Chapter #77The Anarchist's Lair by: Seuzz   It's impossible to see the future. At best, you can anticipate possibilities and assign them probabilities.
But some are better at this than others. Catilindrians are better than most, and an adept who combines Catilindria and Kenandandra, as Hal Swann did, will rank in the top percentiles. Only one who combines Catilindria and Arbol is likely to score better than him and his magical iPhone.
Yet even a Catilindrian, even one who elevates confidence into cocksure arrogance, as Hal does, can be wrong-footed. All he has to do is overlook the kind of small but vital variable whose archetype is the nail for want of which the battle is lost.
In this case, it is Jacob Darrow's lead-footed driving habit, which Frank, consciously or not, is emulating perfectly on the M11. Hal was glad of it on the drive down to London; you are rather less happy with it on the return back.
"Well, it's not as though we're going to pay it," you reflect philosophically after the patrolman has let you go. "Still, it puts me somewhat out of my calculations."
"What are those?" Jacob snarls as he waits for a spot in the traffic to open up.
"Nothing, my pet," you reply in your most soothing tone. "It's only that when I said I wanted us to be back by five, I didn't mean I wanted us to be back by four. You could have spared the horses a trifle."
"What's so important about five o'clock?" He punches the accelerator, and with a cough his van lurches into a gap.
"The hour doesn't signify, only the company. Paige Dear and Rob Darling are likely to make plans if one doesn't intercept them beforehand."
"You could call or text them."
"You're ass part of a secret cell, and I don't share my numbers. You know that, Jacob."
Indeed, Hal only communicates with Jacob—and he communicates with Jacob only—through drops and signals.
* * * * *
So this will be the first time that Jacob Darrow—not to mention Frank Durras—has seen Hal Swann's natural habitat. It's a basement apartment in a corner of Cambridge where the once-grand houses have been gutted and converted into the cheapest and most squalid kind of student housing. Though they're not trying to go outside, two fat girls come downstairs anyway to yell as you and Jacob maneuver the operating tables—sealed up against prying eyes between two expanses of cardboard—through the narrow entryway and down the stairs to the door of your bedsit. You just grin and invite them in for a spot of tea and a cuddle; the pink-haired one cries "rapist" and threatens to call down the fury of her gender brigade. "Heart's in the right place," you cheerfully observe to Jacob once you've got the tables in your room. "Theory's taken a bit of a walkabout, though." You close the door and rub your hands. The operating table will make this place.
Assuming you can find room for it.
To the untrained eye, Hal Swann's dimly lit apartment would look like the lair of a twenty-something male who was a distracted university student by day and an ursine shapeshifter by night. The cold, dank air reeks with the metallic stench of unwashed clothes and unwashed bodies. The salvaged parts of electric fans, mechanical clocks, laptop computers, and a disassembled Roomba are scattered about the floor. Crusted-over dinner plates tilt and list atop the lumpy blankets of an unmade bed. A red flag with a picture of a coal pit and the legend "Scarnsfell Colliery" is draped across an inner wall, but one corner has fallen down to reveal scarred brickwork and crumbling plaster. The pipes beneath the sink have been disassembled and replaced with the hose from a vacuum cleaner. Three desks, supported with used paperbacks where their legs are uneven, groan beneath the weight of four functioning computers and their associated printers, modems, external drives, and monitors. The snarl of cables beneath is only partially obscured by a laundry basket that has tipped over, spilling dirty jeans, plaid underpants, crimson shirts and pea-green sweaters across the floor like the sick of a dragon that ate a conclave of Workers' Party and Green Party activists and found the meal disagreeing with him.
To your eye, though ...
Well, it's still a disordered rubbish heap. But it's a disordered rubbish heap with a meaning.
Sure, the message is three weeks old, and has been partially rubbed out as Hal moved the bits around as he resumed his tinkering and experimentation. But like the make-shift "I Ching" you made back at the Savoy, this mess said something. (Or, at least it did after Hal, while pursuing an independent project, added the discarding Roomba to the mix.) In particular, it said enveloping pervading displacing swallowing.
That by itself might not have looked like much, but after juggling the associated decagrams around on his iPhone, Hal had inferred it was referring to the Cambridge boat team: hence, his suspicion that they were up to no good. No further messages welled up, though, despite his half-hearted juggling of the constituents.
