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EDITORIAL
CHANGES by Gardner Dozois
Change has come once again to Asimov’s, but, unlike the last few changes, when we had the sad duty of reporting to you the tragic deaths of Isaac Asimov and Baird Searles, these are positive changes, changes that we’re actu- ally glad to announce. What a relief!
First, I’m proud and happy to an- nounce that, starting with our July issue, Robert Silverberg’s popular column “Reflections” will be mov- ing to the pages of Asimov’s, where it will be a regular monthly feature.
Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, an- thologies, and collections to his credit, as well as five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. (In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few decades, a par- tial mention of Silverberg’s best- known works would include famous titles such as Dying Inside, Born with the Dead, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The World Inside, and King- doms of the Wall.) “Reflections,” his monthly column of opinion and commentary on science fiction, the science fiction professional and fannish scenes, the cutting edge of scientific speculation, and the
shape of modem society (among dozens of other topics) has been running in Amazing to an enthusi- astic response for several years, and we’re happy to be able to offer it to our readers now as a regular fea- ture. Bob has had a long associa- tion with Asimov’s under several succesive editors, since making his first sale here to George Scithers in the ’70s (several Silverberg stories from the pages of Asimov’s such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another,” have gone on to win major awards), and it’ll be great to now be able to feature him in the magazine each and every month. I once said that nobody could replace an Isaac Asi- mov, and, of course. Bob has no in- tention of even trying to do that — but if there’s any writer alive who can rival Isaac for sharp- ness of intellect and the breadth, depth, and variety of his interests, it’s Silverberg, and we think his column will be an invaluable addi- tion to the magazine.
We will also continue to feature Guest Editorials from time to time (we are always on the lookout for them), and, of course, your re- sponse, the response of the reader- ship at large, to both Silverberg’s “Reflections” column and the
4
Guest Editorials is not only wel- come, but actively solicited. We welcome such feedback, and the most interesting letters of this sort will definitely be featured in our letters column on a regular basis.
Our next announcement is that, after an exhaustive search (and boy, was it! Have you ever tried to read your way through a slush pile consisting of hundreds of sample reviews and critical articles? My advice is, don’t!) we have come up with a replacement for the late Baird Searles, our regular book re- viewer for many years. It would no doubt have amused Baird to learn that it takes three people to replace him — for we have decided to rotate the “On Books” column through a sequence of three different review- ers, and so Moshe Feder, Peter Heck, and Paul Di Filippo will be sharing the reviewing slot on a ro- tating basis. In addition, Norman Spinrad’s column will continue as usual, so, in effect, we will be fea- turing four different critical voices in Asimov’s which should, we hope, give us balanced coverage of a very wide range of different kinds of books, across a wide spec- trum of tastes and sensibilites. The first of the new reviewers starts in this very issue; turn to Sheila Wil- liams’s introduction to “On Books” on page 166 for more details of this plan, and for biographical sketches of our three new reviewers.
So, to all of the new additions to the magazine; Welcome Aboard! And when I have to come to you again with changes, may they al- ways be as pleasant as these! #
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Damon Knight
Damon Knight tells us the following tale was inspired by something he saw in the window of a Hindu shop in Dublin, and by a visit to an excavated Roman villa at Fishbourne in Sussex, England. While there, he held in his hand "an oil lamp that Drusilla might have used. It was no bigger than a sparrow, and I didn't want to give it back." Mr. Knight's most recent novel, Why Do Birds, was published by Tor in 1 992.
S art: Ron Chironna
Drusilla awoke in the little bed at the foot of the big bed, the matrimo- nial bed that she had occupied with three husbands, two of them at the same time. The lamp was smoking; she felt thick-headed, as she usually did in the mornings now. What had she forgotten? Oh, yes — this was to be her son’s fortyday.
Her bladder was full. She put her feet down on the cold tiles, crossed to the commode and sat there; it was almost too high for her, but there was another, a little one, beside it. That was her future.
When she stood up and turned around, the stranger was standing just outside the lamplight. “Does it distress you that your son Rufus is older than you are?” he said.
“He is not older.”
‘Taller, then.”
“He was always taller.”
He looked at her. “Does it distress you that you now look like a child of ten?”
“Yes, but it’s natural.”
“If it’s natural, why should it distress you?”
“Why do you keep asking these questions?”
But he was gone, and Numilia was coming in. The slave’s hands were empty; where were the little gift baskets? “Are there no visitors today?” Drusilla asked. She was still not quite awake.
“Rufus is seeing the clients, by his order. He told me to tell you last night, but you were sleeping so nicely.”
Drusilla said nothing for a moment. “I can have you thrashed.”
“Oh, mistress, forgive me.” Smiling, the slave made an exaggerated gesture of terror.
“Get out.”
Numilia retreated, with a gleam of satisfied malice in her eye. Drusi- lla’s reign as mistress of the house was over, the slave had just reminded her; well, she knew that, but Rufus could have waited one more day.
She took off the gown she had slept in and put on a clean one, and a cloak because the morning was cool. Perhaps she would dress herself from now on; she had noticed lately that she was embarrassed to let even a slave look at her boy’s breasts and her downy pubis like the head of a chick.
She opened the door and went out into the colonnade. The farther half of the enclosed garden lay in deep shadow; in the nearer half, the trees and statues were glimmering with dew.
It was about the second hour; a thread of smoke rose from the kitchen. A few slaves were moving about on errands; the rest stood or squatted in the colonnade, waiting for orders.
Three share-crop farmers, led by a slave, emerged from the atrium and
8 DAMON KNIGHT
started around the colonnade toward Rufus’s room. Drusilla returned their greetings, but when two more appeared, she crossed the garden hurriedly to the passage beyond the kitchen, opened the outer door and went into the courtyard. She walked past the kitchen garden and the compost heap covered with the stalks of the summer’s harvest, then past the dormitory, the kennels and stables, to the swine pen where a dozen shoats ran up to greet her.
Then across the dark creaking bridge, hearing the unseen water talk- ing to itself underneath, and up again, a long uphill stride into the listening silence of the pines. From here she could look out over the meadows and the dawn-rimmed Etruscan hills, a view that always gave her pleasure.
The elder of her first two husbands had planted most of these trees; wood was the estate’s chief source of income now, grapes and olives next, then the pottery and the sheep and swine, and their little plot of wheat last.
A bird called, clear and cold, somewhere up in the branches; then another.
Without turning her head she knew that the stranger was standing beside her. “Tell me,” he said, “what happens to birds? Do they go back into the egg?”
“Don’t you know? When they are too small to fly, other animals eat them. Except the swallow that buries itself in the mud until it is reborn in the spring.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Everybody knows it.”
He was gone, and she felt lightheaded, perhaps because she had been angry before, or because she wanted her breakfast. A fragment of verse was drifting through her mind:
The swallow tunnels in the mire;
Shall I prefer the water, or the fire?
Speak, Muses . . .
She turned to go down the hill, and after a few steps found that she had broken into a run without meaning to. It was indecorous at her age, but perhaps no one would see her, and after all, what if they did? The exercise warmed her and made her limbs supple; she was smiling when she reached the bottom.
In part of the kitchen garden, where beanstalks among the scattered straws had begun their retreat into the earth, slaves were putting up trestle tables. She watched them a moment, then entered the house and went to the larder.
As she emerged carrying her herbs and spices, Thessalus the cook
FORTYDAY
9
came out into the colonnade in his soiled gown and burst into a com- plaint. “Lady, no ’elp good in kitchen. ’Ow I do? — ”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, talk in Greek. You sound like an owl.”
He said with dignity, “You asked me before not to speak Greek to you, in order to practice my Latin which offends you, but as you wish, it doesn’t matter, I only want to say that these swineherds are of no use in the kitchen and only hinder me. I have asked you to buy another kitchen helper, but I really need two. It is bad enough on ordinary days, but now, when we are at heads and tails getting ready for the banquet ...”
“Is the bread doughy again?”
He glared at her. “The bread? He is trying hard to make it better. It is good bread. It is not yet excellent, but he is doing his best, mistress. Please don’t begin that again. I will see to it that he does his best.”
“See that you do yours, too.”
The cook turned with a muttered exclamation and hurled himself into the kitchen, where she heard him shouting at the other slaves. She moved off down the colonnade toward the front of the house.
She had sent a message nine days ago to a neighbor, asking for the loan of his cook, and he had aj^eed, but there was some difficulty — the slave was ill, and might not be able to come. But she could hardly tell Thessalus all that without seeming to apologize.
On the way to the atrium she looked in for a moment on her last husband, Quinctius, who lay red and wrinkled on the folded cloth in his basket. A pregnant young slave, kneeling beside him with a fly-whisk, watched her without speaking. She reminded herself to speak to Rufus later: was the child his, and would he raise or expose it when it was bom?
In the corner gleamed the seated life-size carving of Priapus, where Quinctius would go when he was small enough to rest in the hollow at the tip of the god’s erect wooden pizzle.
It was understood that Calpurnia would do the honors, making it possible for Quinctius to be rebora as her next child. It was not considered likely that she would have another child, but the alternative would be a slave or a prostitute. At any rate, Calpurnia might enjoy the god’s phal- lus well smeared with goose-grease; she complained often enough that she never saw Rufus’s.
The arms and legs of the little red person moved feebly; his eyes were closed, those fierce eyes; his mouth opened and shut, but there was no sound. That was better; for almost six months he had roared incessantly, and nothing could be done to soothe him.
She had been fifty-one when they married, and he fifty-six, a man in his full strength. For ten years he had astonished her with his vigor in bed. It was the best time for both of them, because they were both past
10
DAMON KNIGHT
forty and growing younger. When the ten years were over, she had been to all appearance a young matron not yet twenty, he a youth of fourteen.
After that they had another few years of tender dalliance, gradually more condescending on her part. Then the last years came, and they were difficult for him, especially so because of all the trouble he had with his teeth. She had borne his rages as best she could; after a time he seemed to forget who he was, and ran and shouted with the children. Now she visited him several times a day; she felt that she could talk to him in his stillness as she never had been able to do when he was moving about.
Of her first two husbands, one had been older than she and one younger. Fortius, the younger one, had suffered an affliction in his right arm just before he turned forty; afterward, instead of healing he died and was cremated; it was a great disgrace to the family and his name was not spoken.
Behind her the stranger said, “Do you wish things were otherwise? Would it be better to die as Fortius did, without warning?”
“No, of course not. Death is for animals.” The slave glanced up incuri- ously, then returned her attention to the fly-whisk.
“There are accidents,” he said, “and soldiers sometimes die in battle.”
“That’s different. Soldiers try not to kill each other, but they know the risk they take.”
“But you, you take no risk. You know what’s going to happen and when.”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“Oh, no. In my country, no one grows young after forty. We all grow older instead, until we are so sick that we die. But no man knows the day and hour.”
“How absurd! Wasteful, too. Why do you stand for it?”
There was no reply; he was gone again.
In the atrium, smoke was going everywhere except through the hole in the roof. She arranged her offerings before the little household goddess in her niche, and lighted the incense with a twig from the fire. When she left, slaves were coming in with ladders and pails to clean the blackened frescoes on the ceiling, although the smoke was so dense that they could barely see.
It was now the third hour, and slaves and children were gathering around the sunlit garden to watch the priest’s two assistants putting stakes in the ground to build the Janus hut.
It was always the same, a round hut of wattle roofed with straw, with a hide curtain for a door. There was nothing especially mysterious about it, in Drusilla’s view, but only those dedicated to Janus could build it or take it down.
FORTYDAY
11
The last of the clients were coming out of Rufus’s room now. She went into the family dining room, where slaves were laying the table for breakfast; she sat down and took some bread and olives. Presently Ru- fus’s wife Calpurnia entered with her two children and their nanny, and finally Rufus himself, who sat down and helped himself to cheese with a great stir. “You might have waited,” he said to Drusilla when he saw her eating.
“So might you,” she said.
Rufus took a bite and chewed, staring at her, then rose from his chair and walked around the table. “Get up,” he said to his daughter Prima, who was sitting beside Drusilla. Rufus sat down in the vacated chair (Prima meanwhile giving him a reproachful glance), and said, “Mother, we’ve got to live together in this house, and it’s better to have an under- standing.”
“Yes,” she said.
“There can’t be two masters.”
“No.”
“But I’ll ask your advice whenever I need it, and you can be of great help to me, as long as you understand. Is it agreed?”
“Yes, Rufus.”
“Good, then.” He leaned nearer and said, “Give me just a word before the ceremony. After all, you’re my mother. How much does it really hurt?”
She kept her mouth closed and did not look at him.
“Oh, well, if you lived through it, I suppose I can too.” He went back to his seat, displacing Prima again, and spoke sharply to little Secundus, who had a sulky expression and was pounding the cheese with his fist.
“I don’t care,” Secundus shouted, and kicked the table. Rufus gestured to the nanny, who rose and took Secundus away screaming. Then the butler appeared with his accounts. Drusilla got up, and Calpurnia did too.
“He kept me awake all night,” Calpurnia said as they left. She was pale and looked more haggard than usual.
“Rufus was always a fearful child. It will be all right when it’s over.”
In the courtyard a little slave girl was weaving flowers into straw hats for the banquet. Clattering sounds came from the kitchen. “I’ll be glad, too, when it’s over,” said Calpurnia.
At noon when Rufus and Calpurnia retired for their nap, Drusilla stayed awake and made sure the door slaves were at their posts. Toward the eighth hour guests began to arrive: landowners from neighboring estates, and the same farmers who had come in the morning, now with their wives and children in tow.
Marcus Pollio bustled toward her with elaborate apologies. “Dear
12
DAMON KNIGHT
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Drusilla, about my cook — well, to tell you the truth it wasn’t he who was indisposed, it was my wife, who felt she could not do without the special meals he prepared for her. She sends her regrets. She is feeling better now, but preferred not to travel. I hope you were not inconvenienced.”
“No, it was nothing. Please give it no more thought, Marcus.”
“You’re very kind.” Bowing and smiling, he went away to talk to Rufus. Then the carriages from more distant places began to roll up, and for a while the vestibule was full of guests complaining about the bad roads, while foot slaves helped them off with traveling shoes and into sandals. Gifts were piling up on a table in the atrium.
Drusilla’s sister Serena from Rome appeared, and they embraced; they had been companions in first childhood, and still felt a great affection for each other although they seldom met. There was no time to talk, because Calpumia’s mother and father, both in their vigorous second youth, were bustling through the entrance.
The courtyard was full of drivers and outriders unharnessing their horses, slave children running about underfoot, dogs barking and women shouting. One of the carriages had broken an axle and was blocking the way of others. Rufus had gone to his room with Calpumia and her par- ents. Drusilla, summoned by the butler, got four husky slaves to support the leaning carriage at one comer while other slaves dragged it out of the way. Somehow in the confusion one of the dogs was run over, and yelped piercingly until one of the outriders killed it with his sword.
On the way back, she noticed Rufus’s daughter sitting in a corner of the courtyard, almost hidden behind the carriages. Drusilla hesitated; she really did not have time, but she went to the child and sat down beside her. They were almost the same height. “Well, what is it, has someone been cruel to you?”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“Then it must be something else. You may as well tell me.”
The child bit her lip. “Will he be different afterward?”
“After the ceremony? No, there’s nothing magical about it. The cere- mony won’t change him.”
“Nanny says it will.”
“Nanny is a fool. Your father will be just the same to you as he always was, no better, no worse. Besides, you’ll be going to school next year. Will you like that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I’m afraid.”
“And your breasts hurt? And you wake up sometimes in the night, and cry?”
“Yes. Grandmother, sometimes I’m afraid of everything.” Tears filled her eyes, and she leaned against Drusilla.
The closeness of the sweaty young body called up memories; it was
14
DAMON KNIGHT
pleasant and repugnant at the same time. Drusilla said, “Do you remem- ber when you were much younger, how you were afraid of things that don’t frighten you now?”
The girl’s head nodded. “But then I was a baby.”
“The rest will be just the same. We’re always afraid before something happens, and then we see that it was nothing. When you go to bed, tell yourself, ‘This won’t matter by tomorrow night.’ ”
The girl released her and smiled. “I’ll try. Thank you. Grandmother.”
Drusilla arose and went into the colonnade, where the household and all the guests were gathering. It was a little before the tenth hour. One of the priest’s assistants walked out into the garden, stood in front of the Janus hut, and beat a gong for silence. Then the second assistant ap- peared, carrying the sacred implements. These were wrapped to conceal them from profane eyes, but it was not hard to see what Drusilla already knew, that one was a rod, one a basin, one a lantern, and the fourth a sword. 'The assistants entered the hut and came out empty-handed. One of them went to the kitchen and returned with two jugs, which he depos- ited inside the hut as well.
Then the priest appeared with Rufus, who was wearing a robe so tattered and dirty that he must have borrowed it from the cook. The priest was carrying a bundle that Drusilla recognized: it was the new toga made from wool spun, dyed, and woven here on the estate.
