IDIOT’S
MASK
Chester Burton Brown
Smashwords Edition copyright 2012 Matthew Hemming, Publisher; all rights reserved.
Read more from this author at CheeseburgerBrown.com
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If anyone has the right to tell this story, it’s me. It concerns, after all, things that happened to me—or a thing very much like me—and so I argue that no one is in a better position to explain it all from my point of view. Or, at least, from a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Parts of the story I don’t know at all, but in this respect my diaries have been very helpful. Further gaps I’ve filled in with assistance from media reports and police files. And where such research has left me wanting, I’ve gone out on a limb and extrapolated actions and dialogues which I believe to be largely consistent with what I’ve come to understand about myself.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent. And to protect me, too. When all is said and done, you might agree that I deserve that much.
Or you might not.
If you’re Penardu, you’re already three quarters convinced that I’m reprehensible. And why shouldn’t you? You’ve grown up seeing our dirty mugs on the news, rotating sedately in the corner while images of our victims or their ruined possessions flash by: police are on the lookout for an Ilbisoon male, fair complexion, average height, scars and tattoos, gutter accent, the lack of hope poignant in his dull, vacant eyes...
That was me. I don’t deny it. I grew up on the low streets of Ilbis, spat into this world by a mother I never knew. I ran with a bunch of kids who’d been abandoned around the same time as I had—sleeping in pipes, picking pockets, begging for scraps. We each had a specialty. Mine was playing idiot for the tourists.
“This boy can figure any sum in the blink of an eye! Even the thinnest slice of wage will buy you a personal show of his unique talent! Step right up, step right up!”
I can almost smell Ilbis as I recollect it: the fume-orange sky, the stacked decks of sepia cloud, flies buzzing around livestock standing in the shade of an atmospheric processing tower looming over the low, ramshackle horizon of stove pipes and satellite dishes jutting up from a sea of makeshift roofs. Goats snuffed and bleated as rusted-out cars droned overhead.
“Behold the hidden powers of this idiot’s rare brain!”
Someone would spill coloured rice on a blanket. I’d roll my eyes and gibber and drool. “Two thousand one hundred and nine blue, one thousand eight hundred twenty-seven red.”
Folks would applaud and throw tips in the proffered hat. Few Penardu ever questioned my count, and none would deign ask a robot for verification. If someone seemed too suspicious, we’d just grab our blanket and our rice jar and run away. We laughed as we ran. Stupid marks.
They wore their masks, even on Ilbis. You could never see their faces, but what corners of their skin you might glimpse were untouched by the sun; there was no mistaking the signs of leisure, no confusing them for one of our own. No: the Penardu were as alien to us as giraffes. Another kingdom of creature. A thing very like a man but devoid of suffering. Or so it seemed.
We emptied their purses on the sly. And when there wasn’t enough sly to go around we emptied their purses while they bowed before our muzzles or blades or hard, horny fists. Sometimes they would fall completely apart at such treatment, the chins of adult men quivering while they retched and cried and begged for better. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“What’s life without fear?”
“I’ll give you whatever you want!”
“There’s no use in offering what we take freely.”
“I’ll sabotage my feeds! I’ll report nothing! I swear!”
“Your feeds are already blocked. There’s nobody in this tiny world but you and us. Help will never come. This ends when we choose, if at all.”
Sometimes we worked out some of our personal issues on people like that. Generally, talking to us only made things worse. There’s not a syllable a Penardu could utter that would soften the heart of an Ilbisoon—maybe a long time ago, but not now. It’s too late to be sorry. It’s been too late for ages.
We’d go home with bloody knuckles and a skip in our steps.
So why did they keep coming back? In a word: business. For a Penardu life is business—not the doing of actual things, no: for a Penardu business means the lazy and incessant jockeying of nonsensical affairs that results in the perpetual swelling of their lawless accounts and imaginary holdings. Ever since those faecal worms seized control of our Hojan moons and factories we had to split our pennies with them, and every year our slice got slimmer and slimmer. The whole star system had gone all rosy and crotch-itchy with money, but none of it ever seemed to drip down all the way back to Ilbis.
It was called an economic boom. And we were supposed to feel lucky. We were told we’d have a hope of understanding it all if we just had enough brains to stick it out through school.
But only charity schools would let me and my kind over the threshold, and charity schools serve only to prepare you for one of two fates: shipping off to Hoj for a life of labour, or running the low streets for grift and gain. So we did sign up for the charity schools—again and again—and then stole away in the night after we’d cleaned out the cupboards. Pretending to be turning over a new leaf was the only way to get close to the nuns’ stash, and we were experts at it. Every one of us.
