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

will it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Omnipotent Man: “For the first time I can remember…I’m totally afraid.”

One of life’s greatest paradoxes is that only when we see ourselves at our most naked, weak, foolish, ugly, disappointing, cowardly, broken, repulsive, selfish, and stupid, can we really appreciate just how special we are. For Wally to fill up the tank of personal reintegration, he was going to have to pull into the filling station of exhaustive self-assessment. And so will you.

Get a quiet space and writing tools, and block off enough time to write out all the occasions in your life in which you’ve been weak, foolish, ugly, disappointing, cowardly, broken, repulsive, selfish, and/or stupid. A day should be enough. Don’t hold back. Total honesty is absolutely necessary.

When you’re done, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who else other than I is to blame for what I’ve done?

2. How did I personally choose to be a victim of myself?

3. How did I enable myself to become a perpetrator against myself and everything I hold dear?

4. How many of the psychemotional barnacles attached to the ship of my consciousness am I willing to burn off in order to sail freely across the ocean of well-adjustedness? And why am I too cowardly to burn them all off at once and be done with it? Is it because I’m confusing the barnacles with the ship?

As you’re about to see, the challenge to Iron Lass’s immortality would threaten not only her own survival, but Wally’s recovery…and Festus Piltdown’s soul.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Unrequited Hate

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, 9:16 A.M.

The Roots Beneath the Tree

I sat upon the immaculate silver sofa in the immaculate bronze room across from the palace-owner, who was wearing his immaculate ivory suit and golden cravat. Festus Piltdown had no inkling of the reconnection—or confrontation—I’d already set in motion to bring him the peace he so desperately needed from a man he considered an enemy.

Yet the desperation and fragility Festus felt at that moment in his life demanded that I act, in secrecy, to bring to him a one-man intervention.

While Festus and I watched highlights from the 8:30 A.M. Fortress of Freedom press conference on the wallscreen, his aged manservant placed a cappuccino on the marble coffee table beside me before disappearing.

NBC reporter:—believe the destruction of Asteroid Zed to be in any way connected with the death of Hawk King?

X-Man: I can’t confirm that, no. Not yet, anyway.

CBS reporter: There are reports that Iron Lass is dying from unnamed causes, possibly connected with the orbital prison disaster. Can you comment?

X-Man: That’s true—there are reports.

CBS reporter: Yes, but, but what about them? Are they true? Is her condition connected with the bombing of Zed or the death of Hawk King?

X-Man: I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time.

ABC reporter: Are you investigating Iron Lass’s condition to see if there is a connection?

X-Man:…All I can say is—and I’m not saying she even has a “condition,”—but I will follow to the ends of this solar system any lead that points to a threat to the F*O*O*J, to this country, or to our planet—

PNN reporter: Following the destruction of Asteroid Zed, a Knight-Ridder poll put you fifty-five percentage points ahead of the Flying Squirrel for Director of Operations. How do you respond to those who say you’re exploiting the death of Hawk King, the resignation of Omnipotent Man, and allegations about Iron Lass’s health to advance your own personal political aspirations?

X-Man: My—! Look here! My only aspirations… are truth, and justice! And let truth and justice prevail though the heavens fall!

“Can you believe that hyperactive hypocrite?” snapped the Flying Squirrel, and then, as the image switched, he moaned, “Oh, not this again!”

Onscreen rolled the by then infamous funeral footage of Festus punching Kareem and Kareem hitting him back, with the anchor’s voice-over about X-Man’s “meteoric rise.”

“Meteors never rise, you subcretinous discombobulators! They only fall, crash, and burn out!”

At that moment, Festus’s butler Mr. Savant, so ancient and withered he might conceivably have been an unbandaged mummy, returned to say, “Madame is ready to receive visitors now, Lord Piltdown.”

Noticing my reaction, Festus shrugged and said, “I acquired a peerage a few years back. Thatcher owed me for all the good press. Come on.”

As Mr. Savant led us on the motorized pedway like a guardian mummy through its pyramid, we wound our way through the labyrinthine corridors of Festus’s legendary crimefighting headquarters, the Squirrel Tree. Every hallway was actually the interior of one of the Tree’s “branches,” and each chamber the interior of a giant “leaf.” Vast hydrogen-powered magnetic counter-gravity generators kept the entire assembly, minus the trunk, suspended aboveground. With the facility’s “smart garage,” Trashbots™, Lawnbots™, air traffic dominance, and DETHscan security system coordinated by the Squirrel-Brain 9000X, the Squirrel Tree made Bill Gates’s “smart house” seem like a Fisher-Price play set.

Passing through the cavernous Vehicle Hollow containing the Squirrel Copter, Squirrel Sub, and Squirrel N-ICBMs, and a fabulous five-story-tall replica of the one-dollar bill, we finally entered the Medical Hollow. Mr. Savant led us to the room, pulled back the curtain, stood aside.

From her bed, Hnossi Icegaard looked up at us.

The whites of her eyes were like filthy old pennies. Her face and neck were splotched ashen red and brown. In the worst sections, her skin was flaking off like the scales of a dead rattlesnake dropped into a campfire.

“Rust poisoning,” muttered Festus. “Advanced.”

“Ja,” rasped Hnossi, chuckling out of a bravura smirk. “But you shudt get a look at ze uzzer guy.”

“When the cells opened on Asteroid Zed,” explained Festus, “the Desiccator attacked her, that goddamned bastard.”

“He dit not suffer long—” she said, only to pitch forward in a hacking fit, grating out a sound like someone repeatedly hitting the ignition on a running car. Finally she slowed, cleared her throat, and finished her sentence: “…vizzout his torso.”

I approached her, gingerly touched her wrist. It felt like phyllo pastry. I told