Rufus conferred with the priest a moment; then the priest and the two assistants closed around him and marched him into the hut while the guests and household looked on.
The hide curtain fell, and there was silence, but Drusilla remembered and knew what was going on in the darkness. First they would strip him bare, and make him sit on a low stool between them, with the priest in front and the slaves behind. They would let him wait a while.
Now the priest would be saying, “In this warm water were you bom naked, and this milk was your first food.” Here the slaves drenched Rufus with water from the basin, then pulled his head back and poured milk into his face.
“These bitter herbs made you weep.” One of the slaves would rub a paste of onions and garlic into his eyes. “Weep now for your first child- hood, your first youth and your first manhood, for they are done. Out of the darkness you came ...” (here the slave uncovered the lantern and shone it into his face) “. . . and into the darkness you go . . .” (the slave covered the lamp again), “. . . but not until you have had your second manhood, your second youth and your second childhood.”
Blinded and weeping, he was made to get up and stand on the stool. “You stand now at the summer of your life, looking backward and looking forward. This moment will not come again. Remember it.”
FORTYDAY
15
Then a blow on the back that made him cry out (they heard the cry where they stood watching), and the salt rubbed into the wound. (An- other cry, more anguished than the first.)
Now the slave would be wiping his face with a cloth dipped in water, then drying it until he could see again.
“Will you loyally serve the tribe, your family, your household, and the city and empire? Think before you speak.” Here the lantern was opened again, and the second slave held up his sword.
“Do you know and understand the penalty for breaking this oath?”
He would respond, as he had been taught, “If I break this oath, I must be cut off from tribe, family, household, city, and empire.”
“Remember it.” Another blow, another rubbing of salt. This time he was silent, (jood.
“Will you serve the gods of your mothers, never blaspheming or ne- glecting them?”
“I will.”
A third blow, the last. The priest would dip another cloth in the basin and begin to wash his body. “In this water I wash away your old life and begin the new.”
Now the slaves would be dressing him in the toga sapientis with its purple, green, and white stripes. “Wear this garment in token of new life. From this day you join the company of men, women, and gods.”
The door of the hut opened, and here he was now, looking splendid in his new toga, but sober and red-eyed. The guests surged into the garden and surrovmded him. When her turn came, Drusilla embraced him and said a word or two. “Thanks,” said Rufus, seeming to look beyond her. Then the press of people forced her out, and she went back to the col- onnade.
The priest was there, pulling off his gloves. “It went very well, very well,” he was saying. “Might I have a drop of something to drink?”
One of the slaves dipped him a cup of tempered wine; he poured a little on the ground and drank the rest thirstily. “It’s dry work, you know,” he said.
Because of the unexpected guests the dining room was more crowded than was proper; even though most of the local people were being fed outside, there were twelve at table, four on each side. Luckily Serena and Drusilla were together at the head couch. “At last we can talk,” Drusilla said. “Tell me all your news.”
“Well, I wrote you last year that I was going to Jerusalem to visit Gaius, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but I never heard a word afterward, until somebody told me you were safely back in Rome.”
16
DAMON KNIGHT
“And lucky to get there, too; the ship just before mine was lost in the Internal Sea.”
“Thank the gods it wasn’t yours, but you always were lucky. How did you like Judea?”
“Well, I’d been there before, of course. It’s not so bad, apart from the natives. Do you remember that Jew who was sent to Rome and crucified about five years ago?”
“Which one?”
“Jeshua, the one who prophesied the end of the world and said the Emperor ought to repent.”
“They all say that. What about him?”
“Well, they cut him down when he had finished his time, of course, and sent him home in fair condition to Buggerall or wherever he came from, but now his followers are saying that he died on the cross and then came back to life.”
“How absurd. Does anyone believe that?”
“Only his little clique, but they’re all loud and abusive. We may have to round them up and crucify a few more to teach them manners.”
“It won’t work. Well, what did you do when you got back to Rome?”
“I was just in time for the farewell to Cloaca — ^pardon me, I mean, of course, Clodia.”
“Oh, yes, I heard she was due. Were many people there?”
Serena smiled. “The consul attended, and about half the Committee, and the G.G. knows who. The temple was full, there must have been at least a thousand people outside. Everybody was smiling when they left.”
“She was an awful person.”
“Yes, and her daughters are just like her. I’m afraid. Well, and what is life going to be for you now?”
“Whatever Rufus chooses to make of it.”
Serena looked at her keenly. “When things get too much for you, come and visit me. Promise.”
“Yes, I promise. You’re a good friend, Serena. The last one I have.”
“Let us be all the closer then.”
After the first course of little cakes, herbs, and cheeses, the slaves brought around thrushes and songbirds, sugared pork, ham, cutlets, goose, and fat hen. Rufus began drinking wine without water, and when the dessert came he was singing joyfully.
Afterward, when the eating stopped but the drinking went on, Drusilla took Serena away to her room. In the light of a single lamp, they sat listening to the sounds of revelry. “Seven is a banquet, nine is a brawl,” Serena quoted.
“Well, Rufus was worried. Men take these things too seriously. Do you remember, when the boys were practicing with their javelins, how we
FORTYDAY
17
used to wade down the brook, and try to catch rivernymphs in the shallows?”
“Yes, and we collected the brightest pebbles and took them home in baskets. What did you do with yours?”
“I kept them in a bowl of water to look at, but of course I had to throw them out when I dedicated all my toys to the Lar.”
“You look just as you did then. It gave me a queer feeling when I saw you.”
“And I you. It seems a long time ago.”
“Except in sleep.”
“Do you dream of those days too?”
“Often, lately. Were we as happy then as I think?”
“Probably not. Memory gilds everything, doesn’t it?”
“Well, not everything. When I dream about Father, he’s as awful as ever.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I do know. And nobody else understands; that’s very sad in a way, isn’t it?”
After a moment the door opened and the butler looked in. “Pardon, mistress, but your son is ill and Calpurnia has gone to bed with orders not to disturb her.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He is vomiting, and can’t be roused.”
“Bring him here.”
The butler withdrew and came back; behind him were four men car- rying Rufus; he was groaning and white-faced. “He looks poisoned to me,” Serena said. “You’d better have your slaves tortured just to make sure.”
“He drank too much. It’s not the first time.”
“As you wish,” Serena yawned. “I’m for bed, then, it’s been a long day.”
Alone with Rufus, she sent for purgatives, and made him vomit again and again. After all, it was possible, even likely, that slaves had put something in his wine, but torturing them would prove nothing. Toward dawn, when he fell into a natural sleep, she left him, crossed the silent courtyard, unbarred the door, and slipped out into darkness. It was about the eleventh hour of night; except for a cock crowing in the farmyard, the world was empty.
When she was halfway down to the bridge, she heard a distant discor- dant trumpeting overhead. Up there, so high that they were in daylight although the rest of the world was dark, two Vs of white cranes were fiying home to Africa. She stood without moving until they were gone.
Under the bridge she removed her sandals, tied up her robe and stepped into the fast shallow water. The pebbles were unexpectedly hard
18
DAMON KNIGHT
FORTYDAY
19
The author tells us that although he had thought out much of the story line for "Summer and Ice," it sat in an unfinished state for a long time. Then his editor at AvoNova, John Douglas, "told me about a story idea he'd already given to several writers: an alien invasion of Earth that is the equivalent to Vietnam, with massive repercussions back on the home planet. Everything clicked then.... John had said that while other authors had used his idea, the result was never much like his original suggestion. I think that's happened again, and that John's little seed pearl can still be given out to others." Mr. Jablokov, who recently returned from his honeymoon in Turkey, is now at work on a novel version of "Syrtis" (Asimov's, April 1 994).
SUMMER
Alexander Jablokov
Acceleration reached through the thin skin of the lifepod and crushed Steve Hardt flat. The Jugur ship was performing some high-g evasive maneuver. He could feel the roar as it contacted the outer atmosphere. Steve did a last check of his reentry suit’s functions and wished that there had been some other way of returning home to Earth than attached to the outside of an attacking alien warship.
Trajectory data slithered across the reentry suit’s helmet display. After a year stuck to the hull disguised as part of the superconducting heat- transfer piping, invisible to the crew of the spaceship, it was time to part company. Steve relaxed his muscles and closed his eyes. The lifepod blew clear.
Behind his closed eyelids, the data feed kaleidoscoped images into his optic nerve. He’d learned to juggle the images mentally, just like a Jugur eyemouth. From cameras on the structure-tangled ship surface: the tiny lifepod floated up and vanished into the unmoving stars. From the front of the lifepod interior: a mirrored figure without a face slumped like a miscast statue. From one external pod angle: the Jugur ship began to segment under attack. From another pod angle: the glow of reentry and below, the Earth.
The Earth. Five years since he had seen it, two years subjective travel time back and forth and three years on the planet Jugurtha itself. Five years subjective and, through the inexorable mathematics of lightspeed transition travel, thirty years objective. The place was desperately changed. The ice fields had extended far to the south. The northern hemisphere was almost clear of clouds, and the snow and ice glinted in the sun.
Steve felt himself trying to stare, as if he could control the cameras through force of will. But he saw nothing with his own eyes, and the cameras had been programmed by the independent Jugur eyemouths that had made his trip to and from Jugurtha possible. He could see bright streaks at the limb of the Earth as the warship’s independently maneuvering segments hit the atmosphere. A bright flash: Earth’s defen- sive lasers were still operational, and one had found its target.
Steve was a target too. He tried to curl up into a ball, but the suit wouldn’t let him. What would the reaction be back on Jugurtha if the eyemouth cameras showed him gloriously burning up in Earth’s atmo- sphere? He would become another tragic media hero, but his political effect would be nil. If he was going to die, he had to do it more effectively. He cleared his thoughts. That came later.
The outer layer of the reentering pod peeled off. A stabilized camera floated up with it, and Steve could see the lifepod as it drilled toward the planet. A giant frame wing suddenly puffed out above the pod, turning
22
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
it into a stratospheric hang glider. He couldn’t see any serious damage. The camera tumbled away and went blind.
He dropped westward over Europe. Behind him, just at the horizon, he could see the vast craters of the comet strike in the center of Eurasia. Nothing now lived east of the Urals. One comet fragment had doubled the size of the Aral Sea, another had vaporized Novosibirsk. And, under the cloak of cometary dust, the glaciers marched down from the north once again. Thirty years. This was not the world he had left. He was here to defend a place he no longer knew anything about.
Still, the blue, green, and white globe brought him a sharp joy. He could feel the cool breeze from it. He wanted to reach out his arms and embrace it. He would be free of the high gravity of Jugurtha, free of the incessant Juguijur negotiators, free of the constant media surveillance that been part of his contract with the eyemouths, free to find out if Karinth Tolback was still alive. Karinth ....
He let her rest on the surface of his thoughts like a drop of dew on a leaf. She’d been alive when he left Jugurtha, but that had been almost fifteen of her years ago. Wadded in his right hand he held a piece of string. He and Karinth had burned string, that last day, to mark their parting, but he had kept this, all the way to Jugurtha and back. How mad she would be if she knew! He smiled to himself She’d always sus- pected that his little rituals were just a way of gaining advantage over the situation.
Ahead, America was still shaded before dawn. The sun was just coming up on the ice packs around Nova Scotia. Farther south the coast was edged with gray: continental shelf revealed by the dropping water level.
His cameras flared and went dead. The image feeds were destroyed, and blackness spread from inside his head. An instant later, heat seared his left side. He tried to scream into his breather, but it forced the sound back into his throat. He was cooking, the skin was crisping up, black . . . the suit cooled his burned skin with anaesthetic. He’d been hit by a defensive orbital laser. He twitched a muscle, and was relieved to find that his left arm still existed.
Auxiliary eyes, lower resolution, opened. It took Steve a moment to correlate the images. He was surrounded by a shimmering glow, an aurora, as energy-absorbing shielding boiled off the pod and formed an ionized cloud. The wing folded, dropping him on a random downward path, and the cloud stayed above him to serve as a decoy for further laser attacks.
Steve sucked hot air through his throat. Didn’t the defenders of Earth know he had come back to help? He felt like shouting at them. They had traced the approaching warship as it decelerated from translight speed.
SUMMER AND ICE
23
its mass appearing on their screens as an invisible hand knotting gravi- tational geodesics. They knew it was coming with military resupply for the Stoop, the independent Jugur organization that had invaded Earth. The human military forces were fighting desperately for survival, uncon- cerned with the complexities of intra-Jugur politics on Jugurtha, or the clarity of the images supplied to the home market by the Jugur eye- mouths.
“Here I am,” Steve whispered into his air supply. “Let me live, god- damit.”
His descent slowed, and he hung above the slowly dawn-lit continent. As the minutes went by and no further laser attack came, he relaxed the painful muscles between his shoulders. Examining the ground through the auxiliary optics, he traced the path of the Mississippi up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Illinois river split off there, heading northeast, to- ward the gleaming ice of the Great Lakes . . . and there, on the shore of Lake Michigan, was the city of Chicago. He imagined he could see its towers casting shadows across the plains.
He hummed to himself, like a child eating a favorite food. Until he’d found it, he hadn’t even been sure of what he was looking for. He and Karinth had lived in Chicago, together in those last days before his departure. He remembered their town house, the sun shining pale over- head through veils of atmospheric dust. They had stayed inside and made love while the world grew colder.
Five subjective years had passed for him, but thirty for her. Did it make sense, to search for her there, as if she had been sitting and waiting for him, there at the breakfast table with her head turned away, a piece of burned string in her hand?
Of course it did. In response to his thought, the suit gazed down, pattern matching. The natural features were the same: the Appala- chians, the curve of the Ohio. The human ones had changed. The un- plowed roads had the reflectance of open fields. Outlying houses and villages had been burned and abandoned, and showed no IR signatures. Broken-spined bridges rested their spans in the ice. After some medita- tion, the suit found enough visible-light matches to guide him.
Feeling an entirely inappropriate exhilaration, Steve Hardt floated toward Earth.
The reentry suit’s mirrored surface was scarred and pitted. It lay, a discarded insect carapace, in the snow, surrounded by chunks of the disintegrated pod, while Steve Hardt, swearing under his breath and shivering in the unaccustomed cold, hammered on a recalcitrant joint on the glidewing. The wing was supposed to convert neatly to a snow sledge for his equipment, but it was resisting, making him wonder if the crash
24
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
How can I find inner peace?
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had damaged it. Surely the planners on the Juguijur had known he would crash. He wondered if an eyemouth camera was carefully re- cording his frustration.
At least they’d given him a hammer with the tool kit. He pulled it back to hit as hard as he could, then stopped. Karinth had always thought he had a dysfunctional relationship with mechanical devices. What had she said once? He remembered her sitting cross-legged, her slender fin- gers covered with gritty grease, bicycle parts neatly arranged in front of her. “ ‘One dollar for hitting. Ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to hit.’ Know where to hit, Steve.” He’d almost destroyed that damn bicycle trying to unstick the derailleur. He paused for a moment and looked more closely at the framework. A simple rotating part had been yanked from its socket. Steve tapped it gently. With a groan of bent struts, the wing tip folded under and clicked into slots on the runner. Steve sat back on his haunches and breathed a sigh of relief Thanks again, Karinth.
Behind him, at the end of a slanting tunnel marked by broken branches and shattered tree trunks, was the sky. He’d plowed through this maple copse and embedded himself deeply in the soft central Illinois soil. It had taken him a good hour to dig his way out of his suit, like a metamorphos- ing grub emerging from the dirt. Another hour, and he’d be ready to move out, to the northeast. He’d missed Chicago by a good two hundred kilometers. Not too bad, he supposed, after a journey of eighteen light years, all the way from Eta Cassiopeiae A. It seemed that if he stood and looked back up the path he’d ripped through the trees, he should be able to see the sun of Jugurtha.
It had glowed in the dark sky above the meeting ground of the Ju- guijur, its dimmer companion. Eta Cassiopeiae B, just visible in the sky in the east, over the mountains that thrust their way up through the jungle.
“The Stoop was created for a specific purpose,” old Bardudur said. “The invasion of Earth. You must forgive me, but it made sense at the time.” He drew breath through his long, high snout. It had fallen in on either side of the long nasal bone, a sign of his great age. “But now, even among the Jugur of the Stoop, there is pressure for a change.”
Wincing, Steve took another bite of the decaying meat on the plate. He’d throw up later, in the privacy of his own quarters. The Jugur were light-boned and delicate, nothing like predators, and their food was never fresh.
“But why?” Steve said. “Why did they do it in the first place?”
Bardudur put his hands on either side of Hardt’s face and held him with delicate, rubbery pads.
“An expedition to conquer parts of a fertile, if ecologically damaged planet — a good risk. The Stoop would hold their areas, the natives would
26 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
hold other areas, war would be low-level but continuous. A pleasant life. The Stoop represents something we like in ourselves. But you try to annihilate them. This they do not enjoy.”