When I was six years old, I could have any mark crying within five minutes. Any mark, no matter how he pegged his savvy. Just a third of the way through my story and I’d hear them sniff, or slip a finger up inside their mask to wipe at a running eye. “And you’ve no parents at all?”
“No, esteemed.”
“What about school?”
“A man at the school put his thing in my bum, so I ran away.”
I would end up sitting in their hotel suites, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and sipping lemonade. It tickled them pink if I dropped off for a spontaneous nap after that—they would tuck a blanket over me and sometimes capture my holograph. Look at me: I’m so peaceful!
All I needed were five seconds.
A briefly turned back, a bathroom break, a head bowed over a dataplate: their attention would snap back at the sound of the closing door, my little footfalls a light tattoo down the corridor and away, arms loaded with whatever I could grab.
Sometimes they would alert hotel security. Their descriptions of me would make the dour agents chortle. “You want us to find a skinny pink boy in rags with matted hair?” They would gesture out into the streets below the lobby’s panoramic windows, every corner and stoop jammed with unanchored Ilbisoon ragamuffins just like me. “...Which one?”
When I was older and uglier this kind of trick lost its luck. That’s when I graduated to idiot. In time, I really grew into the role. I discovered the careless comfort people felt in the presence of a fool—the confessions they’d make, the idling ideas they’d let show. It wasn’t just marks this worked on, but anyone. To be affable and unthinking made me an easy companion for those who felt easily threatened; they’d work hard to defend their place in my daily idiot’s pantomime, to protect me from being stolen away. Their viciousness could always be turned outward, and I could crouch in its shadow.
For a long while I ran with Jick, a girl with burnt ears who taught me how to rotisserie sewer rats with common street side spices. One day she didn’t come back to the old warehouse where we squatted, so I started hanging around with Baffa. Baffa was an ace at medical scams, so when we were together I did a lot of seizure work. We preyed on religious ambulances, mainly. The greenest volunteers were always so full of trust. Made it easy.
Then one spring Baffa was clubbed to death by a monk with a wheelchair handle. I got away by the skin of my teeth.
“That was some escape, kid.”
“Fornicate yourself.”
“You’ve got the craft and wile.”
“What’s it to you, tit?”
“I work for Ilbis.”
“Motherfornicator. Take your faecal social work someplace else.”
“I’m not a social worker. I’m a member of the army.”
“Faeces. We don’t have no army.”
“Yes, we do. You’ve heard of us. We are the Font of Righteous Fury.”
My head snapped around to face the stranger as he crouched beside me, watching me eat my dumpster treasures in a shaft of dusty light from a hole between corroded rafters. I narrowed my eyes at him, then turned back to my scraps. “Faeces.”
He straightened and brushed the pebbles from his slacks. “Craft and wile,” he said wistfully, gaze cast out over the squat. Little fires burned in places. Conversations murmured. “That’s what Ilbis needs now. The fight for our people’s proper place is not a fair one. Penardun has seen to that. But hardship has taught some of us real craft and wile.” He looked back at me. “If you ever want to serve a greater purpose, we have a place for you. That means two meals a day and a solid roof over your head—and a chance to put an end to good Ilbisoon men and women living...like this.”
He gestured at the squat but my eyes didn’t follow. “Sell it to someone sappier, sphincter sucker. I don’t do causes.”
“Then you really are an idiot. This is the only cause for an Ilbisoon. Otherwise you consent to it all: the wretchedness, the reputation, the desperation. You legitimize it, and damn the next generation to the same dark.”
“Fellate my pony, anus.”
“Yes, you’re tough. Sure. You have to be. Because you live like an animal.” He turned away and began picking his way down through the rubble pile toward the exit. At the ragged gap in the bricks he paused and looked back at me. “But you do have a choice.”
Self-satisfied sanctimonious motherfornicating rectal slurry muckwad.
One winter evening me, Belly and Ert were working the tourist bridge by the harbour. Like all of Ilbis, the bridge was once decorated with beautiful stone statues; like all of Ilbis, the statues had been razed by Penardu iconoclasts during the Reform. Now the bridge was edged with only splintered stone shins and cracked feet marking where the proud figures once stood, and inspired.
I was counting rice. “Six thousand nine hundred and two!” Belly was my caregiver, and Ert was nearby acting as our sympathy catalyst by mocking me to the passersby. “Ha, check out the retard!” We seemed in a way to be the only human beings on the bridge because the stream of figures around us were all masked. If you wanted to read their feelings you had to look at how they were standing or how they moved their hands. The only eyes and lips and cheeks belonged to beggars like us.
