never could decide if desire was of the mind or of the body. But I can see now it predates both. Before the spores and slugs, there was sex. Just pure sex radiating out, creating as it dawned. Jack, I didn’t think the Botrytis experience was capable of enhancement, but I can see now that I was wrong. Aren’t you proud to have brought so much to us?”

          “I think that’s the craziest thing you’ve said yet.”

          He took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. “Tell me more Jack!” he ho ho hoed.

          “What, about how crazy and stupid this whole set up is? But what’s to make it different then? Isn’t that what the world’s like? You go to create perfection and only recreate yourself.”

          “Burton, Democritis to the reader, Thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.“

          It was the death of time. I read, I slept, I ate, I bathed, and I fucked the woman I loved with more abandon than I ever did at twenty, and it probably would have gone on forever. But then St. Claude invited us to a graduation ceremony, held in the Level 2 meeting room. Evalyn and I stood in back. The room was solemnly lit, with candlelike light streaking across the ceiling. Each floor had its important convocation of heads, and the Level 2 meeting room was no exception. Clara Turback’s and Padraic Stanislau’s waterlogged visages presided over all.

          I can’t pin down what the menace of the heads was. Something about the way the whites of their eyes showed a little too much. And maybe the incongruity between the lifelike texture of the skin and lips and the state of floating in a tank of water ten feet off the ground. It was the strange smile they wore, now that we were fucking. It was like they had a crush on us. And there was the mocking quality of their expression too, like not only did they know things we didn’t know and experience things we couldn’t experience, but they had the power to make us want to die, to become one of them. The heads looked at you in a way that made you jealous of their position, their authority.

          Twenty-five men and women sat on white cushions. A clear screen of glass separated the audience from the stage, where three naked people stood, hands relaxed at their sides. Their skin was suffused with the same lunar radiance Evalyn’s was that first night in the lab. Behind these three stood Stronghole, in a black raincoat, and rubber beekeeper’s hat with clear plastic o’s for eyeholes. Next to him, in the same raincoat, but with the beekeeper’s hat off, was St. Claude.

          “I guess I don’t have to tell you what this is,” he said, holding up a hedge clipper identical to the one I found in Lafferty and Stanislau’s closet. There was laughter. This was as lively as I’d seen this crew get.

          They worked doing one of two things. Making Botrytis, or making crystal. All their projects required these two basic elements. The lab technicians had to produce enough crystal brain to contain them when they moved up. I asked St. Claude about it. I asked him how come he didn’t just take the drug and live as a more highly evolved member of society. I thought of all the things he could’ve done that would be useful. He actually got indignant. Nothing else got to him but that one thing. I could say, “Hey, St. Claude, I saw you wiping snot on your girl friend’s ass last night,” and he would pause, mull it over, and burst out laughing. But this thing made him nuttier than any other. He said, Two billion years ago we made that mistake. It cost us dear. Crystals have the power of self-replication, and they’re more stable with fewer needs. I looked into plants and insects. Bugs were good but too emotional. Plants weren’t complex enough. Too ephemeral.

          He gazed out over the group. “You know, I always say I wish I were joining you, but tonight I really mean it.” He stepped back and put on the hat. Then he cut through the neck of the man in front of him with the clippers. Stronghole ran a blade up either side of the spine and the body jerked forward, head and spine swinging free, blood spraying all over the glass screen, ceiling, walls and floor. I threw up in my mouth. Yet there was something almost orgasmic about the way they looked when he did it. I felt her mind ascending to the dome. All the while the other two just stood there, waiting for St. Claude and Stronghole to do them.

          It went very fast. Snap, zip, stagger, drop. By the time they were done the floor and walls and ceiling were covered in blood. It ran across the eyeholes and dripped from the sleeves of their coat. It splashed into the water system. Little pulses of blood worked their way into the veins and arteries of the dome. It was circulating through the glass. Evalyn and I ran out the door and up to our room.

          “Evalyn, we have to get out of here.”

          She was crying. “I can’t leave him Jack.”

          “Did you know all along that that was what he did?”

          “No. I knew about the dome. But you hear how he talks. I never believed half of what I heard.”

          “Well, I knew. And I didn’t try to stop him. But this can’t go on. He’s out of control, you can see that, right? And you and me and everyone else involved. You know we are seriously fucked right now.”

          “How can I leave him like this?”

          “Maybe we can take him out of here.”

          “That’s what I was thinking. We can take that ship out of here. I know the captain will take us to Champa.”  

          “Go to St. Claude and see what he says. If he won’t go, will you come with me?”

          “I don’t know. Maybe.”

          “Do you love me? Cause I love you. I know this, here, isn’t real. But where I was in your yard, that was real. There were no walls then either.”

          “Yeah, not one. I’ll go if he won’t.”

          My room was located not far from St. Claude’s suite, on level 1, which he shared with Evalyn. It was a plain glass chamber with only one head. The ambient light was the usual deep blue to turquoise, with a brighter radiation in one corner, above a white cushion. This brighter radiation was like a small sun, bright enough to read by if I were right next to it, but not so bright as to prevent sleep. A small fountain pulsed in the opposite corner.

          It was a cozy enough room, if you don’t mind the feel and look of crystal, and the sight of eyes bulging out of a pickled face. On the floor was a simple sleeping mat and a cotton blanket. I hid the gun under the mat. There were books to read and a bowl to drink from.

          I wish I had arrived there earlier, because I felt like I was collapsing cell by cell into myself. But before taking me to my room St. Claude insisted I complete his tour of the dome. He had a funny way of insisting. It was actually a way of getting you to want to do things that he wanted you to do. There was no coercion involved that I could detect. He was on the upswing. In the dome, all things flowed toward St. Claude. Of course, on the downswing things are different.

