Comeback Tour

'How could I know? I should have killed you in Spanish Fork.'

'Why didn't you?'

“…”

'Well?'

'You knew, didn't you? When you left me alive with the seeds of this thing in my brain. You knew what I would turn into.'

“…”

'Am I just another part of the story? Do I have a role to play in your big game?'

“…”

'I won't, you know. I won't be the thing you want me to be. I'll stop you.'

'You will try.'

'I will win. I'm not alone.'

'Neither am I.'

'I can scream inside your head forever, Nguyen Seth. I can shriek and shriek until you go mad.'

'I am already mad by most standards.'

'Big of you to admit it.'

'You will never live to know what it is like, to carry the burden of memory as I do. I remember a hundred years ago as if it were the last minute. A thousand, two thousand, ten thousand years ago. I have it all with me. Forever.'

'Is that why you want to end it all, then?'

'I do not want to Summon the Dark Ones. I must. I have no choice in the matter.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Do you not? You are here inside me—why do you not look around? You might learn something.'

'I don't like the sound of that. I could end up wandering forever in this dark inside your skull, couldn't I? Would you like that?'

“…”

'I think you would. You're full of tricks.'

'The singer will not help you.'

'Singer? What singer?'

'Presley.'

'The Op? He's not a singer.'

'As you will have it.'

'You can pick bits and pieces from my mind too, can't you? As I can with yours. You're remembering something from long ago. A boy singing, with a guitar. A contract. Was that Colonel Presley?'

“…”

'I wouldn't have thought it. He was no Petya Tcherkassoff, that's for sure. So you know the Op from a while back, eh? That's good. He should know something about what we'll be up against.'

'It does not have to be like this, Jessamyn. I can get rid of the Krokodil-thing inside you. It's quite a simple matter, actually.'

'If that big jellyfish of yours couldn't do it, I doubt if you'd get very far.'

'You fought the Jibbenainosay. If you were to submit to a small ritual, you could be free. You could be Jessamyn Bonney again.'

'You're offering me a deal?'

'A bargain.'

'I don't like the sound of that. There are stories about people who make bargains with people like you.'

'Just stories. Colonel Presley could have made a bargain with me. I have always taken an interest in music. His life would have been different.'

'Better?'

'Different.'

'I don't mink I really want to go back to being what I was. I'd have been dead in a few years more with the Psychopomps. I was just wasting my life.'

'You don't have to be what you were. You can be what you would have been. You have many qualities. You could join me.'

'And look forward to the Big Nothing? That doesn't sound like much of a prospect'

'For some, there will be an afterward. For a select few. You could be one of them.'

'That still sounds creepy to me, Seth.'

'Well, decide…'

'No.'

'As you will.'

'That's it? No more persuasion?'

'No. You have decided. I can tell. It is to be regretted, but I can do nothing.'

'Yeah, sure. It's to the death, then?'

'If you will have it that way.'

'Fine. I'll live with it.'

'We shall meet in Deseret, Krokodil. On the last day of the world, we shall meet again.'

'Goodnight, old man…'

'…Krokodil, good night.'

IX

Hiroshi Shiba, Assistant Director of the GenTech Florida compound, wrapped up his daily report to Dr Zarathustra, knowing that the high-flying medico would do no more than glance over the whole sheaf when he was next in Narcoossee for one of his quickie inspections. The 'events' blank was easy to fill: the 'A,' 'B' and 'C' teams were fulfilling their experimental commitments as scheduled, and there had been no unexpected occurrences. The 'comments' box was more difficult. Shiba chewed his lightpencil and tapped the screen, trailing ungrammatical bloops across the report form. There was nothing exactly he could put into official words, but duty tugged at him. He should say something about the strange atmosphere he had perceived recently. He had mentioned the oddly oppressive feelings he had been having to Visser, but the security man had just laughed, scratching his scrotum through his well-filled chinos, and said that summers in the swamp were always like this. That had sounded reasonable, but it still did not explain away all of Shiba's contradictory feelings about the progress the compound was making. It was as if an invisble miasma hung over the whole place like marsh gas, slowing people down, making them irritable, bubbling inside their brainpans.

Shiba was as bound to GenTech as the compound indentees who made the recaff, cleaned the test-tubes and donated their blood. Recruited at the age of eleven, after a four-hour examination assessed by the central computer, he had been taken from his family home in Akashi to the corp's college in Kyoto. The assessment programme had marked him down as an administrator of the future because of the way he had slotted together a selection of irregular shapes on his screen. He had further demonstrated an aptitude for biochemistry by designing some simple gene-splices in order to create a strain of water snail that breathed only half as much as its parent generation. The first night in the Kyoto dormitory, he had wet the bed, and Inoshira Kube, the thirteen-year-old trainee captain, had recommended him for electro-corrective treatment. By the time of his eighteenth birthday he had fully qualified to fill the slot GenTech East had prepared for him, and been initiated into the Blood Banner