Future Crimes Part 51

At the roulette table next to her, the croupier's eyes promised her a winner. He poised his fingers above the wheel, and she dropped to her knees to search the coa.r.s.e weave of the carpet under his table for the careless droppings of a winner.

"Sixty," the croupier announced.

He was teasing her, she thought. Amusing himself while he waited. He had to be--there were only thirty six numbers on the wheel.

The whirr of the wheel began again.

"Sixty." She heard the click of his Lucite marker She sat perfectly still and waited, knowing she had run out of time. Then soft pink fingers lifted her up the length of an immaculate white linen suit, and the security man crooked his arm.

"And to whom do you belong?" he asked, removing his dark gla.s.ses.

Desperately afraid, hoping to save herself, Pia began the required response. It was no use. She had come too far to retract now.

"To myself," she said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster.

To her amazement, the man bowed his head slightly, as if acknowledging that she had said the right thing. She watched the gaslights reflect off his bald head.

"Who are you?" she said, when he stood erect once more.

"Are you one of Their messengers? One of Them?"

He smiled and she noticed the fine wrinkles around his eyes. He's not ugly after all, she thought. The woman's words came back to her: "I am whoever you want me to be." He's the King of Siam, she decided, waiting for the messenger to answer.

"I'm a dreamer like you," he said.

"Aren't you a messenger?"

"Yes. We're all dreamers. Rebels."

Slowly, Pia was beginning to understand.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Sixty-five. I have ten more years of apprentices.h.i.+p to serve."

"Before you become one of Them?" The man nodded.

Pia looked back at the casino; it was the ant.i.thesis of everything she had left behind, yet it was neither better nor worse.

"What happens to me now?" she asked.

"If you wish, you may become one of us."

"One of Them, or a messenger? An enforcer of the rules I've always detested?"

He looked amused at her anger.

"Most people prefer narrow boundaries. Strict rules," he said.

"It makes life easier for them."

She started to protest.

"Isn't it wonderful how They make everything simple for us," the athlete's voice echoed back at her.

"What about those of us who'd prefer the challenge of a less simple life? What about those of us who'd rather control our own destinies?"

He gestured at the casino but said nothing, as if the answer to Pia's question only counted if she found it for herself.

"Is that why They let me come here?" she asked.

"To show me that making choices results in chaos? I don't believe it.

There has to be something in between."

"I'm giving you a choice now," the man said.

"You can go back to California and conform. You can stay here and try to make it as one of the have-nots, or you can come with me."

"And do what?"

"Try to make as many people as possible happy while you help us search for the road in between."

He crooked his arm and waited. Once again, he was bowing slightly, waiting for her decision.

It was there again, Pia thought, that comfortable sense of familiarity that she had always felt around the messengers and enforcers. That was when, suddenly, she knew. The man read her face and smiled as she slid her arm through the triangle of his elbow.

She should have known when he'd said he was a rebel and a dreamer. They were the ones like her, the ones who survived despite the rules and the rule-makers, or perhaps even because of the restrictions.

"Would there be any need for rebels and dreamers if things were perfect?" Pia asked as, together, she and the King of Siam moved toward the door marked EXIT. If she was right, she thought, she'd at least be trying to find a middle path between rigidity and decadence, a moderate road that allowed room for both leaders and followers. And if she was wrong .. .

She looked up at the tall man at her side. Even if she was wrong, she thought, she was leaving with the King of Siam. If nothing else, she was playing Anna at last.

by Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is the author of Dark Father, Hexes, Shards, and The Dead Past. He is the a.s.sistant editor of Pirate Writings magazine and reviews books for Mystery Scene and Mystery News. His short fiction has sold to Hot Blood 6 and 7, 700 Wicked Little Witch, 365 Scary Stories, Deathrealm, Hardboiled, Terminal Fright, and others. A collection of five intertwined stories ent.i.tled Pentacle was recently published by Pirate Writings Press. All of the stories therein have made the Honorable Mention list of Datlow and Windling's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.

A furious, burning wind tearing east off the desert sand-blasted the windows as the hydrocephalic kid, heaving his immense head forward out of the foam lined cranial clamps, pressed his cracked lips to the gla.s.s and whimpered, "From the Well."