          Ceilings, walls and floors were all alike: refractory, intersecting, vitreous planes. I soon got the hang of it. Four levels connected by a single spiral staircase. Light and water flowed up and down the staircase like a spine, each level divided into lobes. Different lobes performed different functions, but all were interconnected and any part could learn to perform the function of any other part.

          Level 2 housed the labs. Here they conducted experiments and turned the crystal into panels that either circulated fluid or light. The white nerve panels circulated light. The blue and red capillaries circulated seawater.

          They lived and slept on Level 3. The sleeping lobe was supervised by a healthy contingent of rather severe looking heads. They slept on thin black mats. Here they also prepared food and played chess.

          Level 4 was what he called ‘the stem’. It was a spore and crystal factory and harsh. Here the salt grew taller and smarter than the people. They were tunneling into the bedrock and smelting it into seed crystals, which they grew in vats and formed into sheets. The people appeared to be huge visors illuminated by a dim, lava like emanation from the ground. The air was sulfurous, unlike the other levels, which smelled like dawn in April.

          The spore lobe was too weird and dark to understand visually. Two technicians in white tended to heaps and piles of a dirt-like substance, on which grew a crystalline fungus which they carefully brushed into flasks. The flasks then went into incubators. This they refined into Botrytis.

          Behind these two lobes was the hydra lobe. They cloned these giant hydras for basic nerve cell material and used them to circulate throughout the dome, performing various menial tasks.

          Behind the hydra tanks was the tunnel out.

          After the tour St. Claude said, “I like plants. They’re beautiful and unpretentious.”

          I lay down on the mat expecting to go to sleep but I could not do it. When I shut my eyes I got the distinct feeling that the head was watching me. And it wasn’t just alone. My head was connected to all the others. Through its eyes all the others saw me. And they didn’t see me, see my face, my ass, my hands. They saw my heart, my thoughts, my desires. They knew me, they didn’t see me. I examined this head then, looked at it so that I might know what went on inside. But it was just flesh floating in water. It had black hair and a smooth forehead. The eyes were brown and the nostrils were a little pinched. The lips were parted as if to speak. I shut my eyes and begged for the sleep to come. But the crystal was cold and hard and the constant activity in the walls agitating.  When it did come, I wished it hadn’t. It wasn’t sleep, it was torture–falling endlessly through some horrific landscape of rotten death. The heads were no longer in their blue water world, they were cured and hanging up like old hams. These heads were carnivores, with the stench of blood and offal on them. Ripe heads and spines, draped in decay, flew through the sky like birds of prey, swooping down to raven my heart and liver and peck my eyes out. Their cries echoed across the black chasms and harbors of the night. The heads arranged themselves in a gallery, like a grand jury. They sat in judgment, summoning all my crimes before me. They dropped my mother’s burning corpse down a well and hurled my father’s cancereaten body to a pack of dogs. Then they were instructing me to do something. I stared into the hollows of their eyes, which the worms had picked clean and yet still burned with life. I couldn’t look away. Whatever it was they wanted me to do, I would do it. If it would stop them from looking at me, I would do it. My hands were on fire. The heads wanted me to go to the lab and take the Botrytis. Then they would migrate back to the sea, to the mind. I was dragging them into my carnal nature, warping the enterprise of the glass brain. My job was to become one of them and restore order to the dome. That’s how I understood their instructions. I bolted out of bed and found the stairs. It was primal now. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would stop the torment of the walls’ constant chatter. The inaudible noise of thought conducted in nervous whispers. I ran bare foot into the lab area. It looked like a space sliced into planes by razors of dark and light. The walls warmed as I passed by searching for supplies. 

          I stumbled on a glass box with about a hundred vials of Botrytis in it. I stuffed handfuls into my pockets and dropped some. The little glass vials bounced a few times and shattered, with a splat on the floor. Shit. The light in the room changed. I turned around. Evalyn was there. The light shined in her hair. Her eyes looked like drops of water on a branch. We stood inches apart. The light had an opalescent quality, like moonlight. It suffused her skin. I could barely breathe. Then she kissed me. A chill passed through all my nerves. Suddenly I didn’t care about Botrytis. I didn’t want it. I wanted Evalyn St. Claude. I kissed her ears and her neck and her nipples. I grabbed her hair. She yanked at my pants and dropped the robe off her shoulders. I fell down to my knees. I kissed her cunt and wanted to die. It was like merging with the moonlight. Then we started to fuck. We fucked right there on the floor, sliding across the glass, barking and yelping. We couldn’t stop. Nothing could stop us. We were totally gone.

          Beneath the heads sat Stronghole, in a glass chair at a glass table, reading a book. He had his usual military bearing; that had not relaxed since coming to the dome. But it had only been a day. Perhaps with time he would become like the others. These heads looked very serious. They were impossible to ignore, banked up along the ceiling, spaced at equal intervals, subjecting everything we did to objective ocular scrutiny. Perhaps these heads were supervisors. St. Claude stood between us. “Stronghole, just as you predicted, Jack has arrived. He wants to take you with him. I think it’s a good idea. We can get along here without you.”

          Stronghole blinked his eyes and gave St. Claude a hard one. “You said I could stay.”

          “That was before he laid out our situation, and with remarkable clarity. I’m sure as his former partner you are well acquainted with his wit, but did you ever watch him drink?”

          “Come on Stronghole, let’s go. This guy is nuts. They all are.”   I felt a little bad about saying it in front of St. Claude. But there comes a time when someone has to say it. I didn’t mind being the one. “Soon this’ll be a heap of glass.”

