Minister Faust (22 page)

E
ven sans their glorious armor and clad in simple orange jumpsuits with faces ravaged by their decade-long sedation, these two superbeings were unmistakable.

Francis Ford Coppola was often compared to the elder of the two, given his wild beard and eyes, although, to my knowledge, the talented director never reached a height of eight feet, achieved arms like a bodybuilder’s thighs, or had a mouthful of teeth like gleaming metal rail spikes. His younger companion, while shorter at a mere six feet, was every bit as remarkable, with his opalescent ram’s hooves and horns, his golden body-fur like the mane of a California model, and his smell pungent enough that even through the letho-glass I felt as if I were bathing in coconut milk.

Heroes and villains in the same bodies.

Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid.

Of course, there were obvious changes. The N-Kid no longer carried his heralded Grail Pail, and both ex-champions were fitted with specially designed Psionic Impotence Helmets to accommodate horns or oversized head. Their psionic restraints looked like football helmets made of black glass, detailed with silicon circuits and frizzed out with flickering, brain-draining psiber-optic filaments.

With nothing on their side of the glass to sit on but the floor of the featureless white cube, they stood, their faces rigid with faltering self-control.

Mr. Piltdown stepped forward, opening his hands in anxious supplication.

“If there’s anything you need, Gil, Kid, just name it,” he said quickly. “If it were up to me you’d be at the Squirrel Tree being tended to by my personal physicians, not up here in this ghastly—”

“Get out get out get out GET OUT GET OUT
GET OUT
—” screamed the N-Kid, leaping from his seat and hurling himself against the glass, kicking his hooves against the barrier, while at every contact the glass seared his fur with awful purple arc light.

Dr. Wells yelled, “This isn’t going to work, Mr. Piltdown, sir! I think we should leave—”

“NO, HUMAN,”
intoned Gil Gamoid, his voice like it was in his glory days, a love child of tuba and gong.

Even the N-Kid stopped long enough for us to focus. Gil said, “DR. WELLS. GO. FESTUS. GO. OTHERS, STAY.”

Dr. Wells gestured toward the door as would a maître d’, but Mr. Piltdown refused to look at him, glaring instead at his former teammates. Finally, he said, “I just want you both to know…that I forgive you. Both of you. We’re even.”

The N-Kid emitted a horrible goatlike
b-a-a-a,
a
b-a-a-a
of rage, a
b-a-a-a
of vengeance. Mr. Piltdown backed out of the room so slowly as to be almost comical, but the mood was nothing short of tragic. Dr. Wells sealed the cubic chamber on his own way out.

I leaned toward Kareem, whispering that he should beware; while he might have gained personal satisfaction by seeing the Flying Squirrel ejected, he needed to remember that the two converts to sociopathy before him were master manipulators. Ejecting their greatest defender, the man who had paid their multimillion-dollar legal fees and refused to denounce them for conspiring to kill him and blow up the Fortress of Freedom, seemed calculated not only to wound Mr. Piltdown, but to create the illusion of alliance between them and Kareem.

To my surprise, Kareem actually whispered back, “Good call, Doc. Thanks.”

“Why you here?” jabbered the N-Kid. “What you want?”

Kareem sat in one of the two chairs. “Information.”

“About what, X-Man-man?”

An eyebrow from Kareem. “So you know my name?”

“Of course know your name. Who you think you dealing with? Celebrity nitwit? President of country? No. You X-Manman,
for
merly of League of Angry Blackmen-men,
cur
rently seeking information.”

“Okay. You’re obviously as insightful and intelligent as your reputation suggests,” said Kareem, sliding into the trick-bag of the interrogator. “So why don’t you tell me…why
am
I here?”

The N-Kid
b-a-a-a
ed a chuckle, horribly. “Gil, him try flatter me. Think that get him information.”

Gil Gamoid narrowed his eyes at his smaller companion. “TELL HIM ANYWAY,” rumbled the voice that roared inside my skull as if it were a dragon chick hatched and trapped there, booming like a sledgehammer slamming into girders. “WITHOUT WASTING TIME.”

“You want know,” said the N-Kid, wincing from the rebuke,
“how Hawk King die.”

Kareem leaned back, both eyebrows creeping up before he returned them to default position. “Well then?”

“DENIED RIGHT TO ATTEND FUNERAL,” gonged Gil. “HUMILIATING. EMBITTERING.”

“That wasn’t my call,” said Kareem. “But you—you
wanted
to be there? Despite your two-man conspiracy to murder Hawk King and the rest of the F*O*O*J in 1985? Why? So you could finish what you started?”

“EARTH YEAR 1985, UR-PRIME YEAR BILLION-AND-SEVENTEEN, WHAT ALL MEAN? CROSS ALL THAT SPACE-TIME TO CAUSE HURT? WHY? TOO CREDULOUS, X-MAN.”

“So why’d you want to come to the funeral?”

“PAY RESPECTS,” said Gil Gamoid. “AND FINISH WHAT STARTED, YES.”

S
o you’re admitting—”

“Ad
mit
ting nothing, X-Man-man! Separate issue! Never want hurt Hawk King. Never! Wouldn’t!”

Kareem leaned forward. “So you’re saying…you had a different target? You weren’t trying to kill Hawk King either in 1985 or last week?”

Silence.

“Then who—”

“Enemy among you…not what seems.”

“Who? How? A shape-shifter? Mind control?”

Silence.

