Too Like the Lightning (22 page)

 

C
HAPTER THE
ELEVENTH

Enter Sniper

Fragments of light broke the darkness sporadically, like the death throes of a battered strobe lamp. A wolf's howl cut across the startled cries as guests huddled together in the dark. Security tightened around the leaders instantly, Spain's Royal Guard, the Censor's Guard, Mitsubishi forces, Cousins, the Ducal-Presidential Guard in livery of blue and gold. Their flashlights cut the blackness, at first revealing only art and wide-eyed faces, but soon one could catch the motion of machinery and great shapes assembling themselves on the ballroom floor like the arrival of a clockwork beast. Startled cries morphed into titters of anticipation, as guests rushed in from other galleries, forcing their way toward spots they hoped would have good views. Then a sudden spotlight brought the beast to life. The center of the hall, which had been nothing but a crowd of socialites, was now a mad laboratory, burbling beakers and giant electrodes raining sparks on bays of ancient vacuum tubes, while in the center a shrouded body lay on a slab, waiting.

“Throw the switch!” The speaker was a picture-perfect hunchback, looming over the machinery in a grungy laboratory smock. “Quickly, doctor, while they're still distracted! Throw the switch and bring our glorious monster to life!”

The crowd burst into exuberant applause.

“Quickly, Doctor Frankenstein! It's too late to turn back!” The hunchback didn't need to drop the name for everyone to know the character. I spotted the doctor now, cowering by a control panel. He made a magnificent Mad Scientist: his Asian black hair was uncommonly wild and wiry in the right way, his shoulders had the academic hunch under the white lab coat, and his hands, forever stained with inks and dyes, had the right inhuman thinness to let him stand proud on a poster between a Werewolf and a Mummy. Even his Chinese features in this context focused the attention on his eyes, almost as black as his hair, and greenish makeup made their glints feel extra maniacal. Poor Cato Weeksbooth. With the eyes of the world upon him, the recluse seemed about to have a heart attack.

Eager ‘Igor' stared expectantly at his Frankenstein, but Cato just gaped, his jaw twitching as if he were on the edge of saying lines, but nothing came.

“Quickly, doctor! I don't know how long we can keep the villagers from invading the laboratory!”

Igor was right. The spectators had recovered from the shock of the reveal, and were beginning to advance and poke the edges of the set.

“I can't do this…”

“You must! There's no turning back!”

“Why'd you drag me into this? Leave me alone!”

The hulking assistant gestured with a too-huge prop wrench toward the shrouded figure, lifeless on the table between them. “You must finish, doctor! You will! There's nowhere to turn back to. You've already shattered the laws of man, of king and country, medicine, conscience, humanity. There's no forgiveness now, nothing waiting for you but the gallows or the asylum. You have only one choice! Push on, doctor! Shatter the next laws too, the laws of Nature! Then, with the powers of life and death at your command, and your glorious creation at your side, you will lord it over your enemies like a god! Throw the switch!”

I myself am not sure whether the ‘unwilling Frankenstein' act was a plan, or an ad lib to cover Cato's genuine stage terror. Either way, there was a chilling passion in his “Noooo!”

“Junior Scientist Squad Attack!” Suddenly a gaggle of kids, aged eight to fifteen, with matching “Chicago Museum of Science and Industry” caps, assaulted Igor with an arsenal of homemade slingshots, water balloons, rubber band guns, and all manner of ingenious and benign projectiles.

“You leave the doctor alone, you meanie!”

“Don't worry, doc! We'll save you!”

Cato slumped back against the buzzing control panels, pale with joy as if the homemade weapons had been Athena's spear. “You came…”

Two girls in the back of the squad, the “big guns,” fed baking soda into a vinegar bottle through a funnel and let the ensuing explosion drench the adversary. “Eat real science, phony!”

“Noooo!” Igor staggered as if the drenching were a mortal wound, and, since the vinegar spoiled the makeup, it almost was. “I won't let you stop us!” Wild-eyed, the hunchback charged forward through the hail of rubber bands, lunged past quivering Cato, and threw the switch himself.

The video footage can do the special effects far more justice than I. There were explosions from the machines, rains of sparks, projections of monstrous faces and equations which chased each other through the smoke as if human ambition and the laws of nature were fighting it out before our eyes, and a soundtrack by Lune Cassirer which would be top seller for four weeks.