          Stronghole stood up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. These people aren’t nuts. Do crazy people build things like this?”   He made a broad gesture with his hand, like I was supposed to take it all in and agree.

          “What the fuck is this, anyway? What is it, St. Claude? You have these goddamn heads everywhere, staring at us all the time. I don’t know how you manage to think straight.”

          The smile on St. Claude’s face was modest, even a little embarrassed. “It’s a brain, actually. I’ll show you if you like.”

          “Don’t you see it, Jack?”  

          “I see a bunch of heads in fish tanks and a lot of loony people lounging around without a care in the world. Meanwhile you got everyone and their mother out trying to kill you. Why do you want to stay?”

          He sat down, smiled and scratched his head. “This Botrytis is amazing. I feel great. I just feel like everything is moving at the right speed for me now. There’s none of that waiting around.”

          St. Claude said, “Jack, let me put this to you in your terms if you will. I’ve taken every drug known to human society. Every one involves you in a chemically induced illusion, resulting in a net loss of twice the imagined gain. But Botrytis is just the opposite. There is an exponential increase of consciousness with every use. And once you have a taste, you would suck it out of someone’s rectum if that were the only way to get it.

          “Now think about the disgust you feel knowing that to be true. As Marvell said,  O, who shall from this dungeon raise/ A soul enslaved so many ways?/ with bolts of bones, that fettered stands/ In feet, and manacled in hands. So we started with disgust and worked our way backwards to the spores and slugs.”

          “I’m just not going to go,” Stronghole said. He opened his book and pretended to read.

          “Can they see us?”   I asked, pointing to the heads.

          “That’s just the thing,” Stronghole said. “They’re the thinkers. This place is pure thought. It circulates in the light and water. Hydras do the work.”  

          “These walls aren’t glass Jack, they’re crystal. This is a giant invisible brain. It uses the sun and seawater for power. And this is just a prototype. By the time we’re done, the glass project will be the new paradigm for terrestrial existence. We are bringing down the sky to earthlings, spreading the word among us all, making available to all the living beings of earth our discovery. It’s not about money and drugs Jack, or about product names and celebrity tie-ins. It’s about the transformation of being into a higher order, not dependent on organic matter.”

          I sat down. “Is the front door the only way out of here?”

          “You mean in case of attack?”   St. Claude asked.

          “I’ve been over it with them, Jack. There’s an exit to the beach. From there they can make it to the ship. It’s fully equipped to do the work off shore, invisibly if need be.”

          “How far from the house does this tunnel let out?”

          “About a half a mile.”  

          Stronghole looked totally gone. There was no point in staying. You have to let people die who want to die. “I guess I’m all done here then. I’m going out that back way.”

          St. Claude said, “You haven’t seen the whole brain yet. You haven’t even seen the labs or the hydra rooms.”

          It was too much. “Just knock it off with that stuff!”

          He laughed deeply. “You are enormously entertaining. Listen Jack, wouldn’t you like to at least try the Botrytis? Just once, to see what it’s like?”

          “The sooner I’m outta your brain the better. And don’t think I’m not holding it against you how you hooked Stronghole. I can’t budge him now, but I’ll be back. As for you, partner, take a look at those tanks, if you wanna see how you’re gonna end up.”

          “I live in anticipation of that day.”

          “But there is much to be done before that,” St. Claude said.

          “I’m his chief of security.”

          “Oh yeah? Have you told Priscilla and Pringle about it yet? Are ya gonna teach these heads math?”

          Stronghole looked sad, the way a kid does. This was gonna kill me.

          St. Claude bristled his eyebrows. “I think Botrytis will give you some insight into how we live.”

          “Yeah, cause those heads don’t see out.”   I headed towards what I took to be the hall. “Do I grope around, or are you coming?”

          “No. I’ll show you to the tunnel. But I won’t repress my disappointment, Jack.”  

          We headed down a hall, and I walked almost right into her. The three of us stopped. Evalyn was not dressed like the others. She wore a red Cornell sweatshirt, faded jeans and black deck shoes. I tried to figure out if she was on the drug. Then I felt a burning sensation in my throat. “Did you know all the time?”   I asked.

          She looked at the floor and said, “I didn’t know you were here, Jack.”

          “Regretfully, he’s leaving. Neither Stronghole nor I could prevail upon him to stay.”

          I looked her over. I was pissed off, but I wanted her worse than the water. The water was nothing to her. And then, once I got to thinking about it that way, other things began to click. Like, maybe it was safer here than on the outside. Cause I had no idea what was out there anymore. “Well, maybe it would be better if I stayed after all. Maybe there’s a way out for all of us.”

          St. Claude clapped his hands together and beamed at me. “Just as I had hoped.”

          I lowered the gun. His eyes made me do it. They were sunken and dark, but very clear. In their light I felt ashamed. A middle-aged man clipping grass with a little silver scissors is hardly a threat. He had a basket on his arm. In it were mushrooms, bundles of the grass, and some sort of a sprout that actually looked like a green-headed sperm with a long white tail. It smelled like semen.

          “Where’s Stronghole?”  

          He smiled and put down the basket. “You must be Jack, then. I’m so relieved. I thought you were from Laraby or Watts.”

          He didn’t look any different now that he was relieved. “I’m from so many different people I don’t know what’s up. Where is he?”

          “He’s O.K. I can bring you to him.”   The light glazed his vile jellies like lamps on a rainy street. “The dome is quite unique,” he said, leading me through the reception area and down a spiral crystal staircase that wound beyond where I could see. And all of it was of glass, light and water.

