“You will, if you wish—from me, if not from Mr. Stubb himself. But from Mr. Stubb surely.”
“I’m still not going to tell you what happened to me. That’s my business!”
“If you will answer just one question, I will desist, at least for the time being. Was it something you are now ashamed of?”
Barnes nodded.
“So for Mr. Stubb also. He was given—might I call it the opportunity of a lifetime?”
Stubb said nothing.
“And he failed. He was brave, yes. And intelligent too, though he would call it smart. But at the crucial moment, distracted. It was not so much different for me. I too …”
“You looked the wrong way too?” Stubb patted his pockets. “Anybody got a cigarette?”
“No. But I failed. I was shown deities—the ultimate deities, so was I told. And they were as I had always believed they would be, Phra the Sun; Khepri, who is Life; Ked, God of Earth; Nu of the Waters, of the Waters of Chaos. But it was all wind.”
“I never believed in religion myself,” Barnes said. “But if they hurt you, I’m sorry.”
“You sacrifice to Kuvera, the Lord of Treasure,” the witch told him. “Also to Isis of Erech. And because you know nothing of them, they drive you as with scourges.”
Stubb said, “It doesn’t sound like you did so well yourself.”
“I did not. The worst thing is not to be ignorant of the gods. The worst is to mistake those who are not gods for them. At the very moment when I thought to be elevated, I found myself mocked and reviled. If it had been only the laughter of men and women, I should not have cared. I have heard that many times, and it is but the rattle of pebbles in an empty jar. But I heard the voices of the gods—of Mana and Skarl and Kib, and Sish, the Destroyer of Hours. Or of whatever the true gods may be.”
Barnes touched a finger to his lips. “Somebody’s coming.”
All three fell silent, listening to the footsteps. The door opened, and a middle-aged man in a duffel coat came in. He looked cold—there was snow on his shoes, and the white touch of winter on his cheeks, and a little frost had begun to form on the barrel of the Thompson submachine gun he carried.
“Good evening,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate an explanation of what’s happened to you and where you’re going.”
In Vino, Incertus
“It’s about time,” Stubb said. “Who was Free?”
Barnes snapped, “Where’s my kid?”
“I said I was going to explain,” the man in the duffel coat told them. “I didn’t say I was going to let you people quiz me, and I won’t.” The index finger of his right hand found the trigger of the Thompson.
Ignoring what he had just said, the witch asked, “Are you going to kill us?”
“We’re going to do what we’re told to do with you,” the man in the duffel coat answered a trifle wearily.
(Stubb polished his glasses and put them back on, leaning forward in his chair.)
“If our orders are to eliminate you, then you will be eliminated, yes. If we’re told to do something else with you, then we’ll do that.” He cleared his throat and spat into a corner. “The trouble with you people is that you won’t do what you’re ordered to. You can never see that when you do what the leader says, everything works out, and when you don’t, it all breaks down. Everything breaks down.”
“You are mad!” the witch said.
“I am the leader,” the man in the duffel coat told her.
“He’s just a little blasted,” Stubb said. “Don’t you smell the booze?” To the man in the duffel coat he added, “I wouldn’t mind a shot myself, sir. How about it?”
“You think you’re going to throw it in my eyes and take my gun.” The man in the duffel coat shook the Thompson, making the cartridges in its drum magazine rattle.
“Hell, I don’t want to throw it—I want to drink it.”
Barnes was shrugging into his checked jacket. “You said you were going to explain. Get on with it. I’d like to hear it.”
The man in the duffel coat chuckled. “So would I. I can’t wait to hear what I’m going to say. That’s Groucho, I think. Groucho Marx.”
“I know. I used to be a stand-up comic myself.”
“So you did. All right, I’ll start with you.” The man in the duffel coat looked from Barnes to the witch, and from her to Stubb, the muzzle of the Thompson following his eyes. “But first, I think it would be best if all three of you were sitting down.”
Barnes dropped into a chair.
“Good. Let me begin with the founding of our great nation—”
“Are you really crazy?” Stubb glared at him.
“No, I’m our leader, as I told you. Our country was founded on the principle of the destruction of the wild by the civilized. Let me—just for a moment, if Mr. Stubb will excuse it—go back thirty thousand years before Christ, when the ancestors of the Indians crossed what are now the Bering Straits to occupy what some people have called an
