Bill nodded eagerly. “Chief Sullivan’s in the right of it—side effects or not, plasmids are just too dangerous. Rapture is made mostly of metal—but it’s complex, and that makes it vulnerable, fragile in some places. Daft bastards running around shooting fire, blasting lightning about—they could bring down the whole bloody house of cards!”
Ryan made a dismissive gesture.
“We’ll get the splicers under control. Meanwhile,” he added musingly, “this is all part of our evolution. Just growing pains.” He considered explaining fully. But they wouldn’t understand if he told them what he really thought. Greavy had understood, though. He’d understood the winnowing. The subtraction of weak links from the Great Chain; what they were going through in Rapture now was the heat of a welding torch, both destructive and constructive.
“It isn’t just the superpowered sons of bitches,” Sullivan growled, crumpling the list of plasmids in his shaky hands. “It’s the leadheads rampaging around the city, shooting guns at random. Faster reflexes from all that ADAM. We’ve had to kill four in the last two days. Sad thing is, they all had kids. Transferred to that new orphanage of Fontaine’s…”
“Fontaine,” Bill said, looking at Ryan significantly. “Got a finger in every bloody thing. Every kind of smuggling. He’s not just bringing in cheap hooch and Bibles anymore, guv’nor.”
Ryan grunted. “How’s the evidence looking on Fontaine’s smugglers?”
Sullivan sat up straighter, suddenly energized. “I’ve got enough to raid him, Mr. Ryan—then we’ll have the proof! I’ve got a witness to the smuggling ring, up in detention, under protection.”
“Then put it together,” Ryan said. “We’ll raid his operation and see what we get.”
Kinkaide shook his head. “All that charity stuff he’s behind. You’ve got to wonder what he’s up to.”
“He’s up to undermining me!” Ryan said bitterly. “Charity is a form of socialism! It’s too much like that Lamb woman. If they’re not working together—then they will be in time. Like Lenin recruiting Stalin. Stopping Fontaine stops this propaganda tool he calls charity…”
“What about this plasmids business?” Rizzo asked. “We don’t want to ban them or regulate them … so how do we control them?”
“Now that’s a good question, mate,” Bill said.
“I am about to announce a new Ryan Enterprises product line,” Ryan said, smiling in a way he hoped was reassuring. “A new line of weapons! Chemical throwers, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, better machine guns—we can use weapons innovation to counterbalance the splicers until we get ADAM perfected.”
Bill shook his head skeptically but said nothing.
“There’s something else,” Sullivan said, frowning. “I’ve got a source in Fontaine Futuristics—tells me about some kind of what they call fairy-moan experimentation, something like that, that can be used to get a handle on those splicers—”
“He means pheromone, I suspect,” Kinkaide said, smirking.
“Maybe that was it,” Sullivan said, unruffled. “Something about Suchong using phero … those things … to control the splicers, without the splicers even knowing it. Maybe spraying a chemical that makes them all show up in one place, so they cause problems for … well, anybody you wanted to cause problems for. I guess.”
Ryan scowled. “Control the splicers … with pheromones…” He was intrigued. But it was troubling too. Because Suchong worked for Fontaine.
Meaning that Fontaine in turn would eventually control at least some of the splicers. And it was becoming clearer: Fontaine was a predator. If you allowed him to grab that kind of power, he would use it to take Rapture over. Probably he’d do it behind a smokescreen. As Bill had warned, Fontaine could even partner up with Lamb’s followers, now that they were at loose ends.
It could mean the destruction of Rapture.
