The Last Guardian of Everness

  Hanging by one hand from the tree branch, one foot on the slope, Wil stared blankly at the license plate. A look of concentration began to come into his features. Then he turned his head up and stared at the moon, his face attentive, as if listening to inaudible voices. Then, slowly, his head began to droop, as if his gaze were being pulled down toward the gulf below.

  Peter, his eyes squinted into slits, his mouth a grimace, surged forward with a thrust of his shoulders. His canes had no purchase on the slope. Tree branches lashed at him as he fell. There was a chaotic moment of pain and dizziness as he tumbled and rolled. Then a blow: he had struck up against a tree. One of his canes was spinning out into the gulf of air, spinning and falling in slow silence.

  There were twinges of pain in his hips and spine, and he bit back his groans with clenched teeth.

  Wil’s voice came from nearby: “Are you hurt? Falls never hurt me, you know. My body is as hard as iron, so I can jump from cliffsides and tall steeples . . .”

  Peter, lying on his stomach in the fallen needles and wiry grass, was staring at the handful of dry leaves he held in one fist. His face was screwed up in a look of terrible concentration, and his lips moved, as if he were trying to recall some long-forgotten word or phrase.

  Dimly, he was thinking of something his father, very long ago, had forced him to memorize. Something stupid; some dumb nursery rhyme; something he had long put out of mind.

  Then his face cleared; his eyes brightened.

  Peter shouted: “That tree you’ve got! Look at it! Look at the damn thing! Do you deny that it is a laurel tree?” It was actually a maple tree, but Peter was hoping Wil wouldn’t say that.

  And, sure enough, Wil said back: “Huh? I don’t know anything about trees, except that I can jump so far, so far . . .”

  “Spirits of the world! He has not denied he holds the Laurel! Hey, Wil listen! There’s a song about laurel trees my Pa taught me! Don’t you want to listen, God damn you?”

  “I’ll talk to you after I climb back up. Bye, now . . .”

  Peter chanted:

  Daphne! Fairest of the dryad race

  Draw Daylight down to your embrace!

  Night comes not where once was woo’d

  The lady whom ļight too bold pursued

  Dream’s deceits flee Daylight’s darts,

  Chained by his harpstring, charmed by his arts;

  No man masters madness, save only he

  Crowned by the leaf of the laurel tree.

  Apollo, Hyperion, Helion, Day!

  Moon’s madness you harness, Night’s dragons you slay!

  And Wil suddenly clung to the branch with both hands, shrieking in panic.

  While Wil climbed up the slope back toward safety, Peter lay in the tangled brush, pounding his fist into the dirt, grimacing, tears in his eyes, and growling: “Jesus fucking Christ, it worked. God damn that old man, it worked. God damn that old house, it worked. It all works. It’s all true. God damn them!”

  It was a long time before he found the strength to drag himself back up.

  13

  Men Unbound

  by

  Magic’s Law

  I

  Private First Class Nat Furlough stood at attention, he hoped, for the last time. On the sergeant’s desk in front of him were his discharge papers: dishonorable discharge papers. He had been in the stockade once too often; he had been drunk once too often.

  But the officer at the desk was not his sergeant. He was a first lieutenant. The man’s nametag read MOCKLEAR. His insignia were strange: Furlough did not recognize the shoulder patch or the unit numbers. MORS. What was that? And the man wore a blue beret instead of a cap: not a cover for any unit Furlough knew.

  Furlough could see there was something odd about him: the way he sat, the way he moved his hands. He slouched at an uncomfortable angle, as if he had a deformed spine, and his fingers curled and flexed and wandered here and there on the desk touching things, fidgeting. It did not look right. Crooked posture, crooked smile. Furlough could not imagine seeing the man on parade. Nothing about him was shipshape and squared away. Despite his uniform, Furlough thought the man could not be a soldier.