At the next level we went into a hall. There were no right angles. Water pulsed in a stream through glass conduits at eye level. It fell from the ceiling to the floor in corners, around stands of six-foot ferns and ivies in crystal pots. The walls radiated light, flaring orange and fading back to blue as we passed. Between each sheet of glass was a network of capillaries, arteries and veins, finely etched in blue or red. Other panels formed a network of white nerves.

          He led me into a room. Water cascaded down one wall, collected in a small pool lined with balls of colored glass and ran out through a hole in the floor. There were three rocks covered in moss. Along one wall was a shelf of books. On another a painting of a black square on rice paper.

          The third wall was a glass tank full of rising bubbles. I followed them all the way up to the ceiling, where they curled around a human head. The lips of the human head were parted in an enigmatic smile. Its eyes bulged slightly. Extending down into the glass was the spinal column, cleansed of meat. The head was clean-shaven. There was life in the eyes and lips. I cannot say what it felt like to behold this thing in its tank, its grim and intelligent eyes and scarf of skin hanging off the neck. Maybe I was a little excited, I don’t know. Wherever the eyes looked, the crystal brightened.

          “This is my suite. The others live together. That’s where Stronghole is now. He’s a new arrival.”   I looked through the floor. I could see two floors down, where the tops of heads walked across floors of refracted light.  

          “Let’s get something straight St. Claude. The best thing for you is to give up Stronghole.”  

          “Is something wrong Jack? You don’t look good. Have a seat, please.”   He pointed to a white cushion on the floor. I sank down. “It was inevitable someone would propose a counter argument, but I never thought it would be David. All that you see here is as much his work as mine or Stani’s. The glass project was his idea. And then he betrays us. I don’t understand that. But, to tell you the truth, it has me feeling kind of fatalistic. There is a pessimism in me these days that wasn’t there before. I even regret staying behind. I fear I have become a mere caretaker of trophies.”   His voice was soft, but not devoid of nuance. It came with a touch of something. It’s hard to say what. It wasn’t contempt. Maybe it was just a single thread of irony woven into everything he said. “I am indeed honored.”   He sat down across from me. “Would you like something to eat or drink?”

          I was hungry and exhausted. My clothes were disgusting. I felt dirty. “I could use a drink.”

          “Would you like hot tea, or a glass of wheat grass juice?”

          “I don’t like tea. I’ll take the juice. And water, if you have it.”

          A woman brought a glass of emerald juice and a bowl in on a tray. He hadn’t called her or anything. It was like watching a picture develop. She emerged from the blur several walls away. She had thick skin and a thin neck. The white tunic and drawstring pants looked like a sack. She neither looked to the left nor the right but stared straight ahead.

          I took the glass and drank it down. It tasted like liquid lawn, minus the herbicide and fertilizer. Then she brought the bowl over to the pool of water, filled it, and set it before me, dripping and cold. I drank it down and for the first time in my life I really knew the meaning of the word slake. The water poured out of the corners of my mouth and over my chin. This pleased St. Claude enormously. He clapped his hands and laughed. “I’m sorry, but it’s like having a monkey.”   He sniffed the air and frowned. “One unpleasant side effect of Botrytis is abnormally acute senses. I can see your pores, hear your pulse and smell what you had for dinner last night, digesting in your bowels. Why do you think I cut off heads and live in a glass house? Wouldn’t you?”

          “Why’d you double up Laraby and Watts? Why this? It doesn’t make sense. You could have had anything. Even Laraby would shell out a fortune for a set up like this. I can see him now as Director of Security. But the way you played it is all wrong. You played it so everyone is pissed off, they all want a piece of you. You’re a smart guy and you didn’t see it coming. Why?”

          “I guess brains aren’t everything, Jack. Is that how you’d put it? They wanted to call it MycoSoph. There were long meetings about it at Monozone, and even longer undercover ones with Urizen. Middle of the night affairs out in Grassmear. Watts and Laraby. I’d just had it. That sort of thing is for bugs. MycoSoph. They just wanted to burn our lab out on stupid moneymaking crap that no one needs. Watts with his paralytic implants and liquid restraints. He wanted industrial drugs to run a chemofactory, using designer moods to boost productivity and domesticate the work force. Those aren’t even bug thoughts. Believe me, I looked into bug thoughts for a while and they’re certainly more interesting than that.”

          My head felt heavy. “I don’t feel well. Did you drug me?”

          “No, I gave you water. You look exhausted. Your clothes stink of blood and vomit and your fingers smell of vaginal fluid and semen. Why don’t you bathe and eat something, and I’ll take you round to your friend.”  

          I stood. He led me down a level. People walked busily about, ignoring us. They read on benches or lay stretched out on the floor, talking. There was a constant bustle of men and women carrying containers of one kind or another in and out of the doorways. “We only eat raw foods, mostly water,” he was saying. “It’s not out of a conviction really. I just found that eating meat was like chewing on a rope made of dead things. The more I chewed the deader it got. And cooked food never seemed to cool down enough to eat. Once a food is cooked it retains its heat regardless of refrigeration. It was the same with sex and then, even riding in a car with other people seemed dirty. I think you will like what we do with mushrooms and sprouts though.”  

          We entered the baths. I looked around for heads. There weren’t any. The room was like nothing I had ever seen before, a garden of giant ferns and palms set among rectangular baths. Against the far wall ran hot and cold waterfalls.  There was a towel and a piece of soap on a glass block, and some linen clothes folded neatly beside them. “This suit is unacceptable to us. I’m sorry.”  

