The Last Guardian of Everness (War of the Dreaming 1) (24 page)

Mocklear spread his hands, and grinned. “Oh, them. They had to be told what they wanted to hear. What else can you do with people like that?”

Crooked as it was, there was something warm and brotherly in that smile. Yeah, Furlough knew how dumb most people were. What
could
you do with people like that?

Mocklear dropped his voice to a more intimate octave: “But people like us—people who want to be on the winning side—we have no such illusions, do we?”

Mocklear paused a moment to let that sink in, and then he continued in a confidential tone: “I’ll lay my cards on the table. I have a quota to fill. The timetable has been moved up. We have a boss, a man who gets things done, and he is about to make his appearance on the scene, and so we need to be
ready sooner than we thought we’d be. So I need to find people, fast. All I need is warm bodies who know which end of the tube the round comes out of and who will obey orders. But we also need people with brains. People who are smart. People who know how the game is played. People with no illusions, no ideals, no messy commitments. People who cannot be fooled by flattery or tricks. Are you that kind of person, Furlough?”

Furlough found the notion that he was above the illusions of ordinary men irresistible. Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.

Like a little wisp of hot flame burning inside him, he felt the dark, savage satisfaction of hearing someone actually come out and say what he had always thought. It was like coming home, home to people like him: people who knew the world was a bag of lies, who knew the game was rigged but who managed to carry off their winnings anyhow.

(The idea that this was just a lie as well, a line being fed him because it was just what he wanted to hear, stirred uneasily below the surface of Furlough’s thinking, like a groundhog peering just its nose furtively above- ground. But that idea, which was not a very flattering one to him, didn’t like its shadow, and subsided again.)

“I’ll think about it,” said Furlough. “If I do decide to look into this new assignment of yours, who do I talk to . . .”

Mocklear mentioned a salary figure around ten times what Furlough’s crappy E3 pay was now. “And there are other benefits. Cooke mentioned some of them. We take care of our own. Interested?”

Furlough wished he could have hidden the hungry look on his face, but he knew the crooked little man had seen. Another slip-up. No point in playing coy now. “Well, maybe there is not that much to think over. Yeah. I guess I’m interested.”

Mocklear said, “There’ll be a test, of course.”

“Like an initiation?” Furlough knew how gangs worked. Once the recruit had done something horrible, something the authorities could not forgive,
the loyalty of the recruit was assured. He had no place else to go, and blackmail could keep him in line.

“Nothing so crude. Wentworth is looking for a select group of men who display certain . . . psychological factors.” He took out a sheaf of papers from the desk drawer. “If you would fill out this questionnaire and request for transfer?”

“Am I still going to be in the service? Or not?”

“You will have a military rank, but the special unit will be performing operations wherever need be, either overseas, or within the continental U.S. Sometimes in uniform, sometimes not.”

Furlough looked over the questions. “I see you’re asking rather personal things here.”

“It is for psychological evaluation.”

“Are you allowed to ask questions like this? Is ‘sodomy’ even a word people can use anymore? What ever happened to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’? “

Mocklear spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, assuming a look of detached innocence. “We are trying to be all-inclusive, and the new unit is seeking out persons of alternate sexual orientation as part of our diversity program.”

“Why are you asking me about my sexual partners here? ‘. . . or, if with your wife, was the ceremony performed in a Church’. . .?”

“That is merely health information. Venereal disease, you know. Also, ah, people who go through church weddings tend to stay married longer. We need to know because it affects our insurance premiums, since the JAG corps handles divorce and custody cases, and this comes out of our operational overhead. You understand.”

“But what about, ‘Have you ever had sexual relations or intimate physical contact with a Jewess, Pagan, or unbaptized woman’? Who would ask—? What the hell is that all about?”

“Part of our commitment to the separation of church and state. Speaking of which . . . could you stand up, please?” From another drawer, Mocklear
took out a crucifix on a chain and dropped it clattering on the floorboards. It was a little wooden cross, highly polished, with a figure of a suffering Christ in ivory. The workmanship was beautiful, simple, and delicate.