  They were in a small wooden building, which without heat, was numbingly cold. It had been more comfortable in the stockade. Here, open windows to the right showed the parade ground: the flag was at half-mast, due to the recent, unexpected death of the base CO in an aircraft accident. Scuttlebutt said the pilot and the copilot had simply fallen asleep at the yoke, and pancaked into the hard top. Furlough was not the sort of person to take rumors at face value. How could anyone know what had happened in the cockpit when everyone had died? He wondered who had started the rumor.

  The lieutenant looked up. “I guess you’ll be glad to be out of here. Soon as your sergeant signs this, you’re gone.”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  “Um, at ease, soldier. Take a seat. Here: you need a doughnut? Coffee?”

  Furlough sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair behind him. It was painted olive green. He did not take any offered coffee. He decided to cut to the chase. “Sir, what are you selling?”

  The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth. That was odd, too. The crooked half-smile quirked back into position on his narrow face. “Maybe nothing, soldier. Maybe your future. Do you have anything lined up when you get back home? Not many employers have much use for a man thrown out of the service, do they?”

  Furlough said, “So. Is this a recruiting pitch? Go ahead. Give it to me.”

  Mocklear was quiet for a moment. He said, “Did Cooke speak to you?”

  Furlough showed no reaction on his face. He did not want to get Cooke in trouble. The two men had been in the stockade together and, later, had been drunk together behind the firing range.

  Furlough said casually, “It was just crazy talk, sir. I’m not sure I remember any of what he said. We were pretty far around the bend.”

  “Bend?”

  “Drinking, sir.”

  “And what did he tell you?”

  Cooke had whispered to him all sorts of strange and crazy things.

  II

  They had been standing in the ditch behind the firing range after lights out. The sentries never came here, and it was pretty far from the barracks but pretty easy to get back to your bunk from here (just a quick jog between two Quonset huts where machine parts were crated) if anyone noticed anything.

  Cooke spoke in an unsteady voice: ‘Any woman you want, Furlough. There in your bed, dressed any way you want, however you want. Pick ‘em out of a magazine. Off the TV Don’t have to be alive, even: You like Marilyn Monroe? Miss December of 1968? The girl you liked in high school? She’ll be as young as she was then. Don’t have to be a real person. Johnson says he’s got Catwoman.”

  Furlough had answered: “But if it’s just a dream, what the hell’s the point?”

  “Point!” Cooke had shouted back in sloppy glee. “That is the point. Real dame, you gotta worry about getting her knocked up, keeping her happy, her ex or her folks, all that rot. But, the girl of your dreams: No worries. No worries.”

  Furlough said, “I can’t believe you just said ‘dame.’ Who talks that way?”

  “Ain’t no books like a dame, nothing looks like a dame!” replied the other with a breathy laugh. “But don’t piss ‘em off. Shit! Don’t cross ‘em. Or they send spiders instead of women. Big ones. Scissors to chop your dick off, things from what you were scared of as a kid. Remember being scared as a kid? Now I lay me down to sleep, if I die before I wake, all that rot? Remember thinking your own pillow would fall over your face and smother you? Remember the Man in the Closet, the Man with the Hook, who waited for your Mom to turn off the night-light? If you step out of line, they send bad dreams. Buried alive. Rats eating your face. I hate it when you can feel the little teeth tearing at your cheek, y’know, and you can stick your tongue out the hole. Or rotting. There is this one where your whole body rots to bits, little crumply bit b
y bit, your teeth fall out, then your eyes. No. No. Don’t piss ‘em off. How ya gonna get away? Can’t get away. Gotta sleep sometime.”

  “Don’t piss who off, man? Who?”

  “They keep him in a cage. He’s coming out.”

  “Who? Who’s coming out?”

  “The wizard.”

  “What?”

  “The wunnerful wizard of Oz. Heh!” And the conversation trailed off into something less coherent after that.

  III

  Furlough decided not to answer. “Cooke, he didn’t say nothing, sir.”

  Mocklear leaned on one elbow, cocked his head to one side. “So, you can keep a secret. I like that. And no, Cooke won’t be punished. We asked him to mention our new unit to you, to see if you were interested.”

