Transhuman (25 page)

Not that it mattered to the gladiator in question, one sword stroke later.) The blatant across-the-street tweakage put paid to all such self-soothing hopes on Margaret's part. Her aspirations to a rematch had been quashed even before she'd had the chance to formulate a plan of attack. The changes to the Pendleton house display was, in effect, a holly, jolly "Bring it!" to the world. Margaret staggered downstairs. Desperate times called for desperate measures. In her case, they called for desperate measuring cups. She began to bake with a vengeance. By the dawn's early light, she had achieved a platter of Christmas cookies of such appetizing taste and texture that if the early Church had been able to use them as bait, Nero would have kept the Christians out of the arena and safely in the kitchen.

History cannot be rewritten, only recounted or repented. A past containing fewer saints and more sugar rushes was not meant to be, but a lovely Buttermilk Crescent morning did witness Margaret standing at the end of the Pendletons' front pathway, cookies to the fore. She'd called ahead, of course, and when she said she'd just baked too many cookies for her little family to eat and she'd be so grateful if her dear new neighbors would take some of the surplus off her hands, she heard her rival's voice burble with gratitude. An invitation to come right on over this very nanosecond was issued, and an inwardly smirking Margaret complied.

Dinah Pendleton had the front door open the moment Margaret set foot on her property. From the pine-and-peppermint scented shadows of her entryway, she beckoned her new neighbor to enter freely and of her own will. Margaret was welcomed into the Pendleton living room where, over tea and goodies, she had leisure to assess the competition at close range.

She was soon deeply disappointed. There was nothing extraordinary or striking at all about Dinah Pendleton. The woman wore her pale brown hair the way she wore her pale blue dress: mid-length, plain, and serviceable. She was exactly the sort of woman who seemed born for the sole purpose of fading back into the wallpaper, and she would have, if the wallpaper and everything else chez Pendleton hadn't been at least a thousand times brighter, prettier, and more eye-catching than the lady of the house. She was a cold, boiled potato trying to conceal itself on an open field of black pearls beyond price. It simply could not be done.

Margaret soon observed that her adversary was the only note of mediocrity in the Wagnerian epic of gorgeous and utterly tasteful holiday decorating 'neath the Pendleton roof. As hard as she tried—and boy howdy, did she ever try!—she could not find a single fault with Dinah's adornment of her surroundings. Naturally, the conversation turned to the matter of the outdoor display. Never one to reach for the embroidery needle of subtlety where the sledgehammer of straightforwardness would suffice, Margaret got down to business. "Dinahdear, I can't get over how fast you put up your decorations. You simply must tell me your secret."

"I don't want to, Margaret," said Dinah, without attaching the mutual endearment. Margaret gasped as though she'd been the victim of a drive-by flounder-across-the-piehole. She'd been dear-denied! It was a social rabbit punch from which she scrambled to recover. "Er, I'm not asking because I want to steal your decorator, Dinahde—Dinah. I prefer to do all of my holiday work with my own two hands."

She held them out to illustrate her point. They hummed softly. Among her implants was a formidable—if perforce small—buzz saw that was a little too closely slaved to the neurons governing Margaret's temper. She had to make a special effort to keep it from manifesting when she was feeling annoyed with someone. The razor-sharp enhancement had proved to be an embarrassment on more than one occasion, especially during Parent/Teacher conferences at Harry and Hermione's former school.

"I don't use a decorator," Dinah replied. "I do it all myself."

"My goodness, even the robots?"

"What robots?"

"Well, when I saw that darling Nativity scene, I simply assumed that— So they're holograms?" Margaret knew this was untrue, but sometimes a lie made effective bait to coax the truth out of its lair.

"You know they're not," said Dinah. And she gave Margaret a look almost as stern as the one she'd received from the affronted Virgin Mary.

Margaret blushed. Stupid security cameras! Dinah must have been monitoring the transmission of her little stone-flinging experiment. No doubt that was the reason for Dinah having withheld dear-designate status from her. This was enough of a gaffe in and of itself, but when Kirkland found out she'd blundered thus with the wife of a Homeland Lockdown mucky-muck, he'd have a purple fit. And purple just wasn't his color.

