The Maggot People (20 page)

Giacomo turned to a guard. “Would you be kind enough to remove this sack of shit, take him downstairs, and keep him under arrest? He's not to go anywhere until further notice.” He looked at O'Hara. “I'm seriously considering letting you expire… keeping you out of our vaults so you can enjoy your precious mortality.”

As O'Hara was brusquely removed from the room, he threw Giacomo a final lingering gaze, and thought to himself, “If there's any way I can give this man a painful death, I will.”

This venal thought was a great comfort to him.

35
.

When Michael and Ariel reached the ancient catacombs deep under the north transept of St. Peter's, they found no modern technology or forklift trucks, only dank, dripping passages and compacted silence, in a world where nothing ever moved. The catacombs were so vast that at times one wondered if they had even been made by humans. Yet it seemed safe to assume they had, for there were carvings everywhere, on every lintel and passage, with names and dates in Romanic numerals and occasionally birds, trees, or fish.

The windings of the various chambers were mostly by a sort of design, not intestinal in their shape but logical.

The first day they just wandered without purpose, descending another level whenever they chanced on cramped stairs winding down like a screw thread.

“Lucky we're not claustrophobic,” said Ariel. “We'd scream the place down.”

“I am claustrophobic,” said Michael. “Every step I take I'm fighting panic.”

Occasionally they were disturbed by search parties with powerful torches. Whenever they saw or heard anything, they stepped into the nearest side passage, of which there were hundreds, each immediately bifurcating, and then bifurcating again.

If by any chance their pursuers got too close, it was easy to clamber behind a stone sarcophagus and lie very still until they had passed. There were sepulchral niches cut into the rock on either side up to ceiling, and nicely proportioned spaces between the wall and the sarcophagi for hiding or getting a bit of sleep.

“There's nothing to bloody do down here, is there?” Ariel said after a few days of traipsing about. “Do we actually know why we're here? Otherwise we could end up walking around for years. And if we ever have the crazy notion of trying to get out of here, we'll meet plenty of helpful people at the top who'd like nothing more than to stuff our throats with embalming cloth.”

“I thought that's what you wanted? To sleep?”

She looked at him. He'd grown so sharp and grim; his comments often hit their mark with an edge of cruelty. She swallowed her guilt, knowing that she had made him what he was.

“You know, if we really want to leave this place we can't head
down
, can we?” she said. “Are you sure you're trying to escape, Michael? Are you sure you're not just playing games with your friends, the graybeards?”

Michael trudged on, considering her question, and then answered: “I'm running because they're puffed-up frauds; I'm sick of their pomposity. They mystify the maggot and keep it secret; they use its power to make themselves stronger. They tell themselves they're the custodians of our future, Ariel, but they're only saving their own skins.”

“You sound a bit like them. Maybe you should also grow a beard? I'm sure it'll turn gray if you wait long enough.”

“I might have to. I don't have a razor.”

Their conversation drifted like this, sometimes argumentative, often consoling, but always aimless. They kept moving for the sake of moving, never knowing where they were heading.

On the third day the passages broadened and they reached an ultramodern silo where the Sacred Tomb of Jesus was housed in a lead-lined cavern beyond yet another pair of blastproof steel doors.

The place was absolutely deserted.

They stood, a little awed, looking up at the doors, which were as tall as a three-story building.

“I've got news for you,” said Ariel. “Hanging round caves for no particular reason… isn't my thing.”

“We should go inside at least and have a look.”

Ariel stared dubiously at the steel doors. “I'm not sure I want to. Something tells me once you go in there you're there for keeps.” Despising herself even as she spoke, she went on: “I'm lost. I don't know what I want anymore. I don't even know if I should stand or sit. I miss fruit and sunlight and water.”