A cheap security robot stood by a tall lamp at mid-bridge. The Penardu gave it wide berth. People-shaped robots aren’t allowed on Penardun. The illusion of life gives their god the willies.
The security robots usually ignored us, so we were used to ignoring them. But I noticed when its head swivelled. A second later a kid, maybe seven, came racing through the crowd with a purse clutched to his chest, knocking people aside, his little face pinched in determination. Penardu yelped as they toppled, feet tangling in their long, stupid dresses. The robot started to move in but before it could a wide-shouldered Penardu grabbed the kid by the arm, causing him to stumble across the stones and then cry out as he was snapped back.
In a flash kid sliced his captor’s glove with a blade.
The Penardu reeled back and gasped at the sight of his own blood wetting the fabric around the slice. He clutched at his wrist, looking up as the security robot arrived at his side. “Do you require medical—”
The Penardu shoved the robot back wildly. “Don’t let that thing touch me!” he bellowed, then turned back to see the kid struggling in the arms of other Penardu, his blade lost under shuffling feet. “Hold it! I’m messaging the real police.”
He meant the Penardun Colonial Guard. The kid knew exactly what that meant, for he immediately redoubled his frenetic attempts to wring free from restraining gloves. Though they were adult men and women and he was a child, they stood no chance; they were fighting for mere justice while he was fighting for his life. He was lithe and experienced, and in a blink he had disappeared between their swirling robes. A cry went up through the crowd as it surged away from the disturbance. “It’s loose!”
“Please exit the bridge in an orderly—” began the security robot, cut off to a sputtering buzz as it was knocked aside by a wave of panicked Penardu. Its plastic limbs crunched beneath their boots as they fled the bridge en masse.
“We gotta bail,” Belly shouted, pulling on my arm. “We’re all gonna get fornicated when the guards get here. Come on, Idiot!”
Suddenly the kid, kicking and thrashing, was hauled into sight again. He was picked up off his feet by multiple hands, the crowd hollering in a blended, inhuman voice. The kid reached out blindly and pulled the mask off one of the nearest Penardu. The man shrieked like a girl, stumbling backward, hands clutched over his features as if the twilight air burned him. The crowd howled in shock and rage.
And then they pitched the kid over the side of the bridge.
A sick cheer rose. Belly’s mouth was hanging open, eyes wide. We both gasped as we saw Ert charging into the fray, crying, “You motherless dogs! He was just a kid!” And then, impossibly quickly, Ert was simply swept up into their arms and dumped over the side of the bridge, too.
Before I knew it the beggars all around me where being yanked from their blankets and hefted up over the crowd’s shoulders, cast over the side, their screeches drawn out pitiably as they plummeted to the frigid bay below. Even the Penardu ladies who a moment before had been crying and cowering had turned to the task, mechanically selecting their victims and manhandling them to the edge in cooperative clusters. They stomped on fingers that tried to hold dear to the stone.
The Penardu acted as one—like two dozen appendages swung by a single, invisible puppeteer. In perfect unison they looked to the south.
The bridge shook with marching boots. A wall of colonials forced the mad crowd to flee ahead of their advance, and I could catch glimpses of their terrifying gargoyle masks with hoses for horns and glowing red eyes as I was kicked aside, mashed into the gutter, my jar broken and coloured rice spilling out across the stones.
I knew my arrest was inevitable. I didn’t wait to lace my hands behind my head, protecting my face behind converged elbows. I knew those cruel batons all too well, and prepared for my thrashing.
But the colonials seemed to have no interest in restoring order: instead, inexplicably, horribly, illegally—they picked up where the panicked crowd had left off, grabbing the Ilbisoon beggar children and launching them off the bridge ruthlessly, mechanically, unrepentantly. The screams of the smaller children, in particular, made my heart burn coldly as it hammered in my chest. How could these monsters be called police?
Belly left deep scratches in my arm when she was pulled away. And then three colonials were looming over me, their riot shields speckled red, their eyes aflame. My arms were yanked away from my head and forced down. I stared back at the trio in idiotic horror, crooning and rocking desperately as they leaned in toward me.
They stopped.
I blinked. Why stop now? Why stop at the idiot? How could three colonials have an attack of conscience at exactly the same moment?
One of them growled: “Go.”
I went.
I don’t know how long I ran, but I only stopped when I could do nothing more than stumble and heave. I wandered on without purpose, numb to the low streets around me. Squadrons of security robots marched past me, their metal footfalls echoing off the building fronts. Sirens wailed in the distance. Groups of Ilbisoon toughs armed with whatever they could grab were slinking in the shadows, converging at the bridge. Soon, clouds of black smoke were rising from that quarter of the city.
