But now, he somehow knew, he was entering a new world: a world of dream, where all his hopes and his childhood imaginings might still come to pass.
He remembered getting stiffly out of his bed, throwing the bedclothes on the floor, dressing leadenly in yesterday's shirt and pants. No shower: freshwater showers at the SRO cost three marks for ten minutes, and he could only afford two each week. Salt water was cheaper, but it came untreated straight from the Bay; it made him itch and stink worse than he would if he didn't bother to wash at all. He'd used a cream depilatory to smooth his stubbled cheeks, and only then had he realized he'd overslept by half an hour. He'd raced to the clinic without breakfast, and had been able to slide into his cubicle and log on with a full minute to spare; this had allowed him the luxury of answering the Artisan cunt's fisheye with a slightly smug smile.
A dim, she'd begun sternly.
Kollberg had hunched over his keyboard, drawing breath for his automatic correction, but he saw the lift of her eyebrow and the compression at one corner of her mouth that said she was waiting for his correction, hoping he would remind her that his name was Arturo, purely so that she could call him Arthur again: another demonstration of how easily she could trample on whatever little dignity he thought to retain. He'd refused to give her the satisfaction. Instead, he had closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his composure, and said politely, "Yes, Artisan?"
"Arthur," she repeated heavily, "I know you're aware that Clinic policy requires data entrars to be on the premises fifteen minutes before log-on. Don't think that you'll be able to sneak away for coffee or to use the bathroom before your 0930 break. You should have arrived early enough to take care of that before you sat down."
"Yes, Artisan."
"I'll be watching you."
His cheeks flamed; he could feel the sneaking stares of the other clerks even through the cubicle walls; he could picture them paused, holding breath, leaning slightly, fingers silently poised above keypads, heads cocked as they listened raptly to his humiliation. "Yes, Artisan."
Kollberg suffered in the ringing silence.
Finally, the Artisan cunt had swept her eyes around at the other clerks, and the muffled thuttering of keystrokes had begun to spread throughout the terminal suite, and he had been able to breathe again. It was at that point, Kollberg decided, that he must have fallen asleep; up to then, it had been a perfectly unexceptional day.
The progress bar filled, and vanished.
For an instant the screen flashed pure white, as though its crystals were breaking down. The flash hurt—hurt his face, his temples, hurt his ears, hurt like it had reached inside his skull and squeezed his eyeballs together.
Kollberg gasped, for from the pain blossomed a vision, unfolding as though it downloaded directly into his brain: he saw himself recasted as an Administrator, returned to the arms of the Studio in triumph, carried through the iron gates on the shoulders of cheering undercastes.
Flash
Not only recasted, but upcasted: Businessman Kollberg, at the podium in One World Center in New York, accepting the Studio Presidency from Westfield Turner.
Flash
Leisureman Kollberg, retiring from the Studio to his private island in the Ionian Sea, to finish his alloted span in a life of sybaritic comfort and satyric pleasures unimaginable to the undercastes .. . And that was when he knew. This was more than a vision: it was an offer.
And it was a test.
He had been seven years in the desert, and now he was being offered dominion over all the kingdoms of the Earth. There was more here than any burst-feed from the net into his brain. This was an offer of power unimaginable: the power of a god.
He muttered, through teeth clenched hard enough to make his gums bleed, "Get thee behind me, Satan."
Where the progress bar had vanished, in the middle of his screen, now stood a menu box with two radio buttons:
Kollberg set his jaw and straightened his spine. With pride in himself and in his calling, with pure, unshakable determination, he moved the cursor to SERVICE, and hit RETURN.
His annunciator chimed, and the menu box disappeared. His screen wiped to brilliant, eye-piercing white that cast black shadows behind him and fogged his vision as though he stared into the sun.
His breath caught and his stomach twisted: something huge and foul forced its way into his mouth, into his throat—tears swam in his eyes, and his face burned with agony as the light charred his flesh. But still, somehow, through the blinding light and the unbearable pain, he could read one last message, written in stark black upon the blazing white.
THOU ART MY OWN SON, WHOM I LOVE. WITH THEE I AM WELL PLEASED.
