SG: Rad #92 (2/2): a Mammal

[swede3000 at earthlink.net]

[ Special collector's edition 'fixed line-wrap' version! ]

(continued from part one, preceding...)

                                  ***

     Aside from the shades-wearing blank-faced man in the three-piece suit on the
front porch, the house seemed no different than any other in the sprawling, sun-
drenched Los Angeles suburb called Crescent Crescent.  Had her mother not told her the 
reason the muscle man was there, Rumi Moroboshi would have assumed it was so that, if 
any member of the Seconds Clan got drunk, they would be able to identify which house
was theirs from the back of the taxi taking them home.
     The thought made her giggle, which her mother clearly felt was an inappropriate
reaction to being scolded for buzzing airplanes.
     "...not taking any of this seriously," said Glum, as they approached
the porch.  "Throwing Johnny at a moving airplane was very dangerous."
     "I don't think so--"
     "The plane could have been damaged," Glum interrupted.  "But
as long as this is the only time it's happened and the only time it *will* happen,
we won't ground you.  Right, dear?"
     "Like, yah," her father said, making his usual contribution to the
cause of Rumi's discipline.
     Kent Clark had been more verbose on the subject when they brought Johnny back
to him and Key.  He gave Rumi a speech on moral rectitude, and Rumi guessed it would
have been inspiring, had it not soon veered into the subjects of the sanitary habits
of criminals, steroid abuse in baseball, why cricket was an apt metaphor for life,
and breakfast foods that went well with cereals.  Possibly there had been more, 
but Rumi's hearing shut down around that point.  The Clarks had gone sightseeing,
rather than inflict on Eivandt's non-space-tech-reinforced house something Key
called 'the Clark charm,' and Rumi supposed that Kent's speech could
still be going on.
     "And an *anvil,* too," Glum continued.  "You've got your
father's strength, all right...."
     Rumi, eager to change the subject, called out to the man on the porch.
     "Hey, who're you?"
     "Secret Service, ma'am," the man in the suit replied.  "The
party's through the house and on the deck in back."
     "Like, don't we have to, like, show I.D. or something?" Rad asked.
     The Secret Service man gave his head a single shake.  "You've already
been identified.  And if I might say so sir, on behalf of all of us... that is one
amazing tan."
     "Like, ah, thanks, dude."
     Rumi could tell that her dad's response to the compliment was tempered 
by the way the Secret Service man spoke, saying 'that is one amazing tan'
the same way he might say 'that is some green grass' or 'that is certainly
a mammal.'  She remembered learning about the Service on the voyage to Earth,
and never being able to find the answer to the question of why they called it Secret
if everyone knew about it.
     The interior of the house was cluttered with magazines, games, and other odds
and ends, and they had to take a winding path to the kitchen and its back door. 
Classic rock music at low volume greeted them as they stepped out onto the 'rustic
oak' deck.
     "Dudes!" someone exclaimed.  A vaguely Belgian man no taller than
Rumi practically leapt over to hug Rad and Glum.  They returned the hug with equal
enthusiasm, which made the man's eyes bug out.
     Manny Seconds was in no way dressed in a manner befitting a former President
-- even one whose short tenure had been officially re-numbered to 41.5 by an act
of Congress.  His loose shirt was ringed by images of numerous beer bottles, and
his blue jean shorts looked like they had crawled out from beneath a thrift store's
bargain bin.
     "Rumi!" he exclaimed, when the hug for her folks was done.  "You're...
tall... er!"
     "Hi, Uncle Manny," she managed to say before being swept up in a 
hug as well.  "Is Aunt Chal... no, that's right."
     "She wanted to be here," said Manny -- who was no more 'really'
her Uncle than Kent Clark -- as he set her down.  "Woulda had to stay in the
house, but... well, you know.  Halliburton's still making trouble with their
hostile takeover bid, and there's been new developments in the pyramid exploration
project... hey, you hear about that?"
     Rumi nodded.  She noticed the gray hair at Manny's temples, and wondered
when it had turned that way.  The last time she saw him,
when he and the entire Seconds clan had visited Planet California, it had been all
black.
     "It's something Chal's been wanting to do for a long time,"
