Kalifornia (27 page)

It’s all just so damn unpredictable.

He looked sidelong at Poppy, who seemed dazed and disoriented. He
shouldn’t have brought her along.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

She shrugged. “She’s so sad, Sandy. Alone in that park. Let’s go
in to her.”

There was no putting it off. They walked past studio guard dogs
and even more vicious teegees, entering the building. A hush rose up from
below. Silence filled the place except for one small sound, a shrill voice
speaking in stops and starts.

Kali’s voice.

They descended through levels of catwalks and metal mesh that
spanned the spaces above the theater. A motionless sea of bodies lay below,
people crowded shoulder to shoulder, none protesting or fidgeting or squirming
in the slightest. Thousands of faces were fixed on the center of the vast room,
on a tall dais where Kali stood gleaming in her grown-up suit.

“Hold on a minute, Poppy,” Sandy said.

He stepped off the stairs, onto a metal ramp, and tiptoed out over
space. Glancing back, he saw his sister clinging to the stair rail, looking
down at her daughter as if she didn’t recognize her. Kali didn’t look anything
like the baby Poppy had seen for a few frenzied minutes on September 9, he
reminded himself. There was little visibly human about her, apart from her tiny
head, which was scarcely a speck at this distance. Even her speech seemed like
something a robot would say.

Her voice was loud, though unamplified. There was no need for
amplifiers when all the spectators listened, via wires, through Kali’s own
ears:

“. . . humanity is one,” she was saying. “It is our destiny to
join together, to unite completely, to move with one mind, one heart, one body,
one brain, one soul, one all-encompassing intent.”

Sandy
crouched down, watching her through the catwalk’s
metal mesh. He felt as if he were frozen in midair, forever falling. This was
as close as he needed to get; he could fire from here and hit her. A cool blue
line of fire would pierce that tiny unprotected skull. All he needed to do was
sight the target and the gun would do the rest. The self-firing weapon required
no marksman, but only someone to carry it. It could take care of the killing by
itself.

He reached into his jacket, hands trembling.

Footsteps vibrated on the ramp behind him.

“Sandy,” Poppy whispered. He let go of the gun. He would have to
get her away from here somehow. If he found Alfredo, he could leave her with
him. But he was afraid to delay what he had come here to do. He might lose his
nerve—or his chance.

“Sandy,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happening, but—”

“It’s all right, Poppy,” he said quietly, taking her by the
shoulders. “Let’s get you to a good safe place.”

“That’s not my daughter, Sandy. I can still feel her. She’s in a
park somewhere. That’s not Calafia, it’s someone else.”

Sandy
looked down at the babyish features, the rapt
crowd.

It couldn’t be anyone but Kali.

Poor Poppy. She really was confused.

“That’s her all right,” he said. “Maybe the grown-up suit makes
her look different. I know you haven’t seen her since she was born, but it
is
Kali.”

Poppy began to weep. “You don’t understand. She’s here, she’s
inside me; I
know
where she is. I’m tuned to
her right now. That thing out there has her flesh, but she’s not in it!”

With growing exasperation, because she was starting to get too
loud, he pushed her back toward the stairs.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I think you’re still disoriented.”

“But that’s not her! It’s someone else using her body. She’s been
pushed out . . . she’s lost. She needs me, Sandy. She—”

Poppy’s frustration peaked. She let out a cry of rage and rushed
away from him, down the stairs, into the crowd.

“Wait!” he cried. And then he was running after her.

It was odd, moving through the crowd. Despite all those faces
fixed on the dais, no one actually looked at Kali. Their eyes were carefully
and without exception averted. He recalled the tinge of feedback pain he’d
experienced while in her control. If only there were some way to make them all
look at her directly. The overload might shock them out of slavery—might even
finish off Kali herself.

Sandy
met no resistance. No one moved out of his way,
but neither did they push back when he shoved them. Some tumbled, fell into
each other, and lay there blinking.

Poppy, far ahead of him, clambered onto the dais. She grabbed Kali
by her metallic shoulders and stared into her face, screaming, “Where is she?
What did you do to her?”

Sandy
reached the platform seconds later, but he was
almost too late. The center of the dais was dropping, retracting into the
floor of the studio while a huge protective lid slid into place above it. He
hesitated, then threw himself over the edge before the lid closed.

The fall left him stunned. He heard Poppy shrieking, Kali’s
startled cries. People were rushing everywhere. Someone pushed him from the
platform. They were underground, beneath the studio; technicians fought to
separate Poppy from Kali, whose four arms whirred and clattered, beating at the
woman. Poppy held on bravely but Kali’s hammering crystalline fists brought
blood and instant bruises, gashing her mother deep, reopening the wounds of her
suicide attempt.

Alfredo Figueroa ran up to them.

“Stop it!” he cried. “Kali—stop! What are you doing, Poppy? Your
own daughter—”

He hauled her away from the augmented baby.

“Where is she?” Poppy cried.

“Open your eyes, girl,” said Alfredo. “Don’t you recognize your
own flesh and blood?”

“The body, yes, but not the soul. Where is she?”