          There was no use getting offended, I didn’t like it either. And the water looked so good, its surface reflecting violet and orange from the walls. I wanted to get into that water like it was fucking for the first time.

          It was a long while before I put the binoculars down and when I did, the dome disappeared. I figured it had to be the glasses. Just like the radio. A trick.

          I felt like kicking his ass off that hill into the valley below. And then I thought about how badly I needed that scowling, mumbling, prematurely haggard shit in tweed. So I handed him the glasses and said, “Where’s St. Claude?” in a voice that blew all the heat out of him. He shivered.

          “In the dome, Jack. I promise.”

          It took everything I had not to stick a gun up his nose. “That’s just not possible David.”

          “It’s made of a special crystal. Do you want to know how it works?”

          “I’m tired of crazy stories. Where’s St. Claude?”

          David smiled. His eyes looked like they were following a mouse along the floor. “You’re going to like this Jack, I promise. The dome absorbs the visible spectrum and reflects everything your brain filters out to see. And then, your brain fills in the blank. It’s an optical illusion. It fills in the blank with the surrounding area. You do it without thinking. And, the dome material is flexible and intelligent.”

          I tried to see it. If I squinted, I could just make out a buzzing haze of gray. “Whose plan was this, your old man’s?”

          “I don’t think so Jack. I think he and Laraby had planned on us working for them at Urizen.”  

          “Laraby is working for Watts.”   It was hard to believe. Laraby was screwed so tight to Monozone. He had Monozone stock, a Monozone pension and had held his directorship for fifteen years. “You doubled up Watts and Laraby on an inside job meant to look like a hostile takeover. You built this behind their backs.”

          “It’s been in the works for years. The day Monozone offered St. Claude and dad a contract Laraby sent in his pander. The idea was to use Monozone to synthesize Botrytis here. Then we break loose and go to Urizen with Laraby. Meanwhile, St. Claude kept Horizon going in secret. Once the dome was built and equipped, we terminated operations at Monozone and made the move. There’s even a ship on hand if things get too hot.”

          “The TetAteT.”

          “A little joke Jack. How did you know?”

          “My partner knew. He and Braque and Helen had you figured out. Only I didn’t.”   I paced circles, toeing the sand. “I think it’s time I have a poke around Horizon Labs.”

          He walked around to the back of the van. “My men first. I want you to give me your best estimate here, as to what they need to do to be a crack unit.”   He yanked open the doors. I stood next to him and waited.

          “Why don’t you tell ‘em to fall out, or go ‘atenhut!’”

          “We’ll have to get them out.”

          I looked in the van. It was dark and smelled like rotten meat. There were three or four coat racks. And on the coat racks hung his puppet army, a bunch of headless corpses in various states of decay. Their clothes were filthy and bloodstained.

          “I had to drag some through the woods, to save them. Then I drove them home to Guernsey. They don’t drive very well.”

          “But they’re brave honest men.”

          “Don’t you want to see the weapons?”

          I massaged my head. The foul cryptic odor made it ache. He shined a flashlight into the van. The torsos gently swayed back and forth, a quiet rhythmic squeak.  The light beam rested on a wooden crate with R5 stenciled on its side, a good generic assault rifle. Fragmentation grenades, stick mortars, phosphor bombs and gas guns were stowed on the walls. There was enough there to take care of St. Claude, even without Helen.

          I didn’t know what was worse, David there or David gone, shooting off his mouth.  So I tried it one way first, to see what would happen.  “David, you go back to that hotel and wait for me.”

          “You need my help getting in.”

          “This part is dangerous. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

          “I feel responsible.”

          I ate into his liver then. “If you don’t get down there soon, Wanda will take off with the money.”

          He snarled at the road. “She wouldn’t do that.”  

          I gave it time to sink in. “I didn’t like the way she talked to you in the parking lot.”

          “She’s disagreeable too. I must like disagreeable people, because almost everyone I know is disagreeable. And I don’t care about the money.”

          “How will you live without money?”

          “Do you really think Wanda would do that to me?”

          “Like the poet said, ‘she would eat shit and say it tasted good, if there was some money in it for her.’”

          He shook his head sadly and then nodded it, and then he shook it some more. It was like he was rolling the marbles around, trying to make them go down certain chutes so he could think. When his head finally clicked into place it stood still. “I don’t care if I die, Jack, I’m staying. It’s my only chance.”

          I didn’t even want to hate him anymore. “Look, you show me how to get in, and wait with your men up here till I signal, o.k.?” 

          “I knew I could trust you. Come on.”

          We walked down a narrow, steep path through the sparse pinewoods. Lichens and moss covered the outcrops of glacial bedrock. Birds flew in and out of the trees.

          Until now I must have had the sensation of climbing up this thing. I figured, when I found St. Claude, that was the top of the mountain. I’d be free one way or another. But as we descended that path, I suddenly felt very different. I had the sensation that all along I had been crawling deeper into a cellar. The cobwebs broke across my eyes and mouth as I groped for a light. The beams overhead were low, and the earthen walls were close to my cheeks. On the ground, small moles and centipedes rummaged through the debris. It was some sort of a killing ground. St. Claude was in the bottom chamber, surrounded by moldy heads with crusty spines attached, the teeth bared and bloody, the eyes sunken and black. We came out of the woods and crossed a small pasture. The grey house was just across the dirt road, surrounded by a small, well kept lawn. Next to the house was a rowboat up on sawhorses. We went around the house, crossed another small pasture and entered the meadow I had seen from the hill. It was very green and dotted with yellow and violet flowers. White moths and bumble bees looped and swarmed about. The sun was warm and pale. I looked for the dome. I sensed that something was there that didn’t smell like hot grass and whatever it was, it was alive.

