Necrom

"The cops are going to be looking for us in the worst possible way."

Slide dismissed this with a shrug. "There's a whammy on this car that's going to make it very difficult to find."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Listen, kid. The cops are the least of our worries. In a matter of a few hours, this city is going to be one great big radioactive parking lot. Although the UKR doesn't know it yet, the Hind-Mancus have decided to use the confusion created by Lancer's murder to launch a sneak nuclear attack. Fifty of their flying wing atom bombers are coming up hard on their failsafe points right now."

Gibson had a good deal of trouble adjusting to this new piece of news. "You're putting me on?"

"The hell I am. I'm not just getting out of this dimension for the sake of your health. This whole place is going to blow."

"Unbelievable."

Slide shook his head. "Not really. The same thing nearly happened in your dimension. I know for a fact that some of the politburo wanted to do exactly the same thing except that Khrushchev put his foot down."

"Are the Kamerians so blown away by the assassination that they can't defend themselves? Can't they stop the bombers?"

Slide grimaced. "Sure, they'll have fighters in the air and their SAM batteries will be on full red alert. The League's going to lose most of its bombers but some are going to get through. Some always do, and some are quite enough."

Nephredana was unwrapping a stick of gum.

"So where are we going to be when the shit hits the fan?"

"Back at the Hole in the Void."

Nephredana rolled her eyes. "The Hole in the Void? Does that mean you're going to go on another hundred-day drunk?"

Even Gibson, with his record of wretched excess and current bemused state, couldn't help but stand awed by a being who could routinely contemplate a three-month, nonstop binge. Slide, however, was shaking his head. "No hundred-day drunk this time round. Things are so delicately balanced right now that we're all going to have to stay on top of it."

Nephredana frowned. "It's really that bad?"

Slide nodded. "It's really that bad."

Gibson was starting to come out of shock and move back into confusion. "I'm grateful for being rescued and everything, but I really could use a certain amount of filling in as to what's going on. I mean, I seem to have just come out of an assassination conspiracy that I still don't fully understand, and now you're telling me a nuclear war is going to break out and we're going to someplace called the Hole in the Void. You've got to realize that I'm feeling a little ragged at the edges after all this."

Slide turned away from the road again and gave Gibson a hard look. "So I not only have to save your sorry ass, I also have to explain what's going on because you're too dumb to figure it out for yourself?"

"I wouldn't put it quite that way but…"

"But you'd like to know what the deal is."

"I'd feel a lot better."

"I wouldn't count on that."

"I was afraid you'd say that."

"So where do want me to start?"

"This nuclear attack is quite inevitable?"

Slide nodded. "Quite inevitable. Accept that and then put it out of your mind. This isn't your city or your country or even your dimension. You may find the death of all these people regrettable, but there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. Regret it and move on. Screw this dimension, in fact. What can you do with a place that has a supermarket chain called Hitler's? There's plenty ahead for you to worry about."

"That's not so easy to do."

Slide made a take-it-or-leave-it gesture. "You don't have time for the luxury of guilt or trauma. Concentrate on what happens next."

"The Hole in the Void?"

"The Hole in the Void."

"What is this Hole in the Void?"

"It's a bolthole, a refuge for us demons, an anomalous place in a fold between the dimensions. A few of us old boys created a safe hideout there, a place to go when the regular time stream gets too hairy. It'll give us a breathing space, you dig?"

Gibson shook his head. "Not really, but I expect I'll find out when I get there. I assume the present situation qualifies as hairy."

"Megahairy."

"How do we get there?"

"Right now, I'm looking for a soft spot where we can trans through."

Gibson could only assume that a soft spot was something akin to the transition point at Glastonbury that he and the streamheat had used to get to Luxor. Slide and his gang seemed to have a much more casual attitude toward moving from one dimension to another than anyone else he'd encountered on his travels.

"So what about the conspiracy? Why did the streamheat want to get rid of Lancer?"

Slide winked and tapped the side of his nose confidingly.

"You're making the mistake that everyone else makes. Conspiracies are hatched in the shadows and, like anything else in the shadows, they frighten people. The temptation is to imagine that they are much bigger and better organized than they really are. Most of the conspiracies I've ever become involved in have been a mess. They're usually uneasy alliances of individuals with a lot of different goals and motivations. Nobody tells the truth, and the internal fighting usually starts well before the deed's been done. Nothing I've seen of this one has caused me to think that it was any exception to the general rule. The way I figure it, the Luxor natives who were in on it were pretty straight ahead.in just wanting to off the president and seize power. Their mistake was that they were too greedy. They only had their eyes on the prize and they didn't pause to wonder how Hind-Mancu, the big rival superpower, might react."

"This is Raus's bunch?"

Slide nodded. He was looking at the road again, driving with one hand and taking a cheeroot from the pocket of his duster coat with the other. He lit it with the same snap of his fingers that he'd demonstrated for Gibson and Windemere in Ladbroke Grove.

"I don't think Raus himself was the same as all the rest. Anyone who keeps Balg penned up in his basement probably has a much more complicated game plan. When the dust settled, though, he probably expected to be crowned king."

"And the streamheat?"

"Those bastards? That's the hard one. The one thing you can count on is that they're lying ninety percent of the time, with a dime of truth to keep you off balance."

"So what's the truth in this instance?"

"The truth? It's probably some floating crap game or movable feast; it usually is around the streamheat. What's their euphemism for getting their faces into other folks' business? Constrainment of chaos? A poke here, a prod there, a dirty little deal in a back alley or a banana skin on a crucial sidewalk, the odd cosmic manhole cover removed, and they think they're playing fucking God, but all they're really doing is screwing things up worse than they're screwed up already. The thing you gotta remember about the streamheat, kid, is that they're basically a bunch of semisavage sons of bitches whose physics peaked too early. A whole bunch of us, the ones who knew what was what back then, should have gone in there in 1427 and wiped out the lot of them. A culture that stumbles across atomic weapons while it's still making sacrifices to the Sun God needs to be nuked themselves, right back into the Stone Age. But no, don't interfere, we all said. Let them work out their destiny. Well, no more, kid, total the swine and work out the destiny later. The problem with the streamheat is that, despite all the crap they give out about interzone cooperation, they're really the tool of a culture that's still as mad as hell that it can't predict the future. That's why they always try to pretend that they can. All their computers, their logic engines, their behavioral projections, societal convection rolls, Lorenz's butterfly, and all the other paraphernalia, it's all just chicken entrails and burned goat bones when you get down to it. All their efforts really only prove that they don't have a plan, they don't have an overall strategy. They run around in a frenzy being personally offended by the chaotic unpredictability of the universe and trying to fix it so it'll be the way they like it. When they fail, as they almost always do, they become even more hysterically convinced that they are fighting some kind of holy war against the forces of havoc, randomness, and disorder. It makes about as much real sense as human sacrifices to the Sun God."