  “To see if I would tell the CO, you mean.” Furlough had seen the game from the start: if he told anyone, anything Cooke said would be just the raving of a drunk. If he did not, they would come to him.

  And here they were.

  He said, “Cooke said he was joining up again. Which I thought was funny, on account of he was being booted out, like me.”

  Mocklear leaned the other way, tilted his head again. Furlough noticed that his eyes did not seem both to be focused on the same spot. Maybe the guy had something wrong with his nervous system? A disease or something?

  Mocklear said, “We are recruiting.”

  “For what?”

  “The Military Operational Reserve System. You see, things are more dangerous these days, what with terrorists and foreigners and all that, and drug dealers have been arming themselves with heavier and heavier weapons—you’d be surprised where some of that ex-Soviet stuff is turning up. And riots, rebellions, protests. A lot of people flying off the handle. Did you know the rate of insanity is on the rise? Drug abuse, murder? So the higher-ups have formed, in cooperation with the BATF, a flexible operational unit that does not answer to the ordinary command structure. An elite unit that can be deployed rapidly within the continental U.S. to face the new kinds of threats the new world is giving us. Rebellions, insurrections, protests, that sort of thing.”

  “Who is threatening insurrection?”

  “Oh,” said Mocklear dismissively, “the elite unit is being formed for precautionary purposes only.”

  “Elite? Buddy, you’re talking to the wrong G.I.” Furlough pointed to the papers on the desk. “You’ve seen my record.”

  “Oh, my friend,” said the man in a voice with no friendliness in it. “The unit is not looking for men who have displayed the ordinary virtues of discipline, courage, patriotism, loyalty. There are other factors, psychological factors, that may be of more use to us. Did Cooke explain about our benefits program? About the future we are envisioning?”

  “He said a lot of stuff that sounded like treason to me.”

  “Oh, that word! What a confused, unreconstructed, inelegant word! Treason to what? To whom? We live in a great nation, surely, the greatest in history, and at a time in history when the might of the nation is unopposed by any serious foe. Whoever faces us in open combat is quickly crushed. None out in the open. So what does this nation have to fear? Internal foes. Foreigners sneaking across our borders. Treason. Terror. Voices of dissent. Voices discouraging our uses of power. Weakness is the only thing to fear. Confusion. Riots. The only thing we need to fear is treason to the people. And what the people want is security. Ah! But you look unconvinced, Private Furlough! Well, perhaps we misjudged.” And he gathered the discharge papers together and took up the pen out of the pen-stand and made as if to sign them.

  “Wait a minute,” said Furlough.

  The other man had his face near the desk, his ear cocked toward the papers, and he looked up crookedly at Furlough with one bright eye.

  Furlough said slowly, “Cooke said something about getting my record sealed.”

  Mocklear said, “He was supposed to say ‘expunged.’ We do not do things by half-measures.”

  “Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”

  Mocklear grinned a crooked grin. “We’re the winning side. You want to be on the winning side, don’t you?”

  Furlough said, “Don’t recall that any war has been declared.”

  “Oh, there is always a war on.”

  “Between. . .?”

  “Between the kind who play by the rules and the kind who get ahead. Well, which side you want to be on?” Mocklear’s fingers twitched, and he picked up the papers on the desk. “You know all your future employers are going to see this, don’t you? If you have any. Oh, I guess there is always the option of going on welfare, but then, well, there are case workers and other people to deal with then, and they are not much different from any other large bureaucracy anywhere, are they? They, too, have people who follow the rules and people who use the rules.”

  Furlough did not say anything for a moment. He puzzled over whether this crooked little man was threatening him, and, if he was, Furlough wondered what he could do about it. A punch in the nose would be satisfying, but another six months in the stockade seemed a dismal prospect when he was only minutes away from getting out of this chickenshit outfit and into wearing mufti again.

  Furlough thought: If I was a man with an ounce of sense, I would turn and walk out this door right now. This is just some gang of crooks. They might be in uniform but they’ve got nothing to do with the Army. Rats in the hold are aboard the ship, but no one thinks they are part of the crew.

