Valhalla, page 26
Kortright frowned. ‘Merc,’ he said, ‘Merc, look at me. This is Lin Kortright here, remember.’
Mercury shook his head. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s fifty-one fucking Lin Kortrights. What’m I supposed to do with fifty-one Lin Kortrights, smuggle you guys past Security under my coat?’
The look of shocked disappointment on Lin Kortright’s face was a masterpiece. ‘Hey, Merc,’ he said, ‘you don’t think I’d bring you all this way just to rescue one guy, do you? Give me some credit, please. One guy is just a guy, but fifty-one guys is a minority.’
Obviously, Mercury hadn’t looked at it in that light, because he limited his next protest to a muted ‘Yeah, but Lin—’ which in context was as good as saying ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ Kortright nodded his approval. ‘Rescuing a minority, Merc, that’s box-office. It’s more than that, it’s pure Hollywood. The only bummer is, Charlton Heston’s too old to play you.’
Mercury frowned. ‘What, you mean chess or something? Like a pro-celebrity tournament?’
‘Play you in the movie,’ Kortright said patiently. ‘Which reminds me; on the way out of here, we gotta find a sea. You’ve gotta part a sea, or we might as well not bother.’
As it turned out, the side door Mercury sneaked them out of turned out to open into the land of the living in the exact geographical centre of Mongolia, which meant that parting a sea would have taken them several thousand miles out of their way. Mercury, who’d set his heart on the stunt as soon as Kortright suggested it, wasn’t happy; it didn’t say anything anywhere, he argued, about it having to be an existing sea, and by the looks of this place it could use a little extra water anyway. So Kortright let him have his sea, which he parted quite beautifully just before it vanished into the burning sand of the Gobi desert in a huge cloud of steam, without leaving so much as an eggcupful of moisture behind. Making a mental note to hire Mercury a whole new team of writers as soon as he got back to his office, Kortright led the way across the blinding white dunes to a lonely, sun-bleached bus stop beside the drift-covered road.
‘Thanks, Merc,’ he said, ‘you done good. There’ll be no stopping you now.’
Mercury smiled happily. ‘It was your idea,’ he said. ‘You know what? Together, we make a great team.’
Lin Kortright thought of the steam cloud dispersing on the stiff desert breeze. All that water had to have come from somewhere; please God he’d at least had the common sense to take it from a major ocean, where nobody but a few oceanographers would notice, rather than scooping out the Mediterranean and leaving Sicily and North Africa staring at each other in horror over a vast, bone-dry canyon. ‘It’s like I always say, Merc,’ he replied. ‘People who need people need people they can trust.’
‘Sure. It’s a shame about Heston, though. Maybe I should just pop back and rescue him too.’
Kortright shook his head. ‘We’ll get Harrison Ford instead,’ he said. ‘Or Tom Hanks. If he’s not too busy,’ he added.
‘That’d be cool, Lin. Hey, you never know, maybe this’ll even help me get on Xena.’
Lin Kortright pursed his lips. To the gods, he knew, all things are possible; there’s possible, however, and there’s miracles.
‘Leave that one with me, Merc,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
It was only when the bus pulled up, and the other fifty Lin Kortrights were turning out their pockets trying to put together the equivalent of sixty-two cents for the fare, that he realised that he’d forgotten something.
Something important.
Dammit, wasn’t that always the way? As soon as it came to business, his mind filled up with the deal like a lavatory cistern filling with water after the chain’s been pulled, and everything else was immediately submerged. All that stuff about Mercury and his goddamn sea, and he’d forgotten Carol.
Shit, he thought. That doesn’t look good.
Still, he argued, as the bus creaked painfully away from the stop, laden down with fifty-one Lin Kortrights, forty-six ancient nomad women on their way to the autumn sales at Ulan Bator and seven goats, I’m definitely going back for her. Or at least, I’m definitely going to get her out of there. As soon as I’ve clinched the deal with Kawaguchi and the anti-thanaton beam syndicate, I’m definitely going to see to it that she gets out of there. Till then, she’ll just have to have a little faith.
