Untitled (26 page)

    He shrugged. "A man must face his demons alone. Sometimes they must torment him deeply before he even sees them as demons. He comes here to let them do that. I pray every day that he will defeat them."

    I didn't get it. It was like pouring gasoline on a fre. "You're a funny guy, Allallo."

    He shrugged again, picked up a spear and bow that were lying against the wall, and opened the door again. "I hope someday soon you will see the wisdom in it. And I hope to see you again." And then he disappeared through the door, shutting it behind him.

    Okay, I thought, George Jones School of Psychotherapy.

    "Ralph," I said, "what are you doing?"

    He looked up at me, bleary-eyed. "Well, this is the bes thing I cuh think of ta do." Then he tipped up his glass, drank it down, and poured some more from the bottle.

    "Jesus, Ralph, you could be mediating this whole thing. You, more than anybody, have a grasp on what's actually going on here. You—" "You think you know what's going on, do you?" He shouted. "You don' know SHIT, buddy boy!" Then he put a hand up, realized he'd gotten a little out of control. He gathered himself, and proceeded to speak up, calmly, in a controlled, sober voice that had the effect of freaking me out completely, only because I knew how trashed he was. He reminded me, then, of this guy my dad used to talk about when he'd see somebody display an improbable, unexpected talent or profciency: "Crazy" Guggenheimer. He was a character, I guess, on the Jackie Gleason show back in the Sixties. Crazy was this stumbling drunk guy who would, once a week on the show, weave and wobble up to Jackie Gleason's bartender character, get a drink, and then proceed to deliver a sweet, fawless Irish tenor ballad. Then he'd stumble out of the bar again until next week.

    "Bhjennigh," he chuckled, "It's Benny. B-E-N-N-Y. You think he's from across the Nonestic Sea? Bullshit. He's from New Jersey.

    Think Glinda can see that with her little book? I don't think so, somehow. He's got some extra special wool he pulls over her eyes.

    "See, they gave security clearance to all kinds of little weasles way back when, if they had a skill, and could make it back and forth through the gate. Now they know better.

    "Benny knew three things: computers, cryptography, and sattelite communications. Otherwise, he was a sorry-ass loser who'd basically sell his granny's ass for a quarter. But over here, he had it made. They put him in charge of those radio dishes. He ran the whole thing.

    "It eventually came to be called Project Scarecrow."

    He downed the contents of his glass again. It was kind of making me sick to watch. I thought he must have a cast-iron stomach or a rock-hard liver or both.

    "No, that's not right. I put him in charge.

    "Before I was CIA, I was Army Intelligence. And I was his commanding offcer. I gave that little creep a shot. I knew what he could do with computers, electronics, codes... Hell, I liked him at one time, despite what a miserable shit he could be.

    "I was his friend. I got him the gig.

    "So, you might say I'm responsible for all this."

    He paused and shakily measured out another three shots into his glass.

    "They started out as a receiving array, in a meadow outside of Togollu—you saw 'em—six pieces of a radio telescope. We were trying to see what was out there—if the celestial map matched ours at all, or if it was completely different. We'd gotten some surprises there already with a big optical telescope: ffteen planets in the solar system, seven gas giants—two of them binary, and eight earth-sized or smaller.

    "From the beginning, we were getting anomalous readings along with the radio data. Soon enough somebody fgured out what was going on: the parabolic surfaces were somehow attracting a steady stream of Mickies. But they weren't inhabiting anything; it was like they were playing or something. They'd fy through, and out the other end.

    "As soon as Bennie let the Powers That Be know about this, all attention shifted from mapping the sky to pulling in and capturing these wandering souls. The idea was to capture as many of these Mickies as possible and keep them contained, until we could build a giant, fast computer around the housing they were contained in. We were going to build a kind of VR environment for them to interact with the hardware. Ghosts in the machine. People had dreamed for decades of a thinking computing machine. We were going to build it, here. We were going to revive slavery, in other words.

    "Bennie didn't give a shit what they did with the dishes, as long as the Brass back home was happy. But it didn't work out. As soon as the containment tank was built, the Mickies stopped coming. It was like they knew. So Bennie decides to construct—a beacon. Something he thought would be bait. He set it up, and nothing happened. He became obsessed, sitting out there for days at a time, changing frequencies, pulse shapes. He wouldn't give it up."