“They killed children!”
“They’re inhuman!”
“They will answer for this with blood!”
The low streets raged. Overturned cars burned at many intersections. There was no doubt that every way to the high streets had been cordoned off and so my Ilbisoon brethren were left to vent fury only upon each other, the Penardu oppressors, as always, beyond our feeble reach. Anger overflowed. Gangs of men cornered whimpering women in alleys. Shops were looted, the owners assaulted. Ashes floated from the sky, carried from any of many fires. The curfew lamps were flashing, but nobody paid them any mind.
We were hurting only ourselves. We didn’t care. We were responding like a pack of starved dogs.
No wonder they hated us.
I walked all night, and when Dzigai rose and light came again I found myself in the old market plaza, facing the last stall in the fishmonger’s row. The smell churned my stomach. The offerings were far from fresh—some even seemed to writhe with parasitic life beneath their discoloured scales. These fish were not for sale. No: everyone knew that the last stall had a special business. The monger raised his brow at me. “Can I help you, esteemed?”
I swallowed, then nodded. “I want to work for Ilbis.”
He unhitched the curtain behind him, revealing a child-sized hole in the plaza’s stone wall. He gestured at the hole with his stubbled chin. After giving him a long, appraising look I shouldered past him and got on my hands and knees to shuffle inside.
“Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life, kid,” he whispered.
I didn’t respond. I just crawled through the gap in the wall, darkness engulfing me, leaving behind the reek of spoiled fish—and my world as I knew it.
2.
The best part of being a revolutionary was riding on trucks.
There was Ilbisia as the city had always been, a patchwork of stains with flows of ants between islands of junk, and there we were: riding above it, the greasy clouds parting at our prow, the cool wind ruffling our shampooed hair as if we were famous actors or gods. I could look down and see a hundred kids that I had been just like, only months before.
The trucks were not specially marked, but everyone knew they were ours. They knew our fake garbage lorries and cargo haulers, our phony security transports and taxicabs-never-for-hire. We would hang off the sides and wink when we swooped low, letting the common Ilbisoon bask for a moment in being close to the cause. Solemnly, they would wink back.
When trouble came we could rely on the fact that nobody ever seemed quite able to remember our faces, or recall the license strings on our vehicles. Robot details chased us into blind alleys only to find nothing but sad little markets, its patrons swearing up and down it had been quiet all morning—while we hid beneath their stalls. When we didn’t have alibis, alibis sublimated from the thin air and we’d find ourselves supported by a whole residential block of Ilbisoon who turned out to have seen us at key, innocent points throughout the day.
Those folks would get a special little wave of the fingers the next time our trucks went by. One of us would point—to a recycling hub or a gutter. They’d look where we’d pointed, and find a stash of stolen colonial rations or contraband to share amongst themselves. Loyalty to the Font was always rewarded.
And we were rewarded, too. It wasn’t just the walking around money, either, or the allowances for clothing and trinkets. No: it came from the people themselves whose attention and respect were happily offered in exchange for rubbing elbows with someone connected. Girls were giddy in our company, batting their lashes as they hung off enthusiastically embellished tellings of our derring-do against Penardun. Even an idiot like me made friends this way—I’d just wait until everyone else more desirable had paired themselves up and left the bar, then see which poor darling too fat or too sallow or too scarred or too shy remained. The last girl standing often wasn’t a pretty sight, but odds were she was sweeter than her friends.
She might work up the nerve to stammer, “So, um...do you work for Ilbis, too?”
I’d nod and wave her over with an easy smile. “What’re you drinking there, lips?”
And what did I have to do to earn this king’s treatment of pocket money and willing castoffs? The truth is: not much. That was our big secret. Sometimes I’d be asked to loiter in idiot-mode near someplace where I could eavesdrop on a couple of colonials; sometimes I carried messages from one drop point to another, or ferried a basket of reward to some particular apartment. Simple stuff. But it was explained to me and my peers that our principal duty was to remind the common Ilbisoon of our presence, and thereby inspire in them hope that a solution was in the works. Our job was to make it look like being a member of the army was as glamorous as it was noble.
“You must be very brave,” the last girl in the bar would probably observe.
“I just do my part. It’s a motherfornicating ugly job, but somebody’s gotta step up. Somebody’s gotta have the testicles to say, ‘No more, Penardun. No more.’”
“Do you ever worry about losing your life?”