          “That’s the stump,” said David.

          “What’s security like in there?”

          “It’s invisible.”

          “Security is?”

          “No Jack, the dome. We, they, don’t need security.”

          “What can I expect?”

          “The ground level is a giant greenhouse. That’s where they grow the food. There are four levels beneath that. That’s where the offices, labs and dorms are.”

          I checked my gun. David winced. “How do I go in?”

          “Here, put these glasses on.”   He handed me a pair of goggles. I put them on. The dome was perfectly visible, a series of interlocking triangles etched in black on an inky, primal blue. There was a door. “How long will you be?”

          “I don’t know. A few hours.”

          “Don’t take the drug, Jack.”

          “Because it’s addictive? Or because it makes you nuts?”       

          He laughed. He mugged a bit with his face. He worked it this way and that and said, “Not really. You can recover fully when you go off and you don’t get cravings. But it does have one small, permanent side affect that can only be alleviated by continued use. Aren’t you going to ask me what that is Jack? Don’t you want to know?”

          I figured this was the last loony conversation I would have to have with him, before he got picked up by the cops or someone killed him. So I thought, why hurt his feelings. “What is it?’

          “Boredom. Very slight. Nothing like despair, or even ennui. Just, everything’s a little bit slow.”

          “Like when you leave the city,” I said. He smiled. He was not cut out for this. He deserved a break. “David, the six million bucks, it’s phony. You get caught spending it, you hang.”

          He looked at me hard. His lips trembled. “You double crossed me. I trusted you and showed you where he is and told you all my ideas, how to get St. Claude, and you frame me up for counterfeiting!  Why?”

          There was nothing I could say. “I’m sorry. That’s how it goes, playing the best hand all the way. That’s what we were doing, all of us–and you got in the game. Now I just helped you to fold early, so be smart and save your own ass. Remember, Wanda’s in that hotel room holding a bag of rope around her neck.”

          I opened the door and entered the dome. It sealed shut with a hiss. I took off the glasses and blinked. It was a giant crystal. The ceiling arched high overhead. Everything, floor, ceiling, walls, was constructed of the same material. I stood before a fountain. The water rose eight feet in the air and splashed into a basin. The cool mist formed a rainbow halo around it. Next to the fountain was a pedestal, and on the pedestal was a bowl. The bowl contained an eye the size of a melon. It roved back and forth, blinking, alive, blue streaked with green and grey and yellow. It focused in on me. The pupil contracted.

          The eye followed me, as far as it could, as I cautiously stepped around it and into the greenhouse. The garden beds were arranged in rows, beneath sprinklers and misters. The air was bright with refracted sun. In the beds grew a vivid green grass about six inches high. Beneath the beds were logs covered in mushrooms.

          About a half an acre away, a man was messing around with the grass. He watched me approach and then went back to his work. The dome radiated light and heat. The air smelled peculiar. It was a smell I had read about but never experienced, the smell they call forest. I pointed the gun at St. Claude. He stood straight and faced me. He wasn’t afraid. In his hand he held a bunch of the grass. A few pieces were stuck to his lips. He was chewing. He said,  “If you’re here to kill me, aim for the heart, not the head.”

          Around the time I’d grown accustomed to the G force he hit the brakes and all the pent up sweat leapt off me onto the windscreen. “C’mon,” he said to his feet. If I had to guess I’d put him in his mid forties, moderate to heavy smoker and drinker. Some people are just born that way. He had a habit of arguing with himself under his breath, so that his voice was barely audible, and I couldn’t be sure if he’d said anything. David’s periodic loss of concentration, or rather, the periodic shift in his concentration from an outer, to an inner, world caused problems with his driving. I felt myself attempting to steer by mental power alone, wresting the wheel from his clenched fingers, or forcing his head and eyes up and away from his shoes, onto the looming guard rail. We were in the parking lot of a largish shopping center. Cars stretched horizon to horizon. Helen followed us in, three cars back. She was very good, and he was an easy tail.

          The anchor was a Cut the Rug outfit. Next to that was Rubber Backs and next to that Tack to Tack and next to that their discount store called U-Cut the Rug. Then there was a Baloney’s Ice Creams of the World featuring twelve international flavors, from Parmesan to durian. These were all Island chains. You don’t see those in town except for on late night TV. He said, “See that Cut the Rug van? Get in.”

          I climbed in and he slammed the door. The inside was banged up. It smelled bad, like he’d been hauling garbage. He started the van up. The floor shook and made my teeth rattle. He adjusted the radio as we drove out of the parking lot, tuning in a voice. The voice seemed to be talking to me. It was highly distorted like a subway announcement, lacking only a train roaring in the background.

          “ooooooh, rrrr….shprk-arg…Mr. Ah Bartell, hello.”

          “Can you hear me?” he asked.

          “Is that you?”

          “RyesR, it is,” said the radio. He grinned.

          “Is this some sort of a fucking game with you?”

          “rrrAh No sir, uh uh it is not ssssome sort of a fucking shpraaak.”

          “Oh cut the crap. Where are we headed?” He wouldn’t answer. We drove farther and farther out on the Island. He stopped for gas. The fumes near knocked me out. I asked him for a soda and a box of Raven 25s. While he was in the store, Helen pulled up to the window, winked and left. When we exited the parking lot she was three cars back.

          We drove past derelict farms and forlorn industrial parks with peeling flames of paint and weather-eaten loading docks. “You got some sister there,” I said.

          “What about her?”

          “Well, you’re very different, that’s all.”

