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“What the hell is that,” she said. “One of your voices?”
“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said. “And then somebody tried to break into my house.”
“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”
“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.
Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.
“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.
“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are winning.”
I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty.
“Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are winning, at least there’s plenty of work for you.”
She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile.
“Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture.
“Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.
From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier—and much more rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did not have to wait long at all for a new host—nor to try again to reproduce. IT eagerly drove IT’s host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the strange and wonderful swelling.
But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.
IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT
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experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.
The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state.
The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.
Then there was fire—fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.
And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.
Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.
IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.
T H I R T Y - O N E
When I was very young I once saw a variety act on TV. A man put a bunch of plates on the end of a series of supple rods, and kept them up in the air by whipping the rods around to spin the plates. And if he slowed down or turned his back, even for a moment, one of the plates would wobble and then crash to the ground, followed by all the others in series.
That’s a terrific metaphor for life, isn’t it? We’re all trying to keep our plates spinning in the air, and once you get them up there you can’t take your eyes off them and you have to keep chugging along without rest. Except that in life, somebody keeps
adding more plates, hiding the rods, and changing the law of gravity when you’re not looking. And so every time you think you have all your plates spinning nicely, suddenly you hear a hideous clattering crash behind you and a whole row of plates you didn’t even know you had begins to hit the ground.
Here I had stupidly assumed that the tragic death of Manny Borque had given me one less plate to worry about, since I could now proceed to cater the wedding as it should be done, with $65
