The Philosopher's Apprentice (31 page)

I grabbed my overnight bag, and then the three of us left Arcadia House, marched across the quadrangle, and headed down Boudicca Street past the leafless, brainless ranks of trees, each elm and sycamore oblivious to its imminent incineration.

The mood at the main entrance was dour, somber, almost funereal. Knapsacks on their backs, suitcases at their sides, the city's entire population had collected in silent clusters of twenty and thirty. I spotted several terrariums and pet carriers—gecko, ferret, parakeet, Chihuahua, tortoiseshell cat: Londa wasn't the only person who'd be saving an animal from the conflagration. Everyone spoke in whispers. To judge from their empty holsters and disgruntled deportments, the Valkyries had complied with the directive to leave their guns behind. I was pleased to note a team of paramedics ad
ministering to our orphans and pregnant teens, making sure they all had their mittens, scarves, and medicines.

For twenty minutes we huddled in the raw morning air, stomping our feet and rubbing our hands, and then the gates opened to admit a company of three hundred heavily armed immaculoids, Lieutenant Colonel Jane Snow 3221 in command. With rude shoves, loutish punches, and the occasional coercive boot, the fetuses herded us through the portal and into a kind of open-air rat maze improvised from sawhorses and quivering streamers of yellow barricade tape. An additional immaculoid regiment appeared, breaking us into groups of ten and forcing us to negotiate the labyrinth, until eventually we stood before a line of nylon pavilions, eight labeled
WOMEN
, four
MEN
. Lieutenant Colonel Snow explained that we were about to be “processed”—checked for smuggled goods—and anyone who resisted would be “treated as callously as our parents treated us.”

More waiting, a full hour this time, an interval during which I beheld the immaculoids climb into the forty gasoline trucks and drive them, engines gasping with diesel flatulence, through the gates toward the city's combustible heart. Goaded by the butt of an assault rifle, I followed my nine fellow evacuees into pavilion number 12, where Sergeant John Snow 0875 required us to strip down to our goose pimples. Our teeth chattered furiously. We sounded like a castanet band. A squad of enlisted immaculoids X-rayed our innards with portable radiology gear, searching for ingested computer chips and swallowed microfilm capsules. A second squad commandeered our wristwatches, credit cards, and loose change, any of which might have been storage media in disguise. Squad number three examined our clothing, probing pockets, turning gloves inside out, inspecting every seam and cuff. A fourth cadre took out utility knives and peeled away the linings of our valises and suitcases like fur trappers skinning beavers. My overnight bag came back
to me in tatters, but at least I'd passed the test, as had the rest of my group—not a single piece of contraband among us.

At long last the sergeant issued the blessed command. “Get dressed, and no stalling!”

As the next band of ten entered the pavilion, the mackies' gun muzzles nudged us through the rear flaps. An instant later the Sisters Sabacthani emerged from pavilion 3. Londa still held Quetzie's cage. Stupefied by the cold and grateful for the restoration of our clothes, we became putty in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Snow and her regiment, and nobody raised the feeblest protest during our subsequent ordeal, which had us first standing around Hypatia Circle for two hours while the remaining Themisopolians were processed, then tromping four miles across frozen fields covered with thorny vines as treacherous as barbed wire, until at last we spied a line of snow-dusted evergreens marking the eastern edge of Quehannock State Park.

The fetuses and their rifle butts continued to treat us harshly, pressing us toward our destination at a rapid clip. Upon reaching the parking lot, the Themisopolis commuters rebonded with their cars and vans, then took off, even as Lieutenant Colonel Snow and her subordinates moved among the rest of us, passing out the promised technology. When Londa received a cell phone, she sidled discreetly away from the mackies and, after ringing up Jordan, spoke to her in a whisper. At the end of the conversation, she offered Yolly a freighted nod whose significance eluded me. I took the phone and called Natalie, but she didn't answer, so I left a message assuring her I was out of harm's way and would probably spend the night in Jordan Frazier's Georgetown apartment.

Within a half-hour the evacuation vehicles started arriving—sedans, station wagons, hatchbacks, SUVs, pickup trucks, limousines, hired taxis. Particularly conspicuous were the shuttles bearing the logos of various Maryland hotels and motor inns, Londa's
medical staff having arranged for our orphans and outcasts to enjoy commercial lodgings until more permanent accommodations could be secured. I took comfort in the thought of our paramedics tucking in these wretches for the night, assuring them that a second City of Justice would one day rise from the ashes.