          He squirmed around and checked the speedometer. I wished for once he’d check it and change his speed. “She thinks she needs to take care of me.”

          “But you don’t think so.”

          He looked at his hands. Up…up….”She’s my sister. And we’re friends.”

          “I guess family is who you can trust.”

          “That’s right,” he agreed, looking at the road again and becoming adamant. “There aren’t many you can.”

          “It’s true that people are generally untrustworthy.”

          “You don’t know the half of it, Jack. Can I call you that?”   He looked at me nervously.

          “Sure, just…don’t look at me when you drive.”

          “I’ve never had an accident. Not once. Do you know whom you’re dealing with here, Jack? Let’s concentrate on St. Claude. Do you know about the drug, Botrytis?”

          “I think I have some idea.”

          “Then you know St. Claude is totally crazy. He wants to conquer the world.”

          “That is a little nutty, David.”

          “See? Even you think so and you know all about the drug. But if you took the drug, things might look different.”

          “In what way?”  

          He smiled and reached to turn on the radio. “I made a tape that I’m broadcasting to us now if you want to listen.”

          “I’d rather have it straight from you.”

          He looked very serious. “I made the tape because this is easier to say when I’m alone.”

          “Why?”

          “I don’t want to be sad in public.”

          I checked the side view mirror. Helen was back far enough to disappear behind hills and turns. “This is pretty private now.”

          He mumbled.

          “He has my partner, David.”

          “I have to make you understand how dangerous he is. We now know that billions of years ago two different one-celled creatures emerged on earth. One was a body creature; it had mass but no perception. The other we call mind–it could perceive but had no mass. In other words, one that occupies space but can’t move and one that moves in time but occupies no space. The creatures co-evolved until one day, by means of this drug, some of us made the leap; it allowed us to discover we no longer required the body. People who take the drug are evolved beyond those that don’t. Botrytis initiates the next mutation. This carries a lot of responsibility, I think you will admit. But St. Claude let it go to his head. He has perverted the theory. He believes that mind spores fell from space and that they were captured and enslaved by the body cells of earth. The mind spores developed into the brain and central nervous system, as well as the main sense organs. His idea is to liberate them from their prison of flesh. He does it by detaching the head and spine and preserving them in a special solution of seawater and light.

          “If we don’t stop him he’ll poison the world with Botrytis. Look at what’s already happened. And he doesn’t see his error. I tried to show him that the body cells were conscious all along. That the mind cells actually colonized them.”   There were tears in his eyes. “The big lie won’t work.”

          “So what’s your plan?”

          “I’ve raised a small army. They’re going to help us take St. Claude and put an end to it. But I need you to train them. You have experience in the field.”

          “Is that what the pamphlets were for?”

          He laughed. “People will believe anything.”

          “What about Evalyn St. Claude?”

          He grumbled, “She’s very disagreeable!”

          “And very good looking.”

          “What do you mean by that? Of course she’s good looking. She’s rich. If at any time she were not good looking, by now she would be.”

          I decided to hit from the other side. “Mind if I smoke?”   I asked.

          “Just blow it out the window. These damn roads are so slow.”

          “Take your time, relax. Now who are these troops I’m to train?”

          “You want numbers? It’s significant that there are any at all.”

          “Are they armed?”

          “Some.”

          “How long does my partner have?”

          “You mean before he moves up?”

          “Is that what you call it?”

          He shook his head. “That’s what they call it. How long has he been with them?”

          “If they haven’t killed him, less than a day.”

          He laughed. “You have nothing to worry about. St. Claude wouldn’t kill anyone. And your partner isn’t even addicted yet. First he addicts you. Then you do the work, the lab work. It’s a totally selfless environment. We designed incredible things. We made a monad out of cloned Hydra parts. Thinking biological circuits, reactive nerve nets, optical memory sensors. But, after a while it’s time to move on. That’s what he tells you. And they do it. They have the ceremony and that’s it.”

          “What’s that, the murder ceremony?”

          “I told you, it’s not like that. He doesn’t kill you, he frees you. He won’t free your friend till your friend wants to be free.”

          “Does anybody ever not want to be free?”

          “Yeah, me. I went back to the body. I wanted to live.” 

          I looked out the window.  We were far out on the Island. Between the ocean and us lay wooded hills and fields.  

          “So David, where are we going?”     

          He sighed and made faces. “Up ahead a few miles is a dirt road. We’ll drive up there and I’ll show you.” A bumpy dirt road cut across a meadow and up a hill. On either side was a stunted wood of scrub oak and pine covered in grape vines and poison ivy. Helen was no longer behind us. After a while we came to a clearing where he stopped. We got out and went to the edge of the clearing. A cool wind came in off the water smelling briny and sweet, like pampas grass. There was a distant booming of surf. Below us was a valley. There was a small cottage of weathered wood and a driveway off another dirt road. The other side of the valley was covered in scrub pine leading to sand dunes. He handed me a pair of field glasses.

          “What do you see?” he asked.

          “Everything I see without them, only bigger.”

          “Take a closer look.”

          “A cottage, a big lawn and a field. A driveway.”

          “You don’t see a large geodesic dome in that field?”

          I looked around through the glasses and saw no such thing. “No.”

          “That house is their beach cottage.”

          I lowered the glasses and glared at him. “Look. I’ve played along so far but don’t take me for a guy who might believe St. Claude’s holed up in his summerhouse. That was the first place we checked.”

          Every syllable made him wince. “Let me show you something.”   He took the binoculars and adjusted them for a while. “Now look through them. You see that stump down there, about ten yards behind the house? Notch it on the bottom of the circle you see.”

