“But on you personally. Only Syndi is bearing Hnossi’s condition as heavily as you are.”
“That’s because I’ve known her for five decades, twenty years longer than even her no-account daughter has. And now I’ve got to worry that these leads I was pursuing on Warmaster Set were all black herrings. Which means that even the destruction of Asteroid Zed—my God!—even that was the work of that Beelzebubian bastard Kareem—”
“Let’s focus on your feelings, Festus—your worry for Hnossi. To see her in this state—”
“ ‘This state’? Dying, you mean? In bed, the way no warrioress would ever want to go?”
“And before she can resolve her family troubles, her distance from her children, not to mention any other…unresolved interpersonal issues—”
He cut me off. “I was never married, so I can’t relate to that. But missing your children—that I understand. I have compassion for that pain. And as her comrade.”
“I’m not seeing comradely loyalty alone here, Festus,” I said, touching his hand. I expected him to yank it away, even order me not to touch him. Instead, he was frozen, his eyes unfocused amid the flashing images from his surveillance honeycomb.
“I’ve been reading up on your noncaped careers,” I said, anxious to maintain the opening. “You two not only worked together in the F*O*O*J, but elsewhere. For decades, Professor Icegaard was a paid consultant of your defense contracting corporation. Pilt-Dyne built the B9 bomber, which you christened the Iron Lass class; because of you, Pilt-Dyne’s nuclear submarine was named the Icegaard class.” I squeezed; his hand trembled. “For a hard-boiled industrial magnate like you, Festus, those were practically love poems.”
He looked over at me, his eyes wet and glossy and twinkling from the honeycomb lights. Sitting there in his chair with his whitened hair, he was no longer the frightening, furry one-man war on crime, and no longer even the towering tycoon of technology.
He was just an old, lonely man facing the truth of his own powerlessness.
“And yet,” I said, probing this rare vulnerability to examine the psychemotional damage that was crushing the life out of him, “for all your devotion to this woman, now that she truly needs you and there’s no one else in your way, you still can’t do anything to protect her…or save her.”
“What?” he whispered, too horrified to be furious.
“Festus, you were up on Asteroid Zed with her, but when she was attacked by the Desiccator, where were you? Even now, with all your wealth and influence, and the awesome power of the surveillance you have at your fingertips right here, the woman you’ve loved for fifty years is dying, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
His lower lip quivering, the spindly old teeth of his lower jaw exposed like a skeleton’s, Festus leaned back in his chair, clutching his chest as if to keep his heart from exploding.
“Festus,” I whispered, leaning toward him, “how does all that make you feel?”
His eyes were huge, his pupils swollen blackly, his face drained of all its color.
Suddenly the high-pitched buzz-whine in the background noise climaxed to buzzsaw anxiety that ripped through Festus’s misery. I glanced up and spied an agitated Brotherfly crawling the Hollow’s ceiling in endless circles while fluttering his wings at just below take-off speed. Festus shook his head as if to wake from sleeping at the wheel, then shoved his chair back away from me and stood.
“Get the fuck out of my crime lab!” he yelled, flipping back the sides of his dressing gown, his hands hovering at the holster level of his exposed utility belt. “And take that wall-crawling parasite with you!”
At Festus’s behest, Mr. Savant, employing a crutch and with one arm in a cast, showed André and me to a drawing room. I offered André a tranquilizer, but he still wouldn’t sit down, leaving his hand-and footprints all over the walls, windows, and ceiling.
Finally, following my special instructions, Mr. Savant left and hobbled back pushing a cart with a bowl of luxurious, exotic fruits, placing it on the grand marble coffee table at the center of the room.
Lured down by the sweet scents and tropical colors, André perched on the coffee table to ingest the fruit, doing so by expectorating rancid yellow digestive juices all over the oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and grapes which dissolved the produce—peels, stalks, seeds, stones, and all—into a steaming, stinking pool that spilled all over the marble table. Opening his mouth, André unfurled his well-endowed proboscis and began sucking up the bubbling soda-pap he’d created.
Suppressing my gorge with an act of supreme will, I sat, taking out my ANDRÉ PARKER, HKA THE BROTHERFLY F*O*O*J file as well as the MORRIS ANDREW PARK, ALIAS BROTHERFLY file that Mr. Savant had brought me.
“You’re twenty-six, André, correct?” He slurped and nodded, still sucking up the revolting stinking slime on the table. “And you’ve been in the F*O*O*J how long?” He held up three fingers.
André was a fascinating set of contradictions. As the hip, laid-back, fun-loving Brotherfly, he could not be a more profound counterpoint to the militant anal-retention of the thirty-four-year old X-Man. In one session, Kareem had described André as a “hyper-womanizing, antiintellectual, willing slave…enough of a collaborator with every racist stereotype about young black males that he should be a PR man for the Klan,” and he’d denounced André to his face at the Dark Star soul food restaurant as “a slack, slick, loose-dicked, willingly-no-self-control…senseless, thoughtless, shiftless, aimless, brainless, oversized pants–wearing, forty-ounce-loving, penis-fixated, self-underrated supreme champeen of galactic niggativity.”
But as the real man beneath the André Parker construct, Morris Andrew Park had so much in common with Philip Kareem Edgerton that the toxic enmity they shared became all the more shocking.
Glancing through the file’s photos, I was struck by how severely André deviated from Andrew: tiny four-year-old Andrew in
