Free Demons by John Shirley

want these things discussed in front of the new visitor. Paymenz laid some printouts facedown atop those taped to the tables to hide them.
    The visitor was Professor Laertes Shephard, looking exactly as I’d last seen him, though there was a quality in his eyes like a candle just after it’s been snuffed—a glow fading to ash. He came to where we stood at the tables, glanced at them and away.
    “Gentlemen,” he said. He looked at Melissa, a disheveled gamin, with what seemed to me like masked longing. “Melissa, I’m glad to see you’re . . . well.”
    “Alive, you mean,” she said.
    “Just so.” He turned like a turret to Mendel and said, “I will not mince words. I have come to ask you to take part in the appeasement program.”
    “And that would be exactly what, Shephard,” Paymenz growled, “and proposed by exactly whom?”
    “The Committee on Social Economics would be the who of it,” said Shephard, unruffled.
    “Who’s that?” Melissa asked.
    “Why, my dear,” Shephard said, not quite looking at her, “it is a committee of economists and business people who have long been concerned about the world.”
    “It’s an influential think tank made up of people highly placed in multinationals and conservative theorists. New Right, that sort of thing,” Paymenz said impatiently.
    Mendel nodded, adding: “I hope this appeasement is not what I think it is. . . . The demons cannot be appeased.”
    “We don’t know they cannot be appeased,” Shephard said, inclining a stiff little bow toward Mendel. “We hypothesize that perhaps they can. That they can be conceded territory, a certain amount of . . . sustenance, and if it’s offered up in a, shall we say, old-fashioned spirit of the sacrificial rite, we may hope to connect with whatever it was that pleased such entities in ancient times.”
    I looked at Melissa. At Paymenz. He nodded wearily to me. I asked Shephard, “Are you talking about going to the demons with people—offering them as sacrifices? Abasing ourselves? Facilitating the murder of human beings?”
    “Do you have a better method, young man, for even so much as slowing them down?”
    “It’s too soon to say—but I think we’d all be better off dead than doing that. We have our souls to think of.”
    “Hear him,” Mendel said, nodding. “He has gone to the quick of the matter. Shephard, it is unthinkable.”
    “It is already under way.” And he turned and walked out.
    “I suspect,” Mendel said, “we should have killed him on the spot.”
    But no one went after Shephard.
     
     
    I sat slumped in a plastic chair and stared up at the dusty metal pipes tangling the ceiling like a freeway interchange. I was beginning to feel a real hunger to see the sky. Nyerza and Mendel came over, carrying chairs, a bottle of wine, and plastic cups, to sit beside me. I sat up, looking from one to the other, feeling, as they looked at me, like a small animal about to be radio tagged by two zoologists.
    “Uh—yes, gentlemen?”
    Mendel said, “When you spoke of the origin of that image—the one that collated so interestingly with the appearances of the demons in that area—you said you had a sort of vision of it?”
    “Yes.”
    “When you say ‘vision,’ Ira,” Nyerza said, “do you mean, exactly, a— How do you describe . . . ?”
    I thought about it. “No, not like Ezekiel. I mean, I envisioned it as an artist, that’s all. But it was a very strong visual, um, inspiration, so . . . I almost think of it as a vision. But it’s not like I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Why do you persecute me?’ ”
    “Quite,” Mendel said, nodding. He looked at Nyerza. “Even so. And the synchronicities.”
    “We must make the leap,” Nyerza said. “What he and the girl bring us cannot be brought by accident. Their higher selves collaborate with the higher design.”
    “I . . . wish to make a leap, too,” I said. They looked at me, both with eyebrows raised. Nyerza’s eyebrows a