Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  "Your Hound is finished," he said, drawing their attention.

  The man on Margle's left swung and fired. Ti deflected the pins, all but one. That one he redirected to the man who had shot. The pin sunk in his chest, its poison shooting through him. He gagged, doubled over, and dropped.

  "Turn yourself in, Margle," Ti said wearily. "I won't kill you if you'll turn yourself in."

  But Margle and the remaining man were crouched behind the sofa. They were not ready to give up just because their target had gotten in a lucky shot. In the dark it had appeared to be a lucky shot and nothing more. They couldn't see that his hands were gone.

  "You're crazy," Margle said. "You were crazy for getting into this in the first place."

  "Why did you kill Taguster?"

  "Why should I tell you?"

  Apparently, they could not see him in the dark. Only the dead man had spotted him, and now the others were waiting to zero in on his voice, or waiting for him to move and give himself away,

  "You're going to kill me, aren't you—or I will kill you. Either way, telling me won't make a difference, will it?"

  "He was on PBT."

  "Drugs?"

  "We supplied."

  "What excuse is that to kill him?"

  Margle chuckled as if he were going lax and unwatchful. But Ti knew, if he moved, Margle would fire a murderous barrage—all of which would miss, of course. "It was getting too expensive for him. So he decided to gather information on us. He hoped to turn the information over to the government in return for licensing as a legal addict. Then he could get his drugs free. But he got too nosy, and our boy became suspicious. We ransacked his house when he was out, and we found his file on us. Almost complete enough to turn over to the proper Federal authorities."

  "That shouldn't have bothered you. You bribe authorities."

  "Local, not Federal. Did you ever try to bribe a U.N. delegate officer? The kind they have with the narcotic bureau? Can't be done."

  "So you killed him."

  "So I did. Or, rather, a Hound killed him. You were pretty clever about that, by the way. Had us worried for a while. But calling the local constabulary—now that was a stroke of pure idiocy. It made finding you a great deal easier."

  He knew enough now. He knew why Taguster, the man with the gentle, lightning fingers that teased the strings of an ancient instrument, had died. It was "the last piece to the puzzle that had begun in the morning and ended, now, not even twenty-four hours later.

  "Why didn't the Hound get you?" Margle asked, anxious to satisfy his own curiosity now.

  "I had more hands than it," he answered. "I had an extra hand."

  "Huh?"

  It was time. He moved toward the couch.

  They saw him and fired.

  He deflected all the pins.

  Then he was behind the couch, almost on top of them. They leaped erect, both firing. He deflected all pins save two which he turned back on them. Margle took his in the right cheek. The other man was struck in the neck. Both gagged as the first Brethren had, clutched their chests as their hearts abruptly ceased action, and folded up in neat piles on the carpet.

  He turned from them, not wanting to look at the corpses he had made. He floated through the dark room into the library. There he found a pencil and spent some time lifting it and carrying it to the com-screen with his psi power. He punched out the number of-Creol's home.

  A few minutes passed before the screen lighted and showed Creol's sleep-drawn features. "Chief!"

  "I have a story, George."

  Creol consulted his watch. "At three thirty in the morning?"

  "Yeah. I want you to get a crew over here, photographer and three reporters who will work different slants on it."

  "Your placer

  "My place."

  "Now."

  "Yes."

  "What's the story, Chief?"

  "You can headline it: ENTERSTAT CHIEF VICTIM OF WOULD-BE KILLER."

  "Don't you think you ought to call the police first?"

  "They can wait, George, boy. I guess I ought to get a story out of this, anyway." He hung up and returned to the Mindlink set. He went to Taguster's home and turned off the android. It was reading a book when he deactivated it. Leonard Taguster was dead.

  A DARKNESS IN MY SOUL

  Religion has always fascinated science fiction writers, whether for the physical structure of the church and its ceremonies, or for the more basic reason of beliefs and moral codes. My own religious development was from non-Catholic to Catholic, and swiftly to agnosticism in which I rejected most all established codes and beat out, through a torturous process in my own head, what seemed like common sense codes. Fortunately, Gerda has gone through the agonizing steps of this process at the same times as myself. And though many might consider us immoral, we have easily spent a hundred times more thought and hours in establishing our own codes as anyone who accepts one established for him. But through this long, aching time of working out our society-taught hang-ups, there were very black moments inside my head, moments when I almost went beyond agnosticism toward atheism (though now I think only an uneducated man could truly be an atheist). I have a clear picture now of my god (you may have yours), and he or it or them is a sort of easy-going power/ person/force that doesn't care what we do down here— as long as we don't hurt each other. But in those bad days, there were some odd thoughts in my head. This was one, and the title speaks for itself. . . .

  I

  I WONDER if Dragonfly is still in the heavens and whether the Spheres of Plague still float in airlessness, blind eyes watching. There is no way to find out, for I live in Hell.

  Men have asked questions about Time and Space, and some have found answers. But there are questions which should/remain unanswered, riddles without tag lines . . .

