Caine's Law (62 page)

I can still see it.

We had our share of problems, Shanna and I. Most were of our own creation. We were never happy together. Never. Not when we met. Not when we married, not even when I kidnapped a god and ignited civil war and crippled myself to save her. She was in love with the guy she thought was inside Caine—the sad, suffering soul who’d forged a monster mask to defend his pain against the bleak realities of Earth.

Me? I was desperate to prove her right.

Pretending there was a decent guy lurking somewhere in the vicinity of my heart gave me a narrative I thought I could live with. I didn’t much like myself in those days.

Still don’t, really. I just don’t mind so much anymore.

Shanna and I both told ourselves—with hysterical insistence—that Caine was just an act. A character played by Hari Michaelson, international superstar and bon vivant. And on the platform, the look on her face … I was watching her finally understand that the character had been Hari Michaelson. From the beginning.

She knew the man she’d married had been Caine all along.

And even then, neither of us understood who—what—Caine really is.

Shanna became an Actress because it gave her the chance to help people, really help them.
Save
them. Being born into a Tradesman family meant she’d never be able to do much for people on Earth; Acting for her was the power, every day, to make a positive difference in someone’s life.

Acting for me was getting rich because I like to hurt people.

But not just any people.

I was already in my sixth straight year in the worldwide Top Ten, and Shanna’s numbers would never get her even a whiff of what Top Ten smelled like. And all this and all that and everything else and I wasn’t thinking real clearly at the time, but I distinctly recall one last fleeting thought skating across the surface of unconsciousness.

Somebody ought to burn this motherfucker down
.

I thought that burn-down would happen on its own after
For Love of Pallas Ril
, with Kollberg’s trial and the L-Con hearings into the Studio’s abuse of contract law. I thought the burn-down would happen after Assumption Day.

I thought roasting Marc Vilo alive on real-time video would make my point. Show, don’t tell, right?

But some people are too stupid to believe even their own fucking eyes.

Including me.

I finally figured it out: I don’t like hurting people. I never did. What I like is hurting people in
charge
.

There’s a reason kings hide when they hear I’m in town.

I like hurting people who think they can’t be hurt. Who think that money or power or God or whateverthefuck makes them invulnerable. Invincible. Omnipotent.

I really, really like proving them wrong.

Check off a list of my Greatest Hits: Purthin Khlaylock. The Black Knife Nation. The Khulan G’thar. Toa-Phelathon. Kollberg. Toa-Sytell. Marc Vilo. Even the ones that didn’t rule anything: Berne. Dane and Blackwood. Calm Guy, Whistler, and Hawk. Adder in the Pit. Even Ballinger. Doesn’t
matter: the guys I aim for are the guys who have the power to make shit better, but they don’t.

Because keeping things shitty gets them what they want.

Me too.

It seems like whenever I smoked somebody for some other reason—
any
other reason—the universe fucked me for it. Killing Creele put Raithe on my tail. Killing Karl bought Faith a date with Avery Shanks. We all know how that turned out. I hated Berne because he tortured Marade and Tizarre to death, down in Yalitrayya. He hated me because I did the same to his lover t’Gall.

I could go on for hours. Days. And then there’s the big one.

Ma’elKoth.

I had him beat. I had Shanna safe, I had Berne dead and Kosall in my guts. I had Kollberg by the balls. I could have left Ma’elKoth there. Should have left him there.

Instead I took his hand, and dragged him with me into Hell.

Not that he was an angel, or a saint. But he truly, sincerely devoted his larger-than-life existence to making the Ankhanan Empire a better place. He didn’t have to. He had unimaginable power, limitless wealth, a perfection of human form that you just don’t see outside of Michelangelo. And instead of kicking back to enjoy all that shit, he put everything he had achieved, everything he’d become, into a job that was not only mostly impossible but would eventually put him in the crosshairs of a homicidal sociopath with serious anger issues.

Jesus, I wish I’d left him alone.