Then it entered him with power: into his eyes, down his throat, in through his nose, his ears, ripping open his rectum and jamming up the length of his shriveled penis, forcing into him with howling lust; it filled him to bursting, swelling him from within, stretching him thinner and thinner like a weather balloon expanding toward destruction, while it dissolved and digested his guts, his heart, lungs and bones, everything within the stretching membrane of his skin. His eyeballs expanded, threatening to burst from his face, to explode from the pressure that built within them.
He screamed in pain as he squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to keep his eyes in their sockets by sheer strength—and as though that sudden shriek had broken the spell, the pain vanished without even the faintest twinge to mark its passing.
He opened his eyes again. Everyone was staring at him, leaning out of their carrels or peering meekly over the dividers, showing nothing but greasy hair and curious eyes. The Artisan cunt looked distinctly alarmed.
"Arthur," she said severely. "I hope there is some explanation for this . . . for this breach of discipline. If you're ill, you should have reported to the Physician before your scheduled log-on. If not ..." She let the sentence trail off into unspecified threat.
His screen was dark. It gave back a faint reflection of his face, and he could see that nothing of this ordeal had marked him: he looked exactly the same as he had one minute before. But now he felt suspended, floating at equilibrium, airy and filled with light. He understood now: yes, he was dreaming.
This was a dream, all of it.
It would always be a dream.
He would never have to wake up.
"Marie . . . ?" He murmured languidly. Marie was the Artisan cunt's name. "I think I'm going to fuck you."
One side of her mouth spasmed down toward her hard jaw as though she'd suffered a paralytic stroke. She backed away from him, making guttural uhm, mm, erm noises deep in her throat; then she said something unspecific about a breakdown, and something else about calling a Physician.
Kollberg slid the tip of his tongue in a slow meaty circuit around his slack lips. He became aware, looking at her, that she and he were not truly distinct individuals; that, in fact, he was a more potent expression of an energy that they both shared. She was a leaf, but he was the tree .. . No, that wasn't right. The concept continued to organize itself within him—or, perhaps, he around it. More like: she was a building, and he was the city.
She was human, and he was humanity.
He saw where she fit into him, and he into her, and now he could feel the lives of the Laborers around him: their cool firefly sparkles fed his landscape of light. He knew them thoroughly, inside and out, their petty hungers and their pale lusts, their tiny pathetic hopes and their private niggard fears. The wave front of his expanding, consciousness outrippled with geometric acceleration, swelling the more with each mind that he swallowed: through the building, through the block, reaching out into the city. Here and there he tasted lives that were familiar: the fetid swamps of the useless on the streets of the District; the ugly fantasies of his SRO roommate, masturbating at a public urinal; the smug self-righteous timidity of his onetime secretary Gayle Keller; the blank wirehead dedication of Studio techs and the delicious devotion of Worker secmen.
And perhaps this wasn't a dream, after all; perhap
s the life of Arturo Kollberg had been a dream, from his childhood disgraced by the miscegenation of his mixed-caste parents, through his spectacular rise to the Studio Chairmanship and his still-more-spectacular fall.
Perhaps he was only now waking up.
He touched the scattered sparks that were the individual lives of the Board of Governors. He gifted them all with a small portion of his gratitude and gave them each the interior warmth and satisfaction of seeing a well-done job come to its fruition. They, in turn, gladly gave up the devotion that he required of them. His loyal priesthood had brought him forth in the body; he loved them for it, and they him.
With echoes of power ringing in his head, Kollberg wondered what he should do now—and the answer was obvious.
Whatever I want.
Joined with that vast sea of human minds, the choice of service and self vanished: there could be no difference between them. His gaze fell once more upon Marie, and sharpened its focus, and he offered his carious teeth to her in a shit-colored smile.
"You stay right there," she ordered, pale as milk. "Take one step out of your cubicle, and I'll call the Social Police."
"No need," Kollberg said, drawing out the word into a drawl of happy lust. "They're already here."
