Futile Efforts (34 page)

"That's crazy!"

"All you
Ganucci's
are out of your minds, but I want a life with you anyway.
 
Are you going to marry me?"

"Listen, honey—"

She stepped forward and tapped my chest, and I swore I could feel it.
 
"Go to early confession, Tommy.
 
Unburden your soul.
 
Because you're a dead man."

T
hree days later Dante showed up in full Christ-regalia: sandals, robe, the beard and long hair, and wearing a crown of thorns.
 
None of those tiny red rose stickers either, these were four-inch long thistles.
 
He might've been out of his mind, but in his own way he had a lot of guts.
 
He said something in Latin and gave me a hug.
 
I tried to stay inside my skin.

Dante hadn't been down from the top floor of the house for over a year.
 
I think he was often drawn to the calm and contented humming of our grandfather's mind now.
 
When we were kids the
Ganooch
would always be yelling or else laughing loudly with a hollow, false humor.
 
Either way it was enough to paralyze us.

Now he stepped over to the bay window and stared at the painting.
 
The
Ganooch's
strokes never slowed or wavered.
 
He never slept and only ate when I spoon fed him soups.
 
He knew exactly what he wanted and just how to get there.
 
His arm was steady, his eyes sharp and focused.

I had initially been surprised by the fluidity of the oils.
 
How a few strokes could completely alter style, substance and color without making everything muddy. There was a stunning sense of liquid that I hadn't encountered because I'd never see anyone actually paint in front of me before.

He used glazes between the stratum of color so light reflected through each coating.
 
The pigments appeared suspended, as if ready to break from the landscape and splash free.
 
The physical substance of the picture seemed less important than the fact that it was chosen as a vehicle of expression.
 
Shadow and relief were what counted most.
 
His style was fiery, exhibiting life, movement, and harmony but the boundaries were softened to blurs and smoke.

Staring at it made me dizzy, and I had to turn away before I got too lightheaded.

I looked back but still couldn't quite make it out.
 
He had Christ crouched at the foot the cross there in the center, his arms massive and muscular, a pained grimace on his bearded face and a gracious glint in his scowl, with a chaos of struggling bodies surrounding him as they pressed against prison bars, limbs angling everywhere, silhouettes, tints and hues blending into emotion rather than representation, hints of pistols that could've been nickel-plated .38s—Ganooch's one-time weapon of choice—and many other hands out as if begging food, mercy, and possibly forgiveness.

I couldn't take my eyes off it and, even as I watched, my grandfather continued to work on his painting, changing it from one moment to the next, but not really altering the piece at all.
 
Or perhaps its constant revision was merely a part of what he was trying to get at.
 
Was it a kind of confession?
 
A memoir or validation?

Dante began to weep, gently at first as he trembled beside me.
 
Soon he became wracked with harsh sobs until he couldn't take it anymore and stumbled from the room.
 
I continued staring even after Joey Fresco walked in.
 
He took one glance and said, "The hell is it?"

"I've been wondering about that myself."

"That supposed to be our lord and savior?"

"Beats me," I told him.

"He's got a halo, I think, but what's with the wrestling cage?
 
Who are all the faces?"

"I don't know."

A staggering sadness filled me then, the same way it had when I'd watched my father die in St. Elizabeth's hospital, shrunken from the black cancer ripping through him.
 
I was still young enough that his hand—thin and covered with sore-riddled, chalky skin—had still completely covered my own.
 
The machines surrounding and attached to him were the best of the time, but they hadn't been nearly enough to save him.
 
If he'd been given the choice to come back the way the
Ganooch
had, I wasn't sure he'd have taken it.
 
My father believed in technology but hated having to rely on it, especially at the end.

"He never talks to me anymore, Joe," I said.
 
"My Grandpa.
 
It's all computerized encoding intercommunication and transmission now."

"You think he's dead?" Joey asked, struggling to make sense of the slowly shifting oils, the weaving, looping, and entwining pattern on the easel.
 
"Really dead?"

"Maybe.
 
I'm not sure."

"If he is, then why's he still painting?"

It was a good question.

I
was drawn from sleep slowly, almost lovingly, by soft sounds so much like my grandmother singing Italian lullabies that I called out to her.

"Mama?" I whispered.

Security and veracity integrity breached, unauthorized activities & monitoring of network-wide intrusion detected.
 
Unable to comply with enhanced prioritization, identification, containment, and removal of security threats.
 
MD5 Osiris Scripts & UAC Linux-Based IDS Unified Access interface cryptographic checksums insufficient.
 
Incapable of analyses or generation of graphical reports on intrusion activity.

"Damn it," I said and rolled out of bed in a half-crouch.
 
I heard a mini-turret swivel in a well-oiled socket.
 
I hit the floor and dove behind my desk as a plasma blast slim as a particle beam slashed through the room.
 
My bed folded in half and crumpled in a heap.
 
Ganooch
continued painting in the living room.
 
He never stopped, not even for a minute.
 