It was roomy, no doubt about that; and quiet, too. And the decor was soothing, in a monotonous way, provided you liked pink. The smell, though, was downright offensive.
‘Hello?’ Vinnie called out, but the only reply was his own voice, echoing back from the high, vaulted roof. Waste of time shouting, in any case; if they were going to come when he called, they’d have done so by now. It was obvious they knew he was here.
The fact he’d been in the belly of the whale for (as far as he could tell) three days now suggested at least that the pattern had been broken; the whale hadn’t sunk or sprung a leak or collided with an iceberg, and here he still was. It hadn’t made the slightest effort to digest him, either; and that, together with the fact that it had swallowed him at all (whales don’t eat people) implied that this wasn’t a standard production-line whale, but more of a specialised - even custom - job. He was pretty sure of this now, since his observations over the last few days had revealed quite a few tell-tale clues that confirmed the hypothesis. Like, for example, the electric light.
It was just one solitary dim lamp, a sixty-watt bulb, maybe even a forty, dangling a foot or so from the apex of the stomach’s vast ceiling. Vinnie wouldn’t have noticed it at all if he hadn’t been looking carefully; the bulb and the flex were pink, just like everything else, and it was so far up that at first sight it was indistinguishable from the scores of other small, bulbous pink dangly bits that were bobbling about up there. If he hadn’t asked himself the question ‘How come I can see so well inside a fish’s stomach?’ he’d never even have thought to look.
Once he’d seen it, however, it changed his perception of the whole situation. He didn’t know a lot about whales, but he was prepared to bet money that no other whale in history, not even Moby Dick, had had electricity laid on inside its digestive system. It was a hint, a clue; and, once he’d noticed it, a fairly insulting one at that. Whoever was responsible just didn’t care about subtlety, or appearances, or even plausibility.
Another dead give-away was the fresh water, which came cascading down from the mouth of the gullet, fifty or so feet above the stomach floor, three times a day as regular as clockwork. That argued a built-in desalination facility somewhere on the premises, along with a pretty sophisticated timing system. A lot of trouble to go to, sure; but whoever it was who had taken that trouble had stopped short of providing anything so useful as a bottle or a pot to store water in. If Vinnie wanted to drink, he had to slurp it up as it came sloshing down the walls, and if he missed out, he stayed thirsty. Likewise there was more than enough food - twice a day it avalanched shrimps, alive-alive-o, served on the full shell but without knife, fork or any other refinement; certainly no garlic marinade and twist of lemon. The eight inches or so of seawater that lay permanently on the floor was actually agreeably warm, the temperature of a bath after you’ve been in it for a quarter of an hour and are just thinking of getting out. Oh, it would have been perfectly possible to live here indefinitely. Horribly possible, in fact.
Vinnie checked his watch; it was time for the bowel to open. High spot of his day, this.
It hadn’t taken him more than a minute to write off the gullet port, which was where he’d come in from, as a possible means of escape. Even after he’d recognised the futility of it, he’d still wasted quite a few hours fruitlessly trying to climb the soft, slithery stomach lining in an effort to reach it. Pointless, of course; there was no way in the world to get a grip on the walls without something to dig in with, and since his nails were too short and he’d carelessly come out without his ice axe and crampons, that was an end of it. That only left the hole in the other end of the stomach, the waste-extraction port.
There would be no difficulty reaching it; almost the only thing he had to worry about in here, in fact, was not reaching it. The sinewy diaphragm that opened twice a day sat in the stomach floor like a manhole cover or the plug in a bath, and the floor sloped down at a gentle gradient so that the day’s garbage could slide effortlessly down into the pool that covered the opening. It would only take a little carelessness to end up in that pool, but that wouldn’t be a good idea at all. In his time, Vinnie had had his share of heartburn and indigestion, so he’d already had a pretty shrewd idea of the effects of concentrated stomach acid. Being methodically minded, however, he’d experimented by throwing in handfuls of prawn shell and watching them dissolve almost as soon as they touched the surface. It wasn’t a spectacle that he found encouraging, professionally speaking.