The Jugur as a species were not territorial, and the idea of conquering only parts of a planet didn’t seem odd to them. Their emotional attach- ment was to organizations like the Stoop. It had taken Steve a long time to understand that the Jugur that had invaded Earth were an independent group, far from being representatives of the central govern- ment of all Jugur. No such entity truly existed, though the Juguijur, a huge debating society, came the closest.
“And you think we can push them harder,” Steve said. “Push them off Earth.”
He looked up at the endless ranks of carved stone chairs that sur- rounded the tiny party picnicking on the Juguijur meeting ground. There were thousands of them, and each was different. They climbed up into the hills. Each was the seat of an organization, some vanished for centu- ries. The chairs remained, for they represented the traditions of the race. The Stoop had a chair, a new one. Steve had examined it, but had not been permitted to sit in it.
“We will do our best, friend Hardt,” Bardudur had replied. But, of course, beyond smuggling Steve onto a Stoop supply ship heading back to Earth, the Juguijur had decided to do absolutely nothing. It was up to Steve Hardt and the eyemouths to convince them otherwise, and Steve didn’t like thinking about how far he might have to go to do so.
The field to Steve’s left was alive. He’d been pulling his sledge through undisturbed white fields for three days, but here bright green lettuce poked jauntily through the snow, leaves covered with waxy insulation. Snow slumped around them, melted from underneath. Steve stopped. He didn’t know how things were on Earth these days, but if this was a functioning farm, it made sense that it was defended. In that case, he had already been detected. It wouldn’t pay to seem any more a threat than he actually was. He detached the sledge pull and stayed still. The frozen expanse of what he had identified as the Fox River stretched to his right.
The sun was setting, and, one by one, the refiecting satellites appeared in a line across the sky. They were, Steve figured, huge circles of mylar set to refiect sunlight down onto the night side of Earth. Jugur? Human? With such a technology, there was no way to tell. Together, they gave more light than a full moon, and had made setting up camp in the evening much easier. Someone unconcerned with aesthetics had ban- ished night.
SUMMER AND ICE
27
Within a couple of minutes he heard the whine of an electric snowmo- bile. It whizzed bouncing through the snow and took up a position screened by underbrush. It crouched like a cyborg centaur, the driver’s long dark coat blending amid the tree trunks.
“Stand back!” the woman barked. “Do not approach any closer.” A short, wide-muzzled gun pointed at his face. “Now!”
Steve stopped in wonder at himself. He had been stumbling through the snow toward her with desperate need. His arms were stretched out to pull her to him and hold her. He dropped them to his sides. Pulse pounded in his ears. He could barely see the woman’s face beneath the hood and goggles.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It’s been five years. I haven’t seen a . . . hu- man being in five years. Please.”
“What do you want?” Her mouth was a thin line on her face. She wasn’t Karinth. Nothing at all like Karinth.
Steve slowed his breathing. “I need to find entities to negotiate with. 'The military commanders in the war against the Stoop. I come from Jugurtha.”
She didn’t react to this astonishing claim. “Approach the farmhouse on this road. One point five kilometers. Do not deviate. If you attempt to produce weapons, you will be killed.”
“Wait!”
She backed and vanished with a mosquito sound. Steve was alone again. He shrugged back into his harness and pulled the suddenly heav- ier sledge up the road.
The next thing he heard was the sound of laughter. He was passing two greenhouses that seemed to be made of ice sheets. Huge green leaves spread luxuriously within, as if trapped by a glacier. Below, at the base of the hill, was a pond.
The ice had been broken through and lay in stacked slabs by the side of the water. Children frolicked there, like seals. They were swollen and sleek, their eyes hidden behind flaps of skin. Steve recognized them as human only through an effort. They yelped and squealed with pleasure, in water not a degree above freezing.
“Nice seconds today,” Adalti said to Karinth. His long-snouted Jugur face disappeared from the screen, replaced by an overhead shot of an alley. Snow-covered cornices at different heights made an intricate pat- tern of overlapping gray-and-white rectangles, a pleasing frame to the deadly battle going on below.
“It was a smooth ambush,” Karinth said. She sat in her chair with a glass of water and watched the fight clinically, seeking to learn some- thing from her close escape. “They hung themselves up in the rafters of
28
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
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an abandoned grocery store. IR showed nothing. No carbon dioxide. They must have been recirculating their air.”
“Why were you out there?” Adalti asked.
Other cameras had been positioned at the alley end, in the second- floor window of an apartment, out on a stalk from a sewer grate. Had Adalti been warned of the ambush ahead of time? She never knew, and the nature of their arrangement did not allow her to ask. In general, though, Adalti was ready for anything, and he moved faster than anyone she’d ever met. If he’d been heading the Stoop, rather than being an eyemouth, she suspected that the war would have been over long ago. The angles were crisply intercut.
“What?” The ambushers dropped from the ceiling, through the rotted acoustic paneling, and burst out of the plate glass window. Shards tum- bled through the air. For an instant, a rainbow flickered in the glass rain. Had Adalti added it? Nice touch. Karinth watched herself drop to the left. Are a quick shot over her shoulder, then vault over a burnt c£ir hulk. Good. Aside from letting herself get caught in the first place, there was nothing to And fault with.
“Why were you out there?” Adalti repeated. “There was no need for you to be on that side of the river.”
Her pursuers were human beings, of course. The nearest Stoop Jugur were in central Wisconsin. The southern half of Lake Michigan was extremely well defended. She dropped and slid on the ice-covered pave- ment, heading for a basement window. At the last instant she pushed a foot off next to the window and rolled back to her feet. Karinth remem- bered that instant of “oh, shit” fear. The window, an escape route she’d plotted out on previous trips through the area, had been too dark, the reflections behind it wrong. The basement was a trap with someone waiting inside it. A shot of her face. It showed no particular expression. A leathery old face, one that had experienced things like this a dozen times.
“I was ...” she said. “I was ... I needed to take a walk. Some fresh air. I hate being cooped up in here, you know that.”
“Of course. You don’t like being safe.”
Her pursuers had hung back just a little too far, anxious to see her sucked up into the maw of the basement. Patriotic scum, she thought, as she watched them move toward her. All Jugur were alike to them, all enemies: Stoop, eyemouth, the hypothetical Jugur of the home planet. These humans and the Stoop together would turn the Earth into a sterile wasteland.
She jumped off a car roof, grabbed a window frame, and swung herself up. For some reason, she found herself seeing herself differently than she ever had before. She was a tough, efficient cylinder with arms and
30
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
legs. Her hooded head was a bullet. She was meant to wear insulating clothes and body armor. A camisole . . . why should she remember a cam- isole? It had been thirty years. Thirty real goddam years.
‘That’s not it, Adalti. You know that.”
“Why now, today, Karinth Tolback? It was just a random attack, they might have missed you, you might have taken another route. The chances were good that nothing would happen to you. Take a walk. But why were you out there?”
“Damn you, Adalti, I — ” She watched herself fire down from the win- dow. Two of them, caught right out in the street like practice targets. The others ducked and dove, and she was through the second fioor of the apartment building and out the other side and she didn’t stop moving until she got back here, to the center of the defenses provided for her by the Great Lakes Consortium.
“You know why,” she said, finally. “I wanted to look up at the sky. I wanted to think.” She paused to breathe. “Do you have any stuff of him coming down?”
Stars spangled the screen. It could have been stock footage: a reentry pod, a glidewing, a long slide down into the center of the continent. It could have been anyone in that pod. Anyone at all. The pod crashed through trees, sending shattered branches and snow flying. The scene cut. A man climbed out of the pod’s ruins and stood next to it, staring up at the sky, his feet once again on his native planet.
Karinth Tolback had been married twice. She had had one daughter. Her right shoulder joint was completely artificial. It still hurt, late at night. She’d lived an entire life, several. He was back again. After thirty years, Steve Hardt was back.
The sun had been pale on the day Steve left the Earth, a burning sore seen through layers of gauze: a comet sky. As the sun sank toward evening, it lit the entire western sky with flame, and Steve stopped for a moment on the street outside Karinth’s house to watch it.
“Hurry up, come in,” Karinth said from an upper window. She leaned out. She’d fluffed her short dark hair and wore a loose dressing gown over a lace-trimmed camisole. “Don’t just stand out there.”
“I’m in. I’m in.”
She flounced her hair and silently slid the window shut, disappearing in a golden reflection.
Steve opened the wrought-iron gate and ran up the wood stairs to the second-floor entrance of the old building. The sunsets upset her. To him they were just beautiful, but she could not look at them without thinking of the comet crash that was their cause, and the ice that was its necessary consequence.
SUMMER AND ICE
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The entire white-painted front of the house glowed rose and the street trees cast bluish shadows on it. A brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head gleamed on the door. Burning clouds sailed overhead. He and Karinth had reached final agreement with the Jugur eyemouths through their main contact, Adalti. In return for control over his image, they would transport Steve to Jugurtha aboard an eyemouth vessel and put him in contact with the Juguijur. The eyemouths had no chair on the Juguijur meeting ground, and never would. But, as Adalti said, the only reason everyone in Jugur-controlled space knew what the meeting ground looked like was because of the eyemouths.
A last furtive glance over his shoulder at the sun, a turn of the brass door handle, and Steve was inside the house. Karinth was in the kitchen, stirring a pot. She’d put a kitchen apron over her peignoir, a sacrifice of grace to practicality that made her more beautiful than ever.
“Wait!” she said. Then: “at least let me put down the spoon. No, on the spoon rest. There.” And a while later: “lucky for you I keep my kitchen floor so clean.”
“Clean enough to screw off of,” he said. “How traditionalist of you.”
Dinner wasn’t even ruined, though the asparagus was soft enough to spread on crackers. They sat silently at the candle-lit dining-room table. Steve watched the flicker of her hooped earrings. She served dinner in her camisole, having carefully smoothed out the creases, and he admired the fullness of her body, which curved with smooth languidness. After this night he would never touch it again, not this body, it would be years gone ....
“Will you remember me?” he asked.
“Steve!” she looked at him, serious. “You promised we wouldn’t talk about that.”
“Well,” he said. “I lied.”
She choked, uncertain about whether to laugh or to cry, and turned away. “You know the answer. Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know,” he said, finally. “Maybe it’s because I feel like I’m running away, leaving you to face ... I don’t know, war, ice, time. All of it. This world will be hell .... No, that’s not it at all. I’m running away, and I’m still afraid, dammit, Karinth, I’m still afraid.”
“We’ve been over it, Steve. You’re not running away. You’re doing your job. I think we can trust Adalti and his eyemouths.” Then she looked at him. “That’s not what I meant. You have a right to be afraid. You’ll be the only human being for eighteen light years. That’s scary. But I’ll survive here. At any rate. I’ll do my best. Don’t worry.”
He slumped his shoulders, letting the air out, then chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, right. I won’t worry. You know, Adalti says I’ll be a major star on
32
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
From the author of Shadow Twin
The Fareland Theater is open again. Business couldn't be better. And the audience is being treated to a double feature, starring unspeakable evil and a madness that will overtake their souls.
A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES YOU’LL NEVER FORGET.
Jugurtha. Everyone will know me. The eyemouths will cover my every move.”
She didn’t say anything more, so he reached across the table and took her hand. He wanted to make love to her again, but he felt drained, as if his body had nothing to say to him anymore. Maybe he’d be able to show her he loved her one more time before the night was through. He’d meant the last time to be so calm and intense and here he’d just jumped on her in the kitchen, as if they had endless time ahead of them.
“Come on,” he had said. “I want you to go to sleep on me. Can you do that?”
“I can do that.” Head down, she had followed him to the bedroom.
Now Steve sat and stared out through the ice at the hollow night. The snow gleamed in the light of the orbital mirrors, streaked with bony multiple shadows. 'The mirrors were part of an environmental war, he’d learned. The Jugfur sought to cool the Earth, the humans to warm it. Orbital battles swarmed around the mirrors.
‘There are all sorts of modifications,” Dr. Saleh said. Steve’s question had been unexpected, and had made her nervous. “Since you’ve left. For example, an internal blood heater controlled by the hypothalamus, surgically installed in the heart’s interventricular septum, the power socket at the manubrium of the sternum.” She prodded sharp fingers at the tip of Steve’s sternum, just below his throat. “Plug in, you can survive being frozen in a block of ice.”
‘Those children — ”
She shook her head. “Something else. Foamed adipose tissue. Closed cell. Better than any insulation in nature. Now please stop moving around.” She vacuumed dead skin from Steve Hardt’s arm with a rubbery nozzle. “Does this hurt? Good, excellent. Radiation didn’t get all your basal cells. Easy regrowth.”
Steve didn’t look at her, but continued staring out at the snow. Two puffily insulated skiers slid through the trees. Why did he feel so empty? He’d held her so close for five years. Why should the news that Karinth was still alive make her evaporate from his arms?
“She’s still in Chicago,” Steve said. “Still in the same place.”
“She is.” Saleh had come to the farm at Lower Fox a few days after Steve’s arrival. Aside from being a medico, she represented the Great Lakes Consortium, the military organization directing the fight against the Stoop in the middle of the North American continent. “Karinth Tol- back is an independent operator, contracting to Great Lakes. She pro- vides a link to the Jugur eyemouths. It’s an . . . ambiguous position.”
“Like mine.”
“Just so.”
Steve couldn’t remember meeting Karinth. It was as if he had known
34 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
her for a long time when he finally recognized who she was. They had all lived in multicolored domed tents on heights near Ararat, the team combined to communicate with the aliens that had been dropped across the snowy expanse of eastern Anatolia. Odd aliens with vestigial wings beneath their arms, who said they were refugees, fleeing war on a distant planet. Suddenly knowing Karinth Tolback was just part of the discovery of that time. It made galactic conflagration seem a thing of joy, something to backlight a love affair.
“So, can you do it?” He’d asked Saleh the question immediately upon learning that Karinth was still alive. “The modification? It is possible. I’m sure it is.”
“It’s not a physiological problem with you,” Dr. Saleh said to him. “I don’t think it’s any sort of problem at all. I’ve performed all the tests. Your sexual responsiveness is completely normal. You are not in any way dysfunctional. A few difficulties from your isolation. Perfectly normal.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that. I need you to tell me if you can perform the modification.”
Rising up around the examination table were branches suspending apples, pears, and peaches, though instead of tree trunks they had pencil- thin rods of tubule-filled composite.
Since his encounter with the guard on the snowmobile, Steve had not wanted to look at anyone. It was as if all the people of Lower Fox were the same as the dying people he had seen on the screens on Jugurtha day after day, like figures on some immense, tragic ceremonial frieze. For five years, that was what human beings had been to him. Eyemouth interpretations had made them heroes, vermin, innocent victims, which- ever was the fashion at the moment, but still, all they had been able to do was die for the camera, blown apart by the coolly efficient Jugur that made up the Stoop. These people here at Lower Fox talked to him, even touched him, but they didn’t seem at all real.
“Do you think it necessary?” Saleh’s voice was clipped.
“I do.”
They needed him. He could feel it. He had fallen from the sky bearing a message from the Juguijur to the Stoop, or so his evidence showed. Saleh had spent the better part of a week examining it. After thirty years of war, the human military resistance could not afford to pass up any negotiation. Steve Hardt represented a chance for stability.
“I can do it. I can give you that control over your sexual drive. If that’s what you want. Then — ”
“Then I will come up to Chicago and negotiate. Great Lakes has to set up a contact with the Stoop, so that I can convey the Juguijur’s message in the appropriate manner. Agreed?”
SUMMER AND ICE
35
“Agreed.” Saleh was clearly much more than a mere doctor if she could make that sort of agreement without consulting anyone else.
Slowly, Steve turned his head to look at her. Dr. Saleh was a wizened, dark-skinned woman, sharp of feature and sharp of movement. Her thin- ning hair was hidden under a turban. When Steve had left the Earth, she had been a young woman. Now she was old, as sharp and hard as a wood letter opener.
“I’ll make the arrangements,” she said. She was angry. And why shouldn’t she be, when the last, best hope of Earth wanted a physiological modification to turn him into a voluntary sex maniac?
Some time later, devices lowered themselves to his skin. Was that a tingle, a vibration, or just an illusion? He looked out at the snow while Saleh fussed intently over her gadgets. She’d explained about the cingu- late gyrus, the hippocampus, the neurotransmitter control, the parasym- pathetic nervous system, but he hadn’t wanted to listen. Lush fruit hung down heavy over him where he lay. The peaches were so ripe that their sweet juice was squeezing out of their flesh and beading on their softly curving surfaces.