He might've been dead, but he still had a hell of a work ethic.

A shape slid closer in the dark and drew to its full height, over seven feet tall it looked.
 
My sheets were on fire and in the light of the flames I saw the tremendous prehensile tail swaying laterally, investigating the shelving units and baseboards behind it.
 
Gyros whirred inside a massive chest.
 
The pseudo-organic flesh was the wrong skin tone, as purple and mottled as someone who'd been strangled and left in a closet for a few days.

It was a
Tybok
.
 
Humanoid with an exoskeleton covering semi-exposed micro-circuitry.
 
Its metal breastplate could shake off an armor-piercing shell.
 
The antennae wavering from its temples spit black sparks.
 
Its eyes rolled and pivoted on needle bearings.

The government was reportedly still in the secondary stages with these things.
 
The
Tyboks
were to be used for outer planetary system exploration, to give scientists more of an understanding of extraterrestrial atmospheric conditions and forces on the human body.

Somebody had been tooling it up.
 
For one thing, it wasn't supposed to have a tail.
 
The
Tybok's
right arm ended at the elbow in a T-85U portative smoothbore cannon.
 
During the Fourth Cold War, the T-85U was exported to nation states principally in North Africa.
 
This one had a jammer 5 mm co-axial
railgun
mounted in a mini-turret as well.
 
360 degree swiveling fire-arc and capable of tracking aerial targets.
 
Maximum effective range of maybe 2500 meters.
 
It had enough firepower to blast me across the Bronx and scatter my ashes down the Henry Hudson Parkway.
 
Someone had taken an advanced anthropomorphic probe meant to explore the deep planetary system and turned it into quite a nasty little assassin.

Clearly the
Tybok
was interested only in individual targets, otherwise it could've discharged into the floor and left behind a crater where the entire estate now stood.
 
So, that was pretty good, except that I was one of the targets.

Tybok
turned those eyes on me.
 
Eerie automaton eyes, black and vacuous, and yet, hidden deeply within them, I could almost see a hint of recognition.
 
They converged and cross-hairs glowed in their centers.

It couldn't be Carla.
 
I refused to believe that.

The barrel of the jammer began to swing my way.

The window.
 
My only chance.

But they make it look so easy in the movies—you cover your face, jump, all the glass shatters and you fall like a feather.
 
When you hit the ground you duck and roll and run away and hide behind a bush.
 
But real glass shreds and slashes, and it only takes a quarter inch shard to snip your carotid or femoral arteries while you're going over the sill.
 
I could just see myself diving forward and the window frame holding against my weight and bouncing me back into the room.

Tybok
took aim on me, the fire-arc rounding down until it was right between my eyes. I felt incredibly stupid.
 
I tightened up about to spring.

My cousin Dante burst into the room carrying a BE-PB-2 plasma rail rifle, with Barabbas barking at his heels.
 
I'd never fired one and had no idea who brought it into the house or when, but he appeared to be damn proficient with it.
 
There was a precision SIGINT targeting system but he hadn't even bothered to engage it.
 
The smoke sent Barabbas into a sneezing fit.

The
Tybok
assassin spun and the jammer locked on Dante a millisecond too slow.
 
Dante fired three shots in rapid succession, perfectly placed midpoint over the
Tybok's
primary extent program hidden within its protected torso.
 
Shrapnel burst and tore into the ceiling.
 
A plasma leak commenced to melt the
Tybok's
weaponry.
 
It retreated a step and let off two wild shots.
 
The sinuous antennae lashed back and forth like miniature whips.
 
Those eyes gave me a sidelong glance again.
 
It wanted me.

I had a weird feeling and shouted, "Dante, its head.
 
Nail the antennae!"

Dante got old school and walked straight up to the thing, aimed the rifle point-blank into its face and pulled the trigger at least a half dozen times.
 
Barabbas barked happily.
 
There was less damage than I expected but it was enough.
 
The
Tybok
shuddered and started tossing pieces of itself loose around the room, the gyros
fragged
.
 
Those antennae were ruined but still threw an occasional spark.

So much for turning the other cheek.

"Thanks, man," I said.

He blessed me, tossed the
railgun
over his shoulder and wafted out, Barabbas sneezing beside him.

My grandfather never quit painting or acknowledged us in any way.
 
He composed his art, the oils swirling against one another, colors fusing, separating, moving sinuously against one another like sentient beings.

"Grandpa, can you find some kind of government signature on this?"

Ganooch's
presence asserted itself in my skull.
 
Activities within advanced integrated photonic systems concentrating on the technologies needed for very high stamina, tenacity, resolution and photonic subsystems, optical elements HOE.

"Yeah, but how about a sig—"

Applications are numerous.
 
For example: microscopic imaging, satellite processing, telecommunications, aeronautics, avionics and medical imaging
.

"And assassination?"

Fourier & Fresnel Synthesis, Self Processing Photopolymers, Authentication & Infiltration, Intelligence High Operative & Extraterrestrial Study of Indicative Human Situation & Factors
.