He’d explored other possibilities, of course, all of which centred around the basic idea of getting the whale to throw up. He’d tried tickling, pinching, jumping up and down, kicking the sides, even hurling himself at them like a violent man in a padded cell. He’d tried overloading the acid pool, shovelling armful after armful of shrimps into it until even the ferocious acid couldn’t dissolve them fast enough to stop the pool getting clogged. Waste of time. This fish had a stronger stomach even than his uncle Woody, and that was saying something.
The gurgling noise was starting, and Vinnie instinctively covered his ears. For the short time it took for the bowel to open and the contents of the pool to drain, the noise level was unbearable; yet another defence to frustrate escape attempts, he couldn’t help thinking. But he forced himself to put his hands down again, just in case there might be some clue he’d missed. He felt his eardrums pop.
The only chance he’d seen was the moment after the acid sump had drained, when the bowel diaphragm was closing. Actually, that was an abuse of the word chance; the moment lasted no more than a second and a half, the hole was almost certainly too small for him to wriggle through, and it stood to reason that, even if he succeeded, all that would happen would be that he’d slide down the bowel to join up with all that corrosive acid at the first kink or U-bend, even if the contraction of the bowel itself didn’t crush him to death first. If he was crazy enough to go down there, he was a dead man, no two ways about it. The fact had to be faced. Until such time as his host either let him go or killed him, Vinnie was stuck here, with the damp and the raw shrimps and the smell. Escape was, finally, not an option.
No question about that. Vinnie was, after all, a professional. He knew about these things.
So, when the gurgling noise started to die down and the last bucketful of prawn tissue dissolved in neat hydrochloric acid was slipping away down the plughole, he shouldn’t have taken a deep breath, dug his nails into the palms of his hands and started to run. Absolutely not. The whole point of being a professional was that you didn’t take the no-chance options.
As Vinnie hit the diaphragm and felt it closing around him, he couldn’t help thinking, in spite of all the other claims on his mental bandwidth, of an old man with no teeth trying to eat a jelly baby. There was (he reflected, while he drove his arms and legs against the soft pink wall that was trying to crush him into something the size and shape of a golf club) that same degree of inappropriate futility: a whale, trying to shit an undigested escapologist. He couldn’t see the point, really. He wasn’t having a good time and he doubted very much that the whale was enjoying the experience; yet all the evidence seemed to suggest that this was what he was meant to be doing - otherwise why the electric light, the fresh water and the minuscule, one-in-a-million chance of escape? Well, (he thought, as the diaphragm suddenly let go and he found himself desperately bracing himself with his outstretched arms and legs against the walls of the pitch-dark slimy chute to keep himself from dropping into the seething cauldron of acid below) I really hope you’re watching and you haven’t just popped out for a cup of coffee and a doughnut, because I’m buggered if I’m doing this again.
As far as active participation in the escape bid went, that was all for now, apart from the sinew-bursting strain of pressing his elbows and knees against the walls to slow his descent. There really wasn’t anything more he could do; rather a waste, in fact, of his professional skills and abilities, because any fool with the stamina to keep pushing with his arms and legs could be doing this, it certainly didn’t require the talents of one of the world’s greatest exponents of the art of escapology. Turds, after all, do this sort of thing every day, without any of the hours of study and practice he’d put in over the years. In fact, he couldn’t help thinking, they almost certainly did it a whole lot better than he did. Mind you, they had advantages that he didn’t share, like a complete absence of bones, skin or nerve endings.
Who are you, and why are you doing this to me? It was, oddly enough, the first time Vinnie had ever asked that question, the one that everybody else seems to be asking at least once every day of their lives, and he’d hoped to be able to carry on avoiding it for a good few years yet, in the same way that he’d always managed to avoid death by getting out of its way whenever he felt it was getting a bit too up close and personal. What do you want to do when you grow up, Vinnie? they’d kept asking him when he was a kid. Here’s all human knowledge, look; which bit of it do you most want to learn? He’d never had to think twice about answering that one. I want to learn how to get out of the way. When I grow up, I want to be somewhere else. And it had worked, too. He’d learned the secret that the immortals guard so jealously, that the only way to live forever is not to die, and every day since, either in front of the audience and the TV cameras or in the seclusion of his workshop where he practised so carefully, he hadn’t died and hadn’t died and hadn’t died. Even now, when his life had narrowed down to being a particle of fast-moving whaleshit being shot down a smelly tube in total darkness, he still had it.