Michael nodded at a familiar contraption fixed into the wall, an adjustable double-prong at the top and a retractable hose below. “At least we can top ourselves up when we need to.” He wandered over to the machine, and stood there fingering the controls, while he thought back on the bullshit Mama Maggot had fed him when she emptied him in Sardinia. All that stuff about… what was it she'd called it?—the
passpartout
—and then the oath of loyalty she had made him swear.

Why did people with power always have to abuse it?

He tested the hose by touching the trigger. A high-pressure burst of wriggling maggots sprayed across the floor.

“Michael, leave that thing and come here.”

She put her arms round him, kissed him and said, “When I am close to you I almost feel human. At least that's something I can be happy about.”

“I'd say everything is going a bit too well,” said Michael. “Maybe they actually emptied us and we're hanging up to dry and this is all a coffin dream? If it is, then I'm quite happy being dead.”

36
.

Giacomo woke up at six-thirty and made sure he was well tanked up on coffee, raisin rolls, Manchego cheese, and a half-bottle of Armagnac by the time his team of advisers turned up, showered and rosy-cheeked in their pressed suits.

One of the first things Giacomo did when he assumed his position as Grand Master of the Maggot Church was to have a group of top bankers and scientists maggotized and co-opted. He never bothered to learn their names; he didn't want excessive contact with seculars. They bored him, for one thing, and then of course they didn't qualify for storage and eternal life—which inevitably meant any friendship would have limited duration.

His chief statistician was a ferocious creature; he knew her simply as Chase, because that was the institution for which she had once worked. His financial analyst, a bit of a pompous dullard from South Kensington, went by the name of Barings. Then there was a smiling, voluptuous biologist, Smithsonian, who in another life would probably have had many happy children. Lastly, an acne-scarred information technology expert from New York—Warburg.

Giacomo watched them settling into their chairs, and as usual he marveled at their apparent ability to find pleasure in this whole ethos of
Don't fuck with us; we're here to do business and we know what we're talking about:
their salmon-striped cashmere suits, thousand-dollar handbags, polka-dot silk ties, expensive splashes of aftershave or perfume, the hiss of tights as legs were crossed, then those shoes, polished and sharp-heeled, lurking under the table like malevolent insects. Warburg, on the other hand, affected a sort of disheveled slacker appearance, always glum, always arrayed in a baggy tracksuit, long hair shedding a light rain of dandruff, a diamond stud in his left earlobe.

Giacomo frowned: Oh, blast it, it was just a lot of ego-posturing, the whole thing. The trouble was he needed them.

He cleared his throat. “I've called you in this morning because we must analyze the state of play. As you know we're having a problem with mortality; we're talking here about significant people—bishops, cardinals, proper religious people—dying without any prospect of ever coming back. It's never happened before.”

“Could I ask…ah…you, whoever you are,” he said awkwardly, glancing at Chase, “to give us a rundown of the situation.”

“Certainly,” said Chase with a repressed frown: “Guys, can I have the projector?” She stood up and walked up to the screen, showing a world map with all the countries color-coded according to their “maggot saturation.”

Using her electronic pointer she clicked first on Beijing. “What we have is a statistical problem that's pretty damn complex, kind of interesting too…”

“Really?” scowled Giacomo. “What's so interesting about it?”

“Well, let's take an example. At current maggot levels available to the Beijing market it's going to take like two hundred and sixty-three years to neutralize the population.”

“That's absurd,” said Giacomo. “I've got ten or twenty years at most.”

“Right,” said Chase. “The problem we have, sir, is if we move more maggot product into the region we're looking at significantly higher maggot die-off levels. Even if we ram Beijing with five times more maggot, the projected timeframe only improves by…” Her face froze as her brain crunched into the equation: “…just short of a century.”

“That's absurd!”
roared Giacomo.

“Anyway, we can't move that much maggot into China, sir. There's a political issue. The Chinese secret service is onto us, and according to our information, they're starting up a maggot program of their own.”

“The Americans are doing the same, and the European Union, too. The technology is very easy,” Smithsonian cut in, with a lovely grin. “Any imbecile can breed them. All they need is oxygen and sugar. Let's just hope North Korea doesn't get hold of them.”

