Cosmos Incorporated (16 page)

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HMV

The small, dark room is warm. The man sitting across from him is a Canadian half blood called Wilbur Langlois. He has blue eyes and a short, natural gray beard, and weighs about two hundred pounds. He stares unblinkingly at Plotkin. A scavenged butane lamp illuminates his face and casts trembling flares of light here and there in the breeze that rattles the metal roof of the mobile home, where the little gas cylinder is hanging from a denuded cable.

Wilbur Langlois wears a silver badge shaped like a six-pointed star on the lapel of his midnight-blue uniform. He is flanked by four men who do not introduce themselves. The mobile home is a sort of tinkered-with bus—one of those, undoubtedly, that he saw during his first investigation. It serves as the official police station of Heavy Metal Valley. Wilbur Langlois is the sheriff of the community. The four men are his assistants.

Two of the men are the patrol officers that surprised him at his lookout point on Xenon Ridge and brought him here in handcuffs. The two others remain at the far end of the room; he cannot see much of them besides their impressively tall shadows, arms crossed, standing on each side of the gray steel rectangle of an escape hatch with its handle right in the center.

How had he made so many blunders in so short a time?

Going to the same place twice, only two days apart, only fifty meters the second time from where he had been the first!

Apparently all the poetic brilliance dancing like fire in his soul had led him—in this bloody world, at least—to the worst kind of danger. An error in
calculation.
“What are you doing in Humvee?” the man asks. He has already asked the question two or three times. This time, his tone hardens.

“HoomVey?” Plotkin asks. He heard “Hum-Vee” perfectly well, but decides to play the fool for a few precious moments, which he knows will really be worth very little.

“Humvee,”
repeats the Amerindian. “That is what we call it. Heavy Metal Valley: HMV. Humvee, like the American neo-jeep from the turn of the century. Okay?”

“Okay. Heavy Metal Valley: HMV. Humvee.”

“Correct,” says Wilbur Langlois. “Now, what are you doing here, eh?”

Plotkin has just realized that the conversation is taking place in French. American French. The base routines of his instruction program are functioning with the detachment of a dream.

Obviously, he can try to play the tourist lost in the hills, but stupidly, he has done anything but act like a clueless Japanese traveler with his neurodigital Nikon. No, he was surprised in the act of spying on something—he doesn’t even know what. Or even why.

He will have to improvise, and fast. Let his killer’s instinct talk. Let his professional assassin’s intuition take over. But it is as if this part of his mind is frozen like an internal arctic circle. Instead, his mouth opens to let out a dart of pure flame that comes from who knows where, and manifests itself in the following words:

“I’m looking for something. Or someone.”

“You’re looking for someone? Who? And why?”

Again, the fire blazes from his mouth, and he can do nothing about it. He looks at Wilbur Langlois, the sheriff of Heavy Metal Valley, and is suddenly filled with strength neither inside nor outside himself. He cannot tell where it comes from—it is as if it’s drawn from some entity in the interworld between him and the world. It is a highly magnetic strength that fills every cell in him. He smiles, and it is a smile that could light up the dark side of the moon.

“I’m looking for a man. Or a woman. Maybe even a child. And I’m looking for him because he, or she, is a Catholic. I mean, a Christian.”

One of the men that captured him, a Nordic-looking fellow wearing round steel-rimmed glasses, brandishes his .12 caliber gun.

“This bastard’s a UniPol bounty hunter. Where does he think he is, California?”

“Shut up, Florian,” Wilbur Langlois growls. He turns back to Plotkin. “So you’re not an insurance agent, as your ID claims?”

Plotkin uses the strength flowing through him to speak a truth that hides the truth. “My ID isn’t false. I’m also an expert in technological risk.”

He hopes his bravado is convincing. He does not betray the slightest emotion as he allows his Swiss-cheese memory to speak for him. Wilbur Langlois does not take his eyes off him. This is a true interrogation.

“Do you have a mandate from one of the American confederations? Or from Canada? Quebec, perhaps?”

The sheriff is obviously expecting Plotkin to answer in the affirmative to one of these choices so that he can inform him that none of these mandates have much power in independent Mohawk territory—and even less here in Humvee, an autonomous territory within an autonomous territory.

