The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (10 page)

JOHN JOHN:
Yes.

NOACOM:
Password?

JOHN JOHN:
…

NOACOM:
Password?

JOHN JOHN:
*M*A*L*A*C*H*A*I

NOACOM:
Good evening, Dean Roberts.

JOHN JOHN:
Open file, please.

NOACOM:
Potts, William, student number 5257525

Department of Anthropology, Graduate Studies

Family Status (last updated A.C.12):

Deceased parent:   Berman Potts, PhD, Mathematics

Deceased parent:   Lucinda née Bolen, PhD, Biology

Deceased sibling:   John (elder) (leukemia, 2011)

Deceased sibling:   Arthur (twin, SIDS, 1987)

Course History:

Pertinent to field of study:

Intro. Applied Anthro 0:01

Applied Anthro 0:02

Culture Dynamics 0:02

Social Evolution 0:02

Extinction Dynamics 0:02

Systems Theory in Anthro 0:03

Processual Anthro 0:03

Revised History of Anthro 0:04

Additional Studies:

Biological Ethics 0:01

Systems Theory in Gov’t (required)

Communications (required)

History of the Oral Tradition

Semantics (required)*

Genetics and the Mind

Advanced Systems Theory (required)*

Advanced Communications (required)

Models of Multiculturalism*

* denotes incomplete

Major Papers (Grade):

Ethics in Systems Theory (sat)

Communicating Knowledge (sat)

Rewiring the Mind (brain function and instinct) (sat)

The Evolution of Fieldwork (fail)

Unpredictability in Systems Theory (fail)

Failures: revision required, status pending

Grant Applications:

Category: Fieldwork

Project: Rural Waysides: Subjects Who Are Nonparticipants in Social Programming: Case Studies

Accepted: affirmative

Project: Hole Peripheral Occupation: Case Studies of Occupants Living on the Periphery of the Midwest Hole

Accepted: conditional

Project: Lakota Adaptations to the Midwest Hole

Accepted: negative*

* Applicant succeeded in acquiring permission from the Lakota Nation with signatory: Horn, D., Exec Band Council

Project: Unknown (private grant)*

* Wheel Foundation

Potts, William, is listed as a Subversive Class 01 (potential). The following observation reports are compiled from academic observation reports (aor), field operatives, E-surveillance.

AOR (course instructors & required Report Review Committee):

(a) Subject displays an exceptional level of inquisitiveness.

(b) Subject takes perverse pleasure in challenging accepted applications of Social Theory.

(c) Subject is advanced in communications theory applications.

(d) Subject’s father is a known dissident for which Subject displays incorrected pride.

(e) Subject displays advanced (unapproved) knowledge of Numbers Theory and Chaos Theory. (Chaos Theory is Suppressed Information, See Freedom File 210X210.) Assume Parental Education, contravening NOAC Parenting Parameters, Criminal Code 16-21IIa-f.

(f) Subject employed No-Trace variants on Net, using a Remote Fieldbook.

(g) Subject continually disrupted classes with adversarial interrogatives.

(h) Subject identified two assigned field operatives via Valentine cards with boxed chocolates (chocolates analyzed and cleared).

(i) Subject displayed advanced knowledge of technological engineering Systems Theory & application.

(j) Subject revealed knowledge of pre-revised archaeology and anthropological dynamics.

(k) Subject revealed knowledge of Indigenous Peoples’ History, Mythology & Belief Systems prior to Applied Anthropological Restructuring of Said Peoples.

(l) Subject successfully breached this file with insufficient trail to advance criminal proceedings.

Present Net Entries: Unavailable.

JOHN JOHN:
Delete File, Potts, William.

NOACOM:
This file is docked at Securicom. There are no other copies of this file, as per Securicom Subversive Investigations Parameters. Do you still wish to Delete?

JOHN JOHN:
Yes.

NOACOM:
File Deleted.

JOHN JOHN:
Delete File, Potts, Berman. Potts, Lucinda n. Bolen.

NOACOM:
No such file exists.

JOHN JOHN:
Sniff back.

NOACOM:
File, Potts, Berman, File, Potts, Lucinda née Bolen were accidentally destroyed in Data Transfer,
A.C
. 13. Investigation Ongoing: sabotage suspected.