He found himself looking at Saleh, filling his eyes with her body. She was a small woman, skinny and dark. She was beautiful. Her small breasts curved out against her businesslike dress, and he could see the tightness of her bottom as she turned to adjust something. He imagined her skin sliding against his, the soft warmth of it, and the flicking of her sharp tongue down his stomach, past his navel. She reached over him to touch some control and he grabbed her, pulled her against him.
Agony flared in his gut and he curled around it. Having jabbed him efficiently in the solar plexus with stiffened fingers, Saleh stood back a few feet from the couch and watched him analytically. He sucked in a painful breath.
“Sorry,” he managed.
“Learn to control it. Now. Close it down.”
Slowly, his blood cooled. He felt as if he had only just crawled out of his lifepod to breathe the air. He blinked at her. “Okay.”
“You leave tomorrow morning,” she said. “A convoy up the Illinois. I’ll make the arrangements.”
“Fine, fine.” Despite himself, he watched her leave. Beyond the ice window, the gentle snow curved under the trees like a woman’s skin stroked by the night.
Karinth remembered perfectly the first time she had seen Steve Hardt. She and the rest of the team had been trying to communicate with the Jugur refugees for over a month. The sun was creeping over the hills to the east, and they all stood, huddled up, watching the line of light work
36
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
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its way toward them across the grass. The cook stove was hissing, and that morning’s crew was hard at work with the oatmeal. The foreign smell of maple sugar penetrated the Anatolian highlands.
New team members had arrived during the night. Karinth noted with annoyance that one of them had plopped his dome tent right across the easiest trail to the latrine. As she glared at it, it shook like a hatching egg, and a man crawled out of it. Something — his sleeping bag, proba- bly— grabbed at his leg. He shook it off, then stood up. He ran his fingers through his wild hair, vainly trying to smooth it, noticed she was looking at him, and smiled.
She and Steve first made love on a flat rock in the sun, high above a valley. She had climbed up there to sunbathe, in one of her few free hours. He followed to bring her the canteen she had forgotten. She would never have forgotten something as essential as a canteen, but there it had been, hanging on a broken-off tree branch, and it had been the simplest thing in the world for him to grab it and carry it up to her so that she wouldn’t be thirsty there in the hot sun.
Steve marked their moving into the same tent together with a little ritual, as was his habit. After letting her choose her side of the tent, he sat cross-legged on the floor and fed her, like an Arab, then insisted she feed him. She laughed and got food all over his face. Then he gave her a tiny amulet with a blue eye in it, something to ward off the evil eye. It hung up near her bed and winked at her.
She rolled out of bed, turning away from the eye. Steve was part of her past. A big part, a good part, but the past, nevertheless. They had agreed to understand that. They had both agreed.
Her encapsulated space was below where her old basement had been. Waste heat got ducted through superconducting heat pipes to sinks blocks away. She still went up into the house once in a while, but it wasn’t really safe up there, even with the military protection her neigh- borhood had. The risk was less the Stoop than other human beings. The walls were perforated by heavy-caliber fire. She had patched and sealed them, for neatness’ sake.
It made no sense to think about him. It made sense to think about Arnold, if she was going to think about someone. There was nothing of her second husband in this apartment, and they’d been married for five years. He’d moved her away, out to the open fields of Iowa to lead a nomadic, military life. Surviving there had meant shaking down the human farmers as well as fighting the Stoop. She remembered sitting behind the machine gun of an assault vehicle in the cooling days of the early fall, watching rye being pumped out of a gun-turret-surrounded grain silo, while the farmers stood by, fear and rage in their eyes, chil- dren held up above their heads so that they might early learn the injus- tice of a farming existence. They had armed and fortified, but not well
38
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
enough. Arnold had led a clever attack at a weak point of their defenses, scaling a river bluff to hit them in the rear, the sort of operation that, under other circumstances, in other times, would have won him a medal.
She and Arnold had fought about that, about the meaning of being armored modern-day Mongols looting without mercy, and about her re- fusal to bear another, late, child for him via one of her own reimplanted gene-scrubbed ova. It had been a constant, sweating struggle, which Arnold had regarded as healthy mental exercise.
He’d been a big, solid man, immovable when standing still, irresistible when moving. He’d been killed in Wisconsin, near the touristic ruins of the Dells. Killed by Jugur soldiers of the Stoop, she was told. Maybe. She half-suspected that the bullet lodged in that wide chest had come from an angry human farmer’s gun. His role in her life had been bigger than Steve’s could ever be, but still he stood back there in her memory, a solid part of the landscape, and never troubled her sleep.
Unlike her first husband, Daniel. He came back only late at night, in isolated incidents, desperately forgotten otherwise, always standing over the still and dead figure of their daughter Selene, which made no sense, he’d never seen Selene dead, never ever talked to Karinth again after that day. Otherwise, she never thought about him. Not consciously. An alarm shivered the air, indicating an intruder on the street. A particu- larly clumsy one, it seemed: she could detect no confusion gear in opera- tion, and you could have heard the footsteps without sonic sensors.
Images of the surrounding streets clicked on. The snow was tinged pink with the approaching evening. And there, just turning the corner, a single human figure, strolling along exactly as if there was no war, no frozen city, no battery of defensive weapons focused harshly on his location.
Steve Hardt pulled back his hood and waved, blowing steam out of his pursed lips like cigarette smoke.
She blinked, and the screens went out of focus. Damn it. She rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. Steve strolled down to her front steps and paused, looking for a moment at the sunset at the end of her street.
“Steve!” She scrambled to her feet. He couldn’t hear her, not through meters of shielding and concrete. And he was going right up to that useless front door, to search vainly for the long-gone brass door knocker. “I’m coming, Steve, damn you.”
She climbed out through a tunnel parallel to the old sewer pipe, undog- ged a hatch, and emerged at the opposite end of the street. He still stood on the porch, looking at the house. It looked just as it had the day he left. Pure white, newly painted . . . the front had been blown up once.
SUMMER AND ICE
39
eind when she’d replaced the door she hadn’t been able to find a lion- headed brass door knocker.
“Over here,” she said. Her voice cracked over the silent street.
He turned and stared at her for a long moment. “Karinth.” Then he walked toward her. “How are you?” His voice was pitched conversation- ally, as if the frozen street was just a length of clean white linen on a restaurant table.
He hadn’t changed: thinning sandy hair, pale blue eyes, big ears, long chin. He looked impossibly young, as if he was her own child.
“Oh, damn you, Steve,” she said through tears. “Damn you. You prom- ised you wouldn’t try to come back.”
“I lied,” he said.
She had to have moved things out of place before he came, so she would have something to do. She couldn’t possibly have had to go through this much work every time she made a pot of tea.
Steve watched the powerful, gray-brush-haired woman bustle around the kitchen. She had trouble looking at him, and snuck glances out of the comers of her eyes. He pretended not to notice. He affected interest in a design of tiles on the wall.
“Why are you looking at me?” she said, standing with her back to him.
“Because I haven’t seen you in so long,” he said.
“And what do you see?” She was challenging.
He shrugged. ‘What should I see? I see Karinth Tolback.”
“The name’s Karinth Carlson,” she said harshly. ‘That was Arnold’s last name. Arnold was my second husband. He died eight years ago. I kept it. It’s about all I have of him.”
“Okay. Carlson. But I see you, Karinth. You want me to say you haven’t changed a bit? I won’t.”
She managed a laugh, and shook her head, looking down at the tea pot. “You haven’t changed much. Not at all.”
Her shoulders were wide, her back strong. She’d lost a lot of her wom- anly shape, and looked aggressively competent, as if she had concen- trated on that personality feature in preference to the others. She wore a utilitarian coverall. Her face was creased and lined. She put the tea on a tray and carried it into the living room. He followed, then stood there and looked at her as she sat on the couch.
He’d been whirled through the infinite spaces and was dizzy, standing on the same rug he’d started on, as if the world had just tilted for an instant and come back completely changed.
“I was the only human being on Jugurtha,” he said. “They watched me. Every minute of every day, they watched me. I represented the entire race to them. . . . Adalti knew I would.”
40
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
“That was your job,” she said distantly. “You knew what you were going up against. You knew. . . .”
“We both knew. Karinth. Kari, love, I came back a long way to find you.”
Tears suddenly flowed down her gullied cheeks. Her eyes were still dark brown, but looked completely different. Not just because her face was different, fallen down on the bones, but because she’d had her lenses and corneas replaced as they aged. The new, more efficient focusing arrangement worked like a bellows camera, and her eyes bulged out at him as he moved closer, efficiently, if disquietingly, changing the focal length.
“I haven’t cried since ... I didn’t cry when Arnold died. ... I didn’t even cry when Daniel left. ... I don’t remember. ... I don’t know ...”
He didn’t put his arms around her. She didn’t want that, not yet. Just crying in front of him was enough of a sign to him. She’d never liked to do that.
“I remember. The last time I cried was when Selene died. She was my daughter. My only child. If she’d lived she would only be a few years younger than you.”
Steve didn’t say anything. He just provided her with a calm silence.
“It was stupid. My stupidity, not hers, not anyone else’s. Not Adalti’s, though later I tried to think so. Mine. She was helping me. She was only fifteen ... I remember myself at fifteen, nothing like her . . . fifteen is old now. You’ve lived a long time at that age. But she hadn’t lived at all. And now she won’t. We ... I was helping Adalti. He had evidence that a local Stoop commander had ordered a massacre of human prisoners in the Indiana dunes, near the ruins of a Gary steel mill. He wanted to cover it. Find the bodies. Display the Stoop to Jugurtha in a way the Stoop didn’t want to be seen.”
“How had he found that out?”
She didn’t hesitate. “From me. I got it from Great Lakes intelligence. They didn’t know what to do with it: propaganda? How are you going to make people fight any harder? Atrocity news is low value, less important than an accurate weather report. We’re fighting for survival. But on Jugurtha it’s a different matter. So I slid it to Adalti.”
Adalti had been with those refugees in Anatolia, managing and re- cording the first contact between Jugur and human beings. It was only gradually, over long thought and investigation, that Steve had realized that the crashlanded Jugur were not refugees from some galactic conflict. That was just a cover story. They were all eyemouths, a boatload of media Jugur, making contacts and getting used to the place. An odd way to make interspecies contact, Steve had thought, until the Stoop-directed comet hit and he realized they were here to cover the big story: the
SUMMER AND ICE
41
invasion of Earth by the Stoop. Slowly, as the humans had talked to the Jugur, Adalti had co-opted Steve and Karinth, and they had been string- ers of his ever since. Some called that treason.
“And it was a trap,” Steve said.
She sighed. “The Stoop had gotten wind of it. How did you know?”
Steve remembered the flurry it had caused on Jugurtha. In juxtaposi- tion, it had made his image stronger. “It was on the news.” A lot of nice visuals: exploding steel-mill buildings, vehicles plowing through collapsing walls, flames so hot that metal melted. It had been intercut with some ancient human newsreel footage of a steel mill, with pouring molten steel and huge glowing cauldrons, an indication of Adalti’s fine hand. Steve had watched the images over and over, catching glimpses of Karinth’s silhouette and her distinctive way of moving. The reports had not mentioned a daughter.
“Of course it was on the news. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? The Stoop hit us there, a hard attack, they usually couldn’t spare that much ordnance. Three of Adalti’s eyemouths were killed. My daughter drove an APC right into a Stoop assault squad . . . the rest of us managed to escape. My husband Daniel blamed me, divorced me ... I never saw him again. He was right to do it.”
Daniel had no doubt known what Steve knew now. Karinth had risked herself and her daughter in a high-stakes gamble to further influence Jugur public opinion via the eyemouths. Actual military operations against the Stoop were of only secondary importance. The flaming images had been common currency on Jugur for weeks, the first significant sign of notice of that war on a distant planet.
She’d been responsible for the way it came out. She’d known the Stoop would catch wind of the eyemouth expedition to dig up their dirt. Perhaps she had even made sure they caught wind of it, taking the risk she would be killed when the attack came. Selene had died instead.
Then, months later, Adalti had come back again, to dig up the bodies from the forgotten massacre and the bodies from the recent battle, and to display them side by side, burnt and shattered human skulls next to lumps of long-forgotten slag. Had Karinth looked there for her daughter’s remains? Had her husband?
“She was your daughter,” Steve said. “No doubt about that.”
“Yes, she was.”
The silence stretched. He had run through the snow to try to throw his arms around an anonymous armed woman on a snowmobile. But he had barely touched Karinth. Their hug had been perfunctory. All the way back from Jugurtha, he had thought about little else but whether he would see her again. It had seemed to him that she had shared that trip home with him, but now, looking at her, he knew that her life had
42
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
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been something completely different. It was an icy, incomprehensible world, full of children that looked like seals, doctors that represented war-fighting corporations, lovers that turned in an eye-blink from equals to grim figures of authority whose histories made mock of your expe- rience.
“Please, Karinth,” he whispered. “Don’t be angry at me for coming back. I need you.”
“It’s all right.”
When Steve Hardt had left the Earth, he and Karinth had released each other from every oath and every promise. It didn’t make sense, they told each other. Light speed will pull on every cord until it is broken. Better to cut voluntarily than feel each one ripped from the flesh and soul. He had made a little ceremony of it, as he liked to do, a parting of string in a candle flame. He remembered it, a tug and then two loose pieces, one in each of their hands, connected to nothing. String after string, then a lot of alcohol, and then soon it was dawn and he had to go. He’d even thrown up, for the first time since college. So she had married, twice, and had a child. It was only natural that she should have, though he could not restrain a flash of equally natural jealousy. Those men had lived the life with her that he should have.
He looked at her as she sat huddled on the couch, and thought: I hid one of those strings in my pocket. Saved it from the flame. He still had it, he’d taken it to Jugurtha and back and held it in his hand as he reentered the Earth’s atmosphere.
He knew she still had one too.
A trumpeting sound. Steve turned slowly and she watched him, wait- ing for his reaction.
“My God!”
For the first time in three days, since he had shown up on her doorstep, she laughed. The midget mastodon trotted out of the trees of Grant Park and extended its snout to Steve, hoping for some food. He jumped back and it looked hurt, not used to anything but full approval. It was six feet at the shoulder and covered with long reddish hair.
“We modified some ova from elephants at the Brookfield Zoo,” she said. “Implemted genes from desiccated Wrangel Island dwarf mastodons.”
“What . . . why?”
She shrugged. “What could we do? The elephants are dead now, all the tropical animals. We let the musk oxen, the bactrian camels, that stuff go. TTiey live out there in the open lands somewhere, I think. I hope. I look for them when I’m out there. But we adapted the elephants as we adapted ourselves.”
He looked up at the tall, silent city around them. The city park opened
44 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
out on the cracked and fissured ice of the lake, huge chunks thrust up, blue in the morning light. He was slender in his bulky, unflattering coat, and his brown hair was crisply brushed. He moved with a bouncing grace.
He turned quickly to her, as if hoping to catch her off guard. “Have you adapted to the Jugur?” he asked.
“You don’t know the first thing about it,” she said angrily. “We’ve been at war so long I’ve almost forgotten anything else. But we won’t stop. Not for anything.”
“Good, good.” Suddenly he seemed distracted. Her anger didn’t affect him. “Now, this meeting with the Great Lakes board ... it still sounds weird to me, you know? That an army has a board of directors, stock holders. But what do I know? What will they think of me?”
“It’s what they will make of you that’s important,” Karinth said. “A hero.”
“The Stoop won’t negotiate with anyone else.”
“That’s right. So if they’re going to listen to a message from the Ju- guijur, it will have to come from someone who’s proved that he can fight them on their own terms.”
“Right, right.” He gazed off distractedly.
So that was why he was nervous. He wasn’t afraid of meeting the Board of Directors of the Great Lakes Consortium. He was afraid of what they would have to do to make him a hero worthy of negotiating with the Stoop. Even a fake hero gets put in danger.
Adalti had once explained it to her. Most Jugur saw themselves in the Stoop. The Stoop represented the basic virtues of the Jugur as a species. They were blithe, interested in dramatic virtue, completely unconcerned with other sentient species save as dramatic backdrops to their own actions. Clan allegiance had always been much stronger among Jugur than territoriality, and the Stoop represented an overarching, almost philosophically defined clan. Most Jugur and Jugurtha had evolved men- tally beyond the simple allegiances represented by the Stoop, but they still valued them, particularly as the Stoop was played to them by the eyemouths.
The Stoop had its own vision of itself, also played to it by the eye- mouths. They valued heroism and constant war. Steve had to appear as a representative of those values before they would consent to hear him speak, no matter how important his message.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Adalti will handle it.”
“Adalti. You’ve known him for thirty years now. Do you understand him yet?”
“He’s a genius, Steve. How can I understand him?”
Adalti was a brilliant eyemouth: a Michelangelo, a Rembrandt of the
SUMMER AND ICE
45
form. He was abnormal, like all geniuses. He was genuinely interested in alien races, human beings in particular. His version of the Stoop’s invasion of the Earth was his great masterwork. Other eyemouths did his bidding, sometimes not realizing it. The eyemouths who had made Steve Hardt famous on Jugurtha had been in the position of medieval stonecutters assisting in the making of a cathedral whose final structure they had no way of imagining.