“I don’t think about what they might take away from me. Taking is all they do. No, sunshine, I just try to think about what I’m taking away from them. That’s the kind of giving I can do until it hurts. And then some.”
She would sigh and look away. “I wish I had something to contribute.”
I’d put my arm around her, steer her chin back toward me. Tenderly: “We’ve each got a part to play. We each give what we have to give. For some it’s more, for some it’s less.” A pause, a slight smile. “Your hair sure smells nice.”
“It does?”
“Oh yes. It does. It really, really does.”
My contact was a freckled twenty-year-old from down south who called himself The Glorious Fist. All of our contacts in the army had names like that—The Fateful Equalizer, The Blade of Justice, The Storm of Recompense. Anyway, The Glorious Fist would meet me or me and another guy or two in one of our pre-arranged spots, and he’d pass us a package or whisper a code word to be transmitted or just load our pockets with wage. One day he did none of those things. Instead, he said, “You’ve proven your craft and wile. You’ve earned my trust. I respect you, Idiot.”
Praise was rare. I was taken aback. “Thanks, esteemed.”
“That is why I’ve recommended you. I’ve been told to choose only the best of the cell.” He raised a brow significantly. “We’re being called in on a major operation.”
I swallowed, then strove to stand straighter. “Esteemed!”
He paced the abandoned warehouse floor, leather gloved hands clasped behind his back. “This is our big chance, Idiot. For you and me both. We’re going to be mixing wile with the big boys. This is our opportunity to show them our craft. To make an impression. And when I move up I’ll be taking you along.” He paused, casting his gaze aimlessly over the pigeon excrement streaks running from the broken windows. “This is our chance to get out of this faecal place once and for all.”
I blinked. “Esteemed, where would we go?”
He turned back to face me, his mouth tight and serious but his eyes betraying a twinkle. “Offworld,” he pronounced carefully. “To Penardun itself.”
“You’re fornicating with me.”
He shook his head, holding my eye. “I would never lie to one of my men, boy.”
I won’t go into the details of interplanetary travel. It may seem like a thrilling sort of thing at first blush, but the reality utterly fellates. Especially if you happen to be travelling illegally. Suffice it to say that getting to that little blue twinkle in the night sky—so bright and close, chasing the sun down each night—was tedious and uncomfortable beyond description. Three hundred hours in a cargo capsule smaller than a coffin was just one leg of the journey.
Along the way our unit lost a couple of guys to hypothermia, and one to hyperthermia; one to asphyxia, one to dehydration. One was simply never found. I forgot her face pretty quickly.
I recall desperately eating my own frozen bile. That was a highlight.
But it all seemed worth it on that first amazing morning as my comrades and I rode together in a big red truck, skimming the rooftops and skirting the belfries as we soared over the outskirts of Fingal itself, Penardun’s proud capital. Like seemingly every mechanical thing on the planet, our truck’s front was emblazoned with a garish, stylized face—gritted teeth and giant eyes framed by whirls of colour. We sailed over cars, trolleys and even buildings with faces on them, unseeing eyes inset with cold, sparkling stones...
The sky was a bold dome of winning ribbon blue, broken up only here and there by archipelagos of cloud shining clean and brazen white. Higher up, contrails crisscrossed in fading, smeared out lines.
It was so warm—even the wind was warm! From Penardun, Dzigai seemed like a whole different star. A star of summers.
I hung my long face out into the breeze, watching the suburbs scroll beneath us with my eyes wide. Scores of Penardu sallied to and fro, masks glinting in the sun, their long robes flapping at their heels as they bought bread or hurried to work, cleaned up after their pets or bumped into old friends. It was just a normal morning. They had no idea.
I heard the guys laughing behind me. “Check out Idiot with his head out the window—he looks like a dog!”
“Arf-arf, Idiot!”
“Come on, you mungful anuses,” I shot back. “This is awesome! We’re riding a motherfornicating fire truck!”
They guffawed. The Glorious Fist shook his head, then watched for my reaction as he clanged the bell. I whooped for joy and grinned. Everybody always loved to make me laugh.
The spires of the city core were blue and hazy in the distance. A white fog seemed to bloom out of one of the tallest, and then it started to lean. A few seconds later a sound like thunder cracked, but there was no weather to speak of. More clouds of dust were rising from other quarters of the city. After a heartbeat the wind carried their reports, too. I swung my head back inside the cab wildly, shouting, “Buildings are falling down!”
The Glorious Fist glanced up from his watch, then nodded. “You bet your ass they are.”
