Shuteye for the Timebroker (40 page)

18.

BUNNY DUCK

The office of the prime minister of North America was guarded by a hideous two-headed monster, the PM’s combination spokesthing and bodyguard.

Created by an international consortium of biofabbers, the guardian of the PM’s privacy and safety combined salient parts of a dozen genomes.

From the basepairs of a famous TV talk show host, the scientists had isolated the genes for persistence and obliviousness to the emotions of others.

From the cells of a ferret they had taken slinkiness and slipperiness factors.

From a duck they had stolen a feathery hide that would repel anything.

From a pit bull they had lifted jaws that would clamp on to anything with enormous pressure and never relent.

From a hare they had taken a beguilingly innocent visage to conceal the creatures harsher qualities and disarm any supplicants or intruders.

And so on and so on.

The dual heads were a feature designed mainly to allow the spokesthing to utter contradictory statements simultaneously.

For many years the spokesthing functioned admirably in its role, disseminating official lies, spinning the truth, and rending to bloody bits anyone who dared to approach the PM unbidden.

But one day, as could have been predicted by any mythographer, a hero showed up to conquer the monster.

This hero looked like a typical female TV journalist, fashionably attired and coiffed. She did not carry a sword or laser pistol or bomb, just the tools of her trade. Meeting the two-headed spokesthing for her appointed interview, the journalist positioned her microphone midway between the two mouths of the beast and asked her poisoned question.

“Which one of you has better access to the prime minister?”

The two mouths immediately blurted out contradictory responses. Two conjoined heads swiveled on rubbery necks to glare at each other, claws extruded from separately controlled paws, and within minutes the spokesthing lay dying from a thousand self-inflicted wounds.

The journalist skipped elegantly aside to preserve her Manolo Blahniks from the runnel of blood, faced her cameraman, and said, “Later on
Entertainment Tonight
, we’ll look at my appointment as the prime minister’s new representative, under the rule of the Golden Bough.”

19.

THE HYDRA OF MADISON AVENUE

Harry Yankdollar was sitting in his luxurious fifty-fifth-floor office at Yankdollar Bleach Hobblewight and Dripp when the small flying saucer zoomed in through his open window. The pale blue, glitter-flecked, bubble-canopied saucer was approximately as big as an amusement park ride for toddlers and contained exactly one purple-hued, wild-eyed, grinning alien.

His mouth widening like that of a housewife presented with the news of the inferiority of her favorite detergent, Harry jerked backward in his Aeron chair as the saucer came to rest on the thick carpeting of his office. The bubble canopy retracted and the stubby alien stepped out.

“Yankdollar, you can call me Quisp. My race has been monitoring the broadcast advertisements produced by your firm, and we’re here to hire you for a big campaign.”

Harry’s pulse slowed and he regained his composure. The alien’s words had restored him to familiar ground. So what if the client sported a single propeller-tipped shaft from the top of its head? A campaign was a campaign, and the client was always right.

“What’s the product?” inquired Harry. “And more importantly, what’s the budget?”

“The product is a service, so to speak. It’s the enslavement of your entire species by my kind. We need you to make this program palatable to your fellows, to diminish their resistance. And the budget is commensurate, as you’ll discern from your personal fee. You’ll receive ten thousand kilotons of prime dark matter and a small habitable moon to which you may retire to escape the hatred of the race you will betray. Do we have a deal?”

Harry considered for only a few moments. “This dark matter—is it the regular medium of exchange across the galaxy?”

“Indeed. One ounce is sufficient to purchase the services of thirty skilled Rigellian lemur-whores for a week.”

“And this habitable moon—does it have any nasty surprises on it?”

“By no means. It was formerly the vacation home of the Exarch of the Pleiades, and you know his discriminating tastes!”

“Right, sure. Hmmm … OK, I’m your man for the job.”

“Excellent!”

Quisp removed a sidearm from a holster and aimed it at Harry.

“Hey! Wait one commercial minute! What’s going on?”

“Merely a formality to insure your continuing compliance and inability to change your mind. This gun is a Mark Three Soul Stealer. The capture and removal of your soul will insure your obedience.”

Harry shrugged. “Fire away. The guy from the tobacco industry used a Mark Four, and I didn’t feel anything at all.”

20.

PIGSKIN GLORY

Starrzell “Screamer” Scripsack emerged from his final NFL game a quadriplegic. And his team lost as well.

Starrzell’s legendary on-the-field endurance and spirit failed him in his new role of helpless cripple. The contrast between his old high life of worship by fans and women, recreational drugs, and physical glory, and his new low life of abandonment by sycophants and tarts, pain-killing drugs, and physical decrepitude, was just too much for him to buck himself up. He dispiritedly forced himself through rehab, and then, the first time he was alone for ten minutes in his new handicap-accessible apartment, he rammed his puff-tube-activated electric wheelchair into the side of a therapeutic Jacuzzi, pitched forward, and drowned.

Starrzell awoke in the afterlife restored to his prime condition, and he knew he was in Heaven. He stood, suited up, in the middle of a playing field. The stands were filled with roaring fans, every last one of whom was himself a former football great. The cheerleaders were all stark naked.

But where were his teammates? So far, Starrzell was all alone on the turf, save for a football resting on its perch. Maybe competitors and comrades were just waiting for him to kick off before materializing? Starrzell couldn’t see anything else to do. So he loped forward, muscles flexing to send the football arcing upward.

Just as he drew his foot backward, the football changed to the living head of his mother. His mother who had died a charity case in the worst hospital in Chicago while her son was partying at the Playboy Mansion West.