Karinth thought of the immense arc of Steve’s journey to Jugurtha and back, the passing close to the speed of light and the quick transition beyond it that sucked up most of the distance. Holding it together was the taut line of his life, with her own high parabola superimposed on it, intersecting at two points. The whole thing made some sort of sense to Adalti that it didn’t yet to her.
Steve Hardt was a child, she told herself, a callow young man who’d spent a good portion of his life cramped in a tuna can stuck to the side of a Stoop warship. Who was he to her? Did she really remember loving him? She wasn’t sure.
Still, there was something in him that spoke to her, even after the distance of time that had stretched between them. She liked the way he moved, the way he held things in his hands. She liked the way he listened when she had something to say. She liked the way he looked at her, really looked at her, as if it didn’t matter that she was thirty years older than he’d seen her last. She could feel that liking within her and she didn’t like it. The time for that was long past. The sooner Steve Hardt made his arrangements with Great Lakes and went off on his mission, the better.
“Come on, Steve,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
“Okay.” He took her arm and they walked together down the path. “I’ll tell you how it goes.”
She couldn’t think of any polite way of getting him to let go of her arm, so she let him hold it. It felt all right. She thought she could put up with it.
“They have the military plans all ready,” Steve said, shaking his head. “They know what to do.”
It had been a rough meeting, and Steve had left soaked in sweat. But they had finally agreed. The Great Lakes Consortium would make Steve Hardt a hero. They had heen resentful, and there had been opposition, but, finally, there had been no choice.
“Of course they do,” Karinth said. “They’ve been at this a long time.”
Her voice was sharp, irritated. Without thinking about it, he sat down on the couch next to her. She jerked as he sank down into the cushions.
“Karinth,” he said. “Why—?”
46
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“Do we really need to talk about it? Do we need the whole analysis?”
“No, we don’t. I love you, Karinth.”
“No, you don’t. You sat there in your little capsule and thought about me and thought about me and now that you see me you’re still thinking about me. We’re not who we were, Steve.”
“No.” He pursed his lips, amused. “We never were, though.”
“Oh!”
She was right, and she was wrong. She wasn’t the tender young woman he’d loved, but she wasn’t someone else either, regardless of how many husbands or children she’d had. He was going out into Wisconsin in a few days, to let the Stoop launch an attack on him so that he could appear to be a hero, and have the honor of negotiating with them.
He was never going to negotiate with them. The Juguijur had nothing worthwhile to offer, and the Stoop would not listen. He wondered if Karinth imderstood his real plan. She’d talked with Adalti for thirty yeeu's. She had to.
He slid down the couch toward her like a teenager attempting his first seduction. His body was a heavy sack full of reality. If he truly loved her, after all these years, after all that had happened, he should feel the urge to make love to her. A woman, no matter what age, had a right to that from the man who loved her. And he knew she felt the absence of that urge in him. There was a look in the eye, a tingly warmth to the tips of the fingers, a tautness in the skin, that should have been there and it was all missing, as if it had been pounded out somewhere between the stars. Even if she rejected him and pushed him away, she should be able to feel that heat coming from him again. He wanted to do that for her.
He put his arms around Karinth’s waist and she finally let her weight relax against him.
“Touch my lips,” he said. “With your fingertips.”
She hesitated a moment, then did as he asked. With his eyes closed, the years fell away. They lay in their tent, tired from the day, their minds buzzing with insane new information, and, and she rolled over and stroked him slowly, as light as a butterfly’s wing, shooting energy over his skin.
He felt the shift, the flow inside. Dr. Saleh had conditioned and trained him. It felt real, by God. And the fact that it came right when he needed it didn’t mean that it wasn’t real, not at all.
He kissed Karinth. Her lips were ridged, rougher than they had been, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He felt the fire inside as he hadn’t felt it in years. As he hadn’t felt it since he left her.
“Please,” Karinth said. “The lights.”
He jumped and turned them off. It was best that way. He stood there
48 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
for a moment, hearing her breathe in the darkness, then returned and felt her fumbling hands slide their way down his sides.
“Okay, Steve,” Karinth whispered into the radio. “The Stoop unit’s just over the ridge.” She looked up at the crumbling ceiling of the subur- ban house she sat in, imagining him out in the snow, lying still, waiting for the first signs of sunlight.
“I see deer tracks,” Steve said.
“How fresh?” She leaned forward. One of the many screens was verti- cally striped by tree trunks.
“Don’t know. I’m lucky I know they’re deer.” A pause. “Do deer live in Wisconsin? Maybe it’s from a dog.”
She laughed, hard. It hurt. “Oh, Steve. Don’t get killed. We need a live hero.”
“Sure. Tell Adalti I’ll do my best.”
Karinth turned to Adalti, who squatted next to the rotted couch. One of his eyes stared blankly, its nerves recruited to process direct electronic image information from his cameras. Jugur seldom massed more than fifty kilos, and Adalti was on the small side. He suddenly seemed tiny to her, with his fine arms and legs, his sharply pointed face, and the fuzzy membranes that were all that was left of ancestral glide wings, stretch- ing from his elbow joints down to his wide, articulated hips. Jugur were like highly evolved flying squirrels, not at all the sort of being to be fighting heavy, solid human beings on more than equal terms.
“Some of the angles are difficult,” Adalti said in his whispering voice. “The main attack will be coming out of the rising sun. I will have to process the image.”
“You always process the image, Adalti.”
“Still, each must have the taste of reality. Otherwise the mind spits it out. And the young trees on that side . . . they fragment the view.”
“Part of the idea. Makes the attack safer.”
Adalti extended his wing membranes in irritation. “Winning the battle is not the point, Karinth. A few more casualties — reasonable cost for a good shot. You know this. What are you after?”
The destruction of your entire species, Karinth thought. Instead, she smiled. Adalti knew that she hated him because he was a Jugur, despite all he had done. It didn’t seem to bother him. If anything, it made her more interesting.
“Steve Hardt has to survive. Without that, all the good shots in the world don’t mean anything.”
“He will survive,” Adalti said. “He will survive forever. Up there.” He pointed to the line of screens. “His story will be watched on Jugurtha centuries from now. Your story.”
SUMMER AND ICE
49
She barely listened to his grandiose pronouncements. She was remem- bering the previous night, when Steve made love to her. She’d seen the heat flare up in his eyes. And suddenly . . . she’d loved both her husbands, and other men as well. She’d made love in calm safe times and in the face of imminent death. She’d borne a child, and seen her die. But still, the night before Steve left the Earth and the night just past formed the lips of a cup that held the last thirty years in it. If he had not come back, none of it would have made any sense. It would simply have happened.
“We’re going up, hon.” She could hear the quaver of fear in his voice. Charging up a snow-covered hill at a Jugur military unit had not been in his job description. “Talk to you later.”
The end of his voice and the start of distant gunfire came at once. What was left of the house’s window glass shook and rattled. The Jugur unit had been entrenched in what had once been this small Wisconsin town’s riverfront park, which covered the steep slope down to the river.
The line of screens dangling from the edge of the ceiling flared with combat. Supersonic bouncing-betty shrapnel shredded the bases of the second-growth trees and they toppled in all directions, forming an impas- sible tangle. Three dull thunks and the thick-frozen river cracked open. Armored vehicles pushed through the ice from their concealment on the river bed and opened fire.
“ . . . keep two meters below the ridge line, Parker . . . that’s a reactive glacis . . . hit the rock next to it, change the angle . . . good, Sugura ...” Steve’s voice cracked through the speakers, giving calm commands. It wasn’t his voice, of course, just a simulation of it coming from a tactical computer, but Karinth found herself listening to it anyway, hoping to hear what he was feeling.
It had taken a while to find a Stoop unit that had strayed far enough out of the defensive line through central Wisconsin. There had been little action in this sector in recent months, and the Stoop had gotten a little lax. An overwhelming force had been mounted against them. It made no military sense: this unit would be destroyed, but then the humans would be exposed to a much larger Stoop counter-attack. By then, they hoped, the emotional effect of this encounter would be felt, making the inevita- ble later military defeat irrelevant.
Adalti wove the various image strands into a narrative. Karinth caught hints of it as she watched. The Stoop weaponry had mostly been destroyed, leaving only the appearance of function. That remotely piloted weapon, for example, cranked fast on its treads, but by now its gun was useless.
He looked good, Karinth thought, her fingers shaking. Steve dodged and weaved over the toppled trunks, dropping, then emerging again. He was a little unsteady on his feet, but the slips were edited out almost as
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they occurred. He rolled through flaming brush and down into a ravine on the other side.
The sun was full up now, and the boiling smoke looked heavy in its light. Flying remotes circled the battle. She’d been through flghts like that herself, but now she found it hard to breathe. She had nothing to do but sit and watch and feel afraid.
“Damn, damn." Steve’s real live voice crackled in her ears. It was punctuated by the blast of shell fire. “Take you down." A screen showed the RPW she had seen before, now firing, not out of commission in the slightest. Its turret whirled, tracking.
She could see the other channels, as soldiers reacted to the possible loss of their imagistic hero. These would not be seen in Adalti’s version. “Get in there! We’re going to lose him! The stupid son of a bitch. ...”
“Steve!” Karinth called.
There was nothing but the sound of his ragged breath. Then: “come here, baby. Come to momma.”
The RPW ground forward. Its armor gleamed like that of a knight in a young girl’s fantasy. Had bored Stoop soldiers spent their time pol- ishing it, or had Adalti removed the grime through some digital filter? A blast, and the earth and logs beneath its treads gave way.
Steve screamed.
Karinth ran through the blown-out front door of the house into the street. Smoke rose up through the trees and she could see the silver specks of helicopters and flying cameras.
“It’s not out there,” Adalti said lazily. “It’s in here.”
Karinth stood in the cold sun, breathing as slowly and silently as she could. Time had gritted her joints. Her inner thighs still hurt from Steve’s desperate lovemaking. She held herself, remembering his arms.
“Interesting,” Adalti said. “Come and see, Karinth.”
She stood in the doorway. Steve was pinned beneath a fall of logs. Helmeted soldiers sawed and pried desperately. The bent ruin of the RPW lay tilted nearby, its weight keeping the logs pressed down on Steve.
“He led it off the solid ground, then blew up a log supporting it.” Adalti monitored peripheral areas of the battle. Most of the Stoop were now dead. “It dropped.”
“Alive?” She held her breath. Steve’s face was pale on the screen.
“Alive.” Adalti sounded amused. “The soldiers are annoyed. We don’t need a real dead hero.”
“Just a synthetic live one. I know. I hope they’ll forgive him.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have what we need. And now they need to move quickly.”
Battle would cover this entire sector by nightfall, as the Stoop reacted
52 ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
to the attack. Steve, Karinth, and Adalti would be long gone by then, of course, but the soldiers would stay.
And all she could think about was last night. Every move, every breath. Where had it come from, that passion she had seen suddenly arise in his gaze? He had gotten it from somewhere, she was suddenly sure. Created it. She blinked in the cold wind. If only she could be young and desirable for just one day, and they could make love in the warm sunlight on top of a flat rock, far above everything else, and tell the world to go to hell.
She stepped back in the house. Steve’s noble face stared out at her from the screens. He commanded the attack and bravely led it up the steep slope into the teeth of the Stoop guns. It was the modem Jugur equivalent of an epic poem, a visual Iliad, the story of a hero. A smart species, the Jugur had adapted to their changing technologies, but used them to support their own image of themselves, the image that said they would negotiate equally only with a hero.
Somewhere under that glossy surface was a genuinely brave man, she knew. Defeat after defeat, and still he had dragged himself back to Earth for the final effort. He was convinced it would finally kill him. And it would kill him. It had to. There was no other sensible end to it all.
Did that mean that there was someone who loved her, somewhere underneath the nerve manipulation that had made him her lover the previous night? Perhaps that image concealed a reality too, and human beings used technology to support their image of themselves as well.
She sat and watched Adalti manipulate Steve’s flaring figure on the screens, for transmission to the Stoop and Jugurtha itself, and felt hol- lower than the loss of either husband had left her.
The records and images would show that Steve had planned it this way from the beginning. He had no doubt of that. It had a satisfying narrative symmetry and would be accepted. That it was really the last desperate act after a string of failures would be ignored.
He stepped out between two lines of upraised batons held in the hands of Stoop commanders. Steve did not look at their expressionless long- nosed faces, their tiny sunk-back mouths gritted in concentration, saving his attention for the rough broken pavement on which he painfully walked. His shattered hip was barely healed, and was held together by fine metal wires.
A fire glowed in the lake beyond the sand-drowned concrete ruins of Gary, lighting the underside of the clouds. The Stoop had lit an ion-tinted fusion flame somewhere out there, visible from Wisconsin to Michigan. Important acts were always consummated at the crossing of the termina- tor, they told him, and the flame gave the all-night negotiations the look
SUMMER AND ICE
53
of perpetual sunset. A pointless gesture, Adalti thought — adding sunset light to the images sent to Jugurtha was a simple procedure — but the Stoop now affected to be traditionalists, though not so traditional that they would actually wait for the sun.
It was almost dawn, the real terminator now approaching. A beam of flickering red light picked Steve out, cast by a parabolic mirror on top of a cnunbling old brick chimney. He blinked in the sudden molten light. Humans now stood to either side, trying to look dignified, respectful, exactly as if they weren’t confronting the creation of a lunatic alien PR wizard, exactly as if he was actually a hero.
Steve had gone all the way to Jugurtha to persuade the Juguijur to pull the Stoop back from Earth. It had taken him three years to realize that the Juguijur, a ceremonial social club a thousand years old, had no intention of doing anything practical, like interdicting Stoop military supplies. While on Jugurtha, however, Steve had become a media star of the sort that ruled the minds and souls of the Jugur. A human, come all the way to Jugurtha to talk and convince! He was a wonder. The war on Earth was just the background from which he came. That fame was Adalti’s first step.
And now, after becoming a hero in the eyes of the Stoop, who were still compelled by the images of his fight in Wisconsin, he had attempted to negotiate with them, and failed again. This was now their planet too, they said, and they were here to stay. Those of their number who wished to leave and go on to fight on a more pleasant planet were not heard. The weak message from the Juguijur impressed no one. He had hoped to break their internal cohesion by a further demonstration of human resolve, and had failed again. And that heroism was Adalti’s second step, for those same images had gone to Jugurtha.
“Karinth.” Adalti had set up a ceremonial space for Steve in what had once been the bottom level of a parking garage. Stumps of supporting beams thrust up armatures of rusted metal. He gasped. His wounded hip sockets were filled with sand. The pain had a sweet feel that brought a flush to his skin. The wide concrete floor around him was rorschached with ancient oil stains.
“Karinth!” What did she think, being here in the place where there was no monument to her dead daughter? The Stoop had insisted on holding the meeting here. Steve suspected some sort of cruel arrogance. They knew of Karinth’s importance to him. Was this any way to treat a hero?
She appeared around a crumbled wall and regarded him solemnly. Her long shadow slid out before her, its flickering edges mixing with the detritus on the ground. They had not made love since that one night. She didn’t want it. He worked to suppress his now-useless lust.
54
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
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“Yes, Steve. What is it?” She was like a wife responding to a husband’s nervous, slightly cranky entreaty.
He stumbled toward her and put his arms around her. He didn’t know what he would do without her. Perhaps he was now unconsciously ad- dicted to Saleh’s modifications to his hippocampus, his cingulate gyrus. It didn’t matter. He kissed her slowly, then rested his head on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I did the best I could.”
She stroked his hair. “I know. But you’re such a goddam man, Steve.”
“What do you mean?”
“You thought I needed the hard rod to let me know you loved me.”
He turned away, deeply embarrassed. “How did you — ”
“Oh, come on. I’ve lived in this world for a long time. Don’t you think I can recognize what’s in it? That stuff was developed for cases of real trauma . . . though I suppose this is real trauma. The life we live is traumatic.”
“Well,” he said. “Did it let you know I loved you or not?”
She managed a smile. “I suppose it did at that. Oh, Steve. There really wasn’t anything we could do, was there?”
“No, there wasn’t.” He felt her shoulder bones under his hands. One of them felt odd — artificial, she’d said. The body was everything, the body was nothing . . . she wore perfume, the scent she’d worn years before. She must have found a bottle of it somewhere in the back of a closet. Amazing that it hadn’t evaporated.
“And now, my dear,” he said, feeling a light-headed terror. “Now you must kill me.”
She jerked away. “What?”
“Sorry.” He didn’t let her go. “Didn’t mean to be flip. Or rather . . . well, what other reaction am I supposed to have? Here, look.” He took her beyond the wall and pointed toward the east. The Stoop forces were emplaced there, stretching out to the Michigan border. “I have done nothing. I have succeeded in nothing.”
