Patrick Griffin's Last Breakfast on Earth (33 page)

“So you want to be sure I care about you?”

“I'm not talking about me, or even us,” My-Chale said, gesturing at Oma. “I'm talking about how we are trying to save three entire worlds from a peril that has already ravaged one, is about to subsume another, and will not stop until it has destroyed the third. We are up against a man who has more power than any being in all of history. The chances of us prevailing are slim to begin with. And, if our greatest hope isn't quite sure that it's all even happening—”

“And you're saying
I'm
your greatest hope? You do know I'm twelve? And that I don't have any superpowers except, maybe, for having a better sense of hearing than most people here?”

The griffin allowed himself a quick laugh—far more lion- than bird-like—before continuing. “The people of Ith have been enslaved by Rex. Rex is the one and only person from Earth they've ever known. And they revere him like a deity. You are from Earth, too. It wouldn't take a very clever schemer to portray you as something of a second coming, a prophet even.

“The Deacons were entirely surprised by your arrival—if you sensed a little confusion about what to do with you, that's because they were fighting among themselves about what to do with you. Some wanted to kill you immediately, and prevent news of your arrival from getting out there.

“But the faction that prevailed watched you and decided that you weren't a threat, and they had this realization. You, Patrick Griffin, could be made into a very powerful propaganda tool for them. That invitation to Silicon City was basically an excuse to get you out there so their media experts could get you ‘on message' and train you to be a public relations figure, a celebrity to help maintain the order.”

“And I would have agreed to it?”

“You might not have. Perhaps you would have seen through their lies, perhaps you would have resisted—perhaps taking courage in the thought that it was just a dream. And, in that case, probably they would have engineered a convenient way for you to disappear from public view.”

“Disappear, like, kill me? How do you know all this?” asked Patrick.

“We Mindthlings have some abilities to see things in dreams. And since—for all the machinery in their heads—Deacons still dream, every so often we get some crumbs of useful information.”

“So,” said Oma, “the Deacons wanted Patrick to be a public relations tool for them. But isn't that what we're asking him to be for us now?”

“Yes, that's true,” said My-Chale.

“Though they started it,” said Oma.

“And,” said My-Chale, “I think you'll also see we will not be lying, coercing, or giving him drugs as we
ask
him to do this great favor for us.”

“And what am I supposed to do? You want me to tell them the Deacons are bad? That Rex was a fraud?”

“That might be useful,” said Oma.

My-Chale turned to Oma. “Had you ever seen a ruin before today?”

Oma shook her head. “I'd heard of them—” Her voice quavered.

“Oma is a recruit to our cause,” continued My-Chale, “and even she has barely an idea of the magnitude of what Rex did here. For the sake of power, for the sake of control, he destroyed an entire world. Nearly three billion souls died here that horrible year. And now Rex is on Earth preparing more than twice that for the same fate.”

“He's really there,” said Patrick, trying to wrap his head around the implications of this. If it were true, if it were real, didn't that mean his entire family—

“The people of this world will listen to you,” said My-Chale. “They can push back on the Deacons. They can maybe even do enough to distract Rex, to help prevent him from going ahead with his plan. It will be a difficult path. But you see why we absolutely need you to
believe
?”

Maybe he was just tired, but Patrick was having more and more trouble resisting their logic. If nothing else he was going to have to admit that he must be pretty crazy himself to dream up something so mind-blowingly strange as all this.

“I need to stop believing this is a dream to do the job right is what you're saying?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” said Patrick. He was starting to get frustrated, and maybe even angry. He felt like they were talking in complete circles. “So, prove it.
Prove
to me it's real already. You guys know all this stuff, and you still haven't gotten me to believe this crazy crap.”

“And how can we do that?” asked My-Chale sadly. “What would
proof
be?”

“I don't know, maybe if I could be awake on Earth so I could remember all of this and realize it wasn't just a regular dream…”

“Yes,” said My-Chale. “It still might not work, but that's what we were thinking, too. We will send you back to Earth.”

“You're going to send me back to
Earth
?!”

“Skwurl told you about transubstantiation,” said Oma.

“We have just enough transcence for a round trip,” said My-Chale.

“A round trip?”

“So you can return, too,” he replied. “
If
you wish to.”

Patrick found himself staring at Oma's enormous eyes. She seemed as surprised at all this as he was.

“So the plan is you'll send me back to Earth and then
I
get to decide if this is all real and then,
if
I want to, I can come back? You'd let me go just like that?”