said Manny, after he released her.  "Intercontinental Salvage got the pyramid
back in place after the Nun on the Road drove off with it for a while, but they 
never checked out all the stuff that got exposed while it was gone.  She thinks 
it's part of this energy system that could eliminate the need for oil altogether...."
     Rumi let her 'Uncle' ramble on as she turned her attention to the others
on the deck and in the back yard.  She recognized Manny's brother Eivandt at
the grill, fighting what appeared to be a losing battle against burning the beer
brats.  His wife, Alice, was attempting to hug Glum without tipping over the 
overloaded plate o' meat she held.  Rad had flown down to the yard, where three 
similar-looking eleven-year-olds were playing some obscure variation on croquet with 
their parents, Tom and Laura McCavish-Laffalot.
     *Oh, this is going to be a _fine_ day,* thought Rumi.  *I wonder if I can feign
unconsciousness until it's time to go.*
     "...but enough about that," said Manny.  "I have to go see your
dad about something."
     She watched him head for the yard.  Another blank-looking Secret Service man
was standing by the deck entrance, watching Manny as he passed.  Rumi had initially
mistaken him for a post.
     The one person she had been hoping to see was not around.  Rumi had a sinking
feeling that it was not because she was inside the house, but went up to Alice and
Eivandt to ask.
     "She was invited," said Alice, after setting the plate of brats down
to give her the inevitable hug.  "Said her and Miguel were going surfing today."
Her tone indicated that she doubted it was the complete truth.
     "Cendra moved out, then?" Glum asked.  Though it had been three years
since she had last seen the Seconds clan, Rumi knew that her mother kept in close
contact with them.  This, though, was the first Rumi had heard about Cendra leaving.
     "Maybe two months ago," said Eivandt, as he waved smoke from his 
eyes.  "Day after her 21st birthday.  Her boyfriend's got this apartment
near the beach, don't ask me *how* he can afford it since the only work he does
is part-time DJing for a radio station.  Cendra's still going to school full-time,
though she says she's thinking of dropping out and going into law enforcement."
     Rumi caught his brief glance at Alice when he said this, and deduced that Alice
was less enthused about Cendra becoming a police officer than Eivandt.
     "You haven't mentioned the worst part," Alice said.
     "I don't think we need to mention--" Glum started.
     "Miguel is a werewolf."
     Rumi blinked.  She remembered that her folks occasionally had adventures, back
in 'the day,' involving a werewolf or two.  She remembered something.
     "Libertarian or Revolutionary Anarchist?"
     "Green," said Eivandt.  He shrugged.  "First I'd heard of
it, but he says that the packs are into all sorts of fringe politics these days.
My dear sweet wife doesn't like it because she's a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat."
     Rumi had barely understood what she had tried to learn of Earth politics, and
almost nothing of what was called 'the American strain.'  Ottsamaddawidu
xenoanthropologists had written a lengthy section on the American system, trying
to explain it this way and that before coming to the conclusion that a local drug
called 'the crack' was involved.  She guessed the reason Eivandt gave would
make sense to someone using 'the crack,' and decided not to inquire further.
     "Hey, you guys!" Alice called out to the yard.  "Get some brats
before we eat 'em all!"
     Her dad passed her, heading for the house.  There was a mix of excitement, 
confusion, and worry in his expression.  While Rad was no stranger to excitement
and confusion, Rumi did not often see worry there.
     'Uncle' Manny passed by, a similar expression on his more lined face.
She remembered he had said he had something to tell her dad.  What had it been?
     Glum, who was helping Alice and Eivandt with the food distribution, handed 
her a brat and a bun.  Rumi considered the brat and felt faintly repulsed.  It was
probably stuffed with a lot of the artificial gunk this area of the Earth inserted
into its foods.  But it was all the lunch she was likely to have, so she took a 
bite.
     It turned out to be surprisingly good... except for the papery part in the 
center.  Rumi pulled a rolled up piece of what appeared to be wax paper from inside
the brat.
     She unrolled it, and read a single word.

