He laughed. Laughing, he rose. He could have scuttled the vessel with a single blinding lance of white light. Instead he stretched out his hand. “Burn, baby, burn!” he shouted, and rained down fire from the sky.
Noel Matthews’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to start a revolution. But somebody’s got to step up to the plate because governments have failed. We live in the freakin’ twenty-first century, and here we are with people starving, and armies fighting in the Sudan, and for what? Oil? National pride? We could achieve wonders, hell, make that miracles-end hunger, travel to the stars, have perfect privacy and total freedom, but we’ve got to get out of the trees. We’ve got to tamp down the monkey brain…
Noel leaned back from the computer screen. The rant continued for several more pages, but he had read enough to have a sense of the writer. An idealist, but angry and cynical. I can work with that.
Working from the handle provided by Broadcast, Noel had determined that the Signal on Port 950 was really Robert Cumming, age twenty-three. He lived in Chicago, Illinois, and he was a joker. He avoided almost all human contact, but he still had to eat.
Noel checked his watch. The groceries were about to be delivered to 865 Lake Shore Drive, apartment 723.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
He was still freaked out when he stalked into the war room of the Nshombos’ new vanity palace in K-ville, a great gleaming concrete iceberg, a true city within a city, if still a bit raw. The air-conditioning inside was like a frigid river flowing outward. Tom still welcomed it after the stinking sauna heat of the Sudd, and the diesel-reeking heat of K-ville. But it raised goosebumps on his arms.
That fucker, he raged. He stole Aquarius from me. He lessened me. Long ago, when his enemy ran around in a purple Uncle Sam suit calling himself “Captain Trips,” he invoked his “friends” by taking unique decoctions of psychoactive chemicals, each and every one devised by Meadows in hopes of invoking him. The man who called himself Tom Weathers now. The Radical.
At last Mark Meadows got his way. And Tom had had things his way ever since. But it had come at a cost: Tom didn’t dare use any kind of drug more mind-warping than coffee or chocolate. No pot. No booze. Not even antihistamines. Because anything that altered Tom’s consciousness risked snapping his mind and body back into the long dark prison of Meadows’s subconscious.
But the only way of reclaiming the surly shape-shifting Canuck who called himself Cetus Dauphine was to re- create the drugs that Meadows used to invoke him. Tom felt sick certainty that wouldn’t work, either: no formulation his enemy had ever tried had sufficed to bring back Starshine after he “died,” or martial-arts goddess Moonchild once she retired from the world in horror at taking a human life. And while Tom had access to many of his predecessor’s memories, he lacked Mark’s biochemical genius. He couldn’t even try.
“Oh, Tom,” Alicia Nshombo said, rising as he came through the automatic sliding door. Video screens covered the walls of the room beyond, showing moving scenes of battle in the Sudd, of Congo-basin forest, of everyday life in K-ville. “I am so glad you are back.”
Dr. Nshombo sat behind a vast gleaming black African blackwood desk. As usual the President-for-Life’s face showed no more reaction than the desktop.
“The United Nations has offered to broker a peace conference between ourselves and the Caliphate of Arabia,” Nshombo said gravely. If he was capable of talking any other way Tom had never heard.
“So? Fuck ’em.”
Alicia uttered a little gasp and pressed fingers to her mouth. She’d reacted the same way the thousand other times she’d heard Tom use such language. “Tom, cher,” she said. “Please don’t take such a tone with my brother. You need each other so much.”
Dr. Nshombo wasn’t one to mouth meaningless phrases. He went on as if Tom had not spoken. “I have decided it is in our best interests to participate. I mean to send our foremost jurist, Dr. Apollinaire Okimba, as our representative. He enjoys an impeccable reputation on the world stage. His participation will play well, as our clever young friend the Chinese colonel would say.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Tom. “You’re not actually gonna negotiate with this fat imperialist Allah freak?”
“Our representative will deliver to Siraj our ultimatum: either he withdraws his support from the genocidal aggressors in South Sudan and pulls back his armies, or we shall destroy those armies, depose him, and liberate the suffering people of the Middle East from the chains of a brutal superstition. There will be no negotiation.”
Tom could only stare at his old comrade. “Yeah, well, that will play well, I’m sure.”
Dr. Nshombo’s brows twitched a millimeter closer together. It was the equivalent of a normal man throwing a rage fit. But Alicia’s mouth crumpled, pursed between plump cheeks, and her eyes got dewy behind her bat-wing glasses at Tom’s rudeness. “But Tom,” she said, “if the Arab gives in, the war will end.”
“Siraj won’t give in. It’d mean crawling home on his belly. And the U-fucking-N? Those Committee fuckers helped protect Bahir when he kidnapped my daughter!” He was half standing and all shouting.
Nshombo faced him impassively. “The Revolution must come before your petty desires for vengeance, Tom, but I am not unmindful of the wrong you suffered.” Then he actually smiled. “It is not my intention to send Dr. Okimba to the Paris peace conference at all.”
“No?” Tom goggled.
Dr. Nshombo began to laugh.
Robert Cumming’s Apartment
Chicago, Illinois
One hundred dollars simplified the negotiation with the delivery boy. Noel stood in front of the apartment door, set down one sack, and rang the bell. He idly noticed that the sacks contained mostly pasta Meals in a Sack, bags of potato and tortilla chips, and several different kinds of cookies.
He expected a behemoth to answer the door. What actually stood framed in the doorway once it was opened was an incredibly tall and incredibly thin monochrome joker. Despite his youth, his hair was grey, his eyes were grey, and his skin was greyer. “You’re not Chuck,” Cumming said.
“No.”
“What do you want?”
Noel was pleased. He hated people who didn’t get to the heart of a matter, and instead wasted time asking, “Who are you?” and “How did you get here?” or “How did you get the groceries?”
“I’m the man who’s going to give you the opportunity to change the world,” Noel said.
21
Wednesday,
December 16
In the Jungle, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Rusty, I need you. We should never have split up. I can’t do this. I can’t.
But there was no choice. She’d already lost one of her charges to the jungle, and she worried about Rusty, about where he was and who might be after him. The despair threatened to overwhelm her: they might both be dead soon, Wally lost in the jungle somewhere, and her with these children who clung to her as if she were their only hope.
She kept the kids crawling forward as long as they could during the daylight hours, and huddled together with them around a small fire at night, when the sounds of the jungle surrounded them and their imaginations jumped at every noise. She fed them from the food her seed pouch could produce-strangely, to Jerusha, it seemed the jungle wasn’t the best place to forage and find food. You are their only hope. She could nearly hear Rusty saying it. Cripes,