There was a thunderous silence.

Chase continued. “The problem is the die-off factor. If we tried to blitz Beijing with a really massive program, say a tenfold increase, the maggots would actually die off before we got them there.”

“What we've got here is a sort of entropy,” Warburg whined. “If we could figure out the problem, we might be able to recalibrate the program and stabilize our targets. Or even modify the maggots… change their hard-wiring.”

“But then we'd have to get into genetic engineering,” Smithsonian sighed, with a look at Giacomo. “What does the Church feel about that?”

“I really couldn't give a fuck,” said Giacomo irascibly. “I'm faced with a classic Patton-Montgomery conflict of interest.” He stood up, grasping his cigar and bottle of Armagnac. “At the end of the Second World War, Churchill wanted to use Montgomery's armored brigades to punch aggressively through the lines of German resistance and race for Berlin. But the Americans insisted on Patton's lines advancing very slowly, taking out all the resistance as they went. And this is why we lost Eastern Europe to the Russians.” He stopped, and swigged his Armagnac. “Just in case any of you have any doubts about where I stand, I want you to know I'm more of a Montgomery man, myself. That means I want the populations of Beijing, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Moscow, and New Delhi punched out within ten years… or I'll decommission you all… and I won't put you in coffins. I'll throw you in the fire.”

He sat down.

Barings had been very quiet up until now. “Sir, what possible advantage would you gain by having us liquidated?” he said in a muted, gentlemanly tone. “Don't you see? This thing is quite out of our hands: the maggots are a force in their own right. To be frank with you, sir, we are doing our utmost. We have no choice but go along with…”

“Oh, shut up, you English prick!” said Giacomo. “Always the same posturing self-confidence. Don't expect me to be reasonable; I am not fucking reasonable at all. I've always hated your country, ever since that fat, gut-bucket king of yours murdered our brothers and took over our Church and spurted his sterile, diseased spunk into all those poor girls and then one by one had them murdered on the scaffold.”

Barings went pale. “I'm not sure this is getting us very far… sir.”

“I'll show you where it's getting you… you atheist
fuck,”
said Giacomo, pressing a button under his desk. Immediately the door opened and a couple of security men walked in accompanied by a priest. Giacomo turned to them: “Take this man below, empty him, and put him in the incinerator. No, that's too severe,” he muttered under his breath. “Put him in storage for a hundred years.”

Barings stood up. “I simply don't understand,” he wailed. “I've done nothing against you.”

“There's no reward for that. You've done nothing
for
me,” said Giacomo, “and that's what counts…old chap.”

“What about my family?”

“Don't you worry about them. I'm not a horrible man, I'll have them maggotized as well, then decommissioned. We'll reactivate them at the same time as you, how's that? When you wake up, my friend, you'll find a nice, clean, empty world without so many annoying people in it. It'll be quite lovely for your family; you'll see. But you'll have to take up gardening, because there won't be any banks and no money, either. Or boarding schools!”

Barings was led off weeping.

Giacomo tried not to look too smug as he refocused on his think-tank. By this time they were looking mesmerized and uncomfortable, like rats lined up in front of a python. “You see,” he informed them pointedly, “my problem is I don't
like
most people very much.
People
don't seem to realize the world is an arena where God and the Devil are slugging it out. They think our planet is a place for humans to live, build factories, and drive cars. How very silly.” He turned to the biologist: “Smithsonian… do you actually understand the significance of the problem we're facing? I need to get rid of the human race, quickly!” With a shake of his head, he refocused on her. “I mean you seem like a sweet woman; why on Earth didn't you just stay at home and get married?”

Smithsonian worked hard to control herself—she grew intense and positively glowed with resentment. “Isn't it enough for you that you took my life from me? Must you make me crawl on the ground? Do you understand what I've paid… my personal sacrifice for my liaison with you?”