Merge, page 11
“You told Nicci Charbon that Cylla was from another country, that her family was in trouble and wanted to emigrate.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Guantanamo naval base … in Cuba.”
“That was a metaphor,” I said.
“Metaphor? What metaphor?”
“Something that perfectly describes the essence of something else,” I said. “Cylla’s love for me made her want to leave everything behind. And that’s how I feel about her.”
“She only cares about you because of your money,” the Voice said.
“That’s a metaphor too.”
I sensed something then. I turned to my right and saw the soldier, a blond-haired woman, thrusting the butt of her rifle at my forehead.
* * *
WHEN I AWOKE I was in a hospital bed. A man was doing something to my skull, drilling. I cried out and fainted.
* * *
I WOKE UP in the hot Cuban night, back in my coffin cage. I could smell my fellow man, hear his convulsions and labored breaths. There were prayers being chanted and curses all around.
I thought that if this was the worst they had to offer that it wasn’t too bad.
* * *
TWO OR THREE DAYS later they came and got me again. I had spent most of that time drifting in and out of consciousness. That’s why I was so unsure about how much time had passed.
I was taken to a small lime-green room that smelled of disinfectant. The room was furnished with two wooden chairs and a metal table. They sat me in a chair that had leather manacles on the arms and legs. The blond woman sergeant strapped me in while an infantryman held a pistol to my head.
The room was cold. It had air-conditioning. At first it was a relief to be out of the heat but after a while the cold began to hurt my bare hands and feet.
The two soldiers flanked me, not speaking or sitting or even talking to each other. We’d been like that for quite a while, an hour or more, before the green metal door opened and a man in fancy combat clothes stalked in. There was a star on his dark green helmet and a pistol on his hip. In his left hand he carried a small hatchet with a dark haft.
Before sitting down behind the table in front of me the officer handed the hatchet to the blond sergeant. She took it without comment or hesitation.
This officer sat down and stared at me. I looked him in the eye trying to come up with the power I called upon to send Tom Beam into convulsions. But it didn’t work.
“What is this thing you put in my head?” I asked the nameless soldier.
“You have some radiation in your body,” he said easily. “The node emits a pulse that nullifies it as far as we can tell.”
The seated officer was in his fifties, white (as were the two other soldiers), with weathered skin. He was powerful looking with as unsympathetic a visage as I had ever beheld.
After a minute he turned his gaze to the woman and nodded.
While I was looking at her the infantryman grabbed my right hand and held it so that only my baby finger was sticking out. The woman, who I will always think of as Blondie, then made a quick motion and lopped that finger off.
I screamed. I shouted and jerked around making the chair hop in front of the stone-faced military men and woman. Blood spurted from the finger stump but they didn’t say anything, didn’t ask me anything.
When I had quieted down, the officer said to Blondie, “Another.”
“No! Stop!”
They chopped off the three fingers of my right hand leaving me only with the thumb and index finger. I passed out after the last disfigurement. When I awoke I was in the cage again.
“Brother,” a man nearby called to me. “I will pray for you.”
I remember thinking that I was a member of the democracy that had tacitly agreed to imprison and torture this man. His generosity tore at my heart.
I fell unconscious and awoke in a hospital bed set in the corner of a cluttered and cramped sickroom. My right hand was half the size of a football and it hurt so terribly that I cried out.
I was sorry for the outburst when the officer that had ordered my amputations came into the messy room.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“I’m dying.”
“No, son. There’s a long way between a swollen hand and death.”
“Half a hand.”
“You’re lucky I let you keep that.”
I smiled then. Ever since the head operation I had been cut off from any connection with Ido consciousness. The metal stud implanted in my skull seemed to be vibrating; and then for a flash I saw the Necrom Queen, a huge-bodied creature in a great chamber a thousand feet below the desert. She looked like a rainbow, hardly an insect-form at all, dropping creatures of all colors and forms moving under the sand, preparing for the Merge.
The image was gone and so was the pain in my hand. My Ido vision subsided but I was satisfied.
“What are you grinning about, punk?” the nameless officer said.
“You’re an evil man,” I replied. “You study evil but you think it’s gonna turn out good. That’s why I’m laughing. Because I know that you’re a fool.”
“I need to know about Cylla Bene, her people, and their plans,” he said. “We believe that either the Mongolians or the North Koreans, or both are responsible for these creatures. We need for you to help us prove this or you will see evil like even Hitler’s brightest stars couldn’t imagine.”
* * *
I COULD DETAIL more of this very early part of the Greater History of Earth but it would be pornographic in its depiction of violence. And there’s no need. I never found out my torturer’s name or exact rank. I lost my right hand, my testicles, left leg to the hip, and right leg to the knee. They gouged out my left eye, both ears were hacked from my head, and they cut off the baby finger of my left hand—I’m not sure why they did that. I was rarely given any kind of painkiller and it took a whole staff of doctors and nurses to keep me alive. Months passed and I was made to suffer in a thousand ways. They wanted to know about Pete and Frank and Cylla and even old Mr. Slatkin.