    Ralph fumbled a cigarette out of his pocket, produced a zippo, lit up the smoke.

    "And then fnally, one day, he says he hears something. I was out of the loop by then, I'd come through every once in a while to monitor progress. And I'd say, 'What, Bennie, what do you hear? I can't hear anything.' And he'd just shush me and get this far away look on his face, very freaky.

    "But he heard something all right. And every time I'd come to check on him, a little more of what he was hearing, and feeling, would be visible to me. A little more of It. A little less of him. Subtle at frst. His eyes were darker. His nervous twitch disappeared. He stopped biting his fngernails. Stopped telling stupid gross-out jokes. His hair grew out really fast, long and jet-black.

    "The containment tank his team had built, meanwhile was flling up—is that the right word?—no, it was coming apart. It was changing. I still don't know what fnally happened to it. But I'd come in and fnd Bennie standing in front of it, with his arms outstretched, eyes closed. I could see him changing. It freaked me out, but I didn't know what to do about it. What to do about him.

    "Whatever he'd called was starting to make its own calls. Pretty soon Benny had his own little army of freaks. They'd show up out of nowhere, sometimes on sandboats, from out across the desert, or a ship would roll over the horizon, and forty or so goons would stroll out and pledge their loyalty to him."

    "Soon nobody knew what to do. Somewhere in there, he'd started spelling his name funny, encouraged the populace to eat their fourlegged friends, and built a castle for himself. Somewhere in there, he became the dictator of huge parts of Gillikin and Munchkinland. One day I found myself addressing not my subordinate, Corporal Bennie Burnbaum, but Bhjennigh, leader of a sovereign nation. And our government had no choice but to recognize him, because what were we going to do? Nuke him? Desert Storm? Not likely, when you can send maybe ten troops a day through the gate. We could have tried to take him out, but guess what? It wasn't—isn't—in the interest of our National Security."

    Then he crumpled a little bit, and looked at me like he was going to start crying again. But he didn't.

    "Aw, Gene," he said, "you don't know. You jus don't know. Meaty Meatcorps. Pace-Horner. The goddam U.S. government want to—are going to—Christ, I can't even say it.

    "They've encouraged him, aided him, every step of the way, every way they could."

    "Remember what happened to Times Square? They want to tur
n
this entire place into a fucking Theme Park."

    It sounded ludicrous and chilling in the same breath, like the guy at the end of the Twilight Zone episode trying to scramble over the edge of the gangplank of the alien spacecraft as it closed, with that lady screaming, "IT'S A COOKBOOK!"

    But this was no joke. My people, people from Earth, white European Americans and their honorary proxies, were going to continue their four-hundred-something-year tradition of Fucking Up A Good Thing.

    "But you know what?" Ralph asked, as he poured another one, "you know what? Surprise! Bhennigh has basically told everyone to go screw. All bets are off. He has shut the Pawt'kween Gate, and is now, as you can see, in the process of grabbing everything for himself.

    "And he's not even in charge anymore. And Whatever is isn't planning a theme park, believe me."

    He downed another shot, stuck the bottle into his coat pocket, and stood up, wobbling. He pulled one of those ridiculous round pointed hats over his ears, and stumbled over behind the bar.

    "So what now, Ralph?," I asked, following him over, "what? Are you going to stay here and drink yourself into unconsciousness? This is your answer?"

    "No. No. Tha is not myanser. NO." He picked out two bottles, shoved them into his coat as well. "My answer is 'end of game. Game over.'"

    Whatever that meant, I thought.

    He wobbled over to the door, opened it, and stumbled out.

Out on the battlefeld, it was totally a party. At least for the moment. Until total hell blew in. From the second I stepped out the gate, I was awash in foofaraw.

    On top of that, I was getting cheered like a gladiator. People up on the east wall bleachers were hooting and calling my name. Having never been a varsity jock in school, this was a new one on me; but I must confess that I turned, waved my axe at the crowd, and danced around a little.