Jordan was among the last chauffeurs to appear, vaulting athletically from the cab of her Plymouth Carmilla minivan. I wanted to tell her she looked fabulous—her buoyant brown eyes and lavish smile had ceded little to the years—and how much I admired her lobbying efforts on behalf of Sabacthanite ideals. But I was so frazzled I could only give her a doleful hug and thank her for being the one bright spot in an otherwise wretched morning.

Under the immaculoids' watchful gaze, we climbed into the minivan, Yolly settling beside Jordan while Londa, Quetzie, and I assumed the backseat.

“On track with Plan Omega?” Londa asked Jordan as we cruised out of the park. “Matériel in hand?”

“Lady Justice is looking out for us,” Jordan replied cheerfully.

Plan Omega? Matériel? The terminology of the moment made me nervous.

“I'm confused,” I said.

“Have patience,” Londa said.

Yolly inserted
Linda Ronstadt: Greatest Hits
into the dashboard music center. As the Carmilla resounded with “You're No Good” followed by “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” Jordan piloted us to I-95, hit the accelerator, and zoomed into the fast lane, everybody except me singing along with the recording. By the time we reached the Havre de Grace turnoff, Ronstadt and her backup trio were belting out “That'll Be the Day.”

Jordan followed the exit ramp to a Burrito Junction, where she parked and killed the engine.

“Can't we do better than this?” I pleaded. God knows I was hungry, but I wasn't in the mood for fatty ground beef enshrouded in a soggy tortilla.

“We aren't here to eat,” Londa explained. “We're here to use the restrooms. Let's say we get into our disguises in ten minutes max—okay, gang?”

“Disguises?” I said.

Londa squeezed my knee. “On her way to pick us up, Jordan bought everything we'll need to turn ourselves into immaculoids. Orange jumpsuits, silver wigs, grease pencils.”

“I could find only three suits,” Jordan said, “but as your getaway driver I don't really need one.”

“Getaway driver?” I said.

“Last night we burned three hundred gigabytes onto sixty CD-Rs and hid them inside our statue of Themis,” Londa explained. “Not the first place the mackies will think to look, but not the last either, so the sooner we go fetch the data—you and me and Yolly—the sooner, the better.”

“All three of us?” I said.

“The plan turns on us having as many Sabacthanites inside the city as possible,” Jordan said.

“Sounds dangerous,” I noted.

“Only if we do something amazingly stupid,” Londa said.

“
Really
dangerous,” I said.

“We can count on you, right, Mason?” Yolly asked.

Of course they couldn't count on me. Who did they think I was, goddamn Anthony Quinn in
The Guns of Navarone
? “I would say we need
two
getaway drivers.”

“Sheesh!” Jordan exclaimed.

“Mason,” said Yolly through clenched teeth.

“I'm a philosopher,” I said, “not a fucking commando.”

Londa unsnapped her seat belt, curling one arm around Quetzie's cage, the other around my shoulder. “Hey, Socrates, don't you
recognize a second chance when you see one? Help us get those CD-Rs, and the world will forgive you for cooking me up.”

It wasn't merely the carrot of redemption that sent me to the Burrito Junction men's room that afternoon. The ovarian cancer drug also figured in my reasoning, as did the slave traffickers. Initially I bobbled the job, applying the greasepaint so liberally I gave myself a leper's decaying cheeks, but by rubbing the stuff away with paper towels I eventually acquired the pocked complexion Plan Omega required. Before returning to the minivan, I donned my silver wig and studied my face in the mirror. An aging mackie stared back at me—not a generic aging mackie but the one whose features I knew best, the former inhabitant of an abandoned Boston switch tower. If I could believe his dying words, John Snow 0001 would have refused to join the imminent burning of Themisopolis. He was a highly principled fetus, a fact of which his semifather would always be proud.