I never answered. When the pain got too great I was visited by the vision of the Necrom Queen and experienced relief for a while. Somehow the ants had found a way around the stud the army used to negate the blue radiance of Ido.
Months went by. There was one nurse, a black woman named Carla, who prayed over me and asked me to forgive her …
* * *
ONE DAY THE VOICE CAME into my hospital–torture room with six soldiers. They lifted all seventy-five pounds of me from the bed, threw me on a cot, and carried me to a helicopter. I threw up from motion sickness in the whirlybird. Carla had to turn me on my side so that I didn’t drown in my own vomit.
We came to an airbase where I was put on a jet. I was flown to Washington, D.C., and transferred by ambulance to an underground bunker filled with men and women in lab coats and uniforms, suits and street clothes.
They took me to a darkish chamber where there was a huge conference table with mostly men, and a few women, sitting around. I was rolled in on a kind of stripped-down utility wheelchair. The stump of my right leg was bleeding through the bandages and the socket from my missing eye oozed pus down my bony cheek. Because I only had one eye I had to keep moving my head to see the assembled inquisitors.
“Mr. Redman,” said a black woman who was sitting at the head of the table.
I had been positioned at the foot of the table.
“Yes. Yes, I’m Redman.” It was hard for me to catch my breath. I suspect that I had developed some kind of lung disease or infection.
There were three large screens behind the speaker. They came to life the moment I spoke.
“Are you familiar with the term ‘Ido’?” the woman asked. She was dark skinned and smallish with a hard body and intelligent and cold eyes that reminded me of the Cleet.
I was stunned even in my state of dissolution. I opened my mouth but there was nothing to say.
On the screens behind the woman images had begun to appear. It was hard for me to make them out because my one eye started tearing when I stared too long. On the leftmost monitor there was an image of an island floating in the sky above the ocean. There were large aircraft carriers below this airborne landmass, they seemed like toys compared with the size of the mountain hovering above them.
The plasma screen on the right side showed a city made of semitransparent, multicolored spirals that sat in the middle of a great sand-covered expanse. The center image was of a huge mound of branches, leaves, and other plant material rising like a mountain out of a dense green forest.
Slowly I began to understand what the images meant. The Ido had come to Earth and set up three cities, four if you counted the silent forests of the great Northwest. The Cleet, the offspring of Dolphus, the Necrom and their Queen had called forth their familiars.
“Mr. Redman.”
“What’s your name?”
“Cordelia Martin,” she said, “the Under Secretary of State.”
“Huh.”
“Do you know the term ‘Ido’?” she said slowly, threateningly.
“Miss Martin, you can see what your people have already done to me. I’ve been amputated, emasculated, tortured, and spit on. So you can take that tone right outta your voice. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Mr. Redman,” Cordelia said, modulating her tone. “This is a worldwide threat. The Russians, French, and Chinese are preparing nuclear attacks on each of these places. The safety of every man, woman, and child in the world may be in your hands.”
“I only have one hand, ma’am.”
That brought complete silence to the room. Everyone there realized how far they’d gone and how close they’d come to being lost.
“We were unaware of your treatment at Guantanamo, Mr. Redman,” said a man in a dark suit sitting to my left.
I didn’t answer him.
After a few more moments of silence I said, “Where is Cylla Bene?”
“She is none of your concern,” Ms. Martin informed me.
“Then drop your A-bombs and shoot me too because if I don’t see Cylla you don’t get shit from me.”
“We can destroy these, these manifestations,” Martin said.
“No,” I said, “you can’t. You don’t even understand them. Your whole world will fall into ashes before you even have a notion of what you’re facing.”
“Cylla Bene has been designated a national threat,” the white man in the dark suit said.
“Bring her to me or see the human race fall into ruin,” I proclaimed.
“What does the term ‘Ido’ mean?” another man asked. He was on my right side so I didn’t see him because I was concentrating on Cordelia.
“It means the transformation of men into angels … or corpses depending on if you allow me to see Cylla or not.”
While we spoke a nuclear bomb went off over the South American aviary. The mushroom cloud and the decimation of the surrounding forest was immediate and ongoing. The trees for many miles burned and fumed. For long minutes the explosion unfolded, deepened, destroying life for a hundred-mile radius. It must have been a hydrogen bomb, the product of man at his lowest.
When the smoke began to clear it became obvious that the Mound Aerie had survived—completely intact.
The silence that consumed the room when the bomb went off was replaced by an agitated din of fear. A man ran at me, knocking me from the wheelchair.
“Bastard!” he shouted. “Motherfucker!”
He kicked me and fell upon me throwing punches and making gurgling sounds in his throat.
Two soldiers pulled him off me but no one moved to put me back in the wheelchair. I was hemorrhaging from my knee and head. The metal stud that had been anchored to my skull popped out and a plethora of indecipherable images came into my mind. I felt dizzy. The room became hazy and I passed from awareness almost into unconsciousness—then I entered a limbo state.
“Rahl?” Pete said or thought or felt.
“Hey, man. Where are you?”
