Ravenous Dusk (93 page)

"It's ROYAL PICA, ma'am. It—what I read—it's not true, is it?"

Ms. Stapleton pursed her mouth a moment, weighing her words. "You want to know about RADIANT, then."

"Brady Hoecker told me it didn't exist, but he believed that Keogh posed more of a threat than the Institute was willing to accept, and now, with all that's happening…did he know about what's in ROYAL PICA? Did we do those things?"

"RADIANT was a classic example of realpolitik run amok, it's true. It was approved and developed entirely outside of our influence, but we took an interest as soon as it had become apparent that the defense program was being abused. When RADIANT was initially tested in the South Pacific in 1984, the results were disastrous, but we weren't so stupid as to believe that it simply self-destructed. Dr. Keitel, as he called himself then, contacted us to deliver his ultimatum, bypassing those nominally in authority. At the time, we had no leverage, but he offered very acceptable terms, given the times. He demanded only that we never try to locate him or the satellite, or interfere with his research. In return, he offered to contract out RADIANT for the purpose for which it was built."

"Giving people cancer?" Cundieffe blurted.

"Neutralizing enemies of the state, Martin. Consider for a moment the rules we have to play by to preserve order and administer justice. Not in Russia or China, but right here at home, and under the noses of our allies. Enemies of the government can openly profess their aggression, recruit more malcontents to their cause, and stockpile weapons, and well-meaning agencies like the Bureau are helpless to stop them. The few actions we have taken have been debacles—Ruby Ridge, Waco, you know better than I."

"But ma'am, this—according to the ROYAL PICA intercepts, it started long before Waco, and the first ones weren't terrorists."

The first demonstrations were performed on Russian military targets in Afghanistan, as per the Institute's orders. The file transcribed the request, and the subsequent battle damage assessment. A general and his staff all died within forty-eight hours of irradiation. There were two hundred eighteen more. Highlights: Ayatollah Khomeini; Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov; several colorful, failed attempts on Castro. So many others that nobody ever heard of, and never would. Long before they ever became a threat, Americans and foreigners were irradiated from space, and quietly died of cancer, with no autopsies officially performed. Even some military officials in the Pentagon and members of Congress were burned, for the good of the nation. The last one occurred only a week before July of last year, when Keogh took RADIANT away and the war started.

"Such people are cancer in the body politic," Wyler said, "fomenting dissent and fueling violence in every avenue of American life."

"But sir," Cundieffe stammered, "this contravenes what we're—what we were born to do."

"And what was that, Martin? What were we born to do?"

"To protect and preserve an orderly democratic society—"

"No," he scissored off Cundieffe's canned reply with a snap of his hand. "To protect an orderly
human
society. To preserve and cultivate the best aspects of that society, and save it from its own base animal tendencies. Democracy is the unholy ideal that opens the door to all that chaos, all that madness, badness and incivility."

Cundieffe heaved a huge sigh. The engine block didn't budge. A whole car had grown around it, and he couldn't get a whole breath. "Okay, so it's—necessary, then, to do this. But Keogh—what about him? He's not a man to bargain with, is he? What is he, do you even know?"

"Only too late did we discover what Keogh intended to do," Ms. Stapleton said, "and we'll probably never understand exactly what he is, but we were never
used
, Martin. His research has positive ramifications for our strategy for a survivable human future that are worth any amount of sacrifice. He is the oldest living organism on earth, but he is the past, and we are the custodians of the future. He believes he is manipulating us, using us for his own purposes, but we were using him, and use him still."

Cundieffe rubbed his temples. They were at Defcon 3, and going down. Keogh presented a crisis that had the President and the Joint Chiefs running scared, or did he? Maybe none of it was true, maybe it was all some sort of horrible simulation, an initiation rite, kill the old Martin Cundieffe with nightmarish lies, so that the new one might be born—

"Are there really Radiant Dawn militants in Iraq?" he asked.

"That, you don't need to know."