“Steve! That’s not — ”
“Isn’t it? I’ve had a great adventure. I’ve gone to a distant world and back. I’ve lost an entire life with a woman I love. And I have failed completely at what I wanted to do. The Juguijur wants to cut off Stoop supplies and the Stoop thinks of giving up the Earth as a bad job and moving on, but neither of them does anything because no one’s given them a reason to. My attempts at negotiating a solution failed. The war will continue. That is, assuming that my purpose was diplomatic in the first place.”
He looked at her, but now she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked out instead over the drifted sand dunes that had obliterated the streets of Gary. “I don’t remember anymore where Selene died, exactly. The sand
56
ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
covers it all up, and all those old buildings are gone. But you saw us on the news, didn’t you.”
“I did. And they’ll see me. Talk to Adalti. He knows. What will — ”
“Oh, some damn thing,” she said harshly. “Easy enough to make this entire negotiation look like an ambush, an attempt to destroy the Stoop in one blow. Adalti can show it that way, if he wants. We’ll help. The Stoop will react quickly.” What he had told her was not really a surprise to her. She’d known it all along. Karinth had always been a little ahead of him.
“I wanted to succeed,” he said plaintively. “I didn’t want it to come to this. Know that, Karinth.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But that’s not good art, and Adalti is an artist. I’m sorry you never got to meet Selene. I think you would have liked her.” A kiss, and she was gone, the woman who had risked herself and lost her daughter in a ploy to get good war coverage from the eyemouths. Steve looked after her and wished she had tried to talk him out of it.
The sun rose and the snow-covered dunes gleamed around him. The Stoop would blame him. He didn’t know how Adalti would play it, how he would convince the Stoop that this entire negotiation was simply a ploy to get them here in one place so that they could be destroyed, but he knew Adalti would do it. And the Stoop would know that it was all Steve Hardt’s doing. He sat down in a chair, favoring his injured hip, and waited.
The Stoop attack on the negotiation ground started just before noon.
“The Consortium will kill me,” Karinth Tolback, smoke-blackened, bleeding from a fresh wound in her thigh, said to the eyemouth Adalti. “They think I planned it all.”
The dull sound of some vast, distant explosion drifted over them and wandered out into the lake. One of Adalti’s ever-present screens showed images of metal bending, brick and concrete shattering. It was impossible to tell where it was, what was happening, who was dying. Without con- text, an explosion is entirely anonymous.
“Aren’t they too busy fighting the Stoop?” Adalti could barely give her any attention. War had spread across the center of the continent in the wake of the Stoop attack on Gary, from Alberta down into the Appala- chians. Each screen showed another bright fragment of the bleizing, bloody war. And Adalti, the master craftsman, laid each one down in its proper place in the mosaic. It would make sense. When someone could finally sit down and watch it, it would make sense. Quite unlike now.
Karinth leaned against the broken-off trunk of a tree. The wave of dizziness passed. “They can spare a little thought for me. I’ve succeeded in destroying the central organization of the Great Lakes Consortium.
SUMMER AND ICE
57
Getting me won’t help the military situation, but it will make them feel better. That’s as much as they can do now.”
“He died bravely,” Adalti said. “He really did.”
“No,” Karinth said. “I don’t want — ”
Steve’s face blossomed on the screens. He stood amid the ruins of the parking structure, looking up at the sky, waiting. The attack was coming from the sky. There wasn’t anything he could do. He couldn’t slap the bombs out of the air with the back of his hand. So he stood there, stern, a little sad, and waited.
Karinth couldn’t turn her eyes away. The end, when it came, was just one single bright flash of light. When the smoke cleared, and the eyes recovered, there was nothing to be seen. She supposed someone digging through the rubble could have found molars, chunks of flesh. Angers.
It was a good job, perfect for both the Jugur home market and the Stoop. Their pet negotiator, their mascot, Steve Hardt, finally asserted his fundamental loyalties. He and countless others had died to create a show for the Jugur to watch while eating dinner. If they stopped chewing for just a moment, it would have served its purpose.
“The Stoop will leave now,” Adalti said crisply. “Some already are.” A ship rose up from an anonymous field, leaving behind it the abandoned remains of what was clearly a Stoop military camp. “This last war is just the maintenance of pride.”
“Pride! It will leave us with nothing but ruins.”
“Rejoice, Karinth Tolback. Victory is yours. Steve Hardt was a symbol to the Juguijur. Now they will act, cutting off the Stoop’s lifelines. And he was a symbol to the Stoop. The Stoop itself is humiliated. Those in favor of leaving the Earth will have their way. You have won.”
“I guess we have.”
She looked at the Jugur. He knelt in the sand, gazing at his screens, seeing images in his head. It seemed he would never stop. Not until the last instant of his life. He had been on Earth for over thirty years, creating his great work.
“Please,” she heard her voice say. “The lights.” A screen showed her and Steve, in the dark, making love. She watched despite herself. He’d thought it would make her happy if he could make love to her, at least once, and he had been right.
Other images flashed. Steve and Karinth running together up a rough trail in Anatolia, laughing and racing ahead of each other. Steve in the middle of a great field on Jugurtha, rows and rows of empty stone seats rising up around him. Karinth kissing Selene one last time before send- ing her daughter out in her armored carrier. Steve struggling through the snow, pulling a sledge behind him. Karinth catching sight of Steve on the security screen in her apartment.
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ALEXANDER JABLOKOV
That had been Adalti’s great work. The saga of the war between human being and Jugur couldn’t be shown directly. That was just explosions and dead bodies. He’d decided to do it through Karinth Tolback and Steve Hardt. From the moment he had met them in Anatolia, he had structured everything around them. He’d sent Steve away, aged her, brought him back. He’d made sure Steve died. He’d made sure the Stoop finally re- moved themselves from the globe they had tried to destroy, and left the Earth in peace. Every work of art must reach closure.
A tear trembled at the end of her nose and she wiped it away. “How much time would it take to watch the whole thing?” she asked. “All the way through.”
Adalti folded his gear away. Other eyemouths busily loaded it into a bulbous wide-tired vehicle.
“Twenty-four of your hours,” he said. “Many will do it. Millions. I am immortal. So are you.”
“Adalti!” She almost stepped forward to grab him and break his slender neck.
“Goodbye, Karinth Tolback. We will not speak again.” He stepped into the vehicle and it sped away across the sand. In a few seconds, it had disappeared.
She’d never understood him, not even for an instant. He was a genius, and a genius of an alien race. Thirty years in twenty-four hours, all held by the structure of a brilliant work of art. Damn the art, she thought. She’d trade every second of that thirty years for just one afternoon mak- ing love on a high rock in the sunlight.
She knelt in the cold sand, turned her face to the sun, and closed her eyes.
She ignored the almost-subliminal whine of the flying camera that caught the final scene. #
SUMMER AND ICE
59
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Canadian author Sally McBride was born in Toronto, Ontario, and now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with her husband, David Sproule. Her credits include SF and fantasy publications in F&SF, On Spec, Tesseracts, and Matrix. A story she co-wrote was nominated for a Nebula and she recently finished a novel. Ms. McBride's dark and unsettling story about 'The Fragrance of Orchids" marks her first appearance in Asimov's.
Sally McBride
THE FRAGRANCE OF ORCHIRS
^ j art; Karl F, Huber
ST i f"-
November, 2023; North Wells, Maine
On Monday morning, a message waited on Sarah Lightbum’s answer- ing machine. It was Seule, breathless, forgetting to say when the call was made, or if she intended to call back. Sarah, who up till now had been happy with their progress, felt a sinking in her heart.
“ — I know I can handle it. Nothing will happen, we’ll be working together, that’s all. Clay needs me.” Seule’s voice was happy, excited. “His project needs me. You’ve helped me so much, Sarah. I really feel that I have my emotions under control, and if it turns out that I don’t . . . well. I’ll call you. I think of you as a friend. You know that, don’t you? Please be happy for me, Sarah. Everything will be all right.”
A pause, and the sound of rapid breathing. Sarah heard Seule’s claws clicking impatiently on the receiver, and thumping noises in the back- ground.
“I have to go. The driver is taking my stuff out to the airport limo. Walter’s picking me up in Washington.”
Walter Farber was head of the psychiatric team assigned to the alien. He’d be happy now, thought Sarah, with his baby back in the nest. She knew that Farber resented anyone other than himself having success with Seule, and she wondered if his attitude stemmed from the past. Or did the past mean anything to a man like Farber?
“Don’t worry,” said Seule, unsuppressed excitement in her voice. “Thank you for everything — ”
A click and she was gone.
Sarah saved the message, automatically hitting the buttons on her old machine. She’d been working with the alien for almost half a year, and they’d made it past the games, past Seule’s evasions and the tricks Sarah used to counter them, and were getting to the real stuff. Contrary to her initial misgivings, she’d started to believe that their sessions might be leading somewhere.
Investigations into the similarities and very definite differences be- tween human and animal mentation — the thought patterns forming the mind — had fascinated Sarah when she’d worked with Farber. She’d been a pink-cheeked grad student, eager as a puppy, working mainly with dogs until Farber had been tapped for the alien assignment. He hadn’t taken her with him, and funding for projects such as hers had inevitably dried up without the canny grantsmanship he’d practiced. Individual animals she’d grown to understand and respect — with more than the love one gives an intelligent pet — ^had grown old and died, or had become too withdrawn and dangerous to work with. People hadn’t liked the idea of animals who were smarter than their five-year-old children; Sarah of
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necessity turned her interests elsewhere. She’d gone into psychiatry, and had ended up practicing in North Wells, a medium-sized town in Maine.
Sarah spent most of her time working with clients who might most benefit from her blended background in psychiatry and non-human men- tation, including a few of the privately owned animals still living with their human mentors. Until Seule, non-human had meant animal or artificial.
Sarah chewed on her lower lip and took a hard copy of Seule’s message for her files. Was Seule an animal? Relations between humans and ani- mals were sometimes very good, sometimes bad. When they were bad they were, of course, very often worse than horrid.
She queued the message for transmission to Farber later when the rates went down, and put on the morning pot of coffee.
Two weeks after Seule’s breathless farewell, Sarah was on board an old government heli-jet halfway between North Wells and Washington. She was wide awake, angry and scared, and sat hunched in her seat dictating quietly into her journal. “We’re flying high to avoid a snow- storm,” she said. “This rustbucket is rattling and dipping like a voodoo dancer, so I’ll keep this entry brief. This whole business makes me ill. It’s so stupid! Can there possibly be a sane reason for what she’s done? Damn, if she’s going to make it as a human, she’s got to learn to bear pain and rejection. Why should she be any different?”
Sarah paused, staring angrily out the tiny, triple-paned window at the indigo horizon. “Of course I don’t mean that. Seule is different. Her problem is that though she understands it intellectually, she can’t really believe it.
“I heard desperation in Farber’s voice through the static on his trans- mission from Washington. What should I expect? He sees his life’s work disappearing. And I bet the bastard’ll try to blame it on me. Farber’s mistake was putting too many emotional and professional eggs into one basket. My mistake? Going after Seule as a client in the first place. I was flattered even to be considered. So who wouldn’t be?”
She paused. No, she thought. It was never a mistake, no matter what might happen . . . Sarah clicked off her recorder and scowled at the night.
Spring, 2023; North Wells
Sarah first saw the alien when it came loping up the walk to her office for its initial session. It had an eager, dog-on-a-walk look, like a rump- heavy greyhound wearing a thick pink scarf.
Sarah unashamedly craned her neck out the window of her office, on
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the second floor of an old renovated mansion, the better to catch her first in-the-flesh glimpse of the creature. What had looked like a scarf around Seule’s neck fluttered up to become two ragged appendages which grasped the old brass doorknob and turned it. Sarah had admitted to herself that she was nervous. This was no ordinary case. She pulled her head back inside her office.
There would be papers in it for her, perhaps a book. How many had been written already? She dumped her half-finished coffee into her wash- room sink, popped a breath freshener in her mouth and ran a hand through her hair. Ready to meet the alien.
During an early session, Sarah made the mistake of handing Seule a Kleenex when they had reached an emotional crisis. It was a purely reflex action, and she felt stupid as soon as she’d done it, as though she’d been suckered somehow. Seule didn’t need the tissue, having no nose to rvm, no tear ducts to leak, and Sarah knew that. But the alien took the token remedy, held it. It became a tradition between them, an occasion for smiles.
As the weeks went by, Sarah found that Seule knew the term “shrink,” and enjoyed digging subtle meaning from the word. The alien loved words and was fluent in several languages. She loved the symbols in mathematics, and the archetypes of humanity hidden in music and paint- ings. Once, on entering the counselor’s office, Seule had caught Sarah Lightbum, hands in pockets, squinting at a framed quotation on the wall. It was from the I Ching, and said:
And when two people understand each other in their innermost hearts.
Their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids.
Seule came and stood beside her companionably, reading it too. Sarah suppressed a throb of anger. The quotation seemed insipid, worthless; it had nothing to do with real life. She turned her back to it, smiling brightly at Seule.
As they took their customary seats, Sarah wondered what had hap- pened to her youthful idealism. The message she kept on her wall was vague yet hopeful, mystical yet worded simply and openly; did it have any relevance to her life now? Seule bounded in each day, eager, hopeful, seeming to fill the room with her strangeness and the queer scent of her hide. Reality was observation, deduction, counsel.
Dr. Farber’s office called Sarah every week. She dared not ignore his punctilious insistence on having every session downloaded to him, realiz- ing that she could either agree to his terms or blow the chance to work, however briefly, with Seule.
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When her application as a local contact for Seule had been approved, Sarah was frankly surprised. Walter Farber’s life had veered so far onto its new trajectory that she’d doubted ever meeting him again.
November, 2023; Washington, DC
Walter and I can’t avoid each other now, thought Sarah grimly. I’ll be in Washington in another half an hour. The heli-jet hit a bump in the air and her stomach lurched.
In French seule means “alone.” The astronauts who had found the alien had thought the name appropriate. The pretty creature had been doted on zealously during the long trip back to Earth from Jupiter orbit. The men were reprimanded for teaching the alien child French and English words: lait, for the pseudo-milk it learned to lap from a cup; hand, whisker; bon jour, good morning. It would have been better, they were told in stern directives from Earth, to have left its brain unsullied by human influences.
Now, eighteen years later, no back page was complete without some tidbit on The Alien.
Like an old-time movie star she passed through life in a shell of her own exclusivity, forever alone in a crowd. After years on earth her strangeness had been diluted into triviality.
But now . . . now, she’d committed an act so outrageous, so desperate, as to vault her back into the headlines with a vengeance.
The heli-jet touched down in Washington just ahead of the snow. Sarah was taken directly to the hospital and allowed to observe Seule for a moment, then, after finding that nothing had yet been organized in the way of briefings or investigations, headed to an all-night restaurant next to the hospital. It wasn’t much, but after what she’d seen she didn’t feel like eating anyway. A pack of newspeople in search of coffee arrived to put in time before the first press conference. Sarah, amazed at how few people knew what was going on, sourly predicted imminent mobs of pro- and anti-aliens bopping each other with signs. As well, of course, as the ones who had claimed all along she was a hoax.
Alone in a high-backed booth, Sarah pushed her half-eaten plate of fish and chips away.
She whispered into her journal, rubbing her eyes with the back of one wrist. “She’s not a hoax. It’s all real; her blood and Elliot’s, the violent, hopeless thing she did. Seule was unconscious when I got a glimpse of her being wheeled out of surgery. She was bandaged, slung with tubes and monitors, and looked small and very pathetic.
“Clay Elliot’s body is down in Pathology, waiting for an autopsy to
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confirm the obvious: death by massive lacerations; that, in fact, he was tom to pieces by a creature who has spent the last half-year proclaiming her love for him.”
Technically, Seule was female. People preferred to think of her that way, seeing beauty in her silver eyes and narrow black face. For her to perform an ungraceful act or to step across the boundaries of human expectation into violence was unthinkable. What would happen to her now that she’d done the unthinkable? Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose and lifted her coffee cup.
“Is Seule thankful for being saved from timeless oblivion in space? If I were Seule, I think I would rather have stayed dead.”
Sarah yawned, feeling cold and tired. The ersatz coffee was weak and insipid, but she accepted a refill from the waiter. At least it was hot. “I remember the fuss that was made when Seule moved to our town,” she said to her joiumal. “It was announced smugly that The Alien had chosen North Wells because of the excellent research facility where she would work as a member of the team decoding the ship’s records. Actually she had been assigned there in an effort to keep her happy and quiet; whether she could do useful work or not was immaterial. It came out that she had developed a passion for one of the scientists studying her, a kinesiologist named Clay Elliot, and was essentially being sent out of harm’s way.
