Take No Prisoners (46 page)

Just this morning, the news would have depressed or upset me, however much my professional training tried to pretend it didn't; now it was just as if it were some special effects fest happening in a movie on a television set I wasn't properly watching. Those weren't human beings we'd destroyed today, I now knew: they were mere thoughts, figments, story elements. Same went for what one might quaintly, inappropriately call their life's work.

And that was why we'd had to destroy them – that type of thinking. Thinking born as an inevitable consequence from knowledge that was too dangerous to let be disseminated.

Not long before we reached Langley, my emotions cut back in, and I started shivering from the reaction to what I'd done, and ordered done. I'd done what I'd had to do, behaved with fascist ruthlessness as I expunged several score existences to make sure the news of Q – of who we truly are – didn't leak out. My motives were of the highest, I told myself: to reduce, in the due course of time, the net sum of human misery. I was doing my part to try to ameliorate the future. We might think the horror of the human condition couldn't get any worse than it had already become, but people have been believing that at just about every moment in human history, and sure enough, despite temporary improvements, sooner or later someone's come along with the capacity to make things worse, much worse, than they've ever been before. The Hell-bringers. I'd been a fascist for the day – and would have to be for quite a few other days, as well, before I got to the end of Alex's list. That list was of course somewhat reduced, now, because destroying the Center for Neuronic Research, the root source of the knowledge of Q, meant a good-sized trickle of other enterprises were no longer potential threats. So it wasn't just a vague number of lives in the future I'd saved; by taking those few score lives today I might very directly have saved hundreds, possibly thousands, of other human existences I would otherwise have had to order be snuffed out.

But I'd been a fascist, all right – no getting away from that. And the thought that I hadn't been as bad a fascist as the ones Alex and now me were trying to counter didn't seem at all consoling.

So who are they, our Hell-bringer foes?

There are enough people around who don't value human life too highly, enough ruthless bastards who'll consign old people and kids and young lovers and anyone else in whole nations to death by fire and torture and explosion, and whatever new vileness they can come up with – who can do this as easily as they might pop a grape into their mouth or comment on how good the steak au poivre is tonight, my dear, and many of them are here in Washington DC, brought here by the True Believers, whether they be believers in the sanctity of human greed or the cattle-like believers in loving and merciful gods. Once upon a time the Hell-bringers preached ideas like democracy and freedom, but that was just until they got where they are, and where they intend to stay for the rest of all eternity. They have their counterparts all over the world, but none of those others have the sheer, raw power these ones have. None of them have the capability to destroy the entire planet and the species with it, through either deliberate malice or stupid inactivity. Which they'll do, if they remain unchecked. I give the human species about another two generations, and that's when I'm in one of my more optimistic moods.

If, if, if the bastards remain unchecked.

And that's what Alex understood. While Barkelane drove me home to Langley along the freeway, my stomach well filled by the excellent gourmet meal served up by the Executive's chefs, as I looked out the window at the streaked lights, I knew my thoughts were following the same train as Alex's had. There'd been no need for him to leave any extra instructions in his covert e-mail. If the bastards were as bad as this when they believed they were destroying human lives, innocent or otherwise, when they could use phrases like "collateral damage" – that most obscene of euphemisms – to gloss over the agonies they deliberately perpetrated, what would they be like if they knew they were just destroying figments of Q's imagination?

The agonies, the miseries, the horrors would be just the same, of course they would; but they'd become even easier to euphemize out of existence. The god-lovers would declare their God and Q (dumb, stupid, puerile Q) to be one and the same thing, and then they'd cheer on with ever clearer consciences the infliction of ever more sickening abominations and torments on their fellow human beings.

Everyone else but me, you see, would be just an idea, not real. It wouldn't matter what happened to them, because who cares what happens to an idea?

For I would be the one true Q.

And so would you.

~

I didn't ever have to replay the cassette that still sat snugly in my recorder-that-wasn't-just-a-recorder to be able to hear again, any time I wanted or didn't want to, what Tim Heatherton had told me in his final moments, the bit he told me he'd never gotten around to telling even Alex.

Q's denial of reality extends far beyond just his inability to effect any real change in the universe. "You see," Tim explained, "what Q most obdurately refuses to accept is the fact that he didn't encounter the universe on his own. He was brought to the universe by someone else, someone who didn't even realize they were bringing him. They looked at the universe for a while, saw nothing there that seemed to have any value for them – or maybe they just realized it was complete the way it was and didn't require any interference from them. Q never knew the full truth of that, even before he blocked off all knowledge of his own true nature. Whatever the case, once the Someone Else had looked at the universe long enough to satisfy themselves, they turned away to move on to somewhere else.

"And, as they did so, the disregarded Q fell out of their pocket, if you like, and they didn't notice they'd dropped him. He was the crumpled empty candy wrapper that's always blowing around on the ground of even the best-maintained of playgrounds.

"That's why Q's so dumb. He's litter."

"Q" was first published in 2004 by
SCIFICTION
, edited by Ellen Datlow, and forms Chapter 2 of my novel
Leaving Fortusa
(2008). Copyright © 2004, 2008 John Grant.