Planet Hate, page 8
Below the surface of the water, Shizuka’s hand reached across until she found Grant’s, her fingers entwining in his as she looked in his eyes. “And what do you think, Grant? Could Brigid still be alive?”
“I think the snake-faces have come back from the dead enough times that we shouldn’t write anything off just yet,” Grant replied, “and we’ll know when we know.”
Shizuka leaned into Grant’s body and he pulled her closer, letting go her hand and wrapping his mighty arms around her as the faucet splashed hot water into the tub. “Who is the other one you brought with you?” she asked, gazing up at the ceiling as she leaned back into Grant’s arms. “I do not recall seeing her in my visits to Cerberus.”
“Rosalia?” Grant asked. “She’s a… Kane found her. She’s a substitute.”
“Can she be trusted?”
“Ask Kane,” Grant replied. “He vouched for her.”
Turning her head, Shizuka peered over her shoulder, up into Grant’s eyes. “Do you trust her?”
“The first time we met she tried to kill me,” Grant said with a tight smile. “The second time she was part of the group that locked me in a cell and tried to starve me to death. We might have some unresolved issues.”
“But…?” Shizuka prompted, knowing Grant still had something on his mind.
“But Kane’s vouched for her,” Grant finished, “and I’d trust him with my life—and yours—a dozen times over.”
Shizuka stretched as she lay in Grant’s arms, kissing him urgently on the mouth once more, and together they drew closer, making up just a little for the time they had been apart.
Chapter 6
The sermon in Luilekkerville cathedral lasted a little under an hour. To Domi, who was naturally restless, it seemed a little like eternity. She neither wanted to be here, nor did she feel comfortable snooping on this performance while she was still worrying about Lakesh’s health. She had been with Lakesh when he had been granted a physical reprieve by the Quad V hybrid out in the Las Vegas territory, and she was having trouble shaking her natural concern for the man. They had been lovers for several years now, and her feelings ran deeply for the aging physicist.
Shortly after the Quad V incident, Lakesh had received the response he had been waiting for from Shizuka—confirmation that she could provide a suitable hiding place for Cerberus. At the same time, intriguing reports were coming through to the Cerberus network that Snakefishville had been somehow reborn. With the Cerberus team split across the country, it had been most efficacious for Domi to leave Lakesh’s side to check out Snakefishville.
The sermon itself had been surprisingly personal given the size of the minister’s audience. Minister Morrow had described himself as a high priest in the glorious New Order. He had spoken on things like love and consideration for one’s fellow man, and the way he had described Ullikummis made the monstrous alien sound like an angel fallen from heaven. Having been on the receiving end of Ullikummis’s fury, Domi found this benevolent characterization both fascinating and disturbing.
However, the vast majority of the sermon had been about love, about the nature of their unconditional love, and great emphasis was placed on how the new love was a love built on rock, sturdy, unbreakable. The congregation cheered and applauded at times, chanting of their love—and Domi felt she must join in, too, for the sake of appearance, but she could see the sinister undertones. Ullikummis was a creature of rock, and his will could change the nature of stones, moving them and shaping them to form mighty structures. He had used this power to reshape the Cerberus redoubt into the prison structure known Life Camp Zero, almost destroying the Cerberus organization in the process. Ullikummis used stones in other ways, too, such as the obedience stones that budded on his body and sapped an individual’s will. Even as Domi thought of this, her hand moved to the brightly colored ribbon of material that she had wound around her left wrist. The material masked a length of almost four inches of her wrist, beneath which was a puckered scar where she had once had one of the stones implanted. Domi had used her own nails to pluck the stone from her body before it could take hold, gouging out a chunk of her own flesh and leaving a bloody trail across her arm.
Minister Morrow had encouraged questions, and he had answered each of them patiently, never once showing irritation, even when two children had asked the exact same question just moments apart.
“Remember that love comes from without,” Morrow had concluded. “Broadcast love from your soul, like a radio broadcast, and it will be felt by all around you. Love is the future, and our love is a rock.” And then he asked all members of the congregation to reach out and express their love to the person beside them.