“She was pining away apart from him, and needed to work it all out. Farber briefed me ahead of time, using words of one syllable in his usual dickheaded way. He warned me that she’d be reluctant to talk about it.”
Sarah snorted. “So she’s sent to me, the perfect person to help her get over a bad love affair. It’s so stupid. I’ve never heard of anything so damned stupid in my life.” Sarah clicked off the recorder and stuffed it in her bag.
June, 2023; North Wells
Seule had come to Sarah late in spring; now it was summer, their sixth session, and hot. Sarah’s office windows were open. Seule was curled on a chair, her main limbs tucked under her smooth mid-section. They were starting to be comfortable with each other. Sarah was still probing the edges of Seule’s attitude of cheerful denial of any real problem.
Seule was silvery-rose in color, her dense silky coat more like napped fabric than fur. The mouth in her long, thin head bore an alarming set of teeth revealed when her narrow black lips drew back in a smile or a laugh. She had a human propensity to laugh, a human appreciation for the absurd.
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“People ask if I mind being monitored,” said Seule. “I don’t. It’s neces- sary.” They were talking about freedom; what the word meant when used in the context of Seule’s life. “I must be a tempting target.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” affirmed Sarah, keeping her expression bland. Her long legs were crossed ankle over knee, manlike, and her short brown hair was tucked behind her ears.
She wondered at first if the government had wired her office when Seule had started her sessions, but knew that it didn’t make a bit of difference. Of course they had wired it. 'The bodyguards in her reception area, the eye that hovered outside the building to gain a clear view through her window were all deemed necessary by someone. The eye followed Seule everywhere, and rumor spread that it had the capability of defensive fire. It had not yet been put to the test.
During the last year, Seule had been allowed to travel, to visit private homes, to live relatively unsupervised. Social conventions on how to treat the alien were being formulated ad hoc; so far Seule remained unharmed.
Sarah had read the multi-volume case history Dr. Farber sent her, skipping over the charts and bio-chemical analyses of Seule’s flesh and excretions, snorting at the extrapolations as to her kind’s origin. Guesses, Sarah had thought. They’re only giving her a loose leash now because they can’t think of any more tests to run. It’s damned pathetic, really.
“Walter Farber has been with you all along, hasn’t he?”
Seule’s limbs shifted, a silky whisper against the chair’s fabric. Ab- sently she poked holes in her unused Kleenex with one of the soft, finger- like projections on her neck.
“Yes, he has. I remember being bounced on his knee, and the expres- sion he wore when I jumped to his shoulder and then to the top of a filing cabinet. He never got used to that sort of thing. I think he wanted me to be more like a human child. Perhaps he still does.”
Seule’s silver eyes slid past Sarah’s. She seemed bored; they’d gone over this before. She leaned forward. “Do you know, he kept my dog until I could find a place here and get him sent out. Would you like to see Amie’s picture?”
Seule rummaged in the leather pwuch she wore slung around her hind quarters. Seule had mentioned Amie before, with great affection, and Sarah had always found it oddly poignant that the alien had a pet. She accepted the photo- vid Seule passed to her: the alien and her dog, pausing for a moment in a romp, then bounding away in unison. The dog was some kind of wolfhound and looked like a primitive, masculine version of Seule. Sarah could tell by the way the dog moved that he was a true dog, not enhanced, and she felt a small pang. It was hard to look at animals and not see instead the psuedo-human personalities laid on top like icing on a perfectly good cake. Though she missed some of her old
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doggy friends, Sarah was glad that no more enhancement was being done. Dealing with Seule was another order of magnitude entirely. The two, terrestrial dog and space-faring alien, leapt in Sarah’s hand until she passed the photo back.
“He’s a beautiful animal.”
Only one stasis pod in the alien ship had been intact, in what must have been a creche area; it contained the baby Seule. The others held only the dead: thirty thousand years dead, according to analysis of the exterior of their ship and the deterioration of components within. All of her family, and most likely all of her race, were extinct.
“Let’s talk about Clay,” said Sarah quietly. “If it’s all right with you.”
Seule’s ears drooped immediately, and she curled herself more tightly in the chair.
“Yes. Let’s.” Her eyes were unreadable, though Sarah had noticed how the moods telegraphed by Seule’s lips and ears were easily understood, as one would read joy, or eagerness, or disappointment in a dog’s face.
“Have you sent a letter to him, as I suggested last week?”
Seule’s ears drew back against the rounded crown of her skull. Her fringe of fingers was completely still for once.
“I can’t. What if he doesn’t answer?”
“What if he does? Tell me how you’d feel if he answered.”
Seule looked away. She replied slowly, choosing words which caught harshly between her pointed teeth. “He won’t. I really hope he doesn’t, you know. I’m afraid I might abandon all my self-respect and run to him.”
“It’s been almost six months, Seule. . . .”
“What does time have to do with it? And who else may I love but a human? Human is what I am, though I don’t look it. What if my kind mates for life? What if I never get over him?”
“It takes time, I know. Believe me. . . .”
Seule’s powerful hind legs propelled her off the chair. She bounded to the window, stared out at maple trees dressed in new green. “I look into a mirror and see this alien thing. But I don’t feel alien. You humans say I’m lovely, you say I’m exotic, unique. Well, you’re right, damn you all. I’m the only one of me, and it hurts.”
November, 2023; Washington DC
“It’s now four in the morning,” said Sarah tiredly into her recorder. “I’m back at the hospital. Washington never goes to sleep completely, certainly a big hospital never slows down. They had to clear a floor for her, which no one here seems happy about, but she’ll be whisked off to
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Houston as soon as she’s able to be moved.” She had to raise her voice over the babble of talk, clacking footsteps, and cell phones beeping.
“Apparently Seule’s guardian eye, confused by the fact that Seule was the attacker, didn’t try any fancy shooting. It screamed for help and hovered, recording, till someone came. Fortunately, for Seule anyway, that wasn’t long. It all happened so fast ... it was very painful to watch.”
Sarah was still shaken. There were few civilians among the tight- lipped men and women in uniforms at the briefing. The videotape was fish-eye distorted, and the sound buzzed and squalled.
Seule and Clayton Elliot were working alone in a mock-up of the alien craft’s interior, observing the varied responses of an environmental panel. They were talking quietly, the eye only picking up the odd innocu- ous phrase. Clayton, a dark, angular man with the weedy look of a student, leaned across his station and took Seule’s left forefoot in his hand, forcefully directing it to a spot on the panel. In slow motion replay, Sarah watched his expression. He looked peevish, impatient.
Seule’s forefoot, claws sheathed, slid up Clayton’s arm and around his neck, pulling him toward her. He drew back. It was obvious that her strength exceeded his. His muscles tensed, his face showed repulsion. Worse, it showed boredom, irritation. When Sarah saw this look, she knew instinctively what would happen next.
Cla5rton pushed Seule away. Seule clasped him more firmly; he strug- gled, swore. She began to whine, a high keening. Sarah was familiar with the look of Seule, but this sound was utterly alien. Its meaning was universal. The next few seconds were full of action, too fast to follow well even in slow motion. Clayton struck at her and she raked him with her hind legs, as a cat would a rabbit, still clutching him with her clawed forelegs. She was licking his face as he screamed. Her neck-fingers grasped and stroked his face, his neck, his eyes and mouth.
Hands and bodies intruded suddenly, the eye pulled back, wobbled, and recorded five or six people trying to separate them. Upon being removed from contact with Clayton’s body, Seule collapsed and began to slash at her own limbs with her teeth. Someone pulled her head back, two men held her limbs. Crashing noises, shouts, the spurting of blood. It had been, literally, a shambles.
Sarah rubbed her eyes, replaying the scene in her mind, and fought down an intense longing for her own bed in North Wells. She forced herself to sit straight in her orange plastic chair and take a deep breath. The taped scene intruded mercilessly past the blank taupe walls of the visitors’ lounge, where she’d gone to hide from the uproar after the briefing.
Her face brightened momentarily. “At least I got a chance to talk to Jim Wright,” she told her recorder. “I recognized him as we entered the
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briefing room and figured that of course he’d be here — where else at a time like this? When I was twenty, a junior at Colorado State, I fell madly in love with Jim (didn’t we all?); big, handsome, holding the alien baby in his arms. The man who entered the derelict ship and came back with a real E.T. He’s still handsome, still a figure of romance, and I got a bit light-headed sitting next to him. Me and my bump of hero-worship. We talked about Seule, and I figured out the kind of man Jim is.”
Sarah smiled bleakly. Jim Wright had taken the viewing harder than anyone else, though unlike some others he hadn’t turned away. White- faced and flag-pole straight, he’d watched every second of the carnage.
“There’s a certain kind of parent who brings their child to me for diagnosis. The kid is ostracized, friendless; usually ugly, often intelligent and artistic. A complete misfit. Everyone except the parent knows the poor kid is a hopeless case; the parent, however, loves this child with a complete, stubborn devotion. The parent never gives up on the idea that someday everything will come out right for the ugly duckling. Jim Wright is that sort of parent. As far as I know he has no children of his own. Only Seule. I wonder if she knows how much he loves her?”
Sareih stopped to blow her nose. She pulled a mirror out of her capa- cious bag and dabbed haphazardly at her eyes while the recorder paused, waiting for her voice.
“He’s left to try calling Yves Giguere, another crew member who is now high up in the European Space Agency, and who might want to be here. None of the others has made it yet, but Jim keeps trying to collect them all by the bedside. I’ll tuck this away now, and try again to see her.”
Sarah, clad in baggy blue track pants and an unflattering sweater, a huge, crammed bag slung over one shoulder, tangled with the security guard outside Seule’s room once again. Before she could make headway, she was waylaid by Dr. Walter Farber. She’d seen him at the briefing and had slipped away before it became necessary to speak to him.
Farber stopped her outside the door, gripping her elbow. “Sarah Lightburn. What are you doing here?”
Sarah frowned at him sullenly. “What’s your problem? Everyone in God’s creation is here.”
Farber relaxed his grip and gave her a sour look. “Hello to you too. Glad you could make it, Sarah. I really am. I’m hoping you’ll contribute some ideas.”
Sarah jerked her arm free. “Seule and I made progress, whatever you may think. Don’t blame me for what went on after she left me.”
“And don’t you be defensive. I think you’re more prickly now than when we were in Colorado.”
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“I’m amazed you remember,” said Sarah tightly. “It’s been a while. And prickles are a form of self-defense.”
“Are we going to start in on all that now?” He clamped his teeth together and stared down at her, then stuffed his hands in his pockets and abruptly turned away. When he turned back his face wore a look of apology. “Look. I was twenty years older than you then; I still am. I liked you, Sarah. You were one of my favorites, one of the really good ones. Grad students like you don’t come along all the time. I didn’t mean an5rthing more.”
“Then why — ” Seirah stopped, controlled her voice. What am I doing'? Why can’t I let it go? “Why did you let me think I was special to you?”
“You were special!”
“You know what I mean. Did you kiss me because my work bolstered up yours? Which did you like better, the curve of my graph or the curve of my breast?”
“Damn.” Farber’s voice was soft. He ran a hand across his mouth. “Sarah, what do you want me to say? You knew the score, or I thought you did. Beryl was on assignment in China, you were a beautiful girl — ”
“Jesus.” Sarah shook her head. “You were everything I wanted to he.” She paused, biting her lip. “You could so easily have taken me on the assignment with Seule. Why didn’t you?”
“You want the truth? It was because, damn it, I needed a clear head for the work. Beryl understood that, and she was out of the country most of the time anyway — truth, remember? We’d battled it out. But you . . . you, I couldn’t afford to have around.”
“It was my work too!”
“Don’t kid yourself, Sarah. I had to make decisions I didn’t like, but I believe it was worth it. Personalities could not enter the situation.”
Ssu'ah sneered. “Personality was everything, can’t you see that?”
Seule’s door swung open and a woman bedecked with government insignia put her head out. “Will you two be quiet, please! The alien is awake in here, and she can hear you.”
Sarah flushed red. She stepped forward. “I have access to the alien, and I’d like to see her now. If it’s all right.” Sarah bit her lip hard, and kept her chin up.
“Let me check your badge.” The woman ran a sensor across Sarah’s clip-on I.D. “Yeah, okay.” She eyed Farber, who abruptly turned and stalked off down the corridor.
Inside, Sarah noticed Seule’s smell. She remembered finding it un- pleasant the first few times Seule came to her office; now it seemed almost to soak into her. It was unlike anything else on earth, but it gave her the feeling of slipping into a sweater borrowed from a friend. The
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olfactory image was wiped out by the sight of Seule strapped onto her bed.
She couldn’t turn her head; it was restrained, as were her four main limhs. Only the soft, relatively feeble appendages on her neck were free to move; they fluttered and waved as if blown by a wind. When Seule felt Sarah’s eyes on her, the motion stopped and the tendrils fell to lie across her high, arched chest. Sarah moved closer and attempted a smile, but found it too painful an exercise.
“Oh, Seule,” she said, gently touching one forelimb on an area not covered by bandages. The animals Sarah had mostly dealt with had been those dosed with intelligence-enhancing drugs. Some had responded to touch, most hadn’t. Heightened mentation seemed also to sharpen the sense of individuality; the animals — dogs, apes, cetaceans — were often intractable.
Seule drew her lips back behind the muzzle clamped around her jaws in what Sarah at first thought was a smile of welcome. Feeling a perverse satisfaction in the intimacy she, and not Farber, had been granted, Sarah bent over the softly lit bed.
Seule snarled, a sound like a direct assault. Sarah flinched back in a primal response that was in a split second replaced with anger. Just as quickly, the anger was veneered in professional detachment, but it was still there.
Seule was neither animal nor human. She must remember that. “What’s she on?” Sarah asked, addressing the woman who let her in. The reply listed dosages of various drugs being pumped into Seule, which Sarah recognized as standard antibiotics and mild sedatives.
“Okay. Thanks.”
Sarah turned to Seule, wary this time and careful to keep her hands in a nonthreatening attitude.
“Seule, do you know why you’re here? Do you know what happened?”
For answer there was a high wailing whine that issued from Seule’s throat; very doglike, distressing to Sarah’s ears. It went on and on; finally Sarah nudged the bed, moving it enough to make Seule’s eyes flick to the side and register her.
Seule’s black lips moved behind the plastic muzzle, and she spoke. Her whisper was soft, spiritless; the keening whine still echoed in Sarah’s ears. “He was with me and he was not with me. He was my friend and he was my enemy. He was with me.” She strained her limbs against the straps. “He was not with me.”
“You were working with Clay and his team. Everything was going well. Seule, whatever happened, for whatever reason, it’s over now.”
If this were a human friend or sister who’d suffered a trauma, thought Sarah, I’d know what to do. Hugs, understanding words; more hugs. The
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comfort of warm primate skin against skin. But I don’t understand her. She isn’t one of us. Sareih found that her arms were tightly crossed over her breasts. Self-consciously she let them relax to her sides.
“He wouldn’t touch me,” whispered Seule. “We were alone in the lab. He was so beautiful, so soft. ... I, I thought ... I held him, he resisted.”
“He died.”
“He wouldn’t touch me. None of you will touch me!”
Christ, thought Sarah. She ripped his guts out and almost tore his head from his body. Is that love to her? Thwarted love, frustrated desire; a death sentence to the one Seule chooses?
“I’ll touch you, Seule. I, I’m your friend, you know.” Tentatively Sarah forced her hand up, stroked Seule’s forelimb lying strapped on the white sheet. Seule turned her head away slightly and closed her eyes.
Suddenly Sarah felt an almost irresistible urge to flee the room. The alien’s life-blood pulsed under the tips of her fingers, life hot with urges Sarah had imagined only in her darkest, most private moments. She snatched her hand away, stood panting in a flush of heat that burned her face. Thankful that the room was dimly lit, she tried to gather her thoughts. But before she could speak, Seule sighed and shifted her limbs minutely, all that was allowed by the restraints.
“All these years on your planet. I thought it was my home, I thought I was one of you. I listened to Walter Farber and tried to please him, I made friends with the people in Houston. And the men who discovered me — ” Here she paused, and her black tongue tried to lick some moisture onto her lips. “Those men. They call me, send me letters and presents. I suppose I’m a mascot, a special toy to them. . . .”
Sarah caught her breath. “Jim Wright is here. He’s hanging around trying to get in to see you.”
Seule turned her dry, glittering eyes on Sarah. “Don’t let him in,” she whispered. “I couldn’t stand it.”
Strangely, it was the lack of tears that disturbed Sarah the most. It had always disturbed her. No need for her, no need for her damned Kleenex. Seule’s appearance disturbed her, Seule’s intelligent doglike way of moving and sitting and listening, her un-earth smell. Her hot silvery body.
And not a tear for the lonely horror of her life.
“I have to go.” Sarah backed away from the bed, turned, pushed through the door to the white-lit corridor. Farber was nowhere to be seen.