It was time for our part. We pulled on firefighter coats that had a fluorescent yellow stripe across the back, and each took a helmet from a locker half-obscured by swaying coils of heavy hose. We lowered our visors and strapped into our harnesses. The truck dove, the pilot making every move according to his clock. The Glorious Fist hovered over him, swaying from a grab bar. We careened down over the high streets where people were running to and fro, shouting into their watches or pointing at the columns of smoke now rising above the skyline. A squadron of police cruisers sped by, the last cars sweeping aside to allow our truck a clear way through. The Glorious Fist grinned.
“Twelve seconds, esteemed.”
“Stay tight.”
We swooped into a narrow corridor between two towers, our sirens echoing off the glass and steel faces. We were jerked violently against our harnesses as the pilot brought the truck to a roaring stop beside a garden terrace high above the grassy streets. A platoon of hose-horned colonials moved quickly to meet us, efficiently carrying two long bags between them. The bags were squirming.
The side hatch of the fire truck rumbled aside and the gangway hit the terrace with a bang. One of the apparent colonials ran up and inside, addressing The Glorious Fist with a thick Ilbisoon accent: “All checks, no marks. Smooth as grease.”
“And the locking helmets?”
“In place and secure.”
“Go now, brother. Power to Ilbis!”
“Power to Ilbis!”
The phony colonials disappeared back inside the tower. The two long, writhing bags were dumped at my feet and then my mates jumped over to button up the hatch even as the pilot peeled us away and into the air with a stomach-swinging lurch. Splashes of sunlight clocked around the cabin. I clutched to my harnesses, mouth pinched shut.
The bags rolled, bumping heavily against the bulkhead. One of them moaned.
“Secure that faeces!” barked The Glorious Fist.
The fire truck climbed, engines keening. Towers flashed past outside, then a wall of rolling black smoke. We passed through it and found ourselves in a swarm of other emergency vehicles settling next to one of the blast sites, the monstrous faces painted on their prows looming toward our windscreen, unblinking through the fumes and ash. The navigation display before the pilot turned red and began to flash. “Faeces!” he cried. “We’re on coordinated control!”
“Fly us out!” bellowed The Glorious Fist as the truck pitched, swooping lower in queue between a brace of ambulances. Down below people were stumbling over a field of broken glass, carrying or dragging those injured worse than themselves. Some of them left crimson trails.
The pilot smacked the controls in frustration. “I can’t!”
The Glorious Fist spun on us. “Prepare to fend off!”
The truck bobbed to a stop. The pilot tore open the access panel beneath the controls and started jimmying with the connections, his hands slick with sweat. The side door rumbled open admitting smoke and a smell like a barbecue gone wrong. People were screaming. I found myself face to face with a real firefighter, his mask blistered and blackened. “My leg,” he wheezed through the grille, “I need a medkit—”
I stumbled backward. “What do I do?”
“Hit him, Idiot!”
The pilot jumped up as the navigation controls turned green. The injured firefighter had grabbed my shoulder and was leaning into me, smoke still rising from his wounded leg. We both fell into the bulkhead as the pilot yanked back on the stick.
“Idiot!” thundered The Glorious Fist.
I threw the firefighter off of me. He hit the threshold but caught a grab bar, his legs dangling out of the truck’s open side as we rapidly rose. I picked up a toolbox and bashed at his hands until he had to let go. I looked away when he fell.
The Glorious Fist dogged the hatch, breathing hard. He looked over at me. “Good man.”
I nodded, pressing my hands together so they wouldn’t shake.
The truck flew on. The pilot killed the sirens after a while, taking us in low over tree-studded exurban manor houses and gleaming pleasure domes as we put more and more distance between ourselves and the mayhem in Fingal’s core. It had all happened so fast, and was now so far away. Was it even real? It seemed less so as the pilot piped in some pop music over the speakers—a catchy tune about forbidden love at a masquerade. The drumming was really impressive.
The Glorious Fist withdrew a fancy-looking box from his inside pocket, then popped it open and offered it to each of us. “You want a cigar, Idiot? You deserve it.”
I hesitated, frowning. “What do I do with it?”
“You smoke it, boy.”
“It kind of looks like a long, skinny turd.”
“Tastes better, though.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
And then it wasn’t too hard to put all the screaming and fire behind me. I puffed experimentally on my cigar and bopped to the tunes. Once again the day was nothing but sunshine and a gleaming red fire truck, mussing the treetops as we soared, smoking and laughing and telling each other dirty jokes. The long bags had stopped moving, so they became just like another piece of furniture.
