Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

fingernail into the frost, which I could see then was at least half an inch thick.

“Don’much care for people suggestin, Doc,” rumbled Omnipotent Man, “that I ain’t tellin th’truth.”

Cold Reality

You listen to Festus long enough,” he whispered, maybe more to himself than to me, “y’start not even knowin what’s true about y’seff. He c’n tear a strip off ya long enough to make a runway. On’y three or four people in th’world he don’never talk like that about. One’s Hawk King, who he thought was doggone infalalal…infabbubull…inflabbubble—”

“—infallible?”

“Right. Then there’s Ir’n Lass. An I spose…yeah, Chip Monk, his ol sidekick, even though they had a powerful fallin out, but he still don’never say s’much as a bad burp about him.

“But me, he’s always ridin me like a fat jockey on a poor man’s pony. Sayin Argon don’exist, that I done wrong by ’Merica, that I’m, ha-ha, that I’m addicted t’argonium. I mean, don’t that jess take jake-all?”

He glanced up at me for affirmation, while his fingernail continued cutting shapes into the frost field on the window, whether randomly or by design, I wasn’t sure.

“So…all these accusations are false, Wally?”

“Yes’m.”

“Let’s take it that they’re false, then. On a scale of one to three, with one being ‘quite a bit,’ and three being ‘one hundred percent,’ how much truth would you say Mr. Piltdown’s claims contain?”

His fingernail stopped on a downward diagonal line. “Well, I…I mean…I guess then I’d hafta say…one? Wait, wait a second, is there a zero?”

“No. How relieved do you feel that you’ve been able to release yourself even a little bit from the burden of these self-deceptions, Wally? With one being ‘very relieved,’ and three being ‘extremely relieved’?”

“Now, I didn’say that I was relieved, ma’am—”

“So how much do you wish that you had not let me know how relieved you are, with one being—”

“Now, Doctor Brain, sir, ma’am, what I’d, I’d, I’d really like to talk with you about is how goshdurn unfair it is for Festus t’be stompin on m’good name like that. An not just, like, a hour ago but for the last dadblasted fifty years!”

I tapped the device next to me. “Wally, do you know what this is?”

He resumed drawing his frost image, his finger cutting and dancing faster than I could see and raising a cloud of snow. Without even looking back at me, he said, “A DynaScan Reflective Spectroscope Junior®.”

“Very good. Do you know why I have it with me?”

He stopped, silent, his finger suddenly stuck in mid-draw.

“I’ve set it to scan for a rare substance,” I said quietly. “Do you know which one?”

“Listen, ma’am, in my work I fly through solar prominences, planetary cores, Cirque du Soleil shows—I could have any number a things stuck to my suit an cape—”

“According to the scanner, this substance isn’t on your suit, Wally, and you’re not wearing your cape. It’s on your fingers, teeth, lips, and nostrils.”

He turned to face me, stepping away from the window. Only then could I see he’d drawn three startlingly detailed portraits, each slightly different, but all clearly versions of the same face.

His own.

And then he turned back to the window and expectorated a gob of electrons onto the glass, and the images pfft! into steam.

“I aint no junkie!”

Grateful I’d taken the precaution of wearing a rubber under-suit and wooden shoes, I adjusted the lightning rods on either side of me. “Wally, I never referred to you as a—”

“I aint!” he said, pointing at me, and without any warning his fingers fell off his pointing-hand and hit the floor.

“Ah, H–E–double oil derricks, not again,” he said, stooping to pick up his scattered digits with his other hand.

“ ‘Not again,’ Wally? Are you saying this has happened before?”

He nodded, holding his fingers up against their stumps, spitting electrical fire upon them to weld them back into place.

I got up to pat the chair across from me to encourage him to sit down when he’d finished with his hand. He didn’t budge. “Wally, tell me about your father. Your real father. About Jobuseen-Ya.”

“Y’mean, you don’believe Festus’s foolin? You think I’m tellin the truth?”

“Wally, I know you’re telling the truth. At least, part of it. Now let’s see if together, we can get the rest.”

The Original Golden Age, or the Age of Fool’s Gold?

My daddy, m’real daddy, was the greatest official on th’entire planet Argon,” said Omnipotent Man after a long, long silence in which the Los Ditkos night began to flow through my bay window like a cola beverage into a crystal decanter.

Wally hardly looked at me, staring instead into the twinkling Bird Island skyline and the neon-metallic phallus of the Tachyon Tower rising above it.

“Daddy was a genius,” he said eventually. “Knew our whole planet was in danger.”

“What type of danger?”

“Oh, all kinds. Aliens, ’specially. And traitors. Plus, Argon was gon explode if we didn’keep relieving the planetary pressure of all its excessive energy, which Daddy was a pioneer in removing.”

“I see.”

“So anyway, he realizes one day thet the whole planet’s gon implode—”

“—explode?”

“—right, splode, like that very week, an he wants t’warn the public, but the damn gubment says he’s jess causin panic is all, an they orders him to shut up or else they gon throw him in jail. So they won’t let im say nuthin, he caint do nuthin, except one thing: save me. So he up and puts me in a rocket ship f’Earth.”

“You were how old? In Earth years, I mean?”

“I reckon round eight.”

“Now, Wally, what about the rest of the family? Your mother, siblings—you had two brothers and a sister—and everyone else in the extended -Ya family…didn’t he try to save any of them?”

“Naw, see, he could only spare the one rocket, so he couldn’send any a them. Else he mighta got noticed and got in trouble.”

“But if he were going to die with the planet anyway, then wouldn’t jail time be a rather empty threat?”

His forehead furrowed into a farmer’s field.

“So why,” I probed, “do you suppose your father saved you alone, out of