Mocklear said in a matter-of-fact tone, “Trample the crucifix, please, and we can get on with processing your request for transfer.”

Furlough looked down at the crucifix on the floor.

“Is there a problem, private?”

“You have got to be kidding.”

Mocklear said, “Merely a psychological test. It really does not have any meaning beyond that.”

Furlough shook his head, slowly. “You guys are . . . not ordinary . . . are you? This sounds like something from . . .”

IV

Furlough had an aunt that everyone called Crazy Jane. He assumed there was one like her in every family. For some people, it was stamp collecting, or bird watching. For her, it was the Knights Templar. Conspiracy-theory stuff for medievalists. Crazy Jane was convinced there was a vast treasure, including maybe even the Ark of the Covenant, hidden somewhere in the old monasteries of Europe: the treasure of the Templars.

Crazy Jane told everyone about her theories. Despite his best effort, she had told Furlough all about it, too. When the Knights of the Order of the Temple of Jerusalem had been destroyed by King Philip the Fair of France, they had confessed under torture to all manner of bizarre things, things meant to shock the conscience of the average burgher of the Dark Ages, so that the average burgher would think Philip the Fair was an honest king, not merely a crook out to plunder the wealthy knights. Naturally, Templars had confessed to whatever the tormentors wanted them to confess: acts of sodomy and devil worship, consorting with Jewesses and Witches, or unbaptized
concubines from the East. In other words, things that would make them look bad only in the eyes of the other men of the time; things no modern man would give a second thought about: fornication; nature worship; disrespect toward the Church.

The Templars confessed to nothing a modern man like Furlough would criticize. Heck, no one Furlough knew went to the chapel except under orders, or avoided women. That’s what whores were for. A man would have to be a freak of some sort even to worry about things like that. Only a girl with deep-seated psychological problems stayed a virgin till marriage, and no man Furlough knew, not ever.

This was something from the dead past. Step on a cross? What kind of people would care about such a thing these days?

Furlough had always thought people from overseas were like Americans, or wanted to be. There was no place he could think of, no people, who would ask a man to trample a cross or care one way or the other if he did.

As if it were part of a voodoo ritual. As if this guy and his boss were from Aunt Jane’s home town in Crazycrazyland.

So Furlough just stood there, his mouth slightly open, his eyes slightly shut, trying to puzzle it out. Where were these guys from?

V

Mocklear said wearily: “If the test is too difficult for you, private Furlough, that will be noted in your records. Naturally, the matter is entirely voluntary, but I am a little surprised. I had been thinking you were a member of a superior personality type, one who knows the essential meaninglessness of rituals and icons and mere material objects, eh?”

“Is there really a wizard? Cooke said something about a wizard.”

The question just blurted out of him, as if by itself.

As Furlough said these words, the idea, which seemed so comical, so
storybook-like, suddenly seemed not so comical. A creature that could bend the fabric of reality to his terrible will, a being who stood outside of all the laws of man and nature, an entity that could transform things and distort them in ways that were not meant to be. . . what other word was there to call him, but a name from a children’s fairy-tale?

Furlough remembered, from something he had read, that the original fairy-tales had been much darker and bloodier than the cartoon versions kids were allowed to see.

Mocklear said blandly, “We’ve made contact with a man who can do things we have trouble explaining, or explaining away. I am sure the science of parapsychology will be able to find an answer some day soon. It certainly seems like magic to the uninitiated, but then again, there are many miracles of science and technology that would astonish the men of primitive times and backwards lands. Is there really such a difference? No doubt, to Cooke, our Master might appear to be a very impressive and frightening figure, capable of inexplicable things, and a man of limited intellect like Cooke might well use a word like ‘wizard’ to describe something his mind was too small to comprehend. It is a mystique, part of a psychological warfare effort. You know.