The body beneath the shroud twitched, jolts of sudden motion like the spasms of electrocution, real enough to cause some in the audience to wonder whether the equipment had malfunctioned. The body lay still next, not even breathing, letting the suspense and music build as a subtle odor of singed meat diffused through the gallery. Only as the last of the wires ceased their hissing did the body twitch once more, then rise, letting the shroud slide down slowly, like the unveiling of a statue. Makeup had reduced the flawless skin to patchwork, dozens of painted shades from north-European pallor to deep African black, which seemed to be sutured together with a gory roughness which only made the perfection of the face and limbs beneath more beautiful in contrast. It was a light, athletic, nymphlike figure, with a childish face and slender, androgynous limbs, every mark of beauty that Duke Ganymede was losing as a decade in office tainted him with the roughness of a grown-up. The monster faltered as it rose, unbalanced like a fresh-hatched chick, and slumped back against the slab, its eyelids sagging like a sleepwalker's. Desperate Igor (recovering from the assault of vinegar) pressed through the cluster of awe-silenced kids and grasped the monster's face, peering warmly into it. “Welcome to life, Sniper.”

Sniper's eyes are huge like a child's, almost black thanks to a Japanese mother, but somehow the genius actor made that blackness seem to transform from dull to lively in this moment, as if it were not the electricity but this first sight of another human face that jump-started true life. “Thank you.”

The crowd could not hold back its applause.

“Magnificent!”

“Spectacular! Heart-stopping!” critics raved.

“Even better than last year!”

“And far less destructive,” Ganymede added, rolling his eyes in memory of Sniper's rampage in gangster's pinstripes, complete with tommy gun and femme fatale, when the techs had dropped two Model Ts through a ballroom skylight and led the Duke President's security on a fifteen-minute cops-and-robbers car chase through the galleries. The poor carpets.

Sniper, all smiles, descended from the laboratory table arm in arm with his hunchbacked ‘creator.' (I confess, reader, there is some arbitrariness in calling Sniper by either pronoun, since these stunts involve female costume as often as male, and Sniper's publicity team has worked so hard to keep the public from learning the androgyne's true sex. But since I have made Sniper's two key rivals, Ockham and Ganymede, both ‘he,' I shall use ‘he' for Sniper, to make their strengths feel parallel). At Sniper's nod the lights returned, so guests could see and thank the black-hooded techies who had made the spectacle possible.

A mob gathered to admire the painstaking stitch-work makeup which made Sniper's naked chest and back seem to be a quilt of real transplanted skin, each patch different not only in color but in texture and moisture, some old, some young, even with the grain of hairs flowing in different directions. Shirtless Sniper is even more tantalizingly androgynous, since the delicacy of his build and tightness of his muscles makes it impossible to guess whether this torso is naturally male or an Amazon, a common enough practice among female Humanist athletes who aim at mixed sports early in life, so have the doctors prevent breasts from developing, opting out of their varied inconveniences.

“Oh, Sniper, the makeup is incredible!”

“Are you going to sell this one?”

“How much?”

“I want one!”

“I want one in kid-size, six or eight!”

Sniper slung his arms over the shoulders of two fans. “Of course, of course, the Frankenstein Lifedoll and the Classic Monster Costume Series hit stores next week, in doll-size, six, and full.”

“Series?”

Sniper made a mock gun of his right hand, his signature gesture, and ‘shot' a signal to his techies, who threw open the laboratory set, revealing the dolls within. There was the Frankenstein monster model, so like the living being that, had Sniper held his breath, one could not have guessed which was flesh and which plastic. Beside it sat another Sniper costumed as a werewolf, another as Dracula, another as a mummy, draped in bandages which left many parts enticingly bare. Beside the life-size models sat the small dolls, twenty-five centimeters but like Sniper to the life, and also the life-sized six-year-old models, the adorable werewolf pup with pointed, fuzz-covered ears, and little Dracula with fangs just peeking out between child-round lips.