“It has to be this way,” she said, the situation dawning on her. “It has to be
your
decision to come back, Patrick.”

The griffin inclined his head and, without a trace of smile in his voice, said, “Patrick, we're sending you home.”

 

CHAPTER 55

Point of Some Return

Patrick was lying on the floor of the abandoned building's boiler room. The door was closed (the griffin said it was important that transcense be trapped in a nearly airtight area so that it could achieve suitable concentrations).

He reviewed the transubstantiation preparations Oma and the griffin, My-Chale, had made him memorize:

One: Lie down on your back.

Two: Hold close any items you wish to bring with you.

Three: Close your eyes and relax.

Four: Do not struggle—let your impulses run free.

Five: Hold fast to your mantra.

Well, he could check off the first one. Oma had found a somewhat clean rug, and he was definitely lying upon it, on his back. He looked over at the burbling censer, the metal cylinder that contained the transcense, a half dozen paces away on the floor. Scary, squid-like tendrils of inky vapor were already snaking their way across toward him.

He shut off the binky and clutched it, and his return ticket—a second censer My-Chale had given him—to his chest. It contained nearly all of the Commonplacers' remaining stockpile of transcense. In other words, there would be nobody coming after him to help and, if he didn't use it come back to Ith, he'd never see My-Chale or Oma or anybody from Ith again.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on his relaxation exercises. My-Chale had told him to flex and loosen his toes, then his feet, then his ankles, and so on up to his forehead.

It seemed to be working pretty well and, having managed to get through the full course twice, he was nearly at the edge of sleep when he was racked by the world's most massive sneeze, a blast so forceful his ears rang and his muscles went all crampy and sore.

“My mantra!” he whispered to himself. Oma had explained it as a combination of familiar words or sounds that would help him focus; something nostalgic was good, she said, but it absolutely had to be something he knew by heart. He ended up deciding to go with a nonsense rhyme that his father used to read to him and Neil before they went to bed when they were little.

It was called “Song of the Stuntman” (even though it was a poem, not a song) and it went,

All right

All set

All fright

No net

He whispered it to himself, once, twice, then partway through a third time before a familiar keening tone filled his ears.

 

CHAPTER 56

Fosse aux Lions

“You're getting close,” said Rex. He was teleconferencing with Victor Pierre, the highest-ranked of all his novitiates. A rainy suburban scene was visible through the car's rear window behind the man's angular face.

“Yes, Your Awarenence. Estimate three terts to the insertion point.” Victor's voice betrayed nothing but cold-blooded mastery.

“Good, very good,” said Rex. “Now, don't let me distract you. Report back as soon as—what's that?! What's going on?”

Victor was checking his mirrors and appeared to be slowing his car. Red and blue pulses of light stained the teleconference projection.

“Nothing significant, Your Awarenence,” replied Victor. “Just a local law enforcement vehicle.”

The sound of sirens rose and faded.

“They're dealing with a missing-person report,” the aspiring Deacon continued. “Still no reports they've discovered the enemy combatant's arrival.”

Rex knew this already. He hadn't been fomenting a telecommunications revolution on this planet so that he would
not
be able to tell what was going on in any corner of it at any moment in time.

And especially so if it had anything to do with a transubstantiation event. He'd been studying the transubstantiation process for close to a hundred years and he knew everything that there was to be known about it—how to initiate it, how to control it (at least to the extent it could be), and certainly how to detect it.

This was how—two days ago—he had almost immediately known about the arrival of the first Commonplace agent in and the simultaneous disappearance of the Griffin boy from a small town in suburban New York. And this is why he now knew of the arrival of yet another Commonplace agent—this time in rural France—and, from the ensuing police broadcasts there, the sudden, inexplicable (at least to the locals) disappearance of one Lilian Carruth, a retired secondary school language teacher.

“Well then, I'm going to leave you to it, Victor,” continued Rex. “You know the desired outcome.”

“I do, Your Awarenence.”

“Report back as soon as your objective is achieved.”

“Of course,” replied the stone-faced man.

Rex shut off the teleconference application. He was distinctly annoyed, but not very worried. Of all the places for an enemy to have arrived—for it to have landed within a thirty-tert drive of Victor Pierre's residence—it was, if not quite in the den, at least just about at the lion's doorstep.

Now Victor's colleagues on the east coast of North America had just to finish taking care of the other visitor, the rabbit creature, and Rex could fully turn his attentions back to the final preparations for Earth's cleansing and rebirth.

 

CHAPTER 57

Surreptitious Returns