Quicksilver(84)
The face before me was that of Annie Piper, the girl from Mater Misericordi? who read stories to us when I was a child, stories by others but also stories she’d written. Annie, the primary caretaker of the orphanage dog, Rafael. Annie, whose soft voice was musical, enchanting. Annie, who had gone away to college on a scholarship and later disappeared without a trace. Her face was so fair and radiated such kindness that we younger foundlings were sure that angels must resemble her.
Nine years had passed since she left the orphanage, eight since she had disappeared, though on the TV screen she looked as if time had not touched her. However, her smile wasn’t the Piper smile that I well remembered, not the inverted arc that was the curve of love itself, but stiff and formal, perhaps formed in answer to a threat. The misery in her eyes welled unmistakable, and about her hung an air of the sorrow of one whose soul is yet intact and who offers her suffering for the intention of others. Her chin was lifted in an expression of what I took to be defiance, what little contempt she could get away with in her current circumstances.
She had not willingly reduced herself to the status of a sex toy for the entertainment of those who felt their high self-regard was vindicated when they proved they could inflict humiliation and pain on others without consequence. She was not the type who would have left college to trail after an intellectually vapid guru who oozed perverse platitudes as if they were the wisdom of the ages distilled to inebriating truths. She had gone missing because she had been abducted. “Special Selections” identified those captives with whom visitors harboring extreme desires—and Emmerich no less—could satisfy their inner beast without any serious risk of criminal prosecution. But the term possessed a shadow meaning, suggesting that the women and men offered here hadn’t come willingly to the Oasis, had instead been selected—identified, stalked, and uprooted from their lives—by agents of Emmerich who, like trained pigs on a truffle hunt, sought the most tender among the young and beautiful to serve them up for the delectation of those with enough power and wealth to convince themselves that they were the most sophisticated sophisticates in history.
I had not thought myself capable of an anger as sharp as the icy wrath that cut through me at the sight of Annie’s face on that TV screen. Litton Ormond’s death had little angered me because the depth and breadth of my depression had been a sodden blanket that smothered other emotions. Litton had been dead when I heard of the shooting at Bellini’s, already beyond rescue. Annie was here, now, in need of being saved. Vindictive, violent emotion ripped through me, flensing away all caution. Anger became rage as Tim blathered on. Before I quite knew what was happening, I was beyond prudence and discretion, having rucked up my loose shirttail to draw the Glock from my holster. I pointed the gun at Soul Timothy.
“I know that woman. Her name’s not Camilla. It’s Annie Piper. She was a friend of mine. She’s not a thing to be used. She’s precious.”
If Bridget or Panthea or Sparky was surprised, none of them showed it. We knew we were on a mission of meaning, and that it abruptly became personal only confirmed the feeling I had that our journey might prove to be a quest for some object of redemption.
“Take us to Bodie Emmerich,” I demanded of Timothy, “or those Moujiks wearing shock collars will spend their evening cleaning your brains off the wall.”
|?34?|
Psychic magnetism would have led us to Bodie Emmerich, perhaps so would have Winston, but probably neither would have been as swift a guide as Soul Timothy with a gun to his head.
In the tornado of my rage, I expected that my companions might disapprove of my rash action, but they all drew their weapons and none raised an objection. They were as incensed as I was. Besides, we shared the concern that, with the day soon to end, the task before us might be complicated by eighty-seven other soul children emerging from their rooms under the influence of whatever, alarmed into the defense of their hive and of the guru of the ephemeral and the excessive, who had spent billions crafting the place.
A button concealed in molding released an electronic lock, and a segment of the golden amboina-wood paneling in this third of three large communal chambers slid aside. A staircase led down to the lowest level of the building.
Responding to my question and to the insistent pressure of the Glock muzzle against his skull, Tim said, “Yeah, alone, he’ll be alone with night not yet here. We gotta rebel against the circadian rhythm that says daylight is life and night is death or a preview of it. That’s a construct of the evil side of bipolar Nature, the Queen of the Void. The Queen serves those corporate masters who want us to work our lives away according to their time clocks, and convert us from alpha emitters to gamma.”
As we descended the stairs, I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. They were everywhere in our time, controlled by those who taught them to fear what didn’t threaten them and receive with gladness those ideas and forces that would rob them of purpose, of meaning, of security—and sooner than later would take away their lives as well.
The stairs ended in a twenty-foot-diameter circular vestibule more lavishly appointed even than the spaces on the level above. The ceiling was leafed with gold and inlaid with what I took to be rows of real sapphires. Dimensional, layered crystal forms paneled the walls, and through them passed amber light from an unknown source, projecting prismatic patterns on us, so that we looked like puzzles assembled from sharp-edged geometric pieces.