Fort Frolic, Fleet Hall, Backstage
1956
“Can anyone ever make you feel like Sander Cohen can? Rapture’s most beloved musical artist returns with ‘Why Even Ask?,’ his greatest album yet. Songs of love. Songs of joy. Songs of passion. Buy ‘Why Even Ask?’ and invite Sander Cohen into your home today.” Hurrying along through the empty backstage area, Martin Finnegan chuckled to himself hearing the public-service announcement playing from Cohen’s dressing room. Cohen was listening to the PA announcement over and over again. “Can anyone ever make you feel like Sander Cohen can? Rapture’s most beloved musical artist returns…”
Martin went down the wood-walled corridor, found Sander Cohen seated pensively in front of his gold-framed oval dressing-room mirror, putting on another layer of makeup with one hand. With the other he was shaping the needlelike points of his hooked mustache. Cohen wore a purple and blue silk smoking jacket, silk slippers, and purple silk pajamas. He looked at Martin in the mirror. “I’m running short of makeup, you know,” Cohen said. He picked up the stub of an eyebrow pencil and began to darken his eyebrows. “I’ve asked Andrew for more, but he talks tiresomely of import priorities, the importance of creating our own goods. Does he really expect me to make my own eyebrow pencil? My, you look virile today, Martin…”—all said while outlining his eyebrow, looking at Martin in the mirror. That face became ever more lurid each time Martin saw it, ever more like a mad, mustachioed mime. “… And invite Sander Cohen into your home today…” The recording ended, and Cohen restarted it. “Can anyone ever make you feel…”
“What do you think of that announcement?” Cohen asked, starting on the other eyebrow, watching him closely in the mirror. “It’s going out tonight on the public address. Trying to push my new record. It seems a bit bland to me. Lacking in verve. Doesn’t have that libidinous fevre that I so delight in…”
Martin sat in a wooden chair behind Cohen, wishing he’d stop playing the announcement. “I think it’s good for regular folks to hear,” Martin said. “Kind of family friendly, like. That’s good, you need that.”
“Oh God, I hope it doesn’t mean they’ll bring their children to my shows. I can’t imagine how I was able to bear being one. Fortunately it didn’t last long.”
Martin shifted in the uncomfortable chair, making it squeak. “Speaking of how Sander Cohen can make me feel … The note you sent me mentioned trying something new…”
Cohen tittered, hand fluttering over his mouth. “Well…” He winked, and opened a dressing-table drawer and drew out two bottles, setting them down on the dressing table, one after the other. They were squat bottles filled with red fluid. Martin knew full well what they were. Cohen opened the lower drawer, took out a flat black box, and opened it. In velvet-lined compartments were two syringes filled with glowing fluid. EVE. For activating the plasmids. Staring at the bottles, Martin’s mouth was dry. He and Cohen had taken cocaine together before, cut with a lot of booze. But this … He had seen splicers. Some of them seemed fairly together. Others, though, were like nitroglycerine, always ready to explode. And then there was the disfigurement. Those who used a great deal of ADAM ended up looking like they had a skin disease. The loony expressions glued on their faces made it all worse. On the other hand—look at that blue glow in the bottles! The implied power in it.
“Well? Shall we indulge?” Cohen asked, his mouth screwed to a cone and twisted comically to one side. “Hmm?”
“What the hell,” Martin heard himself say. He knew he’d try it sooner or later. He tried everything sooner or later. As Cohen prepared the syringes, Martin found he regretted that his first experience with ADAM was going to be with Sander Cohen. The Artiste always took everything to crazy extremes. After that last little drunken trip into Arcadia, dancing naked with the Saturnines, forcing a teenage boy to have sex with an octopus, they were all lucky not to be in the Rapture detention cells. They’d gotten out one step ahead of the constables.
But Martin did want to be a stage performer. So far, the only performance he’d done in Rapture had been at Cohen’s “tableaus,” where Martin and Hector Rodriguez and Silas Cobb and a couple others dressed in scanty costumes and posed heroically under the Artiste’s direction, for a very small audience. Many in the audience had been touching themselves obscenely. What was it Hector had said later that night? “It could well be that all art is just grift, after all.”
“Now, let us partake,” said Cohen. “This bottle contains SportBoost and Winter Blast. A splicer cocktail. That’s yours. Mine is something very, very hard to get—Teleport! Next I want to try those Spider Splicings … Well? What are you waiting for? Bottoms up! So to speak…”
Martin took a deep drink from the plasmids bottle. The thick fluid was surprisingly bland, though there was a chemical aftertaste, a bit of saltiness. Perhaps a suggestion of the taste of blood. And then—
A terrifying rigidity struck him. It was as if someone was running an electric current through his muscles, a charge generated from within his brain, crackling out through his nervous system—and it was making him go rigid. His arching back was threatening to snap his spine.
And then he fell to the floor, shaking with spasms, fighting for breath. Waves of dark, hissing energy unfolded in him. He felt high, but he was also terrified. He was distantly aware that Cohen was dragging down his pants—“Presto plunge-oh!” Cohen whooped—and then came the piercing pain of the needle jabbing into Martin’s gluteus maximus.