There was a low buzz as people said kind words to their neighbors all around the vast hall, and Domi watched as some of the people in front of her embraced or kissed one another on the cheeks. Then, to Domi’s surprise, the woman sitting to her right leaned over and hugged her, pulling her close like a mother with a baby. The woman was in her fifties, streaks of gray in her once-dark hair. “Our love is strong,” the woman whispered, her lips brushing at Domi’s bone-white hair as she spoke. Domi nodded, feeling a little overcome with emotion. With her strange appearance and outlander nature, she had never experienced anything like this, strangers opening their hearts to others so freely.
With that, Morrow had bowed his head and led the congregation in quiet prayer before urging everyone to think on the lessons they had learned today as they began filing from the building.
While the sermon had disturbed Domi on one level, knowing as she did the horror that Ullikummis had brought with his arrival on Earth, it seemed curiously benign. She reflected on this as she rose from her seat to exit the cathedral with the people around her. There were people of all sorts here, and while it was a reasonable assumption that the majority were survivors from Snakefishville, where they had likely lost everything, it was notable how friendly everyone was. There was no sign of the rigid, almost oppressive class structure that had dominated the old ville. Where once those on Alpha Level had looked down upon the people on Cappa and the filthy slums of the Tartarus Pits at the base of the ville, now it seemed everyone was equal. Truly, they had embraced Minister Morrow’s message of love; it dominated not just the congregation but the way the whole of Luilekkerville presented itself.
And more than that, Domi realized, she was being welcomed not as an outsider but as a new friend. Of course she had received several strange looks from people at the cathedral, especially from a few children who had sat close to her; with her chalk-white skin and ruby-red eyes that was inevitable. Yet the old concepts of muties and outlanders seemed far from people’s minds here; it was as if they were ready to embrace all people to create their new society, their promised utopia. Domi had spent her life as an outcast, so to suddenly find complete strangers embracing her was something of a shock.
Domi made her way toward the exit of the cathedral that dominated the skyline of Luilekkerville.
“Minister Morrow is a wonder,” Domi heard one of the people behind her exclaim.
Other voices cheered their agreement, and there was a friendly buzz in the air.
Domi kept her head down, striding determinedly beneath the open arch and out of the towering building of worship, but then someone stood in front of her, blocking her path. Domi looked up and saw a man standing there, mid-twenties with an untrimmed beard on his chin. The man stretched his arms wide, effectively blocking the wide exit from the cathedral. Domi tensed. If she tried to run, she would call attention to herself and potentially the whole of this brain-addled congregation might turn on her, all eight hundred of them, realizing they had a spy in their midst.
Then the man blocking the entrance smiled, his arms still stretched wide in front of him. “Love is our god,” he exclaimed, taking a step toward Domi. His arms reached around her, pulled her close in a friendly embrace. “Spread the message of love, sister,” he said. “Spread love across the land.”
Automatically, Domi flinched, feeling constrained within the man’s broad-shouldered grasp. She had been a sex slave for a while in the lowest slums of Cobaltville, and she still felt a certain sense of disgust at being touched by strangers, despite her seemingly casual attitude toward most things physical.
“Spread love,” Domi muttered, feeling self-conscious as the man at the entrance hugged her.
Then he let go, and Domi thanked him and moved toward the exit. Behind her, the man was hugging another stranger from the crowd, an elderly man who needed a walking cane to shuffle along. “Bring love to the world, my brother,” the man said.
Outside, the sun was just beginning its languid afternoon descent toward the horizon. It was hot—June hot—and she was glad of the thinness of the material of her dress, the way the skirt swished over her legs to fan her. She would prefer to be in her usual clothes in this heat, of course—for Domi, shorts and a vest top was constraining enough. She began to sweat immediately, a little trace of water glistening across her shoulders and bare back.
