Inside Man Read online

  “Hello,” says my old comrade in arms. “What are you doing here?”

  “Lofty?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Lofty hisses, loud enough to wake the quick and the dead. “He’ll hear you.”

  Lofty’s not his real name, of course. It’s just a nickname, something I call him because it annoys him. Why he finds it so annoying, neither of us can remember. He’s exactly the same age as me, to the nanosecond, and we’ve been getting on each other’s nerves and under each other’s feet for all Time.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Lofty says. “Not a problem. And if sixteen years of slow, patient work goes gurgling down the pipes just because you happen to come crashing in, shouting the odds at the top of your voice, so fucking what? I can always go back to square one and start over again.”

  I never liked him much, even before the Fall. I have a shrewd suspicion he doesn’t like me either. “Has it really been sixteen years?” I ask him. “Good heavens. Seems like it was only yesterday—”

  “Go away.”

  “My pleasure,” I say truthfully.

  * * *

  Sixteen years, what we in the trade call a sleeper job. A speciality of mine, as it happens, before I got fragile. Typically, a sleeper is someone identified at a very early stage as being useful to the Plan. He might have certain qualities of mind, soul, or body, or a destiny that’ll put him in exactly the right place at the right time.

  I once spent eleven years in the mind of a poor widow who sold cabbages out back of the Poverty & Justice, at the Hippodrome end of Brook Street, just before the war. She was nobody: nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother, nobody’s reliable tenant or valued employee. Nobody would ever miss her, take any notice if she started acting funny—or funnier than she usually did, poor addled creature. Even if I got rumbled, nobody would pay good money to have her put right, because that’s work for highly trained specialists, and their services are expensive. Seen as too ugly and too dumb to be worth exploiting. (I don’t think I’d want to be a human, somehow; you people never seem to have got the knack of looking out for each other.) She wasn’t worth anything to anybody, except me.

  Eleven years, and she never once suspected I was there. But on a certain day in June AUC1171, she took a knife, hid it up her sleeve, joined the crowd outside the Golden Spire temple just as the Grand Duke was coming out after Mass, and stabbed him three times in the neck before anyone could stop her. Which she wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been deep in her head all that time, twisting her mind and rubbing memories into her wounds, lovingly nurturing her resentments and warping her perspectives to the point where what she did was simply inevitable. And that, boys and girls, is what caused the First Social War (sixty million dead, if you add in the famine victims), proof if any were needed that sleepers really do work, and I don’t give a damn what the bean counters at Division say about inappropriate use of resources.

  The only thing I’d be inclined to question was assigning Lofty to sleeper duty. It calls for certain qualities, not least among them patience, resolve, a cool head, the ability to think on your feet—don’t get me wrong, he’s a good officer in his way. I know of nobody better at draining every last scrap and scruple of joy out of life, flooding minds with black despair, shattering faith, dispelling hope—good, basic, bread-and-butter stuff like that. But finesse? Do me a favor. The proverbial bull in a china shop. The sort who’d trip over something in the middle of the desert.

  “Perfectly true,” says Divisional Command when I raise the issue. “He’s a clown. Solid marble from the neck up and two left feet. Trouble is, who else have we got right now?” He looks at me.

  I look away.

  (Did I mention the slight difference of opinion between Area and Division, on the subject of my fragility? Area maintains that I’m a basket case and should never work on anything Grade 3 or above ever again. Division takes the view that I used to be a basket case but I’ve had a long time to get better, and they’re the ones who have to find the manpower for all the wizard schemes Area comes up with, and the talent pool isn’t exactly infinite. I must confess, I’m with Area on this one. Of course, my feelings on the matter count for absolutely nothing at all.)

  “Is this something I need to know about?” I ask.

  “You? Heavens, no.” He looks at me as though he’s just bitten into an apple in a garden and found me there. “This is big stuff, and everybody knows you don’t fancy it anymore.”