“But—” And now the crooked grin grew wide, and too many teeth showed between Macklear’s thin, colorless lips. “But suppose the world was odder than you dreamed. Suppose there was something Out There. Maybe on the Dark Side of the Moon, maybe in the depths of the sea. Suppose there was something to those crazy old Soviet experiments with telepathy and shared-dream research, or those lights people sometimes see in the sky. What could you do, if there were?”

“What do you mean, what could I do?”

“If there were creatures who could bend the laws of nature, use them, rig the game. They’d seem like wizards to us, wouldn’t they? If there were such a thing, there would be nothing else to do, would there be? You’d have to get one on your side. You’d have to find one who could protect you from the others. It is only common sense. And of course, of course, you’d have to keep it secret.”

“Secret. . . why?” said Furlough. “I’d be in all the papers. Biggest story ever. It’d be like discovering life on other planets.”

“Secret, because we are talking about life on this planet, night-things that have been hidden since the beginning. Secret, because people who wander around talking about this stuff in broad daylight disappear and are forgotten. The world has a defense mechanism.”

Furlough said, “You killed the CO, didn’t you. Made the air crew fall asleep.”

Mocklear said in his most bland and unconvincing voice: “Oh, don’t be silly. If we could do things like that, we could do anything. Anything to anyone. Anywhere. And how could anyone escape? Everyone has to sleep sometime.” He grinned a toothy grin. “And if we could do things like that, why, who would not want to be on our side, eh?”

Furlough stepped on the cross.

Mocklear said, “Welcome aboard, matie. We also have a signing bonus, if you can recommend another applicant.”

VI

Later, after he had removed the mask that made him look human so that his real face beneath could get some cool air playing over its fur, Mocklear (his real name was Mac y Leirr, but he was tired of humans mispronouncing it) sat filling in the rest of his paperwork. The lights were off (he hated human lights) but the moonshine was bright enough for eyes like his to see, and he had learned the art of reading and writing from a trapped sailor, long ago, who had been kept alive one more day for every day he taught Mocklear something new.

He wrote:

Subject was willing to kiss the anus of the statue of Baphomet but would not spit on a reproduction of the U.S. Constitution when
asked. Subject is too curious and too intelligent and may develop resistance to the organization later.

Mocklear frowned and nibbled his pen with sharp, white teeth. He did have his quota to make, and he did not want to be penalized by offering inferior recruits to the human Wentworth, or to the Court of Nastrond. He wrote further:

Hence, subject should be posted to “hot” zones in the CONUS (Continental United States), where he will be required to open fire upon civilians or do other acts that will bind him more firmly to the movement. Include him in Everness operations, but he is not to operate outside of range of “handlers.” However, if his loyalty to his current king is weakened, he may make officer material.

Then, Mocklear, remembering, drew a line through the word “king” and wrote in careful, small letters above that, “Republic.”

And his paw hesitated about the question beneath the interviewer’s comments box, the one that read: CONVERT TO JACKET WHEN CREWMATE BECOMES AVAILABLE? Y/N.

His people were really not that brave and did not follow orders well, and, unlike mortal men, his people were bound by the laws of magic. On the other hand, Mocklear had seen Furlough’s girlfriend, and she was quite attractive, and so if he were replaced, the crewmate wearing his coat might have quite a nice time of it. . . He circled the Y on the form.

He held the document up to the moonlight, his jaws open with satisfaction. There.

He lifted the next of many forms out from his inbox. The height of the stack of paper did not surprise him. If only one man in a thousand could be suborned to treason, then out of a base of fifty thousand men, the chances of finding fifty were better then average.

The trick was to find those fifty without coming to the attention of the fifty thousand honest men. With the Vindyamar planetarium in their hands, and captive astrologers checking the stars, and the Warlock peering into the dreams of men to find their secret fears and weaknesses, the chance of approaching the wrong sort of man was small.

After his paperwork was done, Mocklear took out a little clay pipe, packed it with a shred of tobacco from his poke, and, donning his human face for a moment to light the match (the fire seemed not so fearsome when seen through human eyes), contented himself to enjoy one of the many vices he had learned from wearing mortal skin.