Chapter 8
Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless looked out over the sunset of his native country after Helen left him and sighed. Crickets chirped in a friendly chorus in the growing dark. Mosquitos were still thankfully repulsed with beauty berry oil. Small blessings, but both made his evening enjoyable. With such joys, life was good.
I'd love to stay here, such a nice quiet place. The house was beautiful, both in construction and the efforts he and Helen had put to its comforts. But staying wasn't possible now.
All my quick plans have come to fruition and quick enough for me to find another home, somewhere where the past won't find me. Somewhere where Helen and I can build something new.
It's been a long road from tramping about Europe, studying medical advances. That idealistic young man I was, hoping all the earnest interest of enlightened colleagues writing to me would accept my genius and credentials. You just hoped they would welcome you as sincerely in person when they saw a dwarf standing before them. Unfortunately for me, too many still held old biases about quick minds not existing in an ill-formed package.
I loathe such prejudices. I had to prove myself over and over–that or remove the opposition. Didn't earn friends in the doing, but the stuffy academics learned to give me my professional due. Fear is acceptable when respect can't be had.
As impressive as Europe was, there were things I found irritating, besides the biases. Science and religion's tightly intertwined relationship, for one. Many avenues of research were ignored, by such short-sited moral mindedness. I wrote a long overdue call for a proper study of disease to discover cures. And, as a body, the establishment turned their backs on me, called me a heretic.
Miguelito's mouth and eyes tightened, remembering it. His fists clinched. They said I was out to exploit the sufferings of the afflicted, called me morally bankrupt. No effort or threats changed their tone.
Just as I was ready to wash my hands of it all, I found supporters. They liked my boldness, my obvious genius. He smiled at the sinking sun. At least someone had the courage to recognize my strengths. They especially liked my aggressive approach to medicine.
Miguelito grinned. I knew their flattery and applauds had a purpose, but they offered me the chance to do research without limitations. They promised a laboratory and handsomely generous pay. The organization, LD laboratories, had even offered me challenges to solve and all the resources I needed. All they had asked was that I be exclusive to them, the only recipient of my successes. I didn't really understand what that was about, but I was greedy for the chance they offered. And it was nice being wealthy, thriving on such heady freedom. Living in Paris in high style with such interesting work was heaven.
Miguelito looked down on the dark lawn over the porch rail. Slight pangs over his obtuseness could still bother him. I didn't know they called themselves the League of Darkness or what they were about until much later. Can't say I care for political anarchy, but ignoring my benefactor's politics was the price for my position.
The League's projects had stretched me to my limits and beyond. After only a year, my superiors were impressed enough to give me access to their technology, asking me to innovate improvements. The League had medical and technological advances unheard of in the stuffy formal halls of accepted science. They praised me for my successes, telling me the master was well pleased.
"Never got to meet him," Miguelito told the crickets sadly.
Count Gregory, whoever he was, was a shadowy figure; feared as much as respected. They spoke of him like a god. After making improvements on several of their fancy gadgets, I was handed something far more complex to improve.
The adaptations to watcher technology were so complex. And my first sight of Helen was like a lightning bolt.
She was so beautiful. Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time, deemed of use rather than a problem to be rid of. Even devoid of a past and barely verbal after their other department wiped her memory of–well, whatever it was they had to hide.
She was brought to me along with other test subjects to become watchers. I was to implant her with my newer watcher enhancement. Mine, unlike the original, did not render the watcher a mindless zombie. Such short-sightedness made watchers easily outwitted by the clever. Through my work, the watcher could adapt to problems quickly, saving the constant turnover and needless bungling.
It wasn't without detractors. My superior had doubts. In some preliminary subjects, the free will of the watcher interfered with absolute obedience, degrading usefulness. Ridiculous, insisting on mindlessness, all the League needed to do was to recruit the right sort for the purpose to begin with. Yet, the League insisted on using people they happened on with active moral impediments.
He shook his head. "Well, waste not want not, mother used to say."
When Helen and others were brought to me, I was to make them useful. Better useful than dead, I say. Better useful as a watcher with my better version than be turned over to the other department and that misbegotten screw contraption.
Miguelito turned away from the dark yard, going back into the house, to his office, the past league commander's office. May he rest in peace, the disloyal sot.
Entering the dark room, he turned on the lamps and sat at the desk. He opened a drawer.
"Helen…" my beautiful Helen.
She was far too beautiful for what the league wanted of her. With no one the wiser, I deactivated parts of the implant before her surgery. After recovery and testing, all but she met the League's specifications. Helen, in their eyes, was a failure. Her free will remained too pronounced.