He shot out of the whale’s backside like a torpedo.
How he reached the surface he never knew, because the G-forces and the shock of hitting the water at a speed of several hundred feet a second wiped his mind out and put him cosily to sleep. The next thing he saw was the sky; and then, as he rolled painfully on to his side, sand and rocks and sea and a green hillside sweeping down to meet him like a reception committee.
‘I’m alive,’ Vinnie said aloud. ‘Well.’
He stood up, looked around for his clothes (no chance; they were probably still somewhere inside the whale, what rags and tatters were left of them) and started to walk slowly up the hill; at the top of which was a small, quaint, unspoilt little Cornish fishing village, where a rosy-cheeked policeman arrested him, charged him with indecent exposure and locked him up in a cell.
‘But wait,’ Vinnie protested as the door slammed shut. ‘I’ve just escaped . . .’
‘Oh yeah?’ the policeman replied as he turned the key. ‘Well then, let’s see you get out of this one.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Kawaguchi, with a slight nod of his head. You’ve done well.’
Odin smiled. ‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Really,’ he added.
‘The data you accumulated for us on the rate of decay of the human soul in the period immediately after death has proved invaluable,’ Mr Kawaguchi continued. ‘The third sample, for instance—’
Odin nodded. ‘Howard. Sad case, that. I guess you could say death brought out the worst in him.’
‘That’s just the sort of information we needed,’ Mr Kawaguchi confirmed. ‘Now that we have statistical evidence about how rapidly a—let’s say, a somewhat flawed human personality takes to break down into actual psychotic disorder . . .’
‘Inadequate’s the word I’d use,’ Odin said. ‘Not flawed.’
‘Really? Aren’t you being a little severe in your judgement? His only flaw, if you can call it that, was a preference for the world of his imagination as against reality.’
‘Inadequate,’ Odin said. ‘After all, nobody ever said I had to like the little bastards.’
‘Whatever,’ Mr Kawaguchi said. ‘With this information, we’ve been able to build in safety protocols that ought to make it possible for us to safeguard even our most—hm, sensitive clients against lasting psychological damage. Likewise, samples one and two, the father and daughter - an inspired selection, if I may say so.’
‘Thank you.’
‘By observing how long it took for the bond of natural love and affection between parent and child to disintegrate under the stresses of the death environment, and cross-referencing that against the results from sample four, the megalomaniac with the will to endure for ever—’
‘Please,’ Odin interrupted. ‘I’d be careful with that data if I were you. I did warn you, Attila’s a rather atypical specimen. ’
‘Oh, we’ve taken the standard deviation into account,’ Mr Kawaguchi said, with a wave of his hand. ‘That wasn’t difficult. The net result is that we’ve been able to extrapolate vital algorithms to predict the erosion curve of human individuality in the face of eternal nothingness; our researchers can now place the point at which the One is assimilated into the Whole to within ninety-six decimal places.’
‘That many,’ Odin said. ‘Fancy. Is that enough?’
Mr Kawaguchi shrugged. ‘It’s as exact as we can get. This is, after all, the prototype; we simply don’t know how precise we need to be, at least not yet. There is one thing I don’t understand, though. The last sample.’
‘Joan of Arc? Well, Attila’s had a crush on her for ages, and I just wanted to see how many times love could transcend death. My starting bet was forty-six, but that was a huge overestimate. ’
‘No, I didn’t mean her,’ Mr Kawaguchi said. ‘The escapologist; the Great Vincenzo, Vinnie - Vinnie—’ He frowned. ‘His surname escapes me for the moment. Why did you include him? After all, he never actually died.’
Odin’s brow creased. ‘Who?’