          I found the stump and sat the circle on top. At first all I saw was green. But the green slowly disintegrated into a dull grey. The grey was textured and in the textures I saw little flashes of muted color. Then the colors aligned into crystalline patterns that shifted constantly. It was a geodesic dome shining like a giant opal.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

We drove on a mangy highway, through the post-stripmine covering of processed garbage that adheres to the county wherever banks were too cheap to put up a shopping mall. There wasn’t a bird or rat in it. “How come you’re all dressed up?”   I asked. I’d never seen Stitch even in mascara. Now she looked like a perfume ad. Minus the flocks of doves.

“Me and Juice are gettin’ married. Soon as this is over.”

“You mean today?”

“Nah, whenever. So what’s the suit made of, pigeon neck?”

“Hundred percent.” It started to get suburban. Parking lots and high rises took over from serf and turf. A couple of potbellied idiots soaped up cars with big sponges between bites of ChowderBits while their girlfriends snorted coke and chatted on the stoops about day care and credit cards.

“So, what’s your plan?” she asked.

“I don’t have one. I just go from thing to thing.”

“The whole set up’s queer I say.”

“Maybe so. But six million bucks. There’s something to it.”

“So, David Watts has known where St. Claude is for days and no one else gets to him?”

I thought it over. “You think he’s full of shit. His sister’s just ripping us off. But they move fast. It’s something I’ve noticed. They disappear.”

“If you say so. What about back up?”

“I’ll go in and figure it out. If St. Claude is there, I’ll send Watts back to the motel and you can let them go with the cash.”

“And what if St. Claude’s protected?”

“Then I call you.”   She exited off the highway and drove down a few four-lane roads lined with crap boxes. Beyond that there was nothing but a police station, jail and courthouse. They formed three sides of a square, in the center of which was a brand new gallows. Inanian flags flew at the four corners. Grassmear, where Spartan County takes care of its own. We pulled up in front of some white iron gates in a twelve-foot brick wall. It was exactly ten o’clock. Way down the street a white van approached. “That’s him,” I said.

It pulled up and Wanda Watts stepped out in an emerald green dress with long sleeves and a choke collar. It was so short it didn’t cover the bottom of her ass. She wore wraparound sunglasses and a leopard skin pillbox hat. In each hand was a forty-five. They were so big they looked like barbells. She lifted them up and pointed them at the windshield. A white sports car with the roof down drove up alongside us, boxing us in. Seated at the wheel was a haggard man, slumped forward in rumpled tweed. A thick, unruly coif of black hair stood out on his head. His GlaDiaTor glasses were a little too small. David Watts looked exactly like he did in the picture at Barker’s office, only his skin was greyer and the car was smaller. He was still having a bad time.

Wanda said, “Get out. Slowly.” She leaned against the grill of the van for support. We got out. “Now. Put your hands on the roof of the car. David, pat them down.”

“I don’t really want to touch them,” he growled and mumbled at once.

“Then hold ‘em with this while I do.”   She tossed him the gun. I hate when they do that. Someone always gets his balls blown off. Wanda worked over Stitch pretty well, feeling down her stockings, in her armpits, checking her crotch, her butt, her hair, even asking her to stick her tongue out. She did not like the splash of blood across her dress. She found both knives and the pistol and checked her out again before heading my way. She hit my crotch like she was making meatballs and put me through the rest of it, taking my gun and turning me around.

“I’ll need that to get St. Claude.”

“You’ll get it back in time. Now, where’s the money?” she asked.

“Not till we have St. Claude,” I said.

“The money is for telling you where he is. Let’s see it.”

“We need a guarantee,” I said.

“David’s going to go with you, Jack. Don’t wet your shorts.”

“You know each other?”   Stitch asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“We might have been closer. But everything came up so fast there wasn’t time.”

“It came up at least twice.”

David said, “I wish you two would shut up and get on with it.” The guns bored him. Everything bored him. His cheeks were the texture of coarse sandpaper. Even in sunglasses he winced at the light.

“The money’s in the suitcase in back,” I said.

Wanda said to Stitch, “Get it and open it up.” She flung the suitcase on the trunk and unzipped it. Wanda smiled. It was the warmest, most genuine smile I had seen in days. “Stir it around a bit,” she said, “I want to see what’s there.”   Stitch lifted and dropped the stacks of worn brown and red bills. “My god, all I can see is diamonds. Look at it David. We’re rich!”

“Arguably we have been all our lives,” he sneered.

“Oh shut up. You’re such a pill. I don’t mean his money. This is ours. We earned it.”

“We? Wrong pronoun, sis.”

“You don’t think you could have managed this alone, do you?”

“Why not? And it’s not over yet. You’re forgetting my project now. You got your money. Now I want my army.”

“We’ve been through this all before David. I thought we agreed.”

“Well that’s just like you, isn’t it?” he asked the air. “You talk and argue and fight till I just give up. Then you say I agreed to something I didn’t agree to at all. Mr. Bartell, you’re coming with me. Give him his gun back. You two go to the hotel and wait. We’ll meet you back there. I have a plan. So get in the car and let’s go.”

“Where to?” I asked.

He grumbled, shook his head and looked at the ground. She handed me the gun.

“Ignore it David. He did the same to me. He thinks it’s like that silly war of his where all he had to do was open his big fat mouth and all the little mice came rolling to attention.”

“Well,” David said, trying to spit out the mush, “it’s not like that with us. I told you I have plan.”

Stitch climbed into the van. I got into the sports car. “I hope this thing has seat belts,” I said, searching the seat and floor.

“You don’t need ‘em in these,” he said, screaming down the street. I urinated a little when he hit 90.