  Furlough said, “Cooke seemed to think you guys, your side, was out to change the world for the better. Crack down on the rich, get rid of the corruption in government and in big business, see to it that everyone got a square deal. Feed the poor. But Johnson said—”

  Mocklear’s face twitched. One eyebrow went up, and the other went down. “You spoke to Johnson? Interesting.”

  Furlough guessed that Johnson had not been supposed to speak with him. Damn. He had not meant to get Johnson in hot water. Furlough liked to think of himself as a man who played his cards close to his chest: he was slipping up.

  Furlough said: “Johnson seemed to think your new special unit was going to help restore law and order, crack a few heads, get the bums off the streets, get the filth out of Hollywood, throw a few traitors and protestors in jail. So you did not tell those two guys exactly the same story, did you? Now, I am wondering if this is really whatcha might call a winning strategy, playing each side in the game, because all it takes is one guy to hear both sides, and he’ll know what you’re really up to.”

  Mocklear spread his hands, and grinned. “Oh, them. They had to be told what they wanted to hear. What else can you do with people like that?”

  Crooked as it was, there was something warm and brotherly in that smile. Yeah, Furlough knew how dumb most people were. What could you do with people like that?

  Mocklear dropped his voice to a more intimate octave: “But people like us—people who want to be on the winning side—we have no such illusions, do we?”

  Mocklear paused a moment to let that sink in, and then he continued in a confidential tone: “I’ll lay my cards on the table. I have a quota to fill. The timetable has been moved up. We have a boss, a man who gets things done, and he is about to make his appearance on the scene, and so we need to be ready sooner than we thought we’d be. So I need to find people, fast. All I need is warm bodies who know which end of the tube the round comes out of and who will obey orders. But we also need people with brains. People who are smart. People who know how the game is played. People with no illusions, no ideals, no messy commitments. People who cannot be fooled by flattery or tricks. Are you that kind of person, Furlough?”

  Furlough found the notion that he was above the illusions of ordinary men irresistible. Being told that he was immune to flattery was the nicest thing he had heard someone say about him in a long time.

  Like a little wisp of hot flame burning inside him, he felt the dark, savage satisfaction of hearing someone actually come out and say what he had always th
ought. It was like coming home, home to people like him: people who knew the world was a bag of lies, who knew the game was rigged but who managed to carry off their winnings anyhow.

  (The idea that this was just a lie as well, a line being fed him because it was just what he wanted to hear, stirred uneasily below the surface of Furlough’s thinking, like a groundhog peering just its nose furtively above- ground. But that idea, which was not a very flattering one to him, didn’t like its shadow, and subsided again.)

  “I’ll think about it,” said Furlough. “If I do decide to look into this new assignment of yours, who do I talk to . . .”

  Mocklear mentioned a salary figure around ten times what Furlough’s crappy E3 pay was now. “And there are other benefits. Cooke mentioned some of them. We take care of our own. Interested?”

  Furlough wished he could have hidden the hungry look on his face, but he knew the crooked little man had seen. Another slip-up. No point in playing coy now. “Well, maybe there is not that much to think over. Yeah. I guess I’m interested.”

  Mocklear said, “There’ll be a test, of course.”

  “Like an initiation?” Furlough knew how gangs worked. Once the recruit had done something horrible, something the authorities could not forgive, the loyalty of the recruit was assured. He had no place else to go, and blackmail could keep him in line.

  “Nothing so crude. Wentworth is looking for a select group of men who display certain . . . psychological factors.” He took out a sheaf of papers from the desk drawer. “If you would fill out this questionnaire and request for transfer?”

  “Am I still going to be in the service? Or not?”

  “You will have a military rank, but the special unit will be performing operations wherever need be, either overseas, or within the continental U.S. Sometimes in uniform, sometimes not.”

  Furlough looked over the questions. “I see you’re asking rather personal things here.”