The afternoon aged. Mountains rose up before us, their summits snowy but the lower altitudes lush with mossy tracts of wild trees and bush. We listened to the music very loud. For a while a flock of birds rode along behind us in our wake, honking and flapping. I really got a kick out of that, and honked right back at them. Everybody roared.
The Glorious Fist checked his watch often. “We should be touching down in fifteen.”
The pilot nodded, fidgeting with the navigation arc. “Fifteen,” he confirmed.
He deftly landed us in a small field of long grass beside a cluster of ramshackle wooden cottages. The sun was starting to sink behind the treeline, casting long, purple shadows. The peaks around us glowed gold. The engine spun down, leaving a great, heavy silence. Crickets chirped. My buddies Rex and Weeds grunted as they hefted the two long bags out of the hold.
I hopped off the truck beside them, the grass stalks tickling my hands. “It’s really pretty here.”
Suddenly there was a commotion. One of the bags was on the ground and then a figure was rising from it, battering desperately at whatever hands touched him. He wore a private security uniform and his head was encased in a metal helmet, an opaque visor before his face. He struck out blindly, falling over himself. His flailing arm caught me in the face and I staggered over sideways into the grass. Five guys jumped on his back a second later.
The Glorious Fist shook his head. “I told you,” he called in a crisp, cold voice, “that any trouble you give me would come back to you. You should’ve listened.”
A muffled grunt from within the helmet: “You have no idea what you’ve done, you Ilbisoon bastards.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find we know precisely what we’re doing.”
Surprisingly, the man laughed. “You’re fornicated! Every one of you! You’re already fornicated and you don’t even know it!”
“No,” replied The Glorious Fist with a careless lilt. “Not so long as we have her, we’re not. And we got her. We took her from right under your nose.”
“You took nothing!”
The Glorious Fist rolled his eyes and looked up to the men restraining the security agent, then down again. “Esteemed, I don’t like your attitude. It’s bad for morale. I run a tight ship. Can’t make exceptions. So let me explain this to you just one more time: the crucible in which your head is contained has not one, but two, functions.” He paced through the tall grass, idling picking the heads off some blades. He turned to face his prisoner again. “Yes, of course, it’s a feed-block. Naturally, you had to be isolated from the grid.” The Glorious Fist knelt down in the grass, squatting between the held man and the second long bag. “It is also an instrument of persuasion.” He blew the bits of grass clear from his palms, then straightened. “There are nine different nozzles within your helmet, designed for the strategic release of concentrated acid focused on particular parts of your face and head.”
“You’ve already failed. Nothing you can do changes that.”
“You may be missing the point, esteemed. She is necessary to our plans; you are not. Thus, in order to impress her with the seriousness of this situation, I think I want to open all your nozzles at once. Because I think the noise you’ll make will be...educational for her.”
The second long bag was breathing, its sides moving slightly as it lay in the grass. The pace of that breathing accelerated after a sharp intake of breath.
“Yes,” said the Glorious Fist, turning in that direction. “I know you’re listening, Esteemed Constant. I know you’ll be able to hear everything. I hope for your sake that you take it to heart.”
The security agent bucked briefly, then sagged. “Fornicate yourself,” he hissed.
The Glorious Fist snorted. “Why fornicate myself when we can all take turns fornicating her?”
Instead of making him furious this comment only made the bound agent chuckle mirthlessly again. “You, Ilbisoon scab, are going to feel like an idiot when you finally recognize the truth.”
The Glorious Fist beetled his brow, eyes narrowed. “Enough,” he snapped. “Open the spigots. Melt his motherfornicating face off.”
And that’s what happened. I looked away when yellow smoke started curling out of the helmet’s seams. I had already jammed my fingers into my ears because the sounds the man made were definitely the worst part. He flopped around on the ground until all sorts of weird liquid started spilling out near the chin, and then he just lay still and kind of twitched a bit. The smell made me throw up. A couple of other guys threw up, too.
The second long bag was quietly sobbing.
“Get a hold of yourselves, you fops!” growled The Glorious Fist. He pointed at a bunch of us with a quivering finger. “Burial detail!” Then he turned to the rest. “Get her into the pen.” Then he turned to me. “Clean up that locking helmet. We might need it for somebody else. Get every last bit of crud out, got that, Idiot?”
I nodded, feeling my stomach roll over queasily. “Yes, esteemed.”
The sun set. The air turned cold. We each hopped to our jobs.
3.
The main cottage was quaint. Hand-made furniture, oars mounted over the doors, embroidered scenes from nature yellowing on the walls. There were moth-eaten clothes in the drawers—gay summer dresses—some sized for children and some for adults. Outside the front window teetered a bird-feeder on a decaying, leaning pole.