Behind her, set near the apex of the towering cathedral structure, the circle of red glowed brighter, the high sun making it sparkle like some scarlet lighthouse, a vast homing beacon for stragglers. When the sun was at its zenith in the sky, the twinkling window could be seen for miles around, its red eye visible as many as twenty miles away on a clear day.
Domi peered behind her for a moment, examining that red eye in the sky, her pace slowing just a little. The red of blood, of life, shining across the surrounds, burning like a sun over the infant city of Luilekkerville.
Outside the church, people were gathering, talking about the sermon, about this new utopia, this Heaven on Earth that they were now a part of. Domi could well believe it, as there was a sense of freedom and cooperation in this ville that she had never known before, not in all her years in the Outlands and in Snakefishville. But Domi suspected that the promised perfection would come at a price—the people of Luilekkerville may not realize it, but Ullikummis was a force of evil, another of the snake-faced Annunaki who had manipulated and subjugated humankind for time immemorial, and whose only care was for himself. While these fools in the villes may believe they had found utopia, Domi felt sure it had to be a part of something else.
As the albino girl took a stride away from the cathedral entrance, someone called to her. “Hey, miss? With the white hair…miss?” It was a man’s voice and it had an authoritative tone like a Magistrate’s.
Domi tensed. Had her ruse finally been discovered, that she was a spy in the house of Ullikummis?
She turned, offering a fixed smile as she answered. “Help you?” Domi said. The sentence was clipped, abbreviated in the manner of the wild people of the Outlands, an unconscious habit of Domi’s during times of stress.
The man was tall and broad of shoulder, in his mid-thirties with a tanned face. He looked like a farmer or fisherman, some kind of outdoors type anyway. “We’re going to have a late lunch out on the plains,” the man said. As he spoke his blond-haired wife turned from the cathedral entrance where she had been talking, with two children under five hurrying behind her skirts. “I noticed you were alone, and wondered if you would perhaps care to join us, break bread together.”
“In the name of love,” the man’s wife added in a soft voice, wrapping her arm in his.
Domi looked over the couple for an instant, her eerie red eyes scanning them for tricks. They seemed genuine enough, so much so that Domi actually felt just a little bit touched by their offer. A new philosophy really had taken hold among these people, a new sense of liberty and of consideration for their fellow man. “I…er…I can’t,” she stuttered. “I have to be… I have a place I have to go to. My father will worry if I’m late and he cannot cook for himself with the sickness.”
It was a simplistic excuse, but one with all the evasion and vagary of familiarity: a young woman rushing home to care for a sick relative, a story heard a dozen times every single week.
The albino woman slinked off, continuing along the main thoroughfare as the man and his wife wished her well, wished her love. Domi made her way past a construction site where people cheerily worked on skeletal scaffolds, the men bare-chested and shining with sweat as they hammered at the newly made walls.
Before long, Domi was walking toward the East Gate. Domi thought back, recalling the rigid old layout of the villes. This area would have been a residential block in the old structure of Snakefish, one of the vast enclaves that sprawled out from the Administrative Monolith as though bowing in subservience to that colossal structure. The new buildings were the same but different, still bowing before the mightiest of their number in the center, only now that tower was the cathedral with its cyclopean red eye.
Domi moved on, feeling the breeze play across her neck where sweat glistened, marveling at how the rebuilding was different, yet just the same as it had always been. Brigid’s theory came back to mind for just a moment, the idea that the villes were constructed in a way that locked the minds of the citizens into a certain pattern of thinking, a mandala writ large across the landscape.
As at the South Gate, where Domi had entered the ville, a Magistrate in a fustian robe stood at the gates, his arms folded across his chest, the hood of the robe pulled up so as to mask his features in its shadow. He wore a simple belt around his waist, just a length of rope knotted in the center. A bag hung from the rope belt, made of leather and just a little bigger than Domi’s fist. Inside, she knew, the bag would contain a clutch of stones, their edges sharpened, flecks of Ullikummis, either a part of his body or something he had produced with his uncanny mastery of stone. The rocks were ammunition. The man would also have a simple slingshot hidden in one of the pockets of the robe, a strangely primitive weapon yet devastatingly effective when combined with the stones. Domi had been on the receiving end of those slingshots less than a month before, when Cerberus had fallen. The Magistrate was one of the warrior class that Ullikummis had trained, and his hood likely hid the bulge on his forehead where an obedience stone was buried.