And yeah, it was my job. That was part of it. But mostly it was because he pissed me off. Because I could break him and there wasn’t the first fucking thing he could do about it. My job was just an excuse.

And that’s why—I really think this is true—that’s why I just about drank myself to death after
For Love of Pallas Ril
. Because I let the fuckers co-opt me. I traded them everything I’ve ever done—everything I’ve ever been—for a nice house, money, and something resembling a normal family. I let them make me into the kind of fucker I had spent the best of my life destroying.

I left this shitty world shitty, because it got me what I wanted.

That’s about to change.

“Hari?” Gayle looks up from the pad and nods to me. “Showtime.”

All right, then. I got your fucking showtime right here.

• • •

Now I’m up against it and I still don’t know how to put words to this. There’s too much. So I start small. “It didn’t have to be like this.”

Gayle cocks his head, frowning. “What? I mean, I don’t—”

“Not talking to you.”

I raise my eyes to the moiré face shields of the Social Police anti-magick helmets. “I’m talking to you guys. And to everybody who’s watching the video link through your helmets. And everybody who’ll watch the recording. All you fuckers. Board of Governors. Social Police. Leisure Congress.

“All of you and every other poor bastard who’s gonna have to die because you brain-dead sacks of shit are too fucking stupid to make one fucking deal.”

“Hari—”

“You could have had it all. Everything. And you
know
it. Jesus staggering Christ, have any of you been paying attention these last twenty-five years? I have carved across the faces of two worlds proof that my word is
absolute
. Even my
lies
become truth. What I said I’d give you is what you would have gotten. All you had to do was say yes.

“That’s all. Yes.

“I would have handed you an entire fucking planet in exchange for peace between us. But peace isn’t what you chose, and peace isn’t what you’ll get.

“And thanks for that.”

I shake my head at myself, just a little. I really don’t want to go on. But I have to. People need to know. They need to understand.

“I mean it: thank you. Thank you because I am sick to fucking death of this pus-crusted open sore of a world. And I am sick to fucking death of every one of you. Because you know what this world is, and you have the power to change it. And you don’t. Because you
like
it this way. So thanks.

“Now I’m gonna kill you for it.”

Gayle looks like he just choked on his own tongue.

“This is not a threat. It’s not a warning. We’re way the fuck past all that. You’re already dead, and pretty soon people won’t be able to ignore the smell.

“Days from now, months, years, when your entire fucking world is burning down, somebody’s going to create a narrative to explain it. To tell people why their whole lives are on fire. This narrative will feature me as the bad guy.

“You probably already know I’m okay with that.

“This narrative will explain to people that their families are dead and
their world’s dying because I’m an evil motherfucker. And sure, fair enough. I am.

“The thing is, you knew it.

“You’ve known for decades just exactly what kind of evil motherfucker I am. You knew it when you made me an Actor.

“You knew it when you murdered my wife.

“You knew it when you raped my daughter, and you knew it when you ripped the eyes from my father’s face.

“You knew it twenty-five years ago, when I committed honest-to-fuck-my-ass
genocide
to boost my fucking career.

“You might remember how I gave warning to the Black Knife Nation. How I told them what would happen if they came after us. They didn’t believe me.

“You didn’t believe me either.

“For the record: you were warned. Again and again. I warned you in my offer. I warned you when I killed Marc Vilo. I warned you twenty-five fucking years ago, talking to Arturo Kollberg in a conference room in the San Francisco Studio.

“I don’t rescue people. I don’t do nonviolent resistance, and I don’t work to change the system from within. You need to remember what I am. What you wanted me to be.

“Remember. Remember when I come for you.

“Remember it didn’t have to be this way.”

The secmen shift their balance and adjust their grips on their power rifles just enough for me to read their body language like a fucking headline.
This fucking guy—this broke-down cripple stripcuffed to a bed in a massively fortified installation that nobody even knows exists—expects somebody to believe he’s ever going to do anything other than lie there and wait to die? Yeah, right
.

Maybe in his next life
.

And they’re right. Except this is my next life.