"Well, whatever they are, they're beautiful." Margaret threw herself headfirst into a stream of effusive praise for Dinah's decorations whose patchy sincerity wouldn't have fooled a week-old kitten. Dinah accepted this tribute in the spirit in which it was offered, which meant that the two women traded plastic pleasantries for another half hour before Margaret declared she was so sorry but she must be going (Translation:
Drop dead, bitch
.) and Dinah responded oh did she have to, they were having such a nice time (Translation:
Don't let the doorknob hit you where the Good Lord split you, crone
.). As she walked away from Dinah's front door, Margaret's mind seethed with rage and her MoodzMusyc unit throbbed with A Night on Bald Mountain. She never noticed the baby bottle on the path until she stepped on it and nearly took a pratfall. When she recovered her balance, she picked up the offending object. It was easy enough to figure out whence it had come. Some young mother, airing her spawn, must have watched helplessly as Junior flung the bottle out of his stroller, onto the Pendleton property. There was no question of going after it. A strayed baby bottle wasn't worth risking life and/or limb to recover.

Her near-accident sent her already established foul mood spiking. "Stick this in your manger," Margaret growled, and threw the bottle into the crèche.

"STOP THAT!"

The thunderous admonition set the crèche a-tremble. Dinah's front door flew open and she stood clutching the frame like a drunkard. Her face was pale, her mousy hair rumpled. "What the hell did you do to my display?" she howled.

"I—I'm sorry, Dinah." Margaret was taken aback by her neighbor's reaction. "It was an accident."

"Bullshit!" The crude word seemed out of place on Dinah's bloodless lips. "You did that on purpose, just the way you threw that stone the other day. I know your type. You think you're the first who tried to outdo my Christmas? Well, good luck with that, sweet cheeks. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon implanted in my mouth like the rest of you upscale latte-suckers. I was born in a city!" She laughed coldly when Margaret made the traditional warding-against-urban-evil sign and plowed on. "Yeah, that's right, honey, a city. I was raised in an apartment and went to a public school!"

"How dare you use such language to me!" Margaret exclaimed, her face scarlet at the mounting obscenities spewing from Dinah's mouth.

"I just want you to know where I'm coming from," Dinah said. "When my husband married me, he took me away from all that. There's nothing I wouldn't do for him now, nothing I wouldn't sacrifice to make sure that his house is always the best, the brightest, the showplace of Buttermilk Crescent. When you live your life one online divorce away from the mean streets, you fight to stay 'burby, and nothing says 'burby like Christmas. You got that, bitch?" She took a deep breath, struck a prim stance, smoothed down her hair, and gave Margaret a smile as bland as unsalted porridge. "Thank you so much for the cookies. Have a scrumptious day." She slammed the door in the key of F*** You. Now most women, when confronted with a noxious little sliver of urban rot like Dinah Pendleton, would retreat to the sanctity of their home and liquor cabinet to lick their wounds (with salt, a splash of lime, and a shot of tequila). Not so Margaret Barrow. She returned home more determined than ever to teach her neighbor that the cities weren't the only places that bred hardcore chicks. Her grandmother had spearheaded the cross-country Million SUV Protest Drive in a vehicle tricked out with scenes of penguins and polar bears performing unnatural acts. (Global warming or the Lord's righteous punishment visited upon an arctic Sodom and Gomorrah? You be the judge!) Her mother had lost a leg in the Marin County Trophy Wife Riots, but miraculously kept her husband—too scared to divorce a woman so steeped in the media spotlight—and gained her own talk show,
Out on a Limb
, afterwards. Margaret Barrow's forebears had not backed down. Neither would she.

If Dinah could tweak her display, Margaret could play that game, too. "Marching Through Georgia" rocked her mastoid as she contacted Kirkland and told him that Home Sweet Home was off-limits to him and the kids until further notice. "Whatever makes you happy, darling," he replied in what was either a manifestation of husbandly devotion or total indifference. Having cleared the playing field, Margaret went to work.

There followed a spectacular ping-pong match of one-upsmanship between the two facing properties the like of which Buttermilk Crescent had never seen. Unfortunately for Margaret, it was not a match she could win. Though she kept adding more and more flash, glitter, and glow to her display, the sweat of her brow and the titanium of her thumb fell onto stony ground. A day's hard labor to boost the WOW!

power of her decorations was countered in what seemed like the twitch of a mouse-on-caffeine's eyelid by Dinah Pendleton.

