The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [109]
★★We’ll just have to stop him ourselves, then,★★ I say, trying to encourage her.
★★Whatever. It doesn’t work that way, Bob.★★
★★What doesn’t?★★
★★The geas.★★ She stands up then smiles at the steward. “If you don’t mind?” she says.
The steward stands aside. There’s nobody human home behind his eyes; I sidle past him with my back to the wall. Ramona opens the side door beside the staircase. There’s a short passage with several doors opening off it. “I’ve got something to show you,” she tells me.
Huh? Since when does Ramona have the run of Billington’s yacht? I follow her slowly, trying to worry out what’s going on.
“In here.” She opens a door. “Don’t worry about the guards, they’re either down below or up on the superstructure—this is the owner’s accommodation area and they’re not needed as long as we stay in it. This is the grand lounge.”
The lounge is surprisingly spacious. There are molded leather-topped benches all around the walls, and bookcases and glass cabinets. In the middle of the floor is something that might have been a pool table once, before a monomaniacal model maker repurposed it as his display cabinet.
“What the hell is it?” I lean closer. On one side are two model ships, one being the Explorer, which I recognize from the huge drilling derrick; but the center of the table is occupied by a bizarre diorama: old dog-eared hardback novels and a worn-looking automatic pistol, piled on top of a reel of film and a map of the Caribbean. Something else: a set of fine wires tracing out—“Shit. That’s a Vulpis-Tesla array. And that box must be a—is that a Mod-60 Gravedust board it’s plugged into? Summoning up the spirits of the dead. What the hell?”
There’s a GI Joe doll in evening dress, clutching a pistol. It’s wired up to the summoning grid by its plastic privates. On either side of it stand two Barbies in ball gowns, one black, one white. Behind them lurks another GI Joe, this time hacked so that he’s bald and bearded, in something that looks like Wehrmacht dress grays.
All at once, I get the picture.
“It’s the core of his coercion geas, isn’t it? It’s a destiny-entanglement conjuration, on a bigger scale. James Bond, channeling the ghost of Ian Fleming as scriptwriter . . . Jesus.” I glance across the table at Ramona. She looks flushed and apprehensive.
“Yes, James—” She bites her lip. “Sorry, monkey-boy. It’s too strong in here, isn’t it?”
I stare at her through narrowed eyes. Oh yes, I’m beginning to get it. I’m half-tempted to shoot the bint now, then stuff her through the porthole before the bad guys get their mileage out of her, but I need all the friends I can get right now, and until I’m sure she’s gone over to SPECTRE I can’t afford to—
What. The. Fuck?
I blink rapidly. “Is there somewhere we can go that’s not quite so . . . ?”
“Yeah. Next door.”
Next door is the library or smoking room or whatever the hell it’s called. My head stops swimming as soon as we get a wall between us and that diorama from Hell. “That was bad. What’s the big idea? Why does Billington want to turn me into James Bond?”
Ramona slumps into an overstuffed chair. “It’s not about you, Bob. It’s all about plot. The way the geas works, he’s set himself up as the evil villain in this humongous destiny-entanglement spell targeted against every intelligence agency and government on the planet. The end state for this conjuration is that the hero—which means whoever’s being ridden by the Bond archetype—comes and kills the villain, destroys his secret floating headquarters, stymies his scheme, and gets the girl. But Billington’s not stupid. He may be riding the Villain archetype but he’s in control of the geas and he’s got a good sense of timing. Before the Hero archetype gets to resolve the terminal crisis, he ends up in the villain’s grasp under circumstances such that nobody else is positioned to deal with the villain’s plan. Ellis figures that he can short the geas out before it goes terminal and makes the Bond figure kill him. At which