Birds hopped around the feeder, chittering, splashing in rainwater collected around its rim. They didn’t look any different from the ones we had on Ilbis—brown, nervous, faintly mechanical in their staccato motions. The Creator’s wind-up toys.
The door of the cottage was a giant yawning mouth. The teeth were lanterns.
Inside, The Glorious Fist manned the breakfast nook. He was surrounded by encrypted squawk boxes, turning the knob slowly from one channel to the next while pressing a small speaker into his ear. He frowned, eyes closed, overlooked by a hanging set of mouldering oven mitts with zany, crooked grins.
Chia tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re up, Idiot.”
I blinked. “Up for what?”
She handed me a cattle-prod. “Guard duty.”
I crossed the dew-damp field. Dzigai was just cresting the mountains, shafts of gold light spilling between the peaks and illuminating the slowly churning banks of fog as they burned off. The air smelled like cold salad.
When I got to the entrance Rex and Weeds pulled the camouflaged outer flap up for me, then stood aside as the inner aperture ground open. I fretted at the edge, wondering why people were always expecting me to crawl into dark holes. “Get moving, Idiot,” grunted Rex. I sighed and dropped inside, feeling my way along the antetunnel and then bumping into the guy I was supposed to be relieving, Tober.
“Idiot!”
“I’m sorry.”
He was sitting on a cloth-draped bench in the near end of a small cave. The ceiling was low and damp, every small sound seeming amplified and intimate against it, the rock hugged by a nearly invisible mesh of metallic threads comprising the wireless feed barrier. I squirmed in beside Tober, eyes blinking in the gloom. “Where is she?” I whispered.
He gestured vaguely as he gathered his things. “Behind the screen.”
“What’s she doing back there?”
“Don’t know. Wiping her hole, maybe.” He grimaced once as he straightened and then again as he bumped his head on the ceiling. “Faeces.”
I leaned aside so Tober could crawl out. He farted in the tunnel, then laughed. I swore after him, chuckling, too. He was always such a card.
When I turned back to the cave I was startled. Like a fop, I gasped.
A girl was squatting there with her back toward me. At my noise she spun on heel, hands flying to cover her face with a neat, symmetrical mask of laced fingers. She glared at me through the gaps, then narrowed her eyes and turned away again, hands returning to the metal washing bucket.
She dried her hands and then proceeded to lay down on a simple cot, all the while keeping her face oriented away from me or expertly shielding it with her interwoven fingers. Her hands moved gracefully from one masking configuration to another as perspective warranted, practised and purposeful.
After a while I couldn’t help but ask. “What’s with all the fornicated finger tricks?” I didn’t want to come on too strong, but I was curious. I tried the sympathetic approach. “I mean, are you ugly or something?”
She was lying on the cot, back toward me. She wore some kind of jogging suit, like maybe they’d grabbed her while she was doing her exercises or something. She was pretty young. Older than me, though. Older than The Glorious Fist. After a moment she sniffed and said, speaking into the cave wall, “Whatever should that have to do with anything?”
I frowned. “...Wherever is what?”
“I really can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“Same here. Where’d you learn to talk so retarded?”
She didn’t reply. Typical Penardu snobbery. Like my words weren’t even worthy of her ears or something. I shifted on the bench, then crossed my legs. I checked my watch, but it had lost its charge. “Mung.”
“Profanity detracts from your authority.”
I was startled again. “Huh?”
“It may seem counter-intuitive to you,” she continued, speaking blandly into the wall, “but it’s true. You undermine yourself when you swear every other word. You don’t sound tough.”
I sneered. “Rape yourself, dog. You don’t want to know how tough I am.”
“Why don’t you beat your chest and roar, to see whether I become impressed?”
“Penardu are all the same. Fornicated racists. I’m no animal.”
Neither of us said anything for a long while. I was just thinking how blisteringly standoffish she was, when really she ought to be grateful because I was being nice to her and everything. Then I realized that she was sleeping. I looked around a bit, shifting slightly closer. Beside her cot was the washing bucket, and then a few steps away a folding screen set up in front of a second bucket. A few flies were buzzing around the rim of that one. It didn’t smell good. But she did.
I shifted again, moving closer to the cot, pebbles skipping from under my haunches. She smelled like flowers and desert mixed together somehow, mellowing over a base of newly dried fear. Her ink black hair was pulled up in a now ragged bun. Around the base of her neck I could see marks left by the locking helmet’s clamps. There was an emblem of two pink rabbits on the leg of her pants.
She was just some girl.
It may sound stupid, but it made me feel weird to realize that.