  Nitric acid off a duck’s back. “Only,” I observe, “Lofty’s got a point. I could’ve ruined everything, blundering in not knowing it was a sleeper operation. If you want me to back off from the Third Horn, just say the word, and I’ll go somewhere else.”

  He’s got that harassed look I know so well. “What I want from you,” he says, “is to carry on doing the job you were assigned to do and leave the long-term strategic planning to us. Just mind where you’re putting your great big feet, that’s all.”

  “Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” I say gravely. “But it’s no use saying don’t go treading on the mines if I haven’t got a map of the minefield.”

  I’m doing it on purpose, and both of us know it. I used to tease him back when he was just a snot-nosed junior executive officer and I was his superior, before I got all fragile and he was promoted into my warm, wet shoes. “Stay away from Brother Hildebrand, and you’ll be just fine,” he tells me. “There’s sixteen other monks on his shift, go bother one of them. Talking of which,” he adds, giving me what he fondly imagines is an intimidating stare, “what’s all this about you handing out beatific visions like sweeties? You know perfectly well—”

  I point out that I’ve already taken up far more of his valuable time than I could possibly deserve, and retire in good order, leaving him sullen and unhappy. Not, I hasten to add, intentionally. Just force of habit, I guess.

  * * *

  Something big involving a sleeper, an inside-man job. Ours, needless to say, is not to reason why, but inquiring minds want to know about things, and I have an inquiring mind. It’s got me in trouble before now, and almost inevitably will again. Big deal.

  That night, as I tickled the edges of one Brother Florian’s consciousness with vague images of unimaginable transcendent wonder, I considered what I knew about various things: the political situation, the antecedents of Brother Hildebrand, the last recorded movements of various key players on both sides, one or two incidents from my own experience. I won’t say a pattern started to emerge, but interesting shapes flickered in tantalizing fashion on the meniscus of the void, so much so that when I snapped out of it and looked round, I was alone in the chapel. There’s always ten minutes or so between one shift clocking off and the next one filing in. It gives the vergers a chance to refill the lamps and do a spot of dusting.

  It’s just a job, that’s all—a job for which we get no pay, no thanks, and a volcanic bollocking if things don’t go exactly according to plan. We do it because that’s who we are. You lot got free will; we were assigned our respective functions. We serve; therefore, we are. Furthermore (in theory, at least), every function in the divine service is of equal value, from archangels and cherubim down to night soil operatives and tempters. From each according to his ability, to each . . . Well, there is no to. We require nothing except work to do, which is provided for us, and we’re supposed to be grateful.

  Therefore, in the aftermath of the Unfortunate Event, there wasn’t any punishment, as such. Perish the thought. Mercy and forgiveness are His middle names. What happened was that some of us who were doing jobs of equal value were reassigned to other jobs, also of equal value, jobs that the ones who chose the right side during the Event weren’t awfully keen on doing, for some unfathomable reason. A minor adjustment in the great scheme of things, and the consensus of opinion is that we got off pretty lightly, all things considered.

  True, no doubt. Even so.

&
nbsp; Even before I was officially fragile, I relished (and still do) the very occasional moment of quiet, stillness, and peace. Not something I tend to encounter in my everyday life. When I’m on the job—was on the job, pre-fragile—it’s often quiet, sneaking around on tiptoe so as not to alert the householder to your presence, but the stillness tends to be the pre-storm variety, and you can forget all about peace. When you’re deep inside the mind of the sort of people we generally get called on to inhabit—let’s say I’ve been in some pretty grim places in my time, and nearly all of them have had bone walls. It’s noisy in there, what with all the sobbing and the yelling and the horrible vivid memories played back at maximum volume, over and over again. One thing you can’t do under such conditions is hear yourself think. The Third Horn chapel is, by comparison, an earthly paradise.

