Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

These are their choice for young ones.

But Nico knows they will need even this maimed creature. They must dress her in peasant rags and deed her to some surrogate big sister, herself rustically keloided from neck to nether parts. Offer the baby up to be chucked into the air in time to the delivering ditty. That, on second look at the synopsis, is exactly the point, the secret of this story's draw. The day on which their bruised, abused, futureless ancient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.

cient counterparts skipped town seven hundred years before is the same day that will freeze facts in their pragmatic tracks, finally freeing these chart-condemned to do the tag thing. Go piggyback. Believe in amateur theatrics. Act out the child's play.

Nico takes over the idea as if it had been his from the start. He launches a massive promotional blitz to sell the story to the others. Persuading the boys consists of the usual bribes and blood threats: debts canceled for cooperation, crucial comic sequels withheld for failure to comply. Most of the street savants, with some grounds, consider the entire project yet another load of Eurocentric, racist, imperialist, hegemonistic, queer-ball, degrading eco-exploitation. Why the fuck should they dress up as a bunch of doomed little Kraut goombas? And nary a martial arts sequence in the whole script.

Nicolino, inspired, co-opts these holdouts. '"You: we need you for the Rat King, Mr. Rat Heavy Heself. Big, ugly beefalo muffa, and chillin' like nobody's B. And you, you can be that Julius Caesar rat, the one who lives to write home about it. You, we're going to let be the principal baby-brutalizer. Strip you to your waist, give you a hockey mask. Think how awesome your tattoo will look under the footlights."

They're sold the instant they start bargaining for plum parts. This frees up Nico to concentrate on the females. In practice, he needs the blessing of only one of them: the boat princess, that Stepaneevong. The one who chose the fable in the first place. Through no effort of her own — she's either out in the halls learning how to limp without a crutch, or tucked in bed, booking for an imaginary final exam — she's become the revered senior statesgirl. Fagging unfair, but go figure. It's as if all the other mindless rope skippers, the guaranteed survivors of this ward, have wind of what's up, and defer to her in shame.

He pays a bedside visit, this time with no sidekicks, no seconds in tow. He stands at her elbow, Dodger cap in hand, maybe thinking that the last lone tufts of eiderdown on his evacuated skull might win him some sympathy points. "Yo, Joyless! What is it now? Trig? Bio? Nuclear physics? Spelling?"

"History," she replies, concealing the edges of her widening mouth behind two fingers. She has learned to hide her excitement like winter seed under snow.

"Again? Stuff never ends, does it? I ever show you this great Treasure Chest Illustrated Classic, the one where this whole army of kids — I mean, like we'd be the oldest ones in the entire outfit — storm off to whip the Musclemen? Really happened. That's the unbelievable part."

"What happened?" she asks, all hushed urgency.

"I ransomed it to the adults."

She means the crusade, not the comic, but does not correct the confusion. Nico picks up and flips nervously through her stack of books, picking at her paper-snipped place markers. Rome, Münster, London, Roanoke, Vientiane: each slip marks another adjacent subterranean prison, points of arrival and departure. The scraps slip from his palsied fingers and scatter across the floor like tails on a paper donkey. "Criminetly. You read some weird stuff, I'm here to tell you."

She stares at him, her eyes huge, relentless, and black. "What part?" she says to him, softer than the sweetest confession. "What part do you want me to play?"

The question pops his clutch, but big time. Here she is, coming out both feet, as it were, in favor of the plan. That's it, then; cake. Wrapped up. History. No fight, no hard sell necessary. She'll bring the femmes into the fold, wagging their tails behind them. Slight shift of the bargaining chips, and he ought to be out of suppliant mode, well clear of the proverbial woods. The tough part should be over with, all but put to bed. But in fact, they just now slink up alongside it.

Of course she already knows. Knows it the way she knew he could be depended on to kidnap her choice of tales and take over the production. Knows it the way she knew, on first thumbing through the picture book, that Hamelin was already in the itinerary, a scheduled stop for history's through-service deportation trains.

He spins around defensively, unnerved. "I mean, what the hell, eh? Somebody's gotta take charge. Who do we have capable of pulling something like this off? Floor full of target dummies. Sickos, freaks, and illegals. You: okay. So you're our supreme genius. Everybody knows that. But you're handicapped. You don't understand this country. This place. They think they can buy us off with toxic canned peaches and Jell-O cubes. If that doesn't work, they cram a tube down all available holes, park us in front of the vid, and threaten to send us home if we get better. I swear on my last sheet of toilet paper, they're trying to deep-six us."

"Deep…?" Joy casts about for the translating dictionary among her hopeless references.

"Deep-six, eighty-six. 'Za matta? You no speekee? Out. Off. Post-hole us. Cash in our chips. Cancel our receipts."

"You mean kill us?" Her eyes widen impossibly. This is the truth they have been waiting to whisper to one another. This one. "Why?"

'Well, aren't you the little angel choir? They don't like our kind, case you haven't noticed. Screws up their bookkeeping, jerks around the bed count. And it's a whole lot cheaper to kill us than to give us our own little jungle kingdom." "But they take care of us."

"Will you listen to this! I don't know whether to laugh or barf. "Take care of us' is right. Okay, so they stop short of lethal injections. But they bust their royal butane to make this place about as survivable as a slow boat to… Oh, shitski, Joyless. Sorry. Just an expression, huh?"

A slipup ugly enough to bungle this whole transaction, to condemn it to Sudden Infant Death. But Miss South China Sea punishes him with nothing worse than a serene smirk. You bay, the look says. You harmless boy; how I'd love to rouge your sagging cheek pouches, lipstick that chapped mouth red, tie silk bows through the few remaining sprigs of your hair!

Their complicity infuriates Nico. She'd be frog bait by now, night-crawler in another world, were she not essential to his plan. And in one quick shudder, he receives the even creepier realization: he is essential to hers. Her legs, perhaps? Her mobility. She uses him as executor, someone manic enough to enact the story she, for her own private reasons, has selected.

Point blank between them, they come to terms: We must play this thing or die. Repeat the fading incantation and pass through, rush the crawl-sized slit or be rubbed out, deep-sixed, three baby steps away from the tear they reopen in the seamless cell wall. In the lost boys' world he would cackle at her, threaten her with something sharp, leap through the window and escape on the pulleys and spy wires sketched in by this issue's artist. But in this world, he only chews on his bleeding cuticles, pushes back his nonexistent locks, and hisses, "So. How's about it?"

Her turn for appalling compromise now. "What part?" she asks again, head down. Having bestowed him with executive powers, she must bend to whatever role those powers assign her. "I could make the costumes," she bleats. "I could whisper the lines. I could look up the different versions of the story. There must be an awful lot." Stress scatters her cantering accents wildly through the syllables. "I could print the programs. I'm a very careful printer." Better than any of her peers born into twenty-six letters. The advantage of the late starter. "Well, yeah, fine. I'm sure you print just great. Only, you see, we've got that base covered already. What we really need now is…" He frets at the row of plastic sizing holes at the back of his cap band. He cannot bring himself to spell it out. It. What we really need.