TO SNEAK INTO THE OCCUPIED CITY
on a mission whose unmasking would surely occasion our deaths—to lay hold of the treasure without drawing the attention of six thousand watchful fetuses—to spirit the data away the instant the immaculoids turned their backs: a foolhardy plan indeed, bound to spark tension and discord within our ad hoc commando unit, and so I was hardly surprised when a heated argument erupted between the Sisters Sabacthani. Londa, our reckless rationalist, wanted Jordan to drive right up to the city gates, on the theory that the mackies would be too distracted to note the incursion. Yolly, our sensible sybarite, insisted that we park at least a mile from the ramparts. Better safe than sorry. Just when it seemed the women might come to blows, Jordan resolved the controversy by stopping the van on a spot she insisted was the precise Pythagorean midpoint between Londa's impetuosity and Yolly's prudence.

At three o'clock, eight hours after our captors had marched us through the police-tape labyrinth, Jordan presented Londa with a Phillips screwdriver, Yolly with a cell phone, and me with a knapsack full of Gatorade and cereal bars. Itching beneath our fetal pa
tinas, we dashed down Avalon Lane past the dormant cherry trees until we reached the encampment. Now Londa increased the pace, leading us through the grid of tents and pavilions to the parking lot. Running faster still, we swerved among the moving vans, buses, and semi-rigs, the air growing ever thicker with the aggressive aroma of gasoline. At last the great portal loomed up, its bronze gates hanging open, doubtless so the mackies could make a quick retreat if the conflagration got out of hand. The noxious fumes became sharper yet, reaming our nostrils, scoring our tonsils, scouring our lungs.

A final sprint, and we were inside the city, where I beheld a scene so appalling that for a moment I simply stood and stared, frozen in begrudging awe of CHALICE and its fetal minions. Having attached auxiliary pumps, hoses, and nozzles to the forty gasoline trucks, the immaculoids were busily siphoning this liquid munificence and releasing it in wild ejaculatory spurts. Whatever one thought of Enoch Anthem and Felix Pielmeister, they were consummate apocalypticians, men who could envision a Judgment Day of surpassing surrealism and render it in fossil fuel.

Normally the city's sewer system would have channeled the deluge underground, but the mackies had stoppered all the gratings with swatches cut from their canvas tents. Slowly, inexorably, the gasoline collected in the streets, the puddles fringed by iridescent rainbows. My brain seemed to float free of my body, a neural balloon, borne by the Texaco zephyrs. Despite the urgency of our situation, or perhaps because of it, the women started squabbling again, Yolly insisting that we proceed at the immaculoids' characteristically crippled gait, Londa arguing that we run like mad. The right tactic soon became apparent: we needn't limp at all, the mackies being far too busy constructing their holocaust to notice the impostors in their midst.

We charged down Shambhala Avenue, weaving among the ever-expanding petroleum pools, and a few minutes later arrived
in Alethia Square. Resolute as ever, bronze heart throbbing with her undying devotion to fairness, Themis held her motorized balance scales aloft. The fumes pursued us like vengeful ghosts. Londa dropped to her knees before the statue, so that she briefly appeared to be a pagan supplicant worshipping an idol—or, more likely in this case, Sinuhe's iconoclast sister faking adoration—then took out the screwdriver and fitted it into a screw holding the access plate to the pedestal. She rotated her wrist. The screw resisted. She cursed and increased the torque. The screw surrendered. My headache spread through its bony enclosure, colonizing every sinus. Londa loosened all four screws. The access plate hit the flagstones. She thrust the screwdriver into the hollow, triggering the emergency shutoff mechanism. The balance scales ceased oscillating, as if after all these years Lady Justice had finally reached a quintessentially equitable decision. From the depths of the pedestal, Londa retrieved a crumpled Kevlar satchel—it looked like an enormous green change purse—and hugged it to her breast.

The sewers were backing up rapidly, turning the city into a nightmare Venice, its canals swollen with dark, seething torrents of Regular, Plus, and Supreme. From these ghastly waterways there now arose a shimmering gallery of hydrocarbon mirages. I pulled out the Gatorade bottle and took a big gulp, seeking to wash the Cretaceous taste from my mouth. My eyes swam with tears. My dizziness increased. A blackout seemed imminent, but I fought to forestall it, chewing the insides of my cheeks and slapping my brow with the flat of my hand.

Yolly yanked the cell phone from her jumpsuit. Obviously the immaculoids had shut off the EMP, for she reached Jordan without difficulty, telling her to expect us shortly. “The data's in hand,” she informed her guardian, at which instant the fetuses, having set their torches ablaze, thrust them into the gasoline.