The office door slammed open as though kicked, and Social Police flooded the room, a riot platoon in full combat gear: twenty-five mirror-masked officers in ballistic armor, power rifles slanted across their chests, shock batons dangling from their belts. Everyone but Kollberg froze in place at their desks; in a sudden accession to their ancestral herd instincts, the data clerks understood that to move was to set oneself out from the crowd. To set oneself out from the crowd was to be marked.
They knew: the Artisan supervisor, she had been marked.
Kollberg moved to the center of the room, seeing his own face reflected in every single one of the mirror masks. Those reflections smiled upon him, and he upon them. The nearest officer inclined his head, just a trifle. "At your will," his digitized voice confirmed flatly.
"Seal the mom," Kollberg murmured. Then a better idea floated up from the hollow core of what had once been his brain. "No--seal the building."
The officer crossed his arms to tap out orders on his suit's forearm keypads.
Kollberg turned, his movement graceful and effortless, a weightless ballet. He met the eyes of the Artisan cunt, and his penis stiffened so suddenly that his breath came thick and hot. His testicles burned. "Her," he said, pointing.
She made a gagging noise, deep in her throat, and turned as though to bolt toward the inner offices. Two soapies sprang after her and tackled her to the floor. She moaned, and cried, and begged. Kollberg stepped over and stood above the three of them.
"Her clothes."
One of the officers held her pinned, grinding her face into the filthy polyester shag of the carpet, while the other unfolded a pocket knife and sliced away her clothes. Her flesh was pale and slack, pockets of fat bulging across her ass, down the sides of her thighs. Kollberg opened the fly of his dungarees, and his penis sprang out. "Turn her over. She has to kiss me when I come."
The officers rolled her onto her back, and one of them forced her legs apart. Her breasts spread huge and limp along her ribs, her nipples like used condoms pointing toward her elbows. Hmp, Kollberg thought. Not plastic, after all. He lowered himself between her knees.
He had to spit on her crotch for lubrication.
His penis slid into her, and he humped her thoughtfullly, dispassionately, regarding her anguished sobbing struggle with a detached interest as she thrashed under him, held by the relentless grip of the Social Police. Fucking her was interesting, in an abstract sort of way; because they were one, he was also fucking himself—and he was watching himself fuck her through the eyes of his stunned coworkers. Like masturbating while looking in a mirror.
This, he felt, was the ideal way to get up in the morning.
"And, you know what?" he said. "I woke up hungry."
He lowered his head and sank his teeth into her breast. Her flesh was tough, stringy and old, and she struggled harder and screamed more, but after a bit of work he managed to tear a chunk free. He chewed it slowly, interested in its delicate flavor and rubbery texture, but in the end it meant no more to him than if he'd bitten off a hangnail. He licked her blood from his lips, nodded to himself, smiled, then bent his head for another bite.
3
The live special report of Adventure Update gleamed and flickered in the mirror on Tan'elKoth's desk. Jed Clearlake had caught up with Hari Michaelson at a convention in Los Angeles and was now conducting a live interview from the convention floor—giving Michaelson a worldwide audience to make his case about the "HRVP crisis on Overworld"--while in the background hundreds of bizarrely dressed fans capered and cavorted for the video pickups.
Though the spectrum of costumes reflected admiration for hundreds of Actors active, retired, and dead, the majority of those picked out by the cameras advertised Caine's continuing popularity. Dozens were costumed as Caine himself, many as Pallas Ril, some as Berne or Purthin Khlaylock or the Khulan g'Thar; some few—generally poorly groomed and enormously fat—had costumed themselves as Ma'elKoth.
Tan'elKoth gave only a fraction of his attention to the report; mostly, he studied his visitors.
Arturo Kollberg sat at the ex-Emperor's side, staring at the screen with monomaniac fixity; his rubbery piscine mouth hung open, and he made half-audible panting noises like a tomcat in rut. He had arrived in the company of a four-man enforcement squad of the Social Police. The four officers boxed Kollberg and Tan'elKoth, standing at riot-ready around them, hands on shock batons and power pistols. The mirrored face shields of their helmets glinted with the reflections of the Adventure Update report, and with pinpoint distortions of Kollberg's and Tan'elKoth's screenlit faces.