"Well, let's get it cleared away," you finally declare after Jacob has given you a long, hard stare. "Just get it all off the floor. Onto the bed, inna sink, throw it in with the toilet." For the next few minutes you and he play bulldozer, grader, and excavator. Once the floor is clear, you have Jacob hold the operating table aloft as you pull back a corner of the carpet until you've exposed all the floor that isn't under the desks and bed, revealing a scarred concrete foundation beneath. You grin at the pattern revealed beneath, but only grunt "Nothing" when Jacob asks what you see. Infiltrating, the streaks and swirls read, and you've no need to interpret the associated decagrams to understand what it was trying to convey to the room's occupant. You place the operating table on the concrete and let the carpet flop back.
"Call Mr. Nizamani in here, will you?" you ask Jacob. "That's the sour-faced man in Room 103 directly above. Landlord. We'll scrub away the colonized consciousness that presently degrades him and restore to him a transparent enlightenment suitable to our growing collective." You rummage the place for candles that you know Hal bought against the next time the fascists who run the power grid shut him off for not taking their mercenary games as seriously as they.
* * * * *
Jacob has to use the "fist of Malacandra" to pin the struggling landlord to the operating table, and, lacking a properly receptacle, his anima discharges onto a plate of three-day-old spaghetti, which you have Jacob promptly toss outside. That leaves an inert body, which you leave inert until Joe arrives a little before six with luggage and supplies. You have him inject you with a fifth of Mr. Nizamani's essentia while leaving another fifth in the landlord; once revived, you brace the landlord with a consciousness-raising session, the burden of which is that all his current savings and any balances after deducting expenses are to be joyfully gifted to the local party cadre, the secretary of which happens to be yourself. He is also to deflect all queries for yourself with the claim that you have been evicted for failure to pay rent and that your whereabouts are unknown.
"What about those girls upstairs?" Jacob asks after you send Mr. Nizamani off to execute his new job.
"Girls?" Joe asks, and his ears visibly prick up.
"Nothing to your taste, Franz, unless you've a fondness for pepper spray. We'll leave 'em be," you tell Jacob. "Coupla hedgehogs like that'll further dissuade the inquisitive. Now, for Paige Dear and Rob Darling—" You rub your hands. "Find 'em and bring 'em back quick as you can. Tell Rob you're initiating him to the next level." You raise a clenched fist. "But Paige has to come too."
"She doesn't know anything about us," he reminds you.
"Doesn't matter what she knows now. It's what she'll know then. Who she'll be then, too."
Jacob resettles his glasses and trilby, and goes to fetch the next two members-to-be of your growing collective.
Joe laughs when his brother is gone. "Paige Dear and Rob Darling?" He pushes away the junk on your bed and plops onto it. "Is that actually their names?"
"'Course not. Just what we call 'em when they ain't listenin'. Paige Knotts and Rob Oliver." You frown at a pile of widgets left by the clean up. Something about it is vaguely recognizable.
"So who are they? Why are we interested in them?"
"Well, Hal was interested in 'em on account of Paige. Uni's got a bioengineering program. Fane's putting up the money for it, using it for the usual sorts of evil. Taking people apart in ways that go against nature, like that."
"Like we do," Joe says dryly.
You ignore the gibe. "Paige took a test, showed aptitudes that'd fit the program. She'd made friends with some of Hal's friends, who told him about her, and he got them to push her into it. Fane snapped at her. Plan is to get her in deep, run her as a sleeper, use her to spy it out from inside after she's deep in and high up. The classic play."
"So what's our plan?"
"Same plan, sped up. Use her like a periscope, though, find them what swim higher up. Then take them."
Joe leans back. "Are we turning her into a golem?"
That would be one way of doing it, and Hal's native caution warns you it would be best to leave Paige as a remote puppet—maybe even with a remote sigil on her—so there's no risk of any of your trio getting caught by Fane. Though you judge the chances of being caught to be low, the cost of failure would be too high.
You've already got a hiding face, meanwhile, and so does Frank. Joe could take over as Paige.
But perhaps you shouldn't send someone else to do a job that you're unwilling to do yourself.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
| Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author