Kareem stared at the two prisoners, trying to out-wait them.

A minute clambered past, like an ant across a salt heap.

Then a second minute.

And a third.

The glitter in the eyes of the two aliens had disappeared; their faces were calm enough to appear waxen.

Finally Kareem leaned toward me, whispering, “I thought they were refusing to talk, Doc, but…is it just me, or are they actually zoned out?”

“I think you could be right, Kareem.”

“Their speech, their grammar, the difficulty with pronouns—they haven’t talked like that since they first came to Earth. Is it the drugs? The P-Imp hats? Both?”

“Both, I suspect. Their charts indicate substantial decline in language and social skills since incarceration here ten years ago…but that could be part of a long-term deception, Kareem. Be careful not to—”

GONG! GONG! PING!

The sound was like someone hammering the pipes of a cathedral organ, but it was Gil. Having broken free of his momentary catatonia, he’d begun flicking his metallic fingernails against the iridescent horns of the N-Kid. One horn maintained its basso drone, while Gil flicked the other one into trilling treble.

WHERE’ER BLASPHEMING LIARS RAIL

TO SMOTHER TRUTH BENEATH LIE’S VEIL…

chanted Gil Gamoid, the crispness of his language once again what it was in his prime:

…LET INNOCENTS REFUSE THEIR TALE

FOR JUSTICE MUST ALWAYS PREVAIL!

UNFURL THE SAIL!

SEEK OUT THE GRAIL

SO GLORIOUS HOPE

MIGHT NEVER FAIL!

FOR EVERY BREATH THAT WE INHALE

LET EVERY VILLAIN E’ER BEWAIL

THE POWERS STRONG OF HEROES FRAIL

WHO DRINK THE MILK FROM N-KID’S PAIL!

The gong-and-chiming ended, but hung in the air, like a cruel sentiment.

Once upon a time, millions of cape fans and cape card–collecting schoolchildren knew that oath by heart as well as Gil Gamoid did. Upon reciting that creed, the uncanny N-Kid would be transformed into a Q-939 creature resembling an Earth goat, complete with teats protruding from the apertures of his goat armor. Continuing his incantation, Gil would kneel, and taking the N-Kid’s Grail Pail, “milk” his companion, the rhythmic motion resounding like an underwater didgeridoo. Thus was produced the awesome ultraviolet Q-ichor that, drunk, would grant the two titans twenty-four hours’ worth of their cosmic Q-powers or, refined into Q-cheese, a week’s worth.

But for ten years both the Grail Pail and the star-emblem armor of the duo had been locked far away from Asteroid Zed inside the armory of the Fortress of Freedom, while prison authorities daily injected N-Kid with lacto-suppressants. And despite Gil Gamoid’s invocation of his pledge, the N-Kid stood in front of us untransformed, a humanoid goat-man with a perpetual young child’s/old man’s face, gouged by the aching tragedy of a life consigned to nothing but the long, long wait for death.

“Milk-milk’s
gone,
” whimpered the N-Kid. “No more cheese for me.”

“AND POOR GIL’S COLD,” rumbled the elder. “ISHTAR CRIES FOR US ALL.”

“N-Kid, you said,” Kareem tried again, “that there’s an enemy among us. Who is it?”

“So far from home, X-Man-man. Understand? Been gone so long, been gone so long, been gone so long—”

“SO LONG,” echoed Gil.

“Fabled city of Uruqanthl, capital of Ur-Prime. Old Gil and me…children there. Ancient here. Everything small here. Small planet, small distance to sun. Ur-Prime orbits Quasar Qanthl from one hundred thousand light-years away. Even at that distance, radiation would burn humans into slices of toast—”

“N-Kid, please, I’m asking you to focus. You said you’d never want to hurt Hawk King. So help me find out who did.”

“How can us help inside here?
You
the detective, out there.”

“Your Q-perception—they say it’s strong enough for you to see into the future, or the past…”

“Hat-hat hate perceiving,” said the N-Kid, pointing toward his P-I Helmet, holding his fingers at a cartoonishly far distance that suggested he were feeding piranha. “No Q-ceiving in, what, eight years, Gil?”

“TEN. TEN YEARS.”

“Even so, maybe…Look, have you observed anything else? Anything here out of the ordinary? Other inmates acting unusually?”

The N-Kid and Gil Gamoid laughed awfully, like grave robbers joking about bloated corpses in suggestive positions.

“Okay…I mean unusually for
here.
Anyone been asking you about your visions, like if they relate to Hawk King? Anyone asking questions, asking you about Hawk King’s defenses, or his weaknesses, or the defenses of the Blue Pyramid?”

“Asking questions, X-Man-man? Years and years and years and years of questions-questions-questions—”

“POOR GIL’S COLD…”

“—and filling Gil and me with druggies, can’t-thinkies, P-I-shitties…Done something to old Gil, so he can hardly talky-thinky. But never forget truth, X-Man-man.
Never.
”

“Which is what?”

“Bad moons rising—”

“TROUBLE ON THE WAY—”

“—serpent’s egg a-hatching, dragon’s unfurling, talons scraping, knives sharpening, bloody tide rising, leviathan rising from the deep-deeps, slithering and slouching forth, hungry-hungry-hungry—”

“Who, N-Kid? Who is it?”

“Secret! Mystery! Twilight of the century! Midnight of the millennium! Sky rains, stars darken! Butchering of the prophets! Burning of the scriptures—”