“I’m here with Frank. We’re in this podunk town in northern Idaho. We got people all over the Northwestern states with their Ido. We’re waitin’ for you, brothah.”
“I don’t know, Pete. They done cut me down pretty bad. Can’t walk, half blind … I don’t know if I’m’onna make it.”
“You got to make it, man,” Pete said. “You the Prime One for the human race. Without you there’s no connection.”
“What if I die?”
“Then the few of us who merged will make it but everybody else will be on their own.”
Pete faded away and Cylla came to mind. I could see her in my memory. I loved her so much that I knew I wouldn’t give up on her even for all the people in the world.
When I opened my eyes again I was in a chair in a room sitting across from the president of the United States. I hadn’t voted for him … really, what I mean is I wouldn’t have voted for him if I had voted.
“Mr. Redman,” the white man in the blue suit said.
“Yeah?”
“We need to figure this out.” He was affable but I could see the coldness in his eyes.
“Bring me Cylla and I will save your world,” I said more like a conqueror than an invalid.
“She has been hurt,” he said, a hint of apology in his voice.
“You tortured her?”
“We were trying to save the world.”
“Where is she?”
* * *
THEY CREATED AN ENTIRE STRUCTURE to house Cylla. I later found out that some Brazilian physicist named Parde had developed a device that could read with accuracy where the Blue Radiance (later known as “Ido Essence”) had occurred most deeply. When they used this machine on Cylla they figured that she was one of the mutating pole-snakes that came either from Mongolia or North Korea, or both.
The building was made from glistening metal and was kept on a huge and abandoned army base in Virginia. It was mound shaped, three stories high, glistening in the sun like a religious icon dedicated to the female breast.
I was wheeled through the front door that led to a four-tiered chamber that went around the whole inside of the building. There were at least a hundred technicians and the like sitting at desks on every tier looking at monitors of various types.
“Where is Cylla?” I asked the president.
He was walking beside my chair as his aide pushed me along.
“She’s in a room at the center of the building,” another person said, a woman in a lavender dress wearing a necklace of multicolored gems. “We have isolated her because of the explosions that occurred in Mongolia and Russia.”
“You think this structure could contain an explosion like that?” I asked the woman.
“It could contain a tactical nuclear device,” she said with certainty.
Science, I thought, had come a long way in the deep shadows cast by the Patriot Act and the subsequent victory of terrorism.
“I want to see her,” I said.
We had come to a door where a tall Hispanic man stood. He was dark-skinned with Asiatic eyes. He wasn’t burly but there was strength in his stand. From my recent experiences I recognized him as a torturer.
For a moment I panicked thinking that I had been brought to this place to be persecuted further by this tall, heartless man.
“This is Luna,” the woman in violet said. “He will take you in to your friend. But remember, we don’t have much time. There is fear around the world over these manifestations. Either you tell us what Ido means or there will be a world war.”
Luna moved to take my chair but I held up my one deformed hand to stop him.
“Why do you keep asking me about this word?” I asked the president.
He looked at me with his beady eyes and meaningless smirk. He glanced at the violet woman and hunched his shoulders.
The woman gave him a look, wordlessly referring to an earlier discussion.
“Tell me,” I said.
The president made a decision then. His smirk turned into a grimace and he looked down on me: the half-man in the utility wheelchair.
“The mound in Brazil,” he said, “it spoke to us.”
“In English?”
“No, I mean I don’t know. It said the word ‘Ido’ over and over again and then, the next day, it said your name.”
“Raleigh Redman?”
“Yeah. Do you know why?” The president wasn’t actually a fool. I could see in his eyes that he had the ability to understand the basic nature of people.
“No,” I said not caring if he believed me or not. “But I can talk to Cylla about it. She’ll talk to me.”
The metal door in front of us slid open on that cue. Luna pushed me into a small metal chamber, the door behind us closed, the door before us opened, and we went through.
We passed through seven doors until we got to a moderate-sized all-white room with a bed at the center. Upon this bed with no sheet or pillow or blanket lay what was left of Cylla Bene.
Her limbs were amputated at the elbows and knees and the skin of what was left of her arms and legs was scorched and close to the bone. Her hair was gone as were her lips and ears and eyes. There was blood on the mattress and on the floor around the bed.
“Leave me,” I said to Luna.
“It’s all right, Luna,” a voice said over loudspeaker.
“Rahl?” Cylla called in the yawning pronunciation that the lack of articulating lips allowed.
I heard the door behind me slide open and then shut.
It was with great difficulty that I shifted in my chair to make certain with my one eye that the torturer was gone.
“Rahl?” Cylla cried.
“Yeah, baby,” I said. “I’m here.”
I reached out with my one hand and clutched the edge of the mattress. I pulled until I was flush with the side of her bed.
“I’m here,” I said.
“I was just dreaming of you,” she said, unable to make a satisfactory “m,” “j,” or “f” sound.
“You must have known I was coming.”
“I always dream of you … of you.”
She made a coughing sound then that I knew was her crying.
I lurched about and reached for the stump of her right arm. I missed the first time.