I lift my gaze once more to the distorted blur of my own face reflected in their helmets. “If anybody had given my father a choice, he would have lived and died a gentle man. He believed—believes—that the use of force degrades, and eventually destroys, civil society. He believes that hands are for helping people up, not for knocking them down.

“You’re probably aware that I do not share this opinion.

“My father believes that human life is sacrosanct, and that a human being may be harmed only reluctantly, gravely, as a last resort, when there is no other way to defend the health and lives of others. For Dad, that’s a
law of nature, quantifiable and absolute, like gravity and momentum and entropy.

“Except for you fuckers.”

I nod at moiré smears of my own face. “He hates you. All of you. Every single one of you. Personally. If every soapy on Earth was on fire, he wouldn’t piss on one to put him out.

“He admits this is a failure of principle. He admits it makes him a hypocrite, but he can’t help it. The closest he can come to rationalizing it is deciding you’re not really human anymore. He says humanity can’t be taken from a person, but it can be surrendered. He says every one of you surrendered your humanity when you became the willing tool of oppression. Get it? You’re not even really alive. You’re tools. Inanimate objects. Hammers. Saws. Whatever. You should know that I don’t share this opinion either.

“He’s giving you fuckers too much credit.

“You’re people just like anybody else. Bad people, but people. That’s all. I don’t hate you. You don’t hate slime buildup in your bathroom drain, y’know? But sooner or later you’ve got to clean that shit out.

“My father dreamed of a society that valued people for what they are instead of what they have. He dreamed that government of the people, by the people, and for the people had not perished from the Earth. He dreamed
with liberty and justice for all
.

“He didn’t have the power to bring forth even an echo of these things. He didn’t have the power to save his wife, or his child, or himself. He didn’t even have the power to control his own body.

“There’s tragic irony for you: the greatest accomplishment of this idealist, this civilized man of peace, was to father the living negation of everything he believes in. A human weapon of mass destruction.

“That would be me.

“He didn’t mean to. He didn’t want to. If you could put him back together and wake him up, he’d probably try to stop me. He would never, never
ever
, raise his fist against you. His fists were for my mother, and for me.

“His fists raised against his will. If he could have stopped himself, he would have. But he couldn’t. He can’t. He couldn’t stop his fists then.

“He can’t stop his fist now.

“Against his will he has raised me up, and I am going to beat this world until your entire fucking planet can’t do anything except lie there and bleed.”

• • •

Finally one of the soapies breaks. His helmet’s digitizer turns his derisive snort into a burst of static.
“Nice speech,”
he says.
“Too bad nobody will ever hear it.”

In his mask, my smile looks wider than the span of my hand. “That’s not what I hear.”

“From who? The voices in your head?”

“Um, actually, since you ask? Yes. Exactly that.” I shrug at him. “Voices in my head. Funny, huh?”

“What’s more funny is that your father is part of the system that isolates and deletes seditious transmissions. He might be the exact component that has flagged your whole little rant for deletion.”

“That
is
funny,” I admit. “Want to see something even funnier than that? Gayle, you’ll like this one too. What’s the call code on that palmpad?”

“Why?”

“Just read it out.”

He does, and then I say, “Jed? Get everything? How’s it look?”

When the palmpad’s annunciator chimes, Gayle jerks so hard he almost drops the thing. I nod to him. “It’s all right. Answer it. Hold it so we can all see.”

The soapies shift and tighten up on their weapons. I wonder if they can see the looks they’re giving one another. I wish I could. Merciful Jesus, if I could only see the looks on their faces as Gayle taps the accept and a frame-in-frame box pops up and Jed Clearlake says, “Pretty good, Hari. It’ll take some editing, and I’ll have to cut in reaction shots.”

All six soapies lurch into combat stances and their rifles twitch back and forth like none of them can decide whether to shoot me or the palmpad or both.

I grin at them. “Those voices in my head? He’s one of them.”

“It’s kind of over the top,” Jed says.

“Practically my trademark.”