Jik Dain Bedlip
Dain worked in shadows highlighted by maps, tall symbols of the Byukan-Hamil regions of Continent
Popovich, staggered along the walls of his squarish residence. Former regions, Dain reminded
himself. Gone was the concept, gone were those clumsy, from-Zinghua names, replaced by numbers 1
through 7.
The bureaucracies remained, however. He couldn't disband them in a day; in the meantime, he had
assumed the workloads of the Regional Partners — and missed them for the first time. He hadn't
appreciated how much coordination and decision-making was involved in managing each region, with
its staff, with its thousands of combines, with its immense flow of control and data.
But with Kär's help — with eight Kärs, in fact, one for each regional structure, its numeral
graphed on its face, plus one for his other business — he nearly had everything under control.
In fact — from his bed, canted to thinking position, his chyme flask hanging across his hips, Dain
surveyed the room, each map in its place, each Kär standing in front of its region in case he
needed it — in fact, he finally held the power he'd strived for all his adult life. Bestowed on
him by Norma, despite, or maybe because of, his attempted coup with Idombruce. Bestowed rather
simply and glibly. Suddenly she had handed over the reins to every significant contract on the
continent.
I control every significant contract on the continent.
Once again, Dain burst out of the minutia mindset quickened by all those petty details. Once
again, he rediscovered the thrill of success, of danger dared and thwarted, of standing in the face
of a gwira's charge with a thin spear forged from guts and imagination and insight and turning that
charge. Maybe the beast had not died this time, but impressed, it had granted him a grand wish.
He basked in the authority. Achieved without Le Coeur. Achieved without any of his alters taking
a hand. Achieved by his own talent and perseverance and wiles. Achieved by himself. The rush of
that solitary accomplishment rippled through every channel of his mind. Its horizons glowed.
Unleashed from that dungeon door, he stretched infinitely in all directions.
He now had everything he needed to tackle his ultimate ambition of changing the continent's way of
life.
Except for Norma's deadline.
Every time Dain acknowledged that limit, it slammed into his mind like a toppling boulder. Vivid,
as real as policyware could make it, the expiration of his imprimatur threatened to crush
everything he had done, everything he could do from his current position, everything he wanted to
do with it.
So, Norma had left him a matter of days to consolidate his power, then transfer it out of the
Rendezvous of Futures into another consortium. A matter of days, then, to prepare that
receptacle. A matter of days, then, to win over Ganj Dareh.
Which brought him, once again, around to Lugar. Where was Lugar? Dain had sent out a priority
can-see request last night as he left Norma's quarters. No answer as he started work on his new
job. He had repeated the request many times through the night and now into the morning. Lugar
still had not answered.
Back to work then, the mind-numbing work of revamping the corporate infrastructure. Each time he
had delved into this miasma of staff management, the bureaucrat's thinking cap had crept over him,
crushing all but rote out of his brain. He glanced toward the virtual queues waiting for him like
colorless, dimension-less pythons, and anticipating their touch, shuddered.
"Sir? Sir?" cried the unnumbered Kär. "Ges Lugar answers." The simulacrum pointed and Dain's
holoscreen awoke with the blond head of the Propaganda Leader.
"Lugar!" Dain bellowed. The word was not a greeting, but an attention grabber designed to punch
through the distance.
"Yes, Dain?" Delivered jauntily, these words erected façade. Behind them, Lugar's pale eyes were
rimmed with fatigue and his hair mussed with inattention.
"Where have you been?"
"Busy with Le Coeur inside the Rendezvous and outside. We're in trouble, Dain. This
campaign to disrupt basic services in Ganj Dareh—"
"I don't care, Lugar."
"Listen to me, Dain, just listen. As Le Coeur coordinator here in Ganj Dareh, I deal with this
constantly and the least you can do is take my status report."
Anger roared words of rebuke inside him, but Dain hid them. Frustration chimed in with bickering,
but Dain turned that aside. He realized now that both of these sterile emotions arose from fear,
and like it or not, fear was an old friend. In fact, it had driven his entire life. At first, in
the Network of Learning, he had run from it, spinning off alter egos as decoys and traps, but now,
as Dain, he knew it for the basic source of his power to change the world. For now, he channeled
it to power his patience.
Dain feigned acquiescence with a nod.
Lugar blurted, "Streicher at Em-Deh has already paid a heavy fine and is accruing daily penalties
for failing to meet his metrics. In another seven days, the Collective will open bids to replace
him. He can-sees me twice a day just to fret over it. Delivery has two days left on their
reprieve, Salvage twelve, but all the others — Electricity, Water, Markets, Restaurants,
Gong-shi-tang, Construction, Recreation — were served notice of delinquency hearings by the
Collective yesterday. How long can we keep this up?"
"As long as it takes," Dain said. "Look at it this way, our combines in Ganj Dareh have inspired
the Collective to think of replacing vendors: exactly the mind-set we want. Right, Lugar?"
The blond head nodded, apparently reprieved by Dain's firm grip on objectives.
"In the meantime, just ask those mewling, so-called Executives of ours what side they want to be on
when Le Coeur takes over."
"Yessir." Lugar sighed.
"And you can tell them to get ready to compete for those same contracts as Le Coeur
combines, in case it comes to that."
"Yessir!" Lugar grinned.
Dain could now assert his agenda. "Now tell me about the ollomani."
"I've been launching them against the people of Ganj Dareh."
"With what results?"
Frustration beset Lugar again. He sighed, "Our tidal wave is sinking back into the sea of
humanity."
Dain stared as he absorbed the message. Le Coeur could not falter now. "Get tougher."