Unable to stop his programmed motion, Starrzell kicked the screaming head of his mother perfectly through the goalposts.

Suddenly he was back in the position where he had first appeared, and another football awaited him midfield. Dumb as he was, Starrzell knew what would happen once he came within striking distance of the football, and he tried to leave the field. But the naked cheerleaders morphed into skeletal warriors that barred his exit.

Resignedly, Starrzell returned to the field, where he jogged listlessly at the pigskin—which changed at the final moment into the head of his high school coach, whom Starrzell had cuckolded on numerous occasions.

After that, there came an endless succession of all the people Starrzell had injured during his lifetime. One by one, the ranting, cursing, begging heads went sailing through the goalposts, racking up points on the stadium scoreboard. And when what seemed like an eon had passed, and all of Starrzell’s accusatory victims had been booted once, the cycle returned to the start, with his mother once more.

Several infernal kalpas passed before a halftime show intervened.

And even then, the marching band was hideously out of tune and the Gatorade burned like brimstone.

21.

TAR PIT KITTY

The perfection of the Liminality Stargate allowed mankind to colonize the galaxy.

But this invention also insured that the ultimate pattern of segregated communities would result.

Escape from detested unbelievers of any stripe required nothing more than a single step through any gate to a congregation of welcoming, like-minded fellows.

Homogeneous planets full of identical-thinking dittoheads became the rule.

There were planets full of fundamentalist Christians and planets full of Koran-quoting Muslims; planets of Republicans and planets of Democrats; planets of Trekkies and planets of romance-novel readers.

Some of the affinity groups pushed the limits of trifling distinctions. One star system was devoted solely to Neil Diamond fans.

But two of the worlds hosted radically antipathetic groups that could never, under any circumstances, coexist.

Cat lovers and cat haters.

The inhabitants of Ailurophobe IV maintained strict quarantine over all their Stargates. Newcomers were searched with sensitive detectors and, should so much as a single cat hair or flake of catnip be detected, they would be summarily returned whence they came. The “border” guards of Ailurophile VII subjected visitors to a comparable test: exiting from the Stargates, all new arrivals were forced to cuddle without flinching the most dander-producing, long-haired, insolent felines available.

Naturally enough, given human nature, the two camps were not content merely to exist separately from their hated enemies. No, each side wanted to convert or eliminate the heathens.

Over the decades, many tactics had been tried without success by both sides. The stalemate seemed destined to persist forever. But then the scientists of Ailurophile VII had an inspiration. They created transgenic beings who, to all outward appearances, were incredibly sexy humans, but whose genomes in reality were made up of 75 percent feline genes.

Having raised up hundreds of thousands of these dumb but irresistible double agents with accelerated growth techniques, the Ailurophilians launched them en masse through the gates at their enemy.

The cat-people represented themselves as traders, tourists, immigrants, visiting scholars, and converts to the anti-cat cause. Within weeks, they had infiltrated every stratum of Ailurophobian society, with the mission of interbreeding with the Ailurophobes and, over the long run, rendering them extinct.

The Ailurophilians sat back and waited eagerly for reports of victory, as signaled by a wave of cat-baby births.

After nine months of silence, one of the cat-people returned. Looking marginally chagrined as only a cat can, the agent reported the total failure of the invasion.

“But what went wrong?” demanded the Ailurophilian leaders. “Didn’t you mate with the natives?”

“We did,” said the returned agent, licking one hand and using it to smooth back the hair behind his ear. “But as soon as the kittens were born, we cat-fathers killed all the males, and even then the cat-mothers didn’t have enough teats to nurse those that remained.”

22.

CLOWNS AND CRUSADERS

The living tanks in the endless war fought on the planet of Shiloh were fashioned from giant tortoises and helmed by cortico-chimps. Inside the tiny cabins of the carbon-fiber shells, the cortico-chimps continually manipulated petcocks and zaptrodes that directed the enormous flesh-and-blood crawlers by either chemical or electrical stimulation and restraint. Visual feedback came through fiber optics that connected the tortoises eyes to a small monitor in the cabin. When a tank came within sight of the enemy, its chimp would check that the pilot light in the throat of his tortoise was lit before triggering an enormous belch of methane that would flare out and crisp any unprotected soldiers or structures or vehicles.

The enemy of the tortoises and chimps—Crusaders, the chimps called themselves—were the Clowns. The Clowns were extraterrestrials whose natural facial epidermal patterning made them resemble the earthly entertainers of yore. Moreover, the Clowns possessed big floppy feet and three puffy “buttons” down their torsos, these buttons actually being sensory organs.

The Clowns had been contending against humanity for control of Shiloh for generations. Eventually, with their presence demanded elsewhere in the galaxy, humans had left their cortico-chimp proxies behind to continue the war. The Clowns fought on foot with strange weapons: cube-shaped grenades that contained specks of antimatter, embryonic limpet mines.

One day a cortico-chimp named Joru was enjoying a slight respite from battle. Sipping all-sustaining tortoise milk from a nipple, Joru contemplated his life. When would this fight end? Couldn’t some accommodation with the Clowns be reached? Surely there must be more to life than eternal violence. Would Joru ever get a chance to express some of the finer elements of his nature?

Unfortunately, Joru’s daydreaming allowed a Clown to slip up to Joru’s tortoise and attach a limpet mine. Within seconds, the Clown had gained entrance to the shattered cockpit.

Joru whipped out a small knife, his only hand weapon, and turned bravely to confront the Clown. With wide red lips in a pasty white face, rubbery spherical nose, and black-diamond-bordered eyes, the alien presented an ironic portrait of friendly hostility.