You have seen Lifedolls before, but have you touched them? Each bone, tendon, and muscle of a human body is reproduced precisely, so a hand squeezed folds just as a friend's hand folds, and ingenious systems even keep it warm. Lifedolls are the pinnacle of man's long quest to craft synthetic love. A child with a Lifedoll cries less when ba'pas head out for an evening; a twentysomething with a life-sized Sniper stashed at home rebounds faster when love turns sour. You may call it sick when grown men and women hold these dolls as dear as bash'mates, or, with the fully anatomical Sniper-XX and Sniper-XY models, lovers. And you may be right to call it sick, but should a sickness be cured if makes its sufferers happier than healthy men? When the Lifedoll labs first decided to mass-produce a version of the vice director's two-year-old, they thought no more of it than that the child was exceptionally cute, good therapy for lonely kids and childless couples, especially because his hybrid face, mixing Asia, Europe, and South America, let small changes in costume make him seem like almost any couple's child. When it proved their best seller ten times over, they marketed the child again at age four, again at six, at eight, and it took only one fan to recognize the original on the street to open the doors to young Sniper, instant celebrity.

With the fans distracted by the new designs, Sniper disentangled himself and came to the front of his portable stage. “I thought this was a party! Let's dance!”

Sniper's techies took up their instruments. It was a parody remix of the year's top love songs with wolf howls and zombie moans for ambiance. Not to be outdone, Ting Ting Foster joined in, improvising countermelodies, and the Royal Belgian String Quartet followed, making the instrumental fabric as rich as Handel. Even we down in the kitchens danced.

Sniper himself joined in just long enough to get the crowd well energized, then descended to pose for the mob of photographers that had gathered, begging for close-ups.

The youngest of the Junior Scientist Squad frowned up at Sniper he descended the stairs. “Are you a good monster or a bad monster?”

Sniper smiled, gentle as an elder ba'sib. “I'm whatever kind of monster my creator wants me to be.” He turned to Igor, who followed, her gait athletic now that she no longer faked a hunch. “What am I tonight?”

Igor smiled through the scraggles of her dripping wig. “A mostly good monster.”

“Mostly good. That works.” With a smile that made the patchwork face feel somehow both cherubic and roguish, Sniper leaned toward Igor for a kiss.

“Ewww.” Fleeing the ‘kissy-part,' the Junior Scientist cowered toward Cato Weeksbooth, whom the other club members were escorting down the steps.

Cato was still short of breath from the ordeal. Up close he seemed, not less, but more authentically Frankenstein, his face sun-starved and pallid even without makeup, his motions very accustomed to the white lab coat. “Can I go home now?”

“Home?” Sniper clapped his shivering ba'sib on the shoulder. “The party's just starting.”

“Yeah, we want our cake!” one of the little scientists cried.

“Sniper promised cake!”

Cato frowned, but not at the kids. “You shouldn't have dragged me out here, Cardigan.” He hid his shaking hands in his lab coat pockets.

Sniper leaned on Cato's shoulder, inviting photos of Frankenstein with his monster, which enjoyed a brief spike among Sniper's top-selling posters. “I don't question your judgments about science, Cato. Don't question mine about panache. Now enjoy yourself. You were asking me to help your kids meet movers and shakers who could fund their projects, and I didn't use all my special passes on them for nothing.”

Cato's face brightened. “Oh! Oh, yeah. Yeah, that … I…”

Sniper gave Cato a second pat. “You're welcome.”

Striding forward now, Duke President Ganymede smiled on Sniper, as on a wayward but successful son. “Sniper, welcome. Well performed.”

“Good evening, Member President,” the little monster greeted. “Sorry I'm late as usual.”

Ganymede nodded his graceful welcome. “And whose are you tonight?”

Sniper presented Igor. “Let me introduce Mycroft Isabel Senabe, Mizzie for short, one of the stars of our Blue football team for this summer.” With only 124 days until the Games, no Humanist needed to follow ‘summer' with ‘Olympics.'

The Duke President kissed the hunchback's hand, his alabaster touch deepening the blush beneath her ruined makeup. It couldn't deepen much, though, not while Mizzie had her Sniper in her arms. Golden Ganymede is a particular kind of perfection, glorious but overpowering, unable to be anything but Sun King. Sniper has the more versatile perfection of the all-accommodating toy. Childlike and sexless, you can dress him as a monster, a princess, a Cousin, a Mitsubishi, a good boy, a bad girl, whatever your desire. Think of the nonthreatening fantasy lover every budding teen invents when not quite ready for the first time. Setting out to bring that fantasy to life, Sniper invented his own profession, Earth's first and only professional living doll. Tonight he is Mizzie's living doll, and Mizzie picked monster, but tomorrow Sniper will be remade again by the next fan in his loving queue.