So far, Tan'elKoth had been unable to determine if they were Kollberg's jailers, or his bodyguards.
The call from the Board of Governors had come only minutes before Kollberg's arrival. You are acquainted with Laborer Arturo Kollberg. Laborer Kollberg has our full confidence in this matter. Treat with him as you would with us.
He knew that dangerous forces interacted here below his level of perception, like predatory sharks jockeying for position around a sinking boat. The Social Police officers did not defer to Kollblerg, nor did they seem to direct him; in fact, Kollberg had spoken only to Tan'elKoth since their arrival, and the soapies had remained facelessly silent. He also couldn't guess if any of them realized that their powered weapons were perfectly useless in the Curioseum's ON field; without its nerve-tangling discharge, a shock baton was no more lethal than a whiffle bat.
As Tan'elKoth studied them, he flicked his vision into mindview now and again; this he could do as effortlessly as an ordinary man blinks. When he did so quickly enough, cycling back and forth with ordinary vision, he could sometimes catch glimpses of some strange energy that surrounded all five of them. Not their Shells—they didn't even seem to have Shells in the ordinary sense—but rather a strange colorless distortion. This odd energy or distortion would vanish as soon as he fixed his gaze upon it he saw it only as fleeting twists of reality in his peripheral vision.
Kollberg had changed beyond recognition in the six years since his trial. Had Tan'elKoth not been told to expect him, he would have had no idea who this thin, somnolent, ill-looking man might be. Their arrival had brought with it a smell: blood and more than blood, thick and meaty and sweetly rank: the fermenting shit of a carnivore. In the near darkness of the apartment it was difficult to tell, but Tan'elKoth thought the bloody stench might emanate from Kollberg himself—what remained of the man's hair seemed to be caked with something, and his face bore either some kind of birthmark or a smear of filth.
"The ultimate goal of your masters has never been a mystery to me," Tan'elKoth said by way of a preamble. "It was instantly clear that this release of HRVP was a ploy to increase the Earth presence on Overworld."
<
br /> "Was it?" Kollberg said tonelessly. His voice was thick and meaty, inhuman, as though the choking stench that cloaked him had itself somehow spoken aloud. "Clear?"
"Of course. That's why you target the elves: They're cute. Cute creatures dying horrible deaths are ideal tools to mobilize public opinion. Once a few thousand elves die, the entire Leisure caste will clamor for a massive relief effort; the staunchest rock-ribbed Hands Off advocates on the Leisure Congress will be the first to insist that hundreds of thousands of your people should be shipped to Overworld to combat the disease. Within days, weeks at most, your people are fully in place across the entire continent. It is easy enough to invent excuses to remain, once there—and suddenly, Earth is no longer restricted to a tiny mining colony in the mountains. Suddenly there is cropland, forests for timber, uncontaminated fisheries, billions of tons of coal, crude oil, and space—simple space, to relieve the pressure of fourteen billion lives on Earth. This is how I know that HRVP is merely a dodge; in fact, I anticipate that your epidemic will mysteriously blow itself out, not long after your relief effort reaches its peak. It's clear that your Bog must have some method for controlling the infection—uncontrolled, it would destroy too many profitable ecosystems. The Board of Governors would not damage something as valuable as the Studio System, did they not anticipate decades and centuries of ever-increasing returns."
"You're very perceptive," Kollberg murmured.
"I am Tan'elKoth." And yet—a niggling worm of doubt slithered through the back of his mind—he did not say I was correct.
"What do you propose?"
"An alliance. As I told your masters," Tan'elKoth said, "we have a common goal. Humanity has been locked in a struggle against extinction on my world for a thousand years; we vie with elves, dwarfs, krr'x, and ogrilloi for living space; we struggle against dragons in the mountains and leviathans at sea. In the midst of all this, we continue to war upon each other, giving aid to our enemies. With the power of Earth, we could overwhelm our enemies and ensure our survival—ha, I would not even need your technology: send me ten percent of your Labor caste and I could drown our foes with sheer number"