JOHN JOHN:
Delete Ongoing Investigation Data File, Data Transfer
A.C
. 13, Potts, Berman & Lucinda.

NOACOM:
File Deleted.

JOHN JOHN:
Delete all Subversive all Classes Files.

NOACOM:
Working. All files deleted, Subversive all Classes Files. 16174.96 QTB now available in Securicom System.

JOHN JOHN:
Delete all E-surveillance Files.

NOACOM:
Working …

Net

STONECASTER:
A modest query, then. How is it that he’s getting clearer? Hours tick into days out under that deadly sun. The boy’s cooked, his skin peeling, half-blind.

CORBIE TWA:
Into and out of, Stony. Clarity’s the word all right. Crystal clear. He’s pushed through. He’s been cleansed, hell, reborn to the hour.

STONECASTER:
Still kind of suspicious to my thinking.

BOGQUEEN:
Your thinking’s still too linear, Stonecaster. He’s on a seasonal round, moving a cyclical route. When I read him, I feel him orbiting out there, coming round and round, coming closer with each pass of the great wheel. The closer he gets to what he’s been circling, the clearer things become. For him, for us.

PACEMAKER:
This last hint of NOAC data on population projections and biological dynamics has me curious, to say the least. I wonder if such data exist, and if the trend projections lead to certain inevitable conclusions.

CORBIE TWA:
Carefully crafted belief systems acquire a power of their own. Methinks the powers that be are bucklin under an imperative of their own makin. Inertia’s set in, and now that new information’s comin down the line and mussin up their coifs, they can’t do nothin but lean into the wind.

BOGQUEEN:
Political structures don’t adapt, they react. None of this should surprise you.

PACEMAKER:
There are others out there, like us, who have declared war. It’s a war of information, the staccato of data on all sides. And some have taken a step further down the combative line.

CORBIE TWA:
Ah, you must mean the terrorists.

PACEMAKER:
Strictly speaking, that’s exactly what they are. Not that I’m complaining. The walls of silence have been breached, and data spills like blood into our hands.

CORBIE TWA:
How poetic. But I think the reality’s a tad messier than that, Pacemaker. These guys are pulling down satellites.

LUNKER:
That has, I believe, tailed off lately. For the simple reason that NOAC and the rest have laid off harassing Ladon Inc. and the Lakota.

PACEMAKER:
Given that cyclical storm front over the Central Plains, they haven’t much choice. Now that their hi-tech see-all microsats are all gone …

BOGQUEEN:
Around and around he circles.…

STONECASTER:
You can’t be serious, Bogqueen. Leave me out if you’re going mystical on us. The boy’s an opportunist.

FREE WHIZZY:
All very interesting, ladies and gents, but I can’t help feeling these aimless musings are essentially pointless. We need to get organized. We need a list of things to do, things that arise from a set of goals. There’s an ocean of previously restricted information out there. The boy’s dropping enough crumbs. Time for us to start sniffing the trails.

CORBIE TWA:
You seriously think William knows what he’s doing? That he’s callin for our help? That he has some kind of grand scheme to bring the world to its knees?

FREE WHIZZY:
He may not be consciously aware of such motives, Corbie Twa. Nevertheless, they are clearly operant, no matter who, or what the source.

CORBIE TWA:
Divine guidance?

BOGQUEEN:
You said it, not us.

STONECASTER:
The boy’s dragged you all with him, hasn’t he? Right into the quagmire of madness. Raving loons in the Swamp.

FREE WHIZZY:
You’re free to surface at will, Stonecaster. No one’s insisting you remain.

CORBIE TWA:
Calm down, everyone. Look, somethin’s drawn us to William’s Net entries. All of us, Stonecaster included. We don’t know nothin at all about William, when it comes right down to it. An untreated psychotic? Megalomaniac? Or just someone who knows too much—

BOGQUEEN:
We’re not completely ignorant, Corbie. William dances this Swamp like a whirling dervish. He evades every tracking effort, slips through every drift net NOAC’s dragging across the waves. He’s accessed restricted information and tosses us conceptual time bombs. Is he sitting back right now and laughing while we desperately juggle?