  The leading feature of the chapel, according to all the books, is the Great Iconostasis. Forty feet high and twenty-three across, with a gold leaf background that turns into a sheet of flame when the late-afternoon sun streams in through the rose window at precisely the first verse of evensong, it depicts the Sorrow of the Mother, which has always struck me as odd and just a smidgen off-color, doctrinally speaking. Brother Eusebius explains it by saying that just as human mortals can’t look directly at the sun without damaging their optic nerves, they can’t directly address Him face-to-face and person-to-person without risking spiritual damage—

  (“It makes you go blind, in other words.”

  He grins at me. “Exactly.”)

  —so they seek the intercession of an intermediary, in accordance with the properly constituted chain of command: priest to guardian angel to archangel to principality to power to virtue to dominion to throne to cherub to seraph to Holy Mother and eventually to the big boss himself. It’s all about proper channels, which proverbially run deep, and doing things the right way, so that everybody knows where they stand and the file copies end up in the right folders.

  Color me unconvinced. I think it’s something fundamental, part of your and our shared heritage. Throughout your history, and ours, we don’t go to the king or the CEO or the governor of the province, because we’re scum and we know it. No, instead we like to have a quiet word in the ear of someone who has the ear of the Big Man. As often as not, our hymn of supplication to the ear-haver has an instrumental accompaniment, the jingle of coins or the crackle of crisp notes, sweet music to charm the savage breast. It’s the same rationale that worked so very well for Sighvat III. No point a creep like me asking for anything, but surely He’ll listen to his own mother.

  A creep like me. I slip unobtrusively into human form (look closely, and you’ll see a densely packed swarm of tiny flies; best not to look too closely) and kneel, telling myself it’s okay, it’s just a picture, a picture of someone who never actually existed, since He never had a mother. I should know, I was there a fraction of a second later, and besides, I’m not praying, perish the thought, just taking the weight off my feet. I’m not praying, because prayer is basically just asking for stuff, and I have no stuff to ask for. But it’s nice, once in a while, to stop and have a breather and pretend, just for a fleeting fraction of a moment, that I’m not me.

  A shadow falls between me and the shining gold vision. I look over my shoulder. Oh, for crying out loud.

  He grins at me. “You’re going to be in so much trouble,” he says.

  * * *

  There’s that moment in that play, when the hero comes upon the villain kneeling at an altar: “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.” Saloninus’s hero is intriguing because he’s indecisive. The caster of the shadow isn’t like that at all. With him, to think is to act, only he very rarely thinks. He just does.

  I can be quick when I need to be. I dissolve the borrowed molecules of my assumed human shape, scattering the swarm of flies like an explosion. Then I’m off, in every direction at once, like sound, but he’s quicker. He grabs me. He’s stronger than I am. He scoops me up in his hand and stuffs me into his ear.

  * * *

  We go way back, him and me, further back than I care to remember. This is the thing I said I’d rather not talk about, if you remember, but I’m going to anyway.

  When I first met him—when I reminisce, unless I specify otherwise, him can only possibly refer to one individual for reasons you’ll soon understand—I was only obeying orders. There’s this child, says my district supervisor.

  “Oh, come on,” I say. “You know what they say about working with children and animals.”

  My supervisor doesn’t like me much. “Tough,” he says.

  “Be a sport. Give it to someone else.”

  “Can’t.” He shakes his metaphorical head. “You were asked for specifically.”

  Wasn’t expecting that. “You’re kidding.”

  His edition of the big stone tablet has THOU SHALT NOT KID at number four. “Don’t ask me why,” he says. “I wouldn’t choose you for anything if it were up to me, not if I wanted it done properly. But they specified you for this one, and that comes direct from upstairs.”

  Why am I not entirely overjoyed at this unexpected vote of confidence? “Fine,” I say. “You’d better fill me in on the details.”

  Not the first time I’d possessed an unborn child; maybe that’s why I got the job, because it’s not the sort of assignment that comes up every day, and there are technical issues. A certain level of experience and expertise would, therefore, be useful. It’s a long-term gig. If you go in that early, you can’t come out again until the kid’s at least five years old, not without killing it; besides, the whole point of going in before the subject’s even been born is to create a really high-class munitions-grade sleeper, an ultimate inside man.