    It was fun, and absurdly gratifying, but the black cloud was on a roll. While I basked in the glory, I took note of the banners that futtered all along the east wall. HAVE FUN! said one. HAVE A SANDWICH! said another. HAVE A BIG FUN SANDWICH WITH US! said yet a third.

    I wasn't sure if this was utterly persuasive, so I cast my gaze a little bit further down the line. Somebody else, on a seperate tangent, had written DON'T KILL US! in big squiggly letters. In context, it worked pretty well. I suspected the Flutterbudgets.

    Beyond that was a personal favorite: a childish scrawl that clearly read WE ALL ARE FRIENDS, AND THIS IS DUMB. Some goof wrote HI! Another wrote WHY? Another wrote TRY SOME PLUMBLY PIE!

    I was sensing a pattern; but past friendliness and snacks, there wasn't a whole lot of incentive here. I mean, by Oz standards, that was certainly plenty; but the cloud was clearly not from these parts.

     On the other hand, it probably wasn't reading the banners, either.

    I waved bye to my fans, turned back to my peers in the battlefeld lab rat community. There were nearly a thousand would-be warriors gearing up. Less than half of that was truly battle-ready. I saw some born victims heading for the front lines.

    For example, Miss Cuttenclip's Paper Soldiers. They were noble and bold, but what were they going to do? Give some ogre a paper cut? Crumble ashen into fame? You couldn't tell them that, of course. It would certainly hurt their pride.

    I hoped that Ozma had pointed this out to them somehow, but if she had, it clearly hadn't done any good. Just like the valiant members of the Bunnyberry Precision Marching Team, who were also thoroughly marked for death. You couldn't tell them anything. They had their minds made up.

    On the other hand, I was thrilled to see that Poogli had set up an Emerald Burrito stand. It was set quite a ways from ground zero, but deep enough into the fray to count as a buffer between the walls and the hordes. And Poogli, I knew, could wield a serious bunch of blades.

    Pinky was helping out at the stand. She didn't recognize me at frst, but when I called out her name, she came running and hugged me even harder than Mikio. "Can you believe how scared I am?" she squeaked.

    I stroked her hair. "But you guys did such a great job with the stand!"

    "You really think so?"

    "Yes!"

    "Oh, YAY!" She squeezed me again, let go, her eyes both smiling and flling with tears. "You have to promise not to die."

    "Okay! You, too!"

    "I'll really try!" Then she ran back to Poogli's side, and I proceeded toward the coming slaughter.

By the time I caught up with Dorothy, she had already staked out her turf: about a half-mile from the gate, midway between it and the oncoming rim of the cloud. At least a half-hour had transpired between now and Mikio's kiss; staring up from the ground, it looked like the fucker was already on top of us.

    In reality, it was maybe two football felds away; and the fgures in its shadow were still utterly enshrouded. It sure seemed like there were a lot of them, but that's all I could really tell. I assumed that Rokoko was in there, could feel my blade already hankering for his ass. I was a little less thrilled about O'Mon Node. Not to mention Skeerak, a shitload of ogres, and whatever other mutants Bhjennigh might have conjured up from blackness.

    At that point, it was sheer reassurance to see Scarecrow grinning at me. But there he was, stroking Lion's mane, while Tiger and TikTok and a dozen other robot boys fanked Dorothy and Toto to either side. A handful of other serious warriors were gathered, Mikio's gilliken gal pal among them. We acknowledged each other with respectful distance.

    Allalo from Topeka was there, hanging out with a passel of Ozstyle injuns. So was No Jimmy, the only guy not named Jimmy in all of Jimvania. (Evidently, this had made him a really good fghter.) I recognized several others by reputation, though we had never met: Big Lumpkin, nearly nine feet tall; Tiffy Flora, with her razored fower petals of death; Ev & Bev, the three-armed siamese twins; and the enormous Porky Pine.

    Still others intrigued me for the opposite reason: they were stunning to behold, but I had nothing to go on. Like, how had I missed hearing about the six giant walking stone heads? They had big stone arms growing out of their ears, big stone swords growing out of their hands. You'd think somebody would have mentioned them, at some point along the way. But no. They were certainly news to me.