Plotkin, however, doesn’t feel like playing games. Again, he feels it—the old talent of a human predator is still there within him. He feels it, he knows it, and he acts accordingly. Play straight; tell the truth. Or, more precisely, cover the fundamental truth with a truth of secondary importance. “I’m not a bounty hunter, I’m a journalist,” he says. “I’m passing for an insurance agent. Since I actually am one, it’s very simple.”

Thirty seconds of silence pass. He can tell the guy with the .12 caliber would happily nail him to a post without further discussion.

“Ah…we have no resident that corresponds to your profile, Mr. Plotkin. I’m sorry. I don’t know where you are getting your information, but it’s incorrect.”

Plotkin goes for broke, without even knowing whose table he has been brought to sit at. It is a blind blitz; he has no idea of the rules. He understands that the sheriff is lying through his teeth, a barrage of lies forming a Larsen effect—which explains his attitude, his words, his presence. He is there to cover up problems. He is there to shut up curious mouths. He is there to ensure that the law prevails. The law of Silence. The law of Heavy Metal.

“I have seen and made note of at least a dozen—probably even twenty—crosses, crucifixes, Virgin Marys, and other Catholic symbols that are forbidden within…Humvee. And you won’t believe me, but I’m sure that at least one of the guests in the hotel where I’m staying on the strip is part of the network. Obviously, everything that happens here is neuroconnected to a machine whose code you couldn’t break without about six trillion years’ worth of calculations by the most powerful computer in existence.”

“Our security systems—”

“—are worthless against my intelligence agent. Believe me, Mister Officer Langlois, you might as well quit playing games, like I have. It’s better to talk honestly, man to man.”
While the machines watch,
he adds to himself.

The young bloke named Florian fixes him with an icy, hate-filled stare. He notices that the blond lug is wearing a black bandanna knotted tightly at his neck; a metal charm dangles from it, its shape clearly visible in the
V
of the man’s partly unbuttoned shirt. It is an Iron Cross, a German military medal from the first half of the twentieth century. Definitely a cross, but Plotkin’s memories—the ones from the Russian part of his identity—show him images of ruins, floods of men and women in rags fleeing burning villages while hordes of gray-uniformed soldiers whose lapels are also adorned with this famous Iron Cross advance between cohorts of tanks.

Chin resting on his hands, the sheriff watches Plotkin watch Florian, who in turn does not drop his gaze. Finally, Wilbur Langlois lets out a long sigh. “You aren’t a bounty hunter, but you’re not a journalist, either. Much less an insurance agent. So?”

“So?” Plotkin demands, facing him, abandoning Florian Iron Cross to his little macho games.

“So, who are you?”

I don’t know,
would be the correct response—but somehow he doesn’t think it is appropriate under the circumstances.

“Let me remind you that I’ve committed no crime, and that your agents arrested me without cause. You should cut this conversation short before you infringe on my rights as a UniWorld citizen.”

“First, you are in independent Mohawk territory,” Langlois interrupts him, “a little outside the jurisdiction of UniWorld. Second, as for crimes, my dear sir, I can assure you that it wouldn’t take me a minute to find fifty of them for which I could clap you in irons right now. You say you’re looking for Catholics, but you have no legal mandate. You turned up on the ridge with spy paraphernalia and you think I’m going to swallow your bullshit stories?”

“It isn’t illegal spy paraphernalia. I’m a freelance journalist and I’m investigating the underground Christian movement on behalf of a very confidential press agency. A few different things brought me to Grand Junction. That’s it.”

“What things?”

“I’m not obligated to reveal my sources. I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

Then, Plotkin lets fly with the deathblow. “Are you protecting Christian rebels, Sheriff?”

He has no time to say anything more. The butt of the .12 caliber swings around to aim at him with incredible speed, while an indistinct oath clatters in his head as if uttered in some demonic echo chamber. The next thing he knows is a white flash of pure pain. He falls from the chair, unconscious.

ON/OFF. OFF/ON.

The pain is no longer pure light, a solar fracas, a shock of stars exploding in his head.

It has weight now. It has body.