In a blinding flash, Lake Sunoco caught fire, and then the rest ignited, Amoco Run, Getty Lagoon, Texaco Tarn, the river Exxon,
and soon all five bodies were flowing together, a confluence of infernos, so that a roaring wall of flame now stood between the city gates and ourselves. A great swell of scalding air rolled toward us like a boiling tsunami. We dropped to the flagstones. For a full minute, we lay prone in the courtyard, gasping and coughing, while Londa explained that we had only one option. We must make our way to the Circus of Atonement, descend to the basement, and hide in the ontogenerator until the firestorm passed.

“The vat's lined with silica ceramic,” she noted. “Heat-resistant as hell's hinges.”

Clutching the satchel more fiercely yet, Londa lurched to her feet and led us on a frantic dash down Boudicca Street. Billows of smoke filled the sky, vast and black as the clouds whose cache had scrubbed Noah's contemporaries from the earth. Cinders flew everywhere like squalls of demonic snow. Insectile sparks stung our cheeks and brows, fiery hornets, incandescent wasps.

As we drew within sight of the Circus, Yolly called Jordan again, informing her of the obvious fact that Themisopolis was burning and the less obvious fact that so far we'd all avoided incineration—a circumstance we intended to prolong by taking refuge in the ontogenerator. Next Londa got on the phone, telling Jordan to move into the nearest hotel and stand ready to retrieve us at a moment's notice.

The plaza outside the rotunda was unexpectedly crowded. Galvanized by whatever survival instinct had leaked into their algorithms, the Circus troupers had armed themselves and fled the building—a sensible step but insufficient, for their path was blocked by a fetal battalion, one hundred strong. Clearly a massacre was in the offing, the immaculoids' assault rifles being considerably more powerful than the troupers' theatrical props. Joan of Arc wielded her sword, Pope John Paul II his crozier, Davy Crockett his Kentucky rifle, Edward Teller his flagellant's whip. Mary Baker Eddy had emerged into daylight accompanied by her band of audio-
animatronic victims, all of whom had evidently forgiven her, for they gathered protectively around her like a bodyguard of midgets. Fresh from their church wedding, Percival Sarnac and Leopold Ransom brandished gold altar crosses, which they evidently intended to use as cudgels. The most poorly equipped performers were Warren Anderson, Henry Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan, their only weapons being spindly aluminum stands stolen from the Circus's lighting system.

Sensing her authority and perhaps also remembering her victories, the troupers rallied to Joan of Arc's side. For a fleeting instant, the maid and I exchanged glances of mutual recognition, acknowledging our moment of choreographed passion.

“There are no just wars!” she exclaimed in obedience to her DUNCE cap programming. “There are no greater goods!”

So intense was the immaculoids' delight in having an entire theater company to annihilate, they simply ignored Londa, Yolly, and myself as we slipped behind the Maid of Orléans's ragtag army. Reaching the rotunda entrance, we paused to survey the pitched battle. It was predictably quick and entirely brutal. Anderson, Kissinger, and Reagan were the first to fall, blasted to pieces as, floodlight stands raised high, they attempted to poke out their assailants' eyes. The fetuses fired again, killing Sarnac and Ransom before they could bludgeon anyone with their crosses, and then came the third volley, raining down on my poor Joan and leaving her as perforated as St. Sebastian after the archers had martyred him. More bullets flew. Before succumbing to their wounds, the pope coshed a fetus with his crozier, Crockett shot one between the eyes, and Mrs. Eddy issued a piercing battle cry, ordering her entourage into the fray. The audio-animatronic children fought bravely, collectively dragging a mackie to the ground before salvos of lead separated them from their electric intestines.

Throughout the slaughter I occasionally glanced at Londa, who seemed proud that her troupers were displaying such fortitude in the
face of the mackie host. Even before the butchery ended, I realized that while she still detested the primal Ronald Reagan, the original Warren Anderson, and all their Phyllistine kind, their repentant reincarnations had emerged in her eyes as brave and even noble beings. As we slipped into the Circus, Londa looked over her shoulder, anxious to glimpse her slain creations before their bodies turned to ash.