The robed man was speaking to two people as they exited the ville. It was the young couple from the cathedral that Domi had noticed earlier, the girl with the crown of flowers in her hair. Their hands were intertwined and the dark-haired girl leaned against the lad, her crown of daisies coming up to the point of his chin, brushing at the whiskers of his thin blond beard. The girl wore a dress of purest white cotton, its hem swishing just above her knees, sandals on her feet. The lad was wearing a loose cotton shirt, breeches and a tie-dyed cape that fell to the base of his spine. The man at the gate nodded the couple through.
“Love be with you,” the pretty young lady said as they passed.
“And with you,” the hooded figure replied.
Domi followed the young couple, and as she got closer, the robed man turned and she saw something glinting on his left breast. Her eyes snapped to it, recognizing the design immediately—a red shield, the symbol of office of the Magistrate. With the collapse of the baronies, the Magistrates had struggled to keep order, and their authority had dwindled over the two years that followed. Now, Domi realized, the old symbols were reappearing, reborn under the yoke of Ullikummis. The symbols had power, and Ullikummis was turning their familiarity to his advantage, branding his new model army as Magistrates for the world he was building. Everything old was new again.
Domi nodded as she caught the Mag’s eye, inclining her head as she made her way to the gate that he guarded. The gate was open, and the Mag watched sullen-faced as she exited the ville.
In the old days the villes had kept all gates closed and guarded, vast towers watching for the approach of strangers to the villes, preparing for any hint of attack, any threat of disruption to their citizenry’s ordered lives. Now, Luilekkerville left its gates open, welcoming all comers to the burgeoning society they were creating, so long as they were here to worship this cult of Ullikummis, to confirm their love of love. It seemed like a natural progression, in some ways, for the Program of Unification had specified the need for openness, that no citizen may lock his or her door for they should never have anything to hide. Here, in the infant Luilekkerville, the concept had been taken to its logical conclusion, the gates left open for any who agreed to embrace the future.
But there was more to it than that, Domi intuited as she made her way out onto the dirt road beyond the gates. It wasn’t simply about letting people in, hooking them into this new religion the way an angler hooks a fish—the open gates allowed people to leave and so let the message be spread across the Outlands beyond.
Up ahead, Domi saw the young lovers making their way along the dirt path that led from the gates. Their laughter carried as they walked, linked hands swinging back and forth. Domi slowed her pace, not wanting to catch up with them or anyone else using the roadway on this hot afternoon.
Domi trudged along the path toward the trees in the far distance. Other people were approaching the towering ville via the roadway, called by the insidious siren song of that red, unblinking eye atop the cathedral. Domi had approached from the south but had chosen to leave via a different gate, a natural way of covering her tracks just a little to make her movements in and out of Luilekkerville that little bit more difficult to trace. When she was sure that the Magistrate at the gate wasn’t watching her, she stepped off the pathway and made her way up toward the line of trees lining the ridge beside the newly rebuilt ville. She had left her interphaser unit there after journeying here, with its remarkable capacity for instantaneous travel for a human subject.
Domi checked around her, preternaturally aware of her surroundings. Up ahead, the young couple had halted, the young man leaning down to kiss the girl at his side. Then, as Domi watched, he bent down until his torso was almost horizontal, parallel with the ground, his short cape falling to the side. Laughing, the girl with the long dark hair clambered onto the lad’s back, hitching her legs up so that he could hold her around the knees. The young man straightened then and he began to run up toward the trees, his girl laughing hysterically as he gave her a piggyback. They seemed happy, and not just that, Domi realized—they seemed free.