"The implant, however, is working," said I. "Her memory and sensory enhancements are successes. Let me use her as a laboratory assistant. It would be such a waste to just do away with her after investing so much time."
My superior said, "Whatever."
If I wanted another assistant, or a pet for that matter, he wouldn't have said no. I was too valuable to upset over a minor request.
I so loved training her, testing her abilities. Helen read classics and could recite from memory after one reading. She could do it with tasks too, learning piano with a few lessons and observation. After a little practice, Helen could play any piece of music I handed her. A few social events and the coaching of a duma, and she learned to be a proper lady the same way.
So nice having that perfect memory at my calling, letting her read everything the League had ever written about their technology I could get my hands on. My dear Helen–my goddess of knowledge, Athena and Venus, wrapped in one. We are such a perfect pair.
And then the League sent us here, as the war raged, to build a base of operations. I would be the lead scientist, second only to Commander Tipton.
Miguelito picked up his letters, putting them in a valise of important papers with all the financial information had found in the Commander's office. He smiled at the confirmation that his transfers of funds had been done.
The fool accused me of snooping when he caught me in his office.
"I'd have had no need to snoop, if he had shared information more freely, if he had been loyal to friends instead of a backstabber."
It was just two months ago that everything changed. Tipton's mood changed earlier, after we finished refurbishing the plantation and grounds. I asked what was wrong. He refused to say. He lost interest in his duties, got drunk regularly. I couldn't take his decline, not knowing the reason. That's when I used his drinking binges to go through his office. And there it was. A four-month-old notice that the master had disappeared. Europe was no longer safe for them, and the league was in turmoil.
And a month ago, a French League officer came with the newest seeds for the plantation. The improved castor beans would yield a stronger toxin and a higher yield of beans than the original. I so wanted to get them into my garden plot. The plant's oil would be three times the normal potency. I could guess what they might do with it, but I've stayed out of their political business too long to complain now. Not the time to be getting into it with pandemonium going on all over Europe.
Nice thing, the way sound is caught in this room by the stovepipe. I often listened to Tipton's meetings from the room above. Just two weeks ago, I heard their planning session, so instructive. They were going to abscond with the League's funds for the base. Part of it had already been done. They intended to kill everyone with the caster poison, including me, and head off to California.
"So much for loyalty and partnership."
Well, within days of that meeting, many did get sick, all the staff officers who had met our recent visitor. Some died so quick, I didn't get the chance to examine them–like the commander and his treacherous French cohort.
I called it yellow fever, easily mistaken for other things, especially with a reoccurring regional epidemic. There were some sick with it already, but they were recovering. Sad how the fast-acting contagion caused such a terrible relapse. It swept through the guard barracks and other housing. Interesting how so few of the slaves were affected.
And now, here I sit, commander of the plantation. All league quarters have been burned. All the dead have been buried. All the start-up funds have been converted to my name, along with the Frenchman's accounts on the east coast, nice of him and Tipton to bequeath me control over everything on their deathbeds.
"I've never been one to go down with a sinking ship."
Well, the League's master plan is no more. All that refined castor oil won't be introduced to central water supplies. The population of my native country won't be destroyed by some unknown fast-acting plague. Canada and Mexico will be safe. America's demise won't stop all immigration, assuring the League and quiet home to work its mayhem from. The new world owes me considerable homage, but I'll save them from the palpations of such a disaster averted and just accept the bequeath of the League's assets.
"It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Ambitious is too light a word." If Count Gregory conceived of it, I bow, breath taken away by the sheer audacity. But… too ambitious for a one-man act. I have no interest in obtaining the entire country or the world as he planned; just a small section of it will be fine.
"Perhaps the world one day."
Miguelito smiled and laughed. Surviving the death of the League and living in grand fashion on their coin should be enough, for now.
Miguelito finished packing away the more important records.
My equipment will be packed by tomorrow along with the store of seed and what distilled castor oil I have. "No since in wasting it."
"And where will we go?" Helen had asked him this evening during supper.
"Why, our own little Troy," I said, giving her an adoring smile. "A Troy you, my dear Helen, can preside over as queen. I fancy part of California for our new kingdom. We will have to finish our work first, assess the effectiveness of our elixir on a large scale. There is a certain little town I know that is filled with vicious little vermin begging to be the testing ground."
Miguelito stared into the distance of his past. The small-minded townspeople there who never gave the Loveless's their due. The people who persecuted us for generations because of a bit of genetic mis-coding deserved their fate.
"The world will be better off without them, too."