CORBIE TWA:
You forget one thing, lass. He’s dyin of rad poisonin and toxemia. And he walked into that of his own free will. That, to my mind, seriously undermines his authority as a revolutionary thinker.

STONECASTER:
Unless it’s all a scam. What if he’s driving around out there in some NOAC-issue rad buggy. Throwing us time bombs all right, then laughing when they explode in our faces.

PACEMAKER:
This speculation serves nothing. I believe Free Whizzy’s desire to organize is worthwhile. For one, I am interested in pursuing these population projection data. Much might be unveiled there, about both William and the Official Domain.

LUNKER:
Some of my associates are already working certain related areas. They are actively widening the cracks in the official wall. I’ll lay out a thread down to this place, and pertinent information shall surely find you.

PACEMAKER:
Thank you.

JOHN JOHN:
Hello one and all. Open a cubby, ladies and gentlemen, while I toss you all some background data on one Potts, William. I’m afraid I can’t stick around and chat. There’s a few more things that I need to do. Stay together, keep talking—you may not know it, but your silent audience is vast, and the threads … they fall toward you like rain.…

FIVE

American NW, Terminal Zone, July 11,
A.C
. 14

They gathered beneath a tarp that flapped drumlike in the wind. Seated on folding chairs around a three-legged metal table covered in fine lace. High-electrolyte drinks served from a refractive decanter. Beneath their feet a thick, broad rug.

On all sides on the hilltop the big and little bluestems fluttered their flowers like butterflies pinned to a board. Western wheatgrass and green needle shivered their feathery stalks. Blades and stems all sharp-edged now, reflective juices glittering and defying absorption, shunting deadly rad into the buffered earth. Impervious flowers that opened like throats at dusk and gusted out clouds of pollen that drifted in air swarming with flitting insects.

Bundles of sage smoldered around the periphery of the tarp’s shadow, streams of smoke spiraling and spinning away on the wind. The sage leaves, thicker than leather, burned with an inner fuel, an expulsion of energy as slow and steady as its previous absorption. A balance mocking the chemical descent into ashes.

William squatted just beyond the shadow, at the crest of the western slope where the cacti spread out and down the sun-drenched hillside in mauve and dusty green. Needles angled in antithesis to ancient sunflowers, away from the sun’s light. The symbiotic spiders had spun a mane of angel hair down the entire slope, glistening false dew like a dense scatter of diamonds. The spiders fed on cactus mites through the night, their webs full of cactus spores and tugged away by the scuttling passage of mice and needle-beaked birds that still hopped from pod to pod, plucking flower buds and drinking succulent juices. A microcosm of dependency, newly achieved—to William, a miracle, a creation so precise, so wonderful, that he felt it light his being.

Daniel Horn watched Jack Tree light the pipe. The young man’s face hinted at irony, a delicious taste at the back of his thoughts.

Max Ohman, the Lady’s representative, leaned back in his chair, both hands holding the glass of lime-colored liquid on his lap. Where his eyes held, behind the sunglasses, William couldn’t guess. They may well have been closed, for all the rest of his face betrayed.

Dr. Jenine MacAlister sat opposite the three men, studying a handheld notebook with the viewscreen draped in the shadow of her right hand. She had been reading the stress data for some time now. Finally she glanced up at Max Ohman. “The tensile properties are clearly best-case scenario, Max. What kind of in-field tests have you conducted?”

Max cleared his throat. “Eleven years, Doctor. We in-field tested in Saudi Arabia, at Boxwell Plateau, and of course at the source-point orbiting station. As of this morning, we have extended the tether-lines thirty-six kilometers from the station, well into the ionosphere. A free-flying test run. The stress factors are more than satisfactory. The tensile properties are not best-case, they’re actual. When I say this poly-ore matrix bends, I mean exactly that, Doctor. It
bends
.”

Jenine closed the notebook’s screen lid and reached for her glass. “Of course I’ll need to send the structural details to our NOAC specialists.”

Max Ohman’s grin was coldly feral. “Like hell you will, Doctor. Unless you’ve got an optic implant or eidetic memory, that data remains the property of Ladon Corporation. And,” he continued in a droll tone, “our file on you indicates neither implants nor eidetic memory.”