His
body.

He regains consciousness.

He hears vague noises, then voices, a little hazy, saying, “How is he, Dr. Brandt? I’m going to give that asshole Schutzberg two days in the brig.” He opens his eyes. His vision is unfocused. His body is nothing but pain. His head, his cheek, and his right temple feel as if they have been branded with a white-hot iron; needles of pain are jabbing the entire top of his skull. There is a human silhouette in front of him. Something around his left arm is putting pressure on the vein, and crystallizes the cold sensation of a probe tucked into the crook of his elbow. The silhouette speaks.

“Contusions, a small concussion, scrapes and scratches, a large hematoma. Nothing really serious, fortunately.”

“Finally some good news,” murmurs Plotkin, not really expecting anyone to hear him—not even some random god that might be hiding in the corner.

The silhouette has grown clearer; it moves to the center of the room, toward the sheriff’s desk and its butane lamp. It is a woman. She perches on the back of a chair, facing the big half-blood cop. Her voice is low, calm, smoky, like burning gases—the voice of a woman who has seen much.

“This man has the right to lodge a complaint against you. Your French assistant is an asshole. The fact that Alsatian Islamists exterminated his family doesn’t give him a right to take it out on everything that moves.” The sheriff says nothing. He stares at his boots.

“I inserted a polymedic probe and covered the hematoma with transcutaneous gel. He’ll be back on his feet in a few minutes. Give him the tube of gel and the three remaining doses when he leaves. And take those handcuffs off immediately.”

“Of course, Dr. Brandt,” mutters the sheriff, humbly.

“You’re lucky there are no fractures, Sheriff. Good-bye.”

The woman turns on her heel; one of the guards hurriedly opens the emergency door at her approach.

“And don’t forget to punish that prick Schutzberg. He won’t bring you anything but trouble.”

She stands in framed daylight for a few seconds before the heavy steel door closes behind her.

Plotkin stands up slowly in the light of the butane lamp and faces the sheriff. His bare arm, sleeve pushed up, is encircled by a strip of beige latex at the elbow. A black-and-gray microcomponent is embedded in the skin there; a small, luminous diode pulses gently. He can feel the presence of the probe under his skin with every movement he makes.

The two patrol officers are gone. Only the two guards are still in their places; Wilbur Langlois must have advised the edgy Alsatian to get lost for a little while, so that the affair could be settled as quietly as possible. The woman, Dr. Brandt, had not been wrong—Heavy Metal Valley’s police station had been placed in a very delicate situation, legally speaking. Plotkin is fortunate, in a way, that the peon attacked him. He extends his arms so that the sheriff can unlock the handcuffs with a small metal key.

“Your car is in the parking lot,” says Wilbur Langlois. “You’re free to go—and to lodge a complaint against our department.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Plotkin assures him.

“Good. Best to keep it among ourselves, I suppose.”

Plotkin thinks hard. While he is still bumbling around this tiny office, rubbing his wrists, which are sore from the old-style steel handcuffs, he should continue playing the role of an investigative journalist to the hilt. His core identity, that of a killer and professional spy, allows him to adjust his various fictional identities—and any new ones he might need to invent at a given moment—as often as the situation requires it.

“I won’t bring a complaint against you,” he says, “but I think I have the right to some explanation. I told you that I’m keeping my sources confidential.”

It is when you have been brought to your knees that you can achieve the greatest victories,
says an Order maxim.

Driving back along the North Junction road, Plotkin surprises himself by thinking that it was all worth it. Getting clocked in the face with a gun butt, losing consciousness, having his wrists chafed by those fucking handcuffs, being temporarily but completely helpless—all worth it. The sheriff had admitted that some Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and even a few Israelites had fled the world after the Third Destruction of the Temple and found refuge in Heavy Metal Valley, and that they were tolerated there.

“Are you Catholic yourself, or a rebel Christian?” Plotkin had asked the sheriff. The man had only smiled neutrally. So neutrally that Plotkin had understood his message 100 percent.

“And your assistant, the one who knows how to handle a gun butt?” Plotkin had persisted. “Is he a Christian too? You know, one who strikes the left cheek after having struck the right cheek?”