The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [96]
I put it in my pocket and went out.
39
A few days after my encounter with LeBov, and my first dose of the child chemical that triggered brief fits of speech and illness-free comprehension, I left my office, rounded a corner, and was abruptly ambushed by one of his people. Someone with a covered face hugged me and below my buttock I felt the cold potion flow.
LeBov was waiting for me in the cellar, outside the door to their Jew hole. He was attended by technicians hidden behind goggles, their heads wrapped in flesh-colored rags. Enough strips of foam insulate to cover a large man.
On LeBov’s neck a stained, brown bandage peeled up over a wound, threatening to fall off.
LeBov wanted to know if I had changed my mind, if I’d consider helping them.
The fluid from the injection activated, shooting through me like a rope of electricity. Immediately I felt that this dose of child fluid was different, laced with something harsh, a ballast of amphetamine, a numbing agent. They’d been tampering with it, pushing it through betas.
My speech resources were back. In my face a buzzing commenced, to be relieved only by talking. This medicine didn’t seem to just allow for language, it demanded it.
I looked through the window to the cold, vaulted space where the hole was.
Something pink was tied off to a pole, floating out of sight. It looked like a person hovering in the air.
LeBov asked, “Are you in?”
“You must have others,” I said.
LeBov said, “We do. Nine of them. Foresters. You’ll meet them. They’re a lovely crowd, and your participation, as they say, would round things out nicely.”
Nine of them. And I would make ten. Someone had been doing his reading, a little elementary Jewish procedure, put abroad into the world by our clever elders only to mislead the curious. It astonished me that people expected us to share our holy text, our rules and rituals, with just anyone, or even with each other. Sharing. What a tragic mistake. While the other religions begged for joiners, humping against the resisters until they yielded and swore themselves forever to their principles, we set about repelling them, erecting barriers to belief. It was how I preferred it. And LeBov had taken the bait. The so-called quorum of ten Jews required to ignite proper worship. This rule was one of our better decoys. I marveled at how off track he was. Whoever was running Forsythe thought a Jewish tradition, invented in the first place, was going to assist their decipherment of the transmission, a rigorously difficult act not tied to mystical belief whatsoever.
“You think a minyan is going to help you here?”
LeBov coughed with wretched force, while the technicians kept him from falling. His shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“Well, you tell me,” he said, heaving. “Enlighten me, please. Tell me what will help. I’m at your mercy.”
I looked away from him and said, “I wish you were.”
LeBov waved aside his technicians, but they didn’t leave, only took a step back while continuing to hold him up.
“How about this?” he said to me. “Let’s go take a look at something.”
I paused. LeBov’s show-and-tell had its downside. The last time he’d offered to show me something, it was a room full of children having their essence sucked free into a cup, to be boiled down somewhere into a speech-releasing agent. An essence now forced into my body twice. I didn’t get to see what happened to those children after the fluid was withdrawn, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see anything new that this man might have to share, but, despite myself, I was already following him.
We went up one level to a low, ankle-height window.