  I am a digger into minds. I esp. I find secrets, know lies, answer questions. I esp. Some questions should go unanswered, but they do not always. And now there is a darkness in my soul . . .

  It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone.

  I put down the book I was reading and answered the strident mechanical scream. "Hello?"

  "Simeon?" He said it correctly (Sim-ee-on).

  It was Harry Kirshire. I esped out and saw him standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously drumming his fingers on a simu-wood desk.

  "What is it, Harry?"

  "Sim, I have another job for you."

  He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my agent.

  "Why so nervous? What kind of a job?"

  "A mountain of money. That's all I can say."

  "More than the mint?"

  "More than Midas."

  "Say no more."

  "We'll expect you here at the Artificial Creation building in twenty minutes."

  "I'm on my way." My stomach fluttered. The Artificial Creation Building. The womb.

  I slipped into overshoes and a heavy coat. Without Harry Kirshire, I would most likely be imprisoned at the moment—or in what amounts to a prison. When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild talents, the FBI attempted to impound me and use me as a "natural resource" under federal control. It had been Harry Kirshire who had fought the legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court. I was nine when we won the case—twelve long years ago.

  It was snowing outside. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar. One would imagine that, in 2004, Science could have dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.

  I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a Marine attendant to park. Inside, I was ushered through a door into a cream-colored room with hex signs painted on the walls, a small, ugly child sitting in a leather chair, and four men standing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say something of monumental importance.

  The child looked up, and his eyes and lips were hidden by the wrinkles of a century, by gray and gravelike flesh.

  His voice crackled like papyrus being unrolled in a
n ancient tomb. "You're the one," he said in dust whispers. "You're the one."

  "That's the situation," Harry said nervously.

  The child-ancient's eyes squinted out at me like burning coals sparkling beneath rotten vegetation. I could feel the hate consuming there, hate not just for me, but for everyone, everything. He, more so than I, was a freak of the Experimental Wombs. The doctors and supporting congressmen could gloat again: "Artificial Creation Is a Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me, and twenty years later, this warped super-genius. Two successes in a quarter of a century.

  "I don't know if I can," I said at last.

  "Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk known as General Morsfagen.

  "I don't know what to expect. He obviously has a very different mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people working here at AC, FBI agents, and I have unfailingly sorted out the traitors. But this isn't the same thing at all."

  "You don't have to sort," Morsfagen said. "I thought this had been made clear. He can formulate earth-shaking theories, but each time he fails to give us something vital in it. We've threatened and bribed," Morsfagen almost said tortured, but didn't finish. "You simply go in his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything important back."

  "How much did you say?" I asked.

  "Five hundred thousand pos-creds an hour."

  "Double that figure."

  "What? That's absurd!" He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't flinch. I esped them and knew the child had half-discovered a means of star travel. For the rest of that theory alone, a million an hour was not ridiculous. They gave it to me with an option to demand more if the work proved more demanding than anticipated.

  II

  The lights had been dimmed; the machines had been moved in.

  "The hex signs are part of the predrug hypnosis which the physicians must administer. After he is placed in a trancelike state, Cinnamide is hypoed to him."

  Across from me sat the child, and his eyes were dead—the sparkling, vibrant glistening gone from them. I had become accustomed to his face, and the dried, decaying look of it did not bother me as much as before. Still, within me was a fear. "What is his name?" I asked Morsfagen.

  "Funny, but we never thought to give him one."

  I looked back to the freak. And within my soul (some churches deny me one) I knew that in all the far reaches of the galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billion inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed for the child. Simply, Child.

  A team of doctors administered the drug.

  "Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said.

  I nodded, looked over at Harry who had demanded to be there for this initial meeting. He was still nervous over the 'confrontation of the monsters. I turned back to Child.

  Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the blackness of his mind, flailing . . .

  I woke up to white faces with blurred, black holes where the eyes should have been. When my vision cleared, I could see it was Harry Morsfagen, and a strange physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek.

  "You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.

  Morsfagen pushed Harry out of the way, thrusting his face down at mine, "What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without results."

  "I wasn't prepared for what I found. Simple as that No need for hysterics."

  "But you were yelling and screaming—" Harry started.

  "Don't worry, Harry."

  "What did you find there you didn't expect?" Morsfagen asked, skeptical.

  "He has no conscious mind. It's like a pit, and I fell into it expecting solid ground. Evidentally, all his thoughts, or the great majority of them—at least those under drugs—come from what we 'consider the subconscious."

  "Then you can't reach him?"

  "I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and what isn't, I'll be all right."

  I pushed to a sitting position, readied out and stopped the room from swaying. Looking at my watch, I said, "That will be roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand pos-creds. Put it on my earnings sheet."

  He sputtered. He fumed. He roared. He glowered. He quoted the Government Rates for Employees. He quoted Employer's Rights Act of 1986, paragraph two, subtitle three. He fumed a bit more. He pranced. He danced. He raved. He ranted. He demanded to know what I had done to earn pay. I didn't answer. He finished ranting. Started fuming again. But he put it down in the book and stormed out with a warning to be on time the following day.