  Ah well, not like I had anything better to do for the next twenty-thirty-forty years, and it was bound to be peaceful. No banging about, shouting, goading the subject into screaming fits, broken bones, acts of mayhem. Much more my sort of thing, because if you’re designing and creating a long-term weapon, you want it to be well equipped, versatile, efficient, high performance; therefore, you want a cultured, educated mind in a strong, healthy body, with good social skills, an ear for music, a thorough basic grounding in the arts and sciences, theology and scripture and everything else a person might need in order to carry out an important mission, the particulars of which are to be announced later but which might involve anything, so best to be prepared. It was my duty, in other words, to turn the subject into as close as I could get to the perfect human; the Saloninan Übermensch; a compendium of all the qualities, skills, and virtues; the ideal weapon—

  Great steaming heaps of ambiguity all over the place, of course, because the education and training he’d get from me would be practically identical to those lined up for the Saints. But that’s the fundamental thing about tools and instruments, and weapons. They’re neutral. A skilled craftsman makes them, then hands them over to the likes of you and me, who do things with them, nasty or nice, depending on which side we happen to be on. The nasty-nice dichotomy is, of course, a policy issue and way above my pay grade. I’m only obeying orders. Meanwhile, I get an opportunity to be a skilled craftsman, which is rather more my cup of metaphorical tea than what I’m usually called on to do, or lumbered with doing. As for this business of sides, the Divine Essence is best described as a perfect sphere, which is to say, a geometrical entity with no sides. Just various jobs that need doing, all of equal value.

  So in I go, at the end of the tenth week, at which point brain activity has only just started; the roof’s on and the paintwork is more or less touch-dry but in all other respects, vacant, to coin a phrase, possession. That’s how it’s supposed to be, at any rate, and medically and biologically, it’s inconceivable that it should be anything else. I’ve done this sort of thing before. I know what to expect.

  The prime directive of our order and Rule Number One: First, do no harm. If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, by the way, I’m not surprised. Your lot stole it from us, a lo
ng time ago. But we demons formulated our code of practice while the ancestors of your human doctors were still picking lice out of each other’s fur.

  First, do no harm: so I slide slowly and with infinite care through the upper layers of the unborn infant’s mind, like a thoughtful husband easing into bed next to his sleeping wife. Doing no harm in this context means not letting the subject know he’s being taken over. It’s an incredibly traumatic thing for you people, to know you’re being possessed. It’s terrifying and you can’t bear the intrusion—think what it’s like when you’ve got a sharp bit of grit in your eye, and then consider how infinitely more sensitive your mind is, and how much more damage you can do by rubbing at it. But all your instincts scream at you to fight, and you’re not to know that fighting us isn’t actually possible. Really—don’t try. The more you kick and thrash around, the more you bruise and break yourself, but you can’t touch us, naturally. We aren’t there, in your terms. We are spirit, essence, not of the body; not insubstantial, but composed of a kind of substance you could never even begin to understand. And if that sounds patronizing, you’ve missed the point. You really don’t want to be in a position where you could begin to understand us.

  The image I always use to describe that first stage is when a housewife pours a spoonful of rennet into a big, wide bowl of fresh milk. That’s how I come to exist, in terms you might possibly be able to, no pun intended, get your head around. I curdle out of insubstantiality into substance. What I curdle, incidentally, is your brains, but the resultant mess isn’t me. The knots and bogies of coagulated goop suddenly formed inside your head aren’t me incarnate. They’re still just proteins and fats and hemoglobin, the stuff you’re made of. No, I’m the process, if that makes any sort of sense at all. When I go in, I catalyze, I set changes in motion. In Orthodox Trinitarian terms, there’s now three of us in one: you, me, us. Or, to skip from one homely metaphor to another, your brain is an amorphous sludge of porridge and I’m the yeast. It’s me that makes things interesting.