White fire exploded behind Martin’s eyes, and it was all he could see for a moment—like gazing into the heart of a welding arc. Unfamiliar tastes, like random chemicals, passed in waves through his mouth. He heard his pulse hammering in his ears. And then a wave of relief came, a ripple of release, as the rigidity washed away in a rolling tide of living coolness. After a few moments he was able to move again and struggled to his knees.
“Now,” Cohen said, laying the empty syringe on the makeup dresser. “I’m going to drink mine—here’s the syringe for me—you do me! I mean, the syringe! And don’t try to use your powers yet! You might turn me into a block of ice!”
They repeated the process for Cohen, Martin injecting him in the rump, going about it mechanically even as he struggled for some kind of inner equilibrium. He didn’t feel quite real somehow …
Martin set the empty syringe aside and sat gingerly on the chair as the Artiste flopped about like a fish on the floor, the EVE merging with the ADAM, showing in alternating blue-red energies in Cohen’s body.
Suddenly Cohen went limp, sighing. Then he sat up, chortled gleefully, and vanished. There was an ambient sucking sound as a thump of air rushed to fill the sparkling vacuum where he’d been.
“Sander?” Martin’s tongue felt thick. It was hard to talk. His head pounded like a parade drum thumped by a cocaine fiend. But he felt good, profanely good …
A sucking, a sizzling, a Cohen-shaped sparkling, and there he was, materializing at the door to the corridor. “Ha ha! Look! I did it, Martin! I teleported! Ha ha ha!”
It seemed to Martin that Cohen’s face was rippling within itself, bumps rising and falling on it as if little pistons were pumping randomly under his facial skin.
Martin laughed—it didn’t matter, really, what was happening to Sander Cohen. Nothing mattered! The energy roared like a tornado in the room. The sinews of visible electric power stretched and snapped in the very air.
He looked around, expecting to see these powerful forces throwing the furnishings about, whipping things through the air. But nothing was affected. He was seeing these energies in his mind.
“Come, come, follow me, I have a special delight for us in the rehearsal room!” Cohen crowed, whirling about, dancing toward the door. “Come, come and see my guests!”
“Guests? What sort, Sander? I’m not sure I can deal with guests. I feel strange…”
“But you must!” Cohen insisted gleefully. “This is a test! I test all my disciples! Some shine like galaxies … some burn like a moth at the flame! Just remember: the artist swims in a lake of pain! Perhaps he evolves into something magnificent—perhaps he drowns! Will you drown—or will you come along?”
Sander Cohen went out the door, and Martin was somehow swept along behind him, carried by some powerful inner current. He was unable to walk slowly, unable to think slowly. He was a living dynamo of energy.
No wonder people get addicted to this.
That thought came, and he pushed it rudely aside. No raining on the parade! And the parade drum thumped frantically, pacing him down the hall to the rehearsal room at the rear of the backstage area. Cohen had already teleported ahead.
Martin felt like he was waterskiing, pulled along in a bracingly cold medium by a powerful engine. He burst through the door into the rehearsal room and found Sander Cohen stalking back and forth in front of three people, their arms spread in restraints. They were bound to three interlinked metal frames bolted to the small rehearsal stage …
It was all seen through a glass darkly, for Martin—a filter like mental sunglasses that made some bits shine out and muted others. It seemed unreal, almost two-dimensional, like it was all happening to someone else. Like a movie …
“Please!” said a busty, frowzy woman with flapper-style brown hair. She was pinioned on the left side of the practice stage. “Let me go!” Her eyes kept fluttering, perhaps because one of them was losing its false eyelashes. She wore a ripped black shift and one red pump, the other foot bare.
In the center framework, a middle-aged man with a tonsure of white hair shook in his bonds in rage and fear. His suit was torn and bloody, his nose was swelling and leaking blood, his left eye swollen shut. Cohen’s third “guest” was a young man in a T-shirt, with tousled blond hair and a little red-blond beard that, along with his green trousers, made Martin think of Robin Hood. He looked like he was drugged or drunk; he just sort of hung there in his restraints, murmuring inaudibly, eyes slitted, lifting his head now and then.
“We shall call these three Winken, Blinken, and Nod!” declared Cohen, parading around them, clapping his hands.
I was right; it’s a movie, Martin thought. It’s not real, none of it. He was in the audience and in the movie at the same time. It felt good to watch it and to be the hero of it.
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