                                  ***

     "We should be okay in here," said Manny, as he closed the venetian
blinds over the front windows.  The Secret Service man out front was moving his 
lips and watching, but made no move for the front door.  "They don't like
it when I close myself off from them, especially here, but tough shit.  I went years
without Service protection after I resigned, and nobody said a word.  Then nine-eleven
happened, and... there you go."
     "Like, yah," said Rad, though Manny's Secret Service status had
been the last thing on his mind.  He watched as Manny dug around through the piles
of stuff in the living room, aided only by the light from the partially open overhead
skylight window.  "Hey, did I, like, tell you I saw, like, Karina Selanova,
like, today?"
     "Glum mentioned it," said Manny.  "Said Rumi got into some trouble."
     "Like, yah," Rad said.  "Karina, like, let her off, though. 
Which, like, totally surprised me, like, y'know?"
     Manny nodded.  "She was working for Chalandra for a long time, spearheading
the effort to clean up Harxxon.  Did as fine a job as was possible.  There's
a lot more that *could* be done, and her successor is all over that, but--"
     "Like, who's her successor?"
     "China."
     China Kyoko Moroboshi.  Akane's daughter, for lack of a better word to 
describe her convoluted journey from dream entity to flesh-and-blood human, and 
what that made her in relation to Akane.
     "She's still the same," Manny noted.  "Looks like a goth
ice queen, curses like a sailor, takes things apart in her head like... ah, here
it is."
     He pulled out a thin manila envelope and handed it to Rad.  Rad noticed it 
was still sealed.
     "What, like, is it?" Rad asked.
     "I thought I'd better wait until we could look at it together,"
said Manny.  "Considering the source."
     Rad turned the envelope over, and looked at the return address.
     He looked at it again.
     "Like, whoah," he said at last.  "A--"
     "Sssh!" Manny sssh'd him.  "Think, dude!"
     Rad thought, and looked at the envelope again.
     "Oh, yah," he said.  "Like, it looks like 'Miranda Satori,'
like, who we barely, like, know and stuff, like, sent us something, dude.  It's,
like, been how long?"
     "Too long," said Manny.  "Hell, after that business in Seattle
where the Mega-Intelligence Bureau got 'exposed,' I thought we'd never
hear from her again."
     What had gone on in Seattle nearly a decade ago had receded into the murky 
depths of history.  Most who remembered only recalled that there had been allegations
that the various intelligence agencies in the United States were actually fronts
for something called the M.I.B., and there were hearings that were going to take
place, and it was an outrage, and so on and so on and oh, look, Simon Cowell was
just totally mean to that fat singer on the screen there.  No one remembered if 
anything had actually been done about this 'M.I.B.,' but you never heard
about it anymore, so it must have been.
     Few remembered that the circumstances around the warehouse explosions that 
brought the M.I.B. to brief national attention, or that a hero named Ramrod was 
believed to have perished in those explosions.  Almost no one remembered the single
report in the Weekly World Schmooze that the fireman who was the last to see Ramrod
claimed he had been in the company of an Asian woman who looked 'kinda familiar,
like that Zhang Ziyi chick, you know, the one in that movie with the tiger and the
hidden whatsit.'
     To Rad's knowledge, only a dozen people -- not counting transcended beings
-- knew that the 'Asian woman' was Akane Moroboshi.  Only two people, to
Rad's knowledge, knew where she and Ramrod went after the explosions -- namely,
she and Ramrod.  The letters she once sent via the mail drop she set up under the
name 'Miranda Satori' dried up after that... until now.
     He tore open the envelope and withdrew its contents -- a black-and-white photo
of a guy in some kind of 'business casual' office clothes, holding a coffee
mug and a partially unwrapped Pop Tart.  It looked like it had come from a 
ceiling-mounted surveillance camera, but the photo was good enough for Manny to 
identify the man.
     "That's the Programmer," Manny said.  "Doesn't look 
like his shirt has circuitry on it anymore, but... yeah, that's him."
     "But, like, why does she, like, want us to find him?" Rad asked. 
"I thought you said, like, he wasn't, like, much of a villain, y'know?"
     "There's something on the back," Manny noted.  Rad turned the
picture over and found red-pen writing.  Manny read it aloud.
     "Find him before it's too late.  M.  P.S., look up."
     They looked up at the partially open skylight window.
     Rumi Moroboshi's eyes grew big.
     "Erk," she commented.

IS 'ERK' RIGHT?
SHOULD IT BE 'BWAH'?
WHAT ABOUT 'FWEE'?
WHO IS MANIPULATING THE PROGRAMMER INTO FRESH, INTERNET-EY EVIL?
WILL THEY GIVE HIM A BAD PERFORMANCE REVIEW?
WHO PUT THE PAPER INTO RUMI'S BRAT?
WHO WON THE CROQUET GAME?
WILL THE NEXT EPISODE HAVE SOMETHING RESEMBLING ACTION?
WILL IT TAKE LESS THAN 14 MONTHS FOR ME TO WRITE?

Blah blah blah *unsympathetic noise*... only on SUPERGUY!
--
Gary W. Olson
swede3000 at earthlink dot net
swede at novitious dot com
LiveJournal: http://gwox.livejournal.com


--
Gary W. Olson
swede3000 at earthlink.net