 

MANY ARE THE CONDITIONS
under which a man might relish intimate confinement with a comely heterosexual woman and her polymorphous-perverse sister, but I soon realized that my interval in the subterranean ontogenerator would not be one of them. Londa and Yolly hated our situation no less than I. True, they were accustomed to these sweltering diving bells, not so much from their prenatal immersions as from the deliberate descent they'd made with Donya in Torre de la Carne several months after their mother's funeral, an episode they now proceeded to relate in detail, describing how it had reinforced their sisterly bonds even as it enabled them to absolve Edwina of her sins. Nothing in their previous experience, however, had prepared them for this premature burial with its benumbing boredom, unrelieved claustrophobia, and relentless requirement that we twist ourselves into poses suggesting some sadistic school of yoga.

But for our battery-operated fan—its feeble plastic vanes plying the glutinous atmosphere like spatulas stirring mud, replenishing the vat's stale air via the vent in the hatch—we might very well have suffocated. Hour after hour we sat on our haunches, simmering like meatballs in a Crock-Pot as the bellowing flames consumed the city. Yolly tried contacting Jordan again, hoping her guardian might use cell-phone technology to send some soothing music our way. The connection failed. Even as it saved our skins, the titanium chamber blocked all communication with the outside world.

We slaked our thirst courtesy of the Gatorade, assuaged our hunger with the cereal bars, and preserved our sanity by telling
stories. For my own contribution to this oral anthology, I drew upon Edmund Spenser's epic, recounting the Red Cross Knight's three-day battle with the great dragon, scourge of Faerie Land. When Londa's turn came, she enumerated the misdeeds of those Phyllistines she'd been intending to put in the Circus: Ethan Pepperhill, of course, as well as Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milošević, and Joseph Stalin, assuming the necessary grave-robbing arrangements could be made. Our stellar performer, predictably, was Yolly, who told us the plot of her evolving fantasy novel. Set in Ondoluria, a feudal world where books were living creatures,
The Citadel of Paradox
concerned a band of adventurers—three men and four women, ever eager to enter into carnal configurations with one another—who'd undertaken a long, perilous, continent-spanning quest to heal the sole and sickly copy of the
Epistemologia,
a protoplasmic encyclopedia containing the whole of human and divine knowledge.

“So what do you think?” Yolly said upon finishing her presentation. “Am I on the right track?”

“A very Yolly sort of epic,” Londa said approvingly, and indeed it was, full of horses and eros and the juices of life.

“Maybe the quest should be part of a larger narrative,” I suggested. “Once your adventurers restore the book to health, they attempt to decipher it, and just when they're about to give up, a cosmic Rosetta stone falls into their laps.”

“I like that,” Yolly said.

“What sort of knowledge does the book contain?” Londa asked. “The periodic table of the elements? Maxwell's equations? The Beatitudes?”

“All of the above, I should imagine,” Yolly said, stroking the green satchel. “Not to mention a cure for ovarian cancer and a map disclosing the whereabouts of every sexual slaver in the galaxy.”

 

ON THE MORNING OF THE THIRD DAY
,
we decided to take the risk and test the air beyond the ontogenerator. The instant we
popped the hatch, an agile breeze wafted into the vat, cooling our cheeks and brows. A gust from the gods, I decided—a breath from noble Horus, a laugh from wise Thoth. The inferno, it seemed, had burned itself out.

We ascended to street level, reveling in our newly acquired femurs and knees, and exited the rotunda. Yolly called Jordan on the cell phone, telling her to jump into the van and drive like a maniac. Before us lay a lunar plain, bleak, shattered, sterile. Emerging from our titanium womb, we had entered a void. We had been born into death. The fire had gutted the buildings, blasted the trees, and turned the gasoline trucks into amorphous lumps of metal. Galaxies of particulate matter swarmed and swirled everywhere, their motes dancing like cathode-ray static. An unnamable sensation screwed through my nasal passages, a stench compounded of evil resins, depraved plastics, and satanic polymers.

Like survivors shambling away from a crashed jetliner, we stepped uncertainly across the Circus plaza, moving past the charred bodies of the zombie troupers. Poor Joan of Orléans—twice born, twice burned. We headed down Boudicca Street, Londa hunched protectively over the Kevlar satchel like a mother shielding her infant from a rainstorm. Caedmon Hall, Arcadia House, the Vision Syndicate, the Artemis Clinic, the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations: all had been reduced to naked matrices of blackened beams and melted girders. Combers of ash rolled across the scorched terrain in a vast, unnavigable sea. Parts of the city were still cooking, wisps of smoke rising from the carbonized timbers as the crackling embers issued a disquieting cadence.