Lugar's face shone against the shadows of Dain's room. Lugar seemed constipated, struggling with a
great blockage, not sure which would burst first, his heart or his brain ... or his anus.
"Do you realize what it's taking for me to harness these renegades? Many of them are no more than
mindless brutes! Thy must have—"
"Lugar, work with what you've got."
"If I give them any more rein, they'll kill somebody."
"It is time for that, Lugar. The Collective is not coming around fast enough."
=Don't.=
Dain froze. The word whispered in the expanse of his mind, suddenly absent of all other thought.
With it came a hint of sandalwood and a wisp of emotion, a gentle opening up of his psyche.
Surrender? Was he feeling surrender to a larger will? No, not that; he'd deny it anyway, but that
label did not apply. Acceptance? No. Nothing as foreign as that; this feeling seemed to be a
true part of himself — or would be.
Patience. Somehow, he was moved to patience. That, of course, was nothing new. How else had he
tamed fear? And now anger.
Abruptly, a prickling tension swept up from his shoulders and across his hackles, like another, a
different ghostly massage.
=Don't stop now.= Bedlip marched down that wooden stoop suddenly visible again in Dain's
mindscape. =I drove myself into mental breakdown so you could carry us to this point. Go for it.=
=Don't you tell me what to do,= Dain snapped back. Anger, a leering, sneering anger, surged
comfortably through him. =In fact, you won't ever tell me anything again.=
And Dain ripped open the cerebral ground beneath Bedlip's imaginary feet, then gobbled him down
into the gray folds thus revealed.
Walls denying life-history fell away. Memories returned. Ideas discovered — and long since
discarded — at the start of his career. Infatuations and lusts — long since dismissed as trivial
— during the blossoming of his physical maturity. All that resumed its part within Dain's
boundaries. An easing of a decade's dis-integration. Wonderful. Satisfying. Bolstering.
Dain fixed his eyes on Lugar and bellowed, "Let them kill!" After all, if I can kill Idombruce, why
should I rein in my ollomani? He flashed on threatening Schuess, fury driving his outstretched
finger, revealing Idombruce's heart-attack as murder. Maybe that's why Norma granted my grand
wish. Thanks to unleashed anger.
Lugar was chiding him: "We agreed on finesse, Dain, orchestration, elegance."
"Your audience isn't that subtle. Lugar, Thy is bringing an earthquake. We need the zhee-tely of
Ganj Dareh staggering before she turns the ground under their feet to quicksand. You must prepare
the way! Right now!"
The other man's jaw and mouth worked as though vetoing his brain's choices. Dain knew what they
were. Once the two of them had suffered Thy's mode of persuasion as a last resort. Now, Lugar
stood alone against a solution of ultimate violence.
"Do it," ordered Dain, "or I'll do it for you."
Lugar slumped, his nod of agreement a surrender to zhuhndí. Then he surged again. "Not against
dreamsticks we can't. You promised you'd fix the dreamsticks and you haven't." Whine surged
through those last two words.
That rebuke bit Dain hard. He floundered. Self-anger and self-indictment flailed him.
Uncertainty tunneled up through his belly. A tongue clucked at him, dusted by sandalwood and
soothed by love and acceptance, but he batted that away. He grabbed the shadowed air in front of
him, physical clutching to stimulate mental control. It worked. He took action.
First, he poked at Lugar via can-see. "Wait right there!"
Next, he called out, "Kär, get me Pizi, Consortium priority-override!"
The automaton acted without moving, its eyeballs swirling to hint at its processing. A moment
later, it shrugged and ...
"What?" blurted from Dain's llevar. Even with Pizi's typical filter, the word came snappish.
"Deadline!"
"Hey, I already delivered that consortium coag, opened like an oyster and spilling pearls. And I
don't have to do the same for those will-hears in Ganj Dareh for six more days. A promise is a
promise is a—"
"Dreamsticks!"
"I'm testing it now, okeydoke? You want this to work right, don't you? Get off my back!"
"When?"
"Tomorrow, shift change at dawn. All their dreamsticks will revert to placebo mode left over from
their human-approval testing. Of course, they'll look like they're still working. Hee-hee, after
all, that's what a placebo does.
"Dude, that company's going to regret lots of things—"
Dain didn't care about details. He just wanted to be sure. He broke into the gleest's
word-stream. "Don't fail me on this, Pizi."
"They're going to regret leaving that code in their production model. Of course, who doesn't? Why
fool with something that's working. Even I don't—"
"Pizi, I want a guarantee—"
"They're going to regret paying for that fine technical document I burgled. Pshaw, that's what
they get for documenting their code in the first place, and then—"
"Pizi, shut the fuck up!"
"— not protecting it from gleests like me. Hee-hee, they're—"
Dain said, "Bouncin' Betty".
"I know, I know, I know." The meeting cracked adjourned and dissolved from the llevar's screen.
"First thing tomorrow," Dain told Lugar. "Give the anshin's dawn-shift time to settle into
routine, then sortie: one out of four to kill, the rest to injure. Stir that Collective into
rebellion!"
"Yessir."
Dain's adjournment sent Lugar's face into oblivion. With it, all of Dain's doubts about this
escalation. In fact, he wondered, how they could ever have been so foolish? Given Le Coeur's
differences with society, how could they ever have believed they could take control of it
without violence? Well, no longer. Lugar would diligently pursue death for propaganda's
sake.
And if that didn't work? Thy would come along in nine days to pursue death for domination's sake.
In the end, zhuhndí prevailed over virtual, fact over theory, deed over pattern. In the end, Dain
would prevail.