Schaffer's team had done a good job remaking Jeffy Grant's bedroom and bringing it up to hospital specs-blindingly white, sterile, and packed with whining equipment that looked impressive and didn't do anything at all. Even in the strictly-regulated antiseptic environment, the new chief deprogrammer and his medical a.s.sistants stank of nervous sweat, bile, and single malt scotch. I didn't much blame them.

Sandra Grant quieted her son and resettled him into the angled platform that served as his bed. He couldn't lie flat or the shunts wouldn't drain properly; if he tried to turn over, the shards of his damaged skull would stab inward and kill him. She smoothed his cherubic cheek and stared down for another minute before letting Schaffer's team return to study their patient and pretend they were deeply involved with curing him.

She dipped her face into her hands, and I spotted the barely noticeable surgical scars on the back of her neck, like faint love scratches made in the early mo ming She appeared to be only in her mid-fifties, but ductile derma-polymers hadn't even been used in the last twenty years. She must've been among one of the first trial groups to undergo the expensive, painful process before the new transplantation techniques were developed to rebuke infirmity and old age. I could tell the most recent procedures had fixed up a couple of earlier botched facial alterations.

She had to be at least ninety now, and I admired the will it would've taken her to suffer a synthetic uterus implant so she could bear more children at that stage of her life. Being married to a millionaire husband had its advantages, even if Fredrik Grant proved to be stupid enough to hire an idiot like Schaffer.

Her hair, once blonde like the few remaining wisps hanging above her son's ears, had converted to a tangy saffron. Her eyes were brown and angry and fertile, but they'd probably been replaced at least twice by now. A crucifix dangled around her throat, shedding a reflected drop of light against the ceiling, but I could see by the ingrained grime that she'd just started wearing it again. She'd put it on out of a willfulness to hold tightly to something--even a lost G.o.d--from an 204 age before the coming of the Tenfew, Children of the Well.

Jeffy clapped and giggled, pointing.

"Mom, from the Few, from the Well."

Sandra Grant turned to me, her face so filled with the conflicts of the earth that I saw somebody else there for a second, familiar to me.

"That's all he says.

Maybe it's all any of them can say, dancing and splas.h.i.+ng, trying to drown themselves or whatever it is they think they're doing." She smiled at him as he watched the dust swirling and pecking at the gla.s.s.

"But at least he still calls me Mom. I suppose that means he recognizes me, somewhere, and wants to share what he's found." Mahogany eyes she hadn't been born with narrowed and hardened.

"Cultist maniacs. They did this to my child. They're doing this to everyone's children. They destroyed my son."

Technically, they hadn't, so far as the boy's current state went.

Schaffer had introduced the streamlined viral infection when they'd retrieved Jeffy from the Tenfew. It had been meant to re comprise his personality, memory, and everything else that makes up a normal fourteen-year-old kid. Instead the modified virus had shattered his central nervous system and gutted his mind. A flawed, self-perpetuating neural-nanotech interface had blitzkrieged through the tender convoluted matter of his brain and continued to breed, swelling first the cerebrum, destroying the thalamus, the temporal lobe, followed closely by the cerebellum, causing ma.s.sive organic damage. His head was now four times larger than normal, full of microscopic machinery and viruses, with shunts in front, back, and along the sides to drain off fluid and nanotech waste.

It didn't help.

He sat up gaping in the direction of the Citadel, still smiling with only about a tenth of his intellect left. That remaining portion couldn't recall his name or how to tie his shoes or what it meant to be depressed for being a hydrocephalic incapable of lying flat on his back without killing himself. He did remember the Tenfew, though, and the power of water and rebirth; nothing they did could challenge or change that, and so nothing they did could ever make him anything less than happy.

Schaffer, the former chief deprogrammer who'd led the a.s.sault on the Citadel and created the deprogramming bug, a man known to botch jobs but who had a genius for s.h.i.+fting blame, was no longer a member of his own team. I suspected he was also no longer among the living.

"What's your name?" Sandra Grant asked.