"But you're using him as a catspaw to create a global state of emergency. Why? If you control him, why risk letting him spread? Why not just put out the fire?"

"Because we have everything we need from Dr. Keogh as of today," Ms. Stapleton told him. "We have the Mission's weapon, which has been effectively field-tested, and we're ready to use it. We've gone as far as we can with the present system, Martin. Dr. Keogh has surged far ahead of our expectations in his progress, but thanks to the hard work of agents such as yourself, our own program is ahead of schedule, and if I say any more, I'll spoil the surprise." She smiled again, all motherly. "Recess is over, now, boys. Back to the war room."

Madame Chairperson buzzed the room to order. Cundieffe found his seat next to Wyler, but his eyes were on the door. Fresh air, that's what he needed. If he could just clear his head, he'd know what to do next, he could figure out what was right.

Wyler cast a harsh sidelong glance at him, like a father whose son has just cried through his first trip to the barber shop.
Don't be such a candy-ass
,
Martin
, said his eyes.

"Today, as a few of you already know, is the crisis we've been waiting for. All great evolutionary leaps come out of an environmental catastrophe, and ours will be no different. Our hand has been forced, but we are ready for the massive undertaking we knew would be laid across our shoulders one day. For centuries, we have labored in secret to preserve the candle of human civilization against the storm of animal nature, and for the most part, we have been successful. But as the task became greater and more complex, we knew that it would one day overreach our abilities. The sheer size and power of those arrayed against us would overwhelm our scant numbers, while the safety of the whole would require harsher natures than ours. The author of the
Republic
professed that the philosopher-kings required to guide the ship of state over the uncertain rapids of the future would come from nature, but even before his time, we worked to direct nature, as man has always done, towards the desirable path. That path ends here, today, ladies and gentlemen. When we leave Mount Weather, we will go out into a new world, with new hope of an attainable, orderly tomorrow. Henceforth, though our task will be no less great, the stakes no less dire, yet our burden shall be lessened, and the ship of humanity will sail on into the future of our making."

The doors opened and a squad of soldiers came in wearing uniforms so outlandish that Cundieffe had to stifle a laugh. Ballooned trousers and stockings, slashed sleeves blooming out of steel chest plates, and kettle helmets such as the Conquistadors wore. Each carried an assault rifle slung back on his shoulder, but in their hands they held pikes and halberds. It took Cundieffe a moment to place them, but he finally did. They were dead ringers for the Swiss Guard, the mercenary force who guarded the Pope at the Vatican. Still puzzling over Madame Chairperson's bewildering speech, he wondered for a moment if they weren't making every backwoods bigot's worst nightmare come true by turning control of the nation over to the Catholic Church.

The guards stepped aside and they walked in. All in the war room rose to their feet in silent awe.

The first ones stood head and shoulders above their guards. Absurdly broad in shoulders and deep in the chest, they looked like any Bible storybook picture of the Philistine giant Goliath. They had been selectively bred for aggression and charisma and raw physical power, but at a staggering cost. Their muscles rippled and creaked on brittle bones taxed to their limit to hold them upright. Their wide-open faces were so blank and unresponsive they might have been painted on, and betrayed a bloody-minded idiocy that Cundieffe had seen in the eyes of pit bulls. Drunk on their own physical might, weaned inside a secret realm to rule a world they could not comprehend, they looked around them and saw only meat to be beaten and eaten. They wobbled and drooled, drugged, but an attendant walked behind each of them with a doctor's bag and a cattle prod.

This must be some kind of joke
, Cundieffe told himself. These are Socrates' philosopher-kings?

But they were only the first. Those that came next might be born leaders, but they were, if anything, far less human than their giant brethren. Cundieffe had been taught, of late, to see all biology as an economic process. They, the Mules, were deprived of reproductive capabilities, which biological windfall they shrewdly reinvested in intellect, immune-function, and empathy. From all he had been told, the Mules had been sports, happy accidents of genetics who had helped bootstrap humanity up from savagery into ordered civilization. How could they believe that it was other than destiny, that they came along when they did? And how could they not look at the slope-browed brutes all around them as raw material, to be refined into something more like themselves?

