“Be silent.” Umar and I both turned to stare at Reda Abu Adil, who had popped the Proxy Hell moddy he’d been wearing. Umar was badly shaken. This was the first time Abu Adil had seen fit to participate in a conversation. It seemed he wasn’t just a senile, helpless figurehead. Without the cancer moddy chipped in, his face lost its slackness, and his eyes gained an intelligent fierceness. Abu Adil threw off the blanket and stood up from the chair. “Hasn’t Friedlander Bey explained to you about the Phoenix File?” he demanded.
“No, O Shaykh,” I said. “It’s something I learned of only today. He has kept the thing hidden from me.”
“But you delved into matters that don’t concern you.” I was frightened by Abu Adil’s intensity. Umar had never shown such passion or such strength of will. It was as if I were seeing Shaykh Reda’s baraka, a different kind of personal magic than Papa’s. The moddy of Abu Adil that Umar wore did not hint at the depth of the man. I supposed that no electronic device could hope to capture the nature of baraka. This answered Umar’s claim that with the moddy he was the equal of Abu Adil. That was just self-delusion.
“I think they concern me,” I said. “Isn’t my name in that file?”
“Yes, I’m sure it is,” said Abu Adil. “But you are placed highly enough that you stand only to benefit.”
“I’m thinking of my friends, who aren’t so lucky.”
Umar laughed humorlessly. “You show your weakness again,” he said. “Now you bleed for the dirt beneath your feet.”
“Every sun has its setting,” I told him. “Maybe someday you’ll find yourself slipping down in the Phoenix File ratings. Then you’ll wish you’d never heard of it.”
“O Master,” said Umar angrily, “have you not heard enough of this?”
Abu Adil raised a weary hand. “Yes, Umar. I have no great love for Friedlander Bey, and even less for his creatures. Take him into the studio.”
Umar came toward me, a needle gun in his hand, and I backed away. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but it wasn’t going to be pleasant. “This way,” he said. Under the circumstances, I did what he wanted.
We left the office and walked down a connecting hallway, then climbed a stairway to the second floor. There was always an air of peace in this house. The light was filtered through wooden lattices over high windows, and sounds were muffled by thick rugs on the floors. I knew this serenity was an illusion. I knew I’d soon see Abu Adil’s true nature.
“In here,” he said, opening a thick metal door. He had a strange, expectant expression on his face. I didn’t like it at all. I went past him into a large soundproofed room. There was a bed, a chair, and a cart with some electronic equipment on it. The far wall was a single sheet of glass, and beyond it was a small control booth with banks of dials and readouts and switches. I knew what it was. Reda Abu Adil had a personality module recording studio in his home. It was like the hobbyist’s ultimate dream.
“Give me the gun,” said Abu Adil.
Umar passed the needle gun to his master, then left the soundproofed room. “I suppose you want to add me to your collection,” I said. “I don’t see why. My second-degree burns won’t be all that entertaining.” Abu Adil just stared at me with that fixed grin on his face. He made my skin crawl.
A little while later, Umar returned! He had a long. thin metal rod, a pair of handcuffs, and a rope with a hook at one end. “Oh jeez,” I said. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. I was truly afraid that they wanted to record more than just that.
“Stand up straight,” said Umar, walking around and around me. He reached out and removed the moddy and daddies I was wearing. “And whatever you do, don’t duck your head. That’s for your own good.”
“Thanks for your concern,” I said. “I appreciate—” Umar raised the metal rod and brought it down across my right collarbone. I felt a knife-edge of pain shoot through me, and I cried out. He hit me on the other side, across the other collarbone. I heard the abrupt snapping of bone: and I fell to my knees.
“This may hurt a little,” said Abu Adil in the voice of a kindly old doctor.
Umar began beating me on the back with the rod, once, twice, three times. I screamed. He struck me a few more times. “Try to stand up,” he urged.
“You’re crazy,” I gasped.
“If you don’t stand up, I’ll use this on your face.”
I struggled to my feet again. My left arm hung uselessly. My back was a bleeding ruin. I realized I was breathing in shallow sobs.
Umar paused and walked around me again, evaluating me. “His legs,” said Abu Adil.
“Yes, O Shaykh.” The son of a bitch whipped the rod across my thighs, and I fell to the floor again. “Up,” grunted Umar. “Up.”
He hit me where I lay, on my thighs and calves until they were dripping with blood too. “I’ll get you,” I said in a voice hoarse with agony. “I swear by the blessed Prophet, I’ll get you.”
The beatings went on for a long time, until Umar had slowly and carefully worked over every part of me — except my head. Abu Adil had instructed him to spare my head, because he didn’t want anything to interfere with the quality of the recording. When the old man decided that I’d had enough, he told Umar to stop. “Connect him,” he said.
I lifted my head and watched. It was almost like being in someone else, far away. My muscles jumped in anguished spasms, and my wounds sent sharp signals of torment through every part of me. Yet the pain had become a barrier between my mind and body. I knew that I still hurt terribly, but I’d taken enough punishment to send my body into shock. I muttered curses and pleas to my two captors, threatening and begging them to give me back the pain-blocking daddy.
Umar only laughed. He went over to the cart and did something with the equipment there. Then he carried a large, shiny moddy link over to me. It looked a lot like the one we used with the Transpex game. Umar knelt beside me and showed it to me. “I’m going to chip this in for you,” he said. “It will allow us to record exactly what you’re feeling.”
I was having a difficult time breathing. “Motherfuckers,” I said, my voice a shallow wheeze.
Umar snapped the chrome-steel moddy link onto my anterior corymbic plug. “Now, this is a completely painless procedure,” he said.
“You’re gonna die,” I muttered. “You’re gonna fuckin’ die.”
Abu Adil was still holding the needle gun on me, but I couldn’t have done anything heroic anyway. Umar knelt down and fastened my hands behind me with the handcuffs. I felt like I was going to pass out, and I kept shaking my head to stay conscious. I didn’t want to black out and be completely at their mercy, though that was probably already true.
After he got my wrists bound, Umar caught the handcuffs with the hook and pulled on the rope until I staggered to my feet. Then he threw the end of the rope over a bar mounted on the wall high over my head. I saw what he was going to do. “Yallah,” I cried. He pulled on the rope until I was hoisted up on tiptoes with my arms raised behind my back. Then he pulled some more until my feet no longer touched the floor. I was hanging from the rope, the full weight of my body slowly pulling my arms from their sockets.
It was so excruciating, I could only take panting little breaths. I tried to shut out the horrible pain; I prayed first for mercy, then for death.
“Put the moddy in now,” said Abu Adil. His voice seemed to come from another world, from high on a mountaintop or far below the ocean.
“I take refuge with the Lord of the Dawn,” I murmured. I kept repeating that phrase like a magic charm.
Umar stood on the chair with the gray moddy in his hand, the D Syndrome moddy I’d brought. He chipped it onto my posterior plug.
He was hanging from the ceiling, but he couldn’t remember why. He was in terrible agony. “In the name of Allah, help me!” he cried. He realized that shouting just made the pain worse. Why was he here? He couldn’t remember. Who had done this to him?