  "Don't push your luck," Harry advised me later.

  "Not my luck, just my weight."

  When I left, they were wheeling Child out of the room, his empty eyes staring at the ceiling.

  The snow was still falling. Fairy gowns. Crystallized tears. I slid into the hovercar, lifted, and floated out toward the highway. The book was lying at my side, the jacket face down because it had her picture on it. Honey hair. Smooth lips. A picture that disgusted and intrigued.

  I turned on the radio and listened to the dull voice of the newscaster. "PEKING ANNOUNCED LATE TODAY THAT IT HAS DEVELOPED A WEAPON EQUAL TO THE SPHERES OF PLAGUE LAUNCHED YESTERDAY BY WESTERN ALLIANCE AND WILL USE IT IF PROVOKED. ACCORDING TO ASIAN SOURCES, THE CHINESE WEAPON IS A SERIES OF PLATFORMS ORBITING ABOVE THE EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE. THESE PLATFORMS ARE CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING LEPROSY-CONTAINING ROCKETS WITH ANTIRADAR GEAR. MEMBERS OF THE NEW MAOISM SAID TODAY THAT—"

  I turned it off. No news is good news. Or, as the general populace of that glorious year was wont to say, "All news is bad news." It seemed like that. The threat of war was so heavy on the world that Atlas must certainly have been experiencing backache. Then there was the super-nuclear accident in Arizona, claiming thirty-seven thousand lives, a number too large to carry any emotions with it. Then the horrible things Artificial Creation labs developed (their failures) and sent to the freak homes to rot away in unlighted rooms. Anyway, I turned it off.

  III

  At home, in the warmth of the den, with my books and paintings to protect me, I took the dust jacket off the book so that I might not accidentally chance upon the picture, and I began reading Lily. It was a mystery novel in a way. And it was a mystery of a novel: the prose wasn't that spectacular—actually designed for the average mind. Still, I was fascinated. And through the chapters, between the lines of prose, a face seen at a party weeks before kept drifting through my mind. A face I fought to forget . . .

  "See her. Over there?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Marcus Aurelius. Honest. Writes those pornographic novels—or nearly pornographic. You know, Lily, Bodies in Darkness, those."

  And she had sweet golden silk hair.

  And she was blessed with a sculptured face.

  And she had deep eyes of blue.

  She.

  "How would you like to—-"

  I ignored him, what he was saying about her. I had to ignore!

  "Those legs—"

  Honey hair.

  Smooth lips.

  When I had finished, I picked up the phone, clutching the dust jacket in my other hand, my mind remote, as if my body were overpowering my brain. I punched out Information. The operator refused to give me Miss Aurelius' real name and number, but I esped out and saw it as she looked at the book in front of her. MARCUS AURELIUS or ME-LINDA THAUSER/22-223-296787/UNLISTED.

  It had only recently been announced by her publishing company that Marcus Aurelius was a woman. And a woman with a pretty name of her own.

  "Hello?"

  Summer humming tunes in willows.

  "Miss Tauser?"

  "Yes?"

  "This is Simeon Marflin. You've heard of me, I imagine?" My words seemed not my own but tumbled forth from the mist of my mouth, which I seemed not to know.

  She seemed uncertain, but the whisper of her voice said she knew me.

  "I have been reading Lily. You know, of course, that I have always refused to have my biography written. However, having read your books,
I would be honored if we could discuss a volume by you—on me."

  There was a bit more said, and it ended with me and this: "Fine. Then I will expect you here for dinner tomorrow night at seven."

  My mouth was dry, and my lips seemed about to crack. I was sweating. I had suggested escorting her to dinner somewhere. She had said dinner was not necessary. I had insisted. She had said restaurants were too noisy to discuss business. I said I had a cook. And now she was coming to my place. I couldn't sleep worrying about it.

  Getting heavily out of bed, I walked into the den. The machine stood in the corner, silent.

  The headrest was ominous.

  But my nerves demanded soothing.

  The chair that folded into the machine was like the tongue of a monster.

  I could see the hollow compartment that would swallow me. But my nerves demanded soothing. I reminded myself that other generations never had the advantage of a Mechanical Psychiatrist. They could never have afforded one even if their technology would have made the thing possible. I forgot the emptiness that would fill me later. For the moment, I needed comforting. I needed a few things explained . . .

  Proteus' Mother taking a thousand shapes.

  But never to be caught and held to tell the future . . .

  The life spark flickering, then holding a steady flame. And a very vague awareness even in the womb where plastic walls were soft and warm and giving—but somehow unre-sponding . . .

  He looked up into the lights overhead and sensed a man named Edison. He sensed filaments even as his own filament was disconnected from the womb . . .

  And there were metal hands to comfort him . . .

  And . . . and . . . there . . . and . . .

  SAY IT WITHOUT HESITATION! The voice was everywhere.

  And there were simu-flesh breasts to feed him . . .

  And . . . and

  OUT WITH IT! The computerized psychiatrist had a voice like thunderstorms.