“Ready for lunch,” his captor said. “Your hands are comin’ to me and mine, I hear.”
His hands. What a place. Trapped in the wagon with nothing to do but think, he had remembered more of his real life. If you looked—really looked—you wouldn’t find a trace of Wylie Dale before December 26, 1995, the day he’d made his transition into a human life that had been painstakingly constructed for him to enter. “Wylie Dale” had already been established as a novelist by the organization that had sent him to the human earth, but the first book he’d written himself was Alien Days, his story of his abduction, which had actually been a looking-glass memory of his arrival on one-moon earth.
As Wylie’s eyes adjusted to the light, he found himself standing before a gigantic version of a building familiar to him. It was the model for the Tomb of Skull and Bones on the campus of Yale University. But the Tomb was not large. This building was two hundred feet tall, a great, ugly monolith.
Compared to the rest of the city, which echoed with roars, screeches, discharges of steam, the rumbling of wagons, and various unidentifiable hoots, laughs, and howls, the silence here was total.
Bones had been founded by William Huntington Russell, whose step-brother Sam had carried opium into China for the British when they were trying to get back the gold they’d spent on Chinese tea. British captains hadn’t been willing to do it. It might have been the 1850s, but drug running was still drug running. Russell had no problem with addicting the Chinese.
“Are you happy?” he asked his grinning captor.
“Yeah, I’m happy.”
“Then fuck you.”
“Could I season your fingers?”
“You going to two-moon earth?”
“I should be so lucky. No can afford.”
Wylie thought of the shithole the seraph hordes were being sent to. “What does it cost?”
“Whatever you have. Which assumes you have something. They don’t consider an artificial syrinx with a busted jaw and this old wagon worth a ticket. I live in it, you know. When it’s not otherwise occupied.”
“So you’re poor?”
“Poor as shit, which is why—” He stopped. He listened, so Wylie listened, too. Keening came, heart-freezing, getting louder fast. “Knees!”
Wylie didn’t argue. As he went down to the hard earth and little knots of mushrooms like small, exposed brains, a line of flying motorcycles with silver fenders, ridden by figures in gold metallic uniforms and gleaming gold helmets and face masks, came speeding out of the sky and hung dead still a foot or so above the ground, their motors revving as the riders worked to keep them stable.
This was followed by a smooth whoosh of sound, and a jewel of an aircar appeared.
He knew who it belonged to, of course: Marshal Samson. His escort bowed, and he bowed, too. There was a click and he could sense somebody getting down, coming over.
“Hello, Wylie.” The voice positively bubbled. “I knew it from the first. It had to be this. Actually, I’m impressed. I’ll never tell her that, of course, but it was a brilliant operation.”
“Thank you.”
“I just came from raping your wife, incidentally. Bring him.”
He was kicked from behind, and ended up scuttling through the huge doors, which had opened soundlessly and now presented the appearance of a gaping cave.
As Wylie walked through the darkness of the anteroom and Samson opened the inner door for them both, the enormous golden floor struck him with a powerful sense of remembrance. That floor had been a source of scandal at home, a symbol to the Union of the greed of the autocrats who ran this side of the planet.
A tall woman loaded with jewels, her hair sleek and white, dressed in the richest clothing Wylie had ever seen, came striding forward. Her face was so white that it glowed, the scales attractively tiny, the features delicate. He knew that this was the infamous leader of this world, Echidna, whose family had held controlling ownership of the Corporation for uncountable millennia.
All the females in the line were called Echidna. When one wore out, a new clone replaced it seamlessly, without any public awareness. There was never an issue of succession, unlike the Union, which was a simple democracy and in turmoil all the time.
“Come, Spy,” she said, “I want to gloat before dinner.”
As they crossed the great room, he saw Lee Raymond, Robert Mugabe, and Ann Coulter playing a game involving dice on what appeared to be a table made of emeralds, rubies, and a great, gleaming expanse of pure diamond. He recognized the game. It was senet, the Egyptian predecessor to backgammon. In the human worlds, the rules of senet had been hidden away by the seraph, but here, where they had not, players at senet gambled for souls.
He was not sure if they were human, or simply proud of their achievements as human, and showing off their forms.
“I had no idea your penetration of human society was so extensive.”
“But not of both human worlds, not as much as I hoped. This time around, we’re only getting the one, I fear.” She shot him a twinkling glance. “But we are getting it, you Union shit!”
Coulter now shifted into a sallow reptilian form with big, beady scales. Her black tongue darted behind spiked teeth made yellow from too much tobacco. Wylie realized that she was lusting after him. Mugabe, who was apparently her seraph husband, scurried behind her, trying to keep a cloak around her.
“Ann wants to bed you before we eat,” Echidna said. “It’s a particular pleasure of hers, to fuck her food.”
They arrived at a tall window, curtained. “Open it,” Echidna snapped at Samson. “I just want you to see this, Union man.”
Wylie realized that she had brought him close to a great, black wall with huge levers on it. Scalar controls, he knew, that worked the gigantic lenses that were deployed on two-moon earth. But then the curtains swept open, and he saw a lawn so bright green it must have been painted, awash in splendid people, some of them reptilian, others human, or seemingly so. There were politicians, of course, great, grinning hordes of them, military officers in the uniforms of a dozen countries, representatives of various royal families, rock stars, CEOs, television personalities, preachers, mullahs, gurus—in fact, every sort of human leader and person of power. Among them strolled naked seraph girls and boys, their scales bleached so white they looked new-minted, carrying trays loaded with barbecued fingers, ears and toes, and flutes of hissy champagne.
To one side was a line of elaborate gas grills, all black and chrome. He recognized that they were Strathmores from home, the brand he had on his own deck, except that these were limousine models, with twelve burners instead of the usual four. Most of them were rolling spits, and on them some of the victims still twisted and squirmed. Behind each grill hung a complete body molt on a tall spike, a pale skin attesting to the youth and therefore tenderness of the person under preparation.
Echidna pointed to an empty grill. “That’ll be you,” she said.
He wanted to try to run, anything to avoid what seemed inevitable. But there was more, because he saw that this party was not to celebrate his capture, or not only that, it was also to celebrate an enormous event that was unfolding in a valley behind the building.
In the center of this valley was a gigantic circular lens of purest black, its surface reflecting the wan midday sun. And around it, stretching to every horizon, were what must be millions and millions of seraph, ready to pour through the moment the signal was given. He saw men, women, children, heard the booming of syrinxes, the chatter and whoops of other animals, and above it all the excited, argumentative shrieking of the seraph themselves as they jostled for position and accused one another of trying to break the baskets of black, oblong eggs the women all carried.
He assumed that he would die here today. He’d been living for years in an extremely dangerous situation with a wiped memory, and that made you vulnerable—so vulnerable, in fact, that it was probably just a matter of time before you ended up going through the funny little door in the woods. He loved his poor family, though, his striving, brilliant, lovely family. What would happen to them? Could they shift, he wondered? Did they, perhaps in secret, the children under their covers at night, Brooke in the privacy of her early mornings?
Ann had sidled closer, and he thought maybe he could cause a little confusion. In this class-ridden society, she was bound to have some prerogatives. Time wasn’t on his side, obviously, but distraction might be.