How does she do that
? Margaret wondered, groggy from exhaustion as she beheld her foe's most recent return volley. It had almost ruined her, physically and financially, but Margaret had installed a glorious
son et lumiére
extravaganza that transformed her home's façade into Christmas at Versailles, complete with spouting fountains done to scale. However, by the next morning there were three massed choirs of angels around Dinah's crèche, all singing periodic praises from risers that looked like captive clouds. As Margaret stared, one of the heavenly host turned his head and blew an unmistakable seraphic raspberry in her direction.

That was when Margaret snapped. Her attempts at outdoing Dinah died. She knew better than to pound sand down a rat hole, even a rat hole that had been wreathed with mistletoe. As Christmas approached, she apparently withdrew from the field of battle. Apparently.

Dusk on the evening of December 23 crept over Buttermilk Crescent like Nature's own E-Mask-U-Lite. One by one, the houses put on their best after-dark holiday bib and tucker. Margaret stood brooding by her bedroom window, watching the Pendleton place as a troop of Roman legionnaires marched across the lawn and vanished behind the eastern corner of the house. They were bellowing a bluff and manly soldiers' song—or so she surmised from the rough melody, since she didn't understand Latin. It merged into perfect harmony with the angels' chorus. Up on the housetop, instead of an image of Saint Nick, King Herod sat upon a sumptuous, jewel-encrusted golden throne. You could almost hear him plotting the Massacre of the Innocents.

He was not alone.

Margaret took a shower, shaved her head, waxed herself hairless as a crystal ball, and put on her early Christmas present to herself. It had cost her an unholy amount to procure before its official release date, and it would be obsolete within three minutes of its debut, but a determined person could accomplish a lot in three minutes. A person who was willing to drain the family coffers to the marrow in order to get three-minutes-plus use out of her brand new Peek-a-BOOM bodysuit (with pan-universal security system hoodwinking capability) could accomplish even more.

She crossed the street without rousing so much as a peep from the neighborhood who-goes-there cams. She trampled on the lawn of the house next door to the Pendletons' as a quick test of the suit's powers of utter concealment and grinned when nothing happened. The humiliated ghosts of Ninjas Past watched with envy as she strolled right up to the crèche, stuck out her tongue at the Virgin Mary, gave the massed angels the finger, and initiated Phase Two.

It's just that the very thought of another human being so much as touching her Christmas
decorations sends Dinah clear around the twist
! Kerry's words rang good tidings of great joy through Margaret's mind. The miniature buzz saw in her hand thrummed to life. By the time she was through, she'd give Dinah Pendleton an object lesson in the fine art of touching. The question now was simply, where to start? Behead the oxen? Turn the manger into kindling? Make the stable itself into Sawdust Central?

Then she saw it: the tree.

How could I have missed that thing
? she wondered as she gazed upon the towering pine with its wealth of garlands, lights, ornaments, candy canes, and toys, toys, toys in the branches. Wooden soldiers, teddy bears, dolls, trains, popguns, all the playthings of a bygone era made the tree a three-stories-tall monument to Noël nostalgia.

They also made it Margaret's ideal target. With the agility of a flea, she leaped beneath the branches, enabled her in-hand buzz saw, and slashed deep into the bark. She imagined she already heard Dinah's screams of rage and frustration. Wait until she awoke to find the footing of her holiday dominatrix throne cast down into the figurative dirt! That loathsome woman might even be driven so foaming mad that she'd learn a Valuable Lesson about trampling on other people's dreams.

Self-righteousness gave renewed strength to Margaret's buzz saw. She cackled as it reached the halfway point in the great tree's trunk. She was so caught up in her own role as Dinah Pendleton's divine nemesis that she didn't stop to think about how much it was going to cost Kirkland to bail her out, if she were caught, nor about which way the tree might topple once she'd cut it all the way through and if she ought to be planning her escape route, nor even about—

Shouldn't there be sawdust? Margaret suddenly did think of something besides Pendleton payback. Sawdust, or at least the smell of burning plastic, or some other material, or— or—? The buzz saw stilled. The tip of her right ring finger glowed with a tiny work light. By its frosty blue (Arctic Splendor) glow, she saw the slow, thick, crimson trickle seeping from the cut in the Christmas tree. Her scream was swallowed up, along with the rest of her, as the assaulted tree trunk generated a vertical split that intersected Margaret's own malicious cut, gaped wide, swayed forward, and snapped shut with the finality of a bear trap. Her last moments on earth were bizarrely akin to those of the madeleine Kerry had absorbed those many days ago, except for the fact that most baked goods remain indifferent in the face of mortality.