Kali stared at her mother with a slight smirk, her arms whirring
menacingly. There was blood on the shiny fingers. “Keep her away from me,” she
said.

“Now, Kali,” said Alfredo mildly. “She’s distraught, that’s all,
but she is your mother.”

“I said keep her away from—”

Poppy tore free and threw herself again at Kali. Everyone in the
room moved to stop her, but clumsily.

Perhaps they were numb from Kali’s control; perhaps she hadn’t yet
learned to manipulate them all at once, except to keep them quiet and orderly.
They moved jerkily and a bit unwillingly, even Alfredo, converging on Poppy and
once more hauling her away kicking and screaming.

Sandy
crouched back in the shadows, the only one to
evade Kali’s summons for aid. As he watched Poppy struggling, he thought of the
weapon in his pocket. Could he get a clear shot at her now, while everyone was
distracted?

He noticed a movement across the studio, a figure in the shadows
like himself. At first he thought it was a teegee, an auggie-doggie or seal who
lacked the wires and couldn’t be controlled. You’re the only ones who might
evade her, he thought. For a while . . .

But it was no teegee. He saw a flash of tiny lights. Jewelry. Crystals.

Thaxter Halfjest.

Sandy
watched the RevGov carefully, suspiciously,
noting the way Thaxter studied Poppy as she was gradually—forcibly—quieted.

Why hadn’t Kali seized and enslaved Halfjest? He was California’s biggest sender, thoroughly wired, constantly live. He would have been useful
to her.

Sandy
wished he had wires, for just this moment. With
wires, he could have tuned in to see what Thaxter saw.

He remembered his last conversation with the Reverend Governor.
Thax had said something about a special-effects device he’d used to confound
President McBeth. A synthesizer. Thax must have found a way to protect himself
from Kali by using this device; a way of diverting her into some false
scenario.

But what was he doing hiding back there? Why didn’t he help Poppy,
if it was in his power?

A synthesizer, Sandy thought. For special effects.

Effects like . . . a death on the moon?

An altered station wagon?

Sandy
couldn’t take his eyes off Halfjest. The RevGov
stood quietly, not his usual flamboyant self at all. He stared off into space;
and then his lips began to move, his hands to twitch.

Sandy
saw him mouth a few silent syllables, like a
lip-reader, and synchronously Kali spoke: “Take her away. I never want to see
her again.”

As Kali fell silent, Thaxter’s mouth stilled. Sandy fought against
disbelief, fought to trust his intuition that both had spoken the same
words—but that Thaxter had spoken them a split instant earlier.

Poppy wept as they dragged her away.

A green place, he thought.

He could feel the change around him, the coming tidal shift in
consciousness, and it prefigured nothing but evil. A vast conformist brain
warming up to motivate the world . . . its ugly awareness
rising like an immense, fearful wave.

A wave, yes. Thinking in such terms, he knew he could handle this.
Remembering the surfboard under his feet, the water rising to carry him. Real
as a wirecast, but of his own imagining. It was the thought he needed now to
carry him through. Ride this wave, this moment, or miss it forever. . . .

And then he thought nothing at all. A perfect silence filled him.

The gun slipped into his hand; he kept it out of sight behind his
back. He walked steadily from the shadows, counting on the effect of surprise.

It was his only advantage.

He walked straight toward Kali. She stood alone, her puppets all
preoccupied with Poppy.

She heard him coming and turned suddenly in his direction. For a
moment she looked fearful, but then, seeing him, a wide smile spread over her
features.

“Hey, Thaxter,” he said casually.

And Kali spread her four arms wide, in a gesture the Reverend
Governor had used a million times, used so often it was more than habit. It was
a trope, a reflex.

“Sandy, my boy!” Kali said. Not
Uncle
Sandy.

She faltered, furious, her voice choked off in her throat. She
turned to the passageway, where her helpers were busy with Poppy.

“Help me!” she cried, her voice too deep. “Help!”

Thaxter moved in the shadows, starting forward. “Help!” he echoed
in a cracking voice. His head swung toward Sandy; Kali mirrored the motion.

Gun out, aiming, firing. All in an instant.

The wave broke around him. He was still up, still riding through
the roar of the surf that was really the voice of the crowd above. There was no
arguing with the ocean, no coaxing a wave into breaking as you wished it. No
chance to argue with Thaxter or toy with sparing his life. No place for situational
consultants here. This was pure improvisation.

But he kept his balance.

With a crash of broken crystal, the Reverend Governor fell.

Halfjest twitched on the floor, the golden crown a molten dribble
pooling in his eye sockets, hair sizzling, gemstones blackening and cracking
from the blast of heat. Sandy had expected a clean hole in the middle of his
brow, but Thaxter’s head looked like a marshmallow barely rescued from a
bonfire.

Another shape burst from cover, fleeing across the room on thick
legs, a red cape fluttering behind him. The Pope of Las Vegas. Sandy leaped on him from behind, knocking the pope to the floor, tangling him in his velvet
train.

The pope rolled over, gasping. Kali walked up beside Sandy and stared down at the fat man.

“What were you doing to me?” she said.

Sandy
saw her eyes begin to burn. She leaned over the
pope and glared into his face.