The second batch could not walk on their own, and rode in wheelchairs with bubble domes around them. Their skins looked like the unfinished, shiny pink flesh under an unripe scab. Their limbs were stunted, vestigial affairs, flippers with a few crudely hewn digits, garbled, misfired wings folded into sunken, swaybacked torsos. In the womb, nature had given up early on their bodies and squandered all the saved biological capital on an orgy of cranial engineering the likes of which homo sapiens would never, in a million generations, have spawned on its own. Their wizened faces were squashed down underneath explosive blooms of cranium, which rested on cradles. The seams of their enormous skulls did not meet, but curled back like the lips of a tulip to make way for a crippling mass of brain tissue. It spilled out of their skulls in great, trembling sacs that would have hung down to their waists, if they could stand. Cundieffe counted eight chairs parked alongside the long table in the center of the war room.

The giants were herded into a corner by their warders, and had to be prodded into submission when the room broke out in thunderous applause.

Stapleton called for order. "For some of you, this may come as a shock, but we have known all along that we were not the last word on the species, but only the vanguard of a new human genetic diaspora, which must be shielded and nurtured until it can take its rightful place."

Cundieffe goggled at the new leaders. Many of the outer circle of the Committee demanded answers, some openly incensed and repulsed, others ecstatic. Madame Chairperson explained that they were the products of the best-known human husbandry project in recorded history, the ruling families of Western Europe. The giant guardians were selectively inbred in Europe for centuries within the so-called Black Families of the European aristocracy. The philosopher-kings were of the same blue bloodline, but were hybridized with another ancestral line preserved in France and Germany in the Merovingian dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire. After their betrayal in the ninth century, the heirs retreated into nameless secrecy under the care of the Prieure De Sion in the south of France, where only a few outsiders became privy to the secret of their origins. Few outside this room today knew that these mutants were directly descended from the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and her sometime paramour, an exceptional mutant specimen known as Jesus Christ of Nazareth. By law of nature and holy fiat, they were humankind's naturally ordained rulers.

"They are, of course, severely handicapped and physically infirm from centuries of recessive traits piling up in their germline, so until very recently, we seemed to be further than ever from our ultimate goal. Then Keogh opened doors for us. From the prisoner Storch and the captives taken at White Bird, we harvested mitochondrial DNA unlike anything ever discovered in living animal tissue. The Shoggoth mitochondria in Keogh's genotype powers the drastic somatic alterations observed in the Radiant Dawn specimens, but now we have harnessed that dangerous power for society's benefit.

"With Keogh's gene therapy technology, we have grasped the power to accelerate nature's plan for the human race a thousandfold. The new leadership is responding to treatment, and will soon be ready to assume its place."

And there were to be more. Video screens lit up showing animated computer graphics of the forms into which they would cast the citizens of tomorrow. Spidery human skeletons and fish-faced changelings, shaped to live in orbit, and under the sea. Hulking, monolithic monsters with only mouths and black eyespots on their minimal heads, burrowing troglodytes with the outsized spade-claws of a mole. Women who looked like Holroyd, the shapeless human monster in the slaughterhouse, all dewlaps and rolling haunches of blubber, breeding cows for a better humanity.

Cundieffe didn't know how long Wyler had been looking at him, but the crumple of Mosaic scorn his face had become told him his own face betrayed his inner turmoil. "It's—sir, this is monstrous."

Wyler bristled, whispered scalding tones in Cundieffe's ear. "You had no problem with the notion that you were a genetically superior administrator, and should rightfully trample due process to keep human affairs running smoothly. By the same argument, these are superior rulers, and will see humanity through the coming instability to greater levels of specialization, into a smoothly run hive, instead of the self-destructive cesspool of contradictory impulses it is now. With judicious application of the genetically enhanced mitochondrial DNA, the human race will be shaped into something fit for the future."