She ran for the elevator. During the interminable wait for its arrival, Sarah saw Jim Wright, fast asleep in the visitors’ lounge, his head nod- ding, his knees up. She looked away, pushed the call button again and again.
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Down, alone thank God, down and out the nearest door to the cold night air. The freshness of melting snow piled beside the walkways was like a balm on her nerves; she headed for a bench and slumped down on it, shivering, yet hot with the feel of Seule still in her fingers.
Sarah bent over and clutched her stomach, squeezing her eyes shut. She breathed slowly and deeply, pulling in the moist freezing air which smelled of nothing, not even the damp soil; no scent of alien flesh in her nostrils. She dug her fingers hard into her abdomen.
Oh, god, she wondered darkly, have I really gone so long without a lover? She gasped a little at the pain inside her, under the skin and muscle; it was like the bitter distillation of anger and denial. Poison.
Cautiously she straightened on the hard, slatted bench, very glad she wasn’t crying, because she might not be able to stop. That primal long- ing— how terribly intense it was . . . could it be that she had once felt it for Walter? She had forgotten how powerful it was, how lonely and terrible. . . .
“No,” she whispered aloud, her breath puffing in the cold. “Walter was a different sort of pain ... a betrayal, and what I just felt, up there with Seule. . . .” She stopped, confused. What had she felt? It had been electric, visceral; unexpected and overwhelmingly demanding. Its dregs had been vinegar. She shook her head, trying to think.
There was a shout from the corner of the building, and she turned to see six or seven newspeople, armed with cameras and lights, bearing down on her. Rising in dismay she looked in vain for an escape and was surrounded.
“Are you a nurse? A doctor? Where is the alien — where is Seule?”
“How bad are her injuries? Will she die?”
One of them checked a fax sheet of photos and called out her name.
“Leave me alone,” cried Sarah. “I don’t know anything.”
“You’re Sarah Lightbum, the alien’s psychiatrist — ”
“I am nothing of the sort! I only counseled her, briefly — ” A mistake. The newsies moved in closer and Sarah was forced to push her way past them. One of them caught her by the arm and shouted into her face. “Will the alien be destroyed now? She’s a killer.”
Sarah stopped, mouth open. “Destroyed? Don’t be a fool — ”
“Yes,” screamed someone from the back of the growing crowd. “She killed one human, she’ll kill more!”
“What if there are more aliens coming?”
Sarah, appalled, felt incongruous laughter well up. More of them! Seule would appreciate the irony of that.
“Is it true that Clay Elliot was her lover?”
“Leave me alone!” Sarah bolted for the door. Two security men, at- tracted by the noise, let her through and closed the thick reinforced glass doors against the reporters.
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“Oh, journal, I’m so tired. And this coffee is awful. It must be almost morning by now.”
Sarah looked up at the TV suspended in a corner of the hospital cafete- ria. It confirmed her predictions: mobs of Seule denouncers harassing Seule supporters. By now the whole world knew what had happened. “I’m here at the center,” whispered Sareih, “and I’m not sure I know anything at all.”
Slumping in the chair, she rubbed her eyes. “Why? Why did she kill him?” Blinking, she looked up and stared at nothing. “Will we ever really know why she does an3rthing? By now, her life among us may have rendered her incapable of rational behavior, or even whatever instinctive behavior is proper for her race.
“And I really thought I was getting somewhere. Damn . . .”
Sarah sipped her coffee, winced.
“And why did I run away from her? Was it the feel of her flesh on mine?” She felt her face heat with confusion, with shame. “What hap- pened up there, an3rway? I, I . . . journal, I find myself having a hard time talking about this.”
Sarah Lightbum stared morosely into her cup, wondering if she was losing her mind. She watched her hands place the cup neatly in front of her as the apex of a chevron pattern of plastic knife, fork, spoon, and stir-stick. 'The cafeteria was growing crowded and noisy with talk and the clatter of dishes as the day shift arrived.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” she told the journal. She clicked it shut and stowed it in her bag.
Sarah left the cafeteria and headed for the elevators, wondering what kind of man Cla3fton Elliot had been. She stabbed at the elevator button. Had Elliot treated Seule like an intelligent pet, perhaps expected her to get the coffee? Or was he kind, thoughtful — just a nice guy who simply couldn’t find it within his heart to love someone who looked like a dog?
The elevator door opened and she shuffled tiredly on, not noticing until too late that the only other occupant was Farber.
He stood his ground, smiled remotely as she reached across him to push the button. The door closed. Farber put his thumb on the stop button.
“I don’t want you to go up to Seule’s room just now, Ms. Lightbum,” said Farber in a flat voice.
Sarah refrained from pointing out that she had intended only to get to the main floor and out. She withdrew her arm, hauled her heavy bag higher on her shoulder.
“Fine. We’ll park right here while you' tell me where I should go.” Sarah wished her voice matched her feelings. She hated the way it went
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high and girlish in a confrontation. Typical female, Sarah sneered at herself. “I’d like to know why you’ve chosen to blame me. What about Elliot? Is anyone looking into his actions? What kind of background checks did you do on him?”
“That’s not what I want to talk about, and besides, it’s immaterial. You encouraged her to remain in contact with him. She went off with stars in her eyes, looking for romance.” Farber took his thumb off the button and the elevator started upward, called from somewhere above.
“And what’s wrong with romance?” Sarah snapped. “What was wrong with that dumb shit Elliot? She loved him. Do you know anything about love. Doctor Farber?”
“Sarah, please. This is neither the time nor the place — ”
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open onto the sixth floor. Farber, tight-lipped, motioned for Sarah to exit ahead of him; she did, and when he started down the corridor she followed.
“I don’t really give a damn any more,” she said. “There was a time when you were my hero, right up there with the astronauts, but not any more. I’ve wised up.”
Farber reached a door, keyed it open and stood to one side.
“Well?” he said. “Shall we continue in private, or do you prefer to rant out here?”
Sarah stalked in and threw her bag on the floor beside a table sur- rounded by straight-backed chairs. It was some sort of meeting room, windowless and stale.
Farber yanked out a chair and dropped into it. He bent over and rubbed his temples. After a moment Sarah sat too. It seemed stupid and childish to keep standing. Hadn’t she grown up? Wasn’t it impossible for this man to make her do foolish things any more?
Farber looked up, steepling his hands under his chin. It was a manner- ism Sarah remembered from long ago. “I did try to keep track of you after I left,” he said. “Not all my time was spent with Seule. You distinguished yourself at Colorado, did a couple of years with Arthur Kemp before he went to work for Biostym. Then you disappeared for a while. Let’s see ... I next saw you in Edmonton, at a lecture. You were at the back.”
Sarah kept her eyes on the tips of his fingers, unable to speak.
“Believe it or not, it pleased me to see you again, though you left with someone and it didn’t seem the right time to renew old acquaintances. I thought that soon I’d meet you at a conference, laugh over old times. You’d be married. I’d have Beryl with me, we’d have drinks. Something.” He looked down again. Sarah could barely keep her eyes on him, her urge to run was so strong.
“Why did you resist my counseling Seule?”
“I didn’t. When your name came across my desk I thought about what
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might happen, but then I realized that it might be a good idea to have you on board. I’m still not sure if it is, all things considered. Perhaps I was trying to make up for the past. I do know that there’s obviously a lot still to learn about Seule.”
He sighed deeply, running his fingers over his lips. “When she was just a baby. I’d visit her quarters every day, and every day she’d come leaping at me out of nowhere. I always caught her. It was a game we played, until she got too big. I had to remind her over and over to keep her claws in, to be gentle, to take it easy on us humans.”
He looked exhausted. He looked like an old man coming to understand that the best part of his life was ending.
In her mind’s eye, Sarah saw Farber as he’d been when he landed the plum assignment. Suave, dark-haired, grinning wolfishly, he had abandoned everything to make Seule his own. He’d been with her from then on, in every newscast, at every conference and study. It’s all getting away from him now, she thought. We get old, the children grow up and leave. This one has been a heart-breaker, but then, the special ones always are.
Sarah looked at her watch. Eight o’clock in the morning, and she felt as though sleep did not exist any more, at least on this world. Almost time for the news conference. What an ordeal that was going to be — she was thankful she wouldn’t have to be there. She hoped Farber could handle it.
He looked up at her finally. His eyes were unreadable. The eyes show nothing, Sarah told herself— it’s the lips, the brows, the tiny muscle- pulls that tell the story. Animals can show their emotions if they’re smart enough, if they have anything inside to show . . . Farber tipped his chair back and crossed his ankle over his knee in a way Sarah instantly recognized.
She felt her thoughts realign themselves. Had it really been Walter Farber she wanted? Or did she want what he had, what he was'? Seule had seduced him away, and all Sarah’s tears and anger and wanting had never gotten him back. . . . Stupid woman, she jeered at herself. Daddy loved her more than me!
And if he’d taken me along to work with Seule, how long would I have been content to be in their exceptionally thick shadows?
Sarah had a sudden merciless vision of herself, an imitation of him, hands steepled and legs crossed in just his way, sagely nodding at a distraught client. She jammed her hands between her knees and almost laughed out loud. Hadn’t that been a sort of apology she’d heard a while back? Something about making up for the past?
Sarah leaned forward and stood, stretching her shoulders and running
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her fingers through her hair. She grinned suddenly. “It doesn’t matter now. I’m okay. Truce, all right?”
Farber stood too, looking at her uncertainly. He turned for the door, then stopped and looked back at her, clearing his throat. “Within the next few days you’ll be getting a request to come to Houston. I’d like you to do some very careful thinking before you make a decision.”
Sarah, completely surprised and not knowing what to say, said nothing.
‘"There’s a lot of work to be done,” Farber continued. “I’m not sure if we can treat this whole episode as an advance or a setback in our knowl- edge of Seule. Whatever the verdict, she’s going to be locked away for a while. No way around it. I’m afraid. It’s hoped you’ll have something to contribute.”
Farber straightened his tie briskly, seeming to come fully awake by the sheer power of will. “They’re broadcasting soon from the directors’ boardroom,” he said. “I’d better get myself up there.” He squinted at her speculatively. “My office will be in touch with you.”
He turned and put his hand on the doorknob, then looked back at her as if he was going to say something else, but did not. He left, letting the door remain open behind him.
“Did you really want Clayton Elliot for your lover?” asked Sarah softly, into the gently beeping, monitor-lit dimness of Seule’s hospital room. There was a different military nurse on duty now, a man who kept his eyes on her carefully. Sarah ignored him.
“Or did you want him to love you? There’s a difference, you know. It has to do with possession. It gets mistaken for love so often. . . .” She stepped closer to the bed.
Seule’s eyes seemed brighter now. The look in them of lost despair had retreated a bit, and she turned her head to follow as Sarah moved up beside her.
“I was so jealous of you.” Sarah’s voice was soft; all the anger had left her. “You didn’t know Walter and I had once been lovers, did you? When you came along, he just wasn’t interested in me any more. He had found something so absolutely lovely and new that he had to let everything else go.” She gazed at Seule almost kindly, feeling light as a husk from which a spoiled seed has been shaken.
“I’ll never love Walter again, or even really like him, but I can admire him for what he’s done with you. That’s good enough.”
The alien moved slightly on the bed under her restraints, and her soft pink tendrils undulated across her chest.
“Clayton Elliot wanted you to be a piece of experimental equipment conforming to his thesis. Walter Farber wanted you to be his brilliant.
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beautiful little girl. And I wanted to use you to get next to him, to show him ... to show that I mattered.”
“Sarah,” croaked Seule, barely audible.
Sarah backed up a little. She wasn’t ready to risk touching Seule again, not yet.
“Sarah.” The alien’s eyes were on her, those dark-silver, tearless eyes, and Sarah almost stopped breathing. “Please. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let you feel what I was feeling. I’m ... so tired of being human, but I don’t know how to be anything else.”
Sarah bit her lip, backing off still farther. She retreated to the window and drew aside the drapes to let in the brightening day. “'They’re asking me to come to Houston,” she said, around a lump in her throat. “Walter wants me, he thinks I can be useful.” She swallowed carefully and turned back to the bed. “How . . . how about you? Do you want me there?”
Sarah forced herself to look unflinchingly at Seule.
The alien reached toward Sarah with her neck-tendrils, something she had never done before; she had never touched Sarah unless Sarah initi- ated it. In fact the alien had deftly avoided contact during their sessions.
A moment of self-doubt, of struggle against the urge to flee, and Sarah stepped forward, bracing herself for whatever might flood into her.
Almost, she didn’t feel the first moment of touch, Seule’s tendrils were so light and soft and tentative. Like a baby’s fingers — warm, slightly sticky, full of innocent life — they gently explored the lengths of Sarah’s fingers, probed between them into the soft webs of flesh, slid across the hard nail surfaces. It was, to Sarah, so intensely sensual that she could only watch. The blood pounding in her ears made it impossible to move or react.
Yes, she thought, this is it — that moment, that fragrance sweet and strong; this is what it means.
And under the sweetness was a bitter taste, and behind the new light the shadow of a permanent darkness that could never pass; Sarah knew it. There were no miracles to offer, only friendship to ease the path.
“Yes, please come with me,” whispered Seule. •
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Greg Egan
Last year, tfie author's novel Quarantine, published in 1 992 by Random House (UK), won Australia's prestigious Ditmar award. The British edition of his latest novel. Permutation City, has just been released by Orion under their
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The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 a.m. Residents wo- ken by the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene when I’d only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an hour, assembling background data and moni- toring the radio traffic on headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.
By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions, but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegeta- tion of corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adja- cent national park that straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of precision instruments for scien- tific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotech- nology firms — including Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done an5rthing remotely like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modem building to rubble in a matter of seconds.
I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the mins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I’d had my knowledge miner ex- tract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I’d left home.
I approached her and said, “James Glass, Nexus Investigations.” She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the techni- cians trawling their gas chromatographs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the mins.
“They’re yours, I suppose?”
“Yes. They’ve been here since four.”
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She smirked slightly. “What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?”
“If you hire another company, we’ll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we’ve collected.”
She nodded distractedly. “I’ll hire you, of course. Since four? I’m im- pressed. You’ve even arrived before the insurance people.” As it hap- pened, LEI’s “insurance people” owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way imtil we were finished, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, “Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiber- optic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They’re supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but appar- ently they didn’t bother.”
I grimaced sympathetically. “What exactly were you people making here?”
“Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D.”
In fact. I’d already established that LEI’s factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There’s a fine line, though, between demon- strating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.
“So what were you researching and developing?”
‘That’s commercially sensitive information.”
I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing’s did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.
Lansing said, “Our main project here was engineering improved syn- cytiotrophoblastic cells.” I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. “Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and fetal blood sup- plies. Mother and fetus don’t share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn’t evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomidelike disaster. We’re aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tai- loring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood.”
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“A thicker barrier?”
“Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for trans- porting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through.”
“Very impressive.” A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded exactly like the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I’d heard that AIDS most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy — ^but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placental barrier more frequently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene- tailored fetal barriers installed — ^but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term — if the system actually worked, and wasn’t prohibitively ex- pensive— it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.
Beneficent, and lucrative.
In any case — whether or not there were biological, economic, and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete suc- cess ... it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.
I said, “Were you working with animals?”
Lansing scowled. “Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir.”
“Mmm.” In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equal- ity— ^the only group known to use such extreme methods — had concen- trated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes — many of them quite close by. “What about competitors?”
“No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There’s no race being run; we’ve already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components — the membrane channels, the transporter molecules — so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, re- gardless.”
“What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?”
“Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting
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off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn’t earning a cent.”
“Your share price will still take a dive, won’t it? Nothing makes invest- ors nervous quite so much as terrorism.”
Lansing agreed, reluctantly. “But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, them- selves. I don’t deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then . . . but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics.”
Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology . . . but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifacient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safe- guarding the unborn child.
Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, “It was a very professional job. If you’d hired demolition experts, they wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges.” She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.
She continued, “Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint ev- ery batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We’ve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago.”
I added, “Which may not be a great help, though, I’m afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times.”
Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, “I’d like to talk to you again, later — ^but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible.”
She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, “Nothing’s been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson’s Point.”
Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the re- cords stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world — heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, “You’d better let the vault’s operators know what’s happened.”
“I’ve already done that; I phoned them on my way here.” She gazed at the wreckage. “The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In
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six months’ time, we’ll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on.”
I SEiid, “Who would want to stop it in the first place?”
Lansing’s faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn’t remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn’t knocked her slightly out of kilter.
She said, “You tell me. That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening. Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved. Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his expression that he’d caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.
Over dinner, though, he couldn’t help himself
“Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the biggest yet. You could at least come and watch.” His eyes glinted; he enjoyed needling me. We’d had this argument five years running, and it was close to becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself
I said flatly, “Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?”
“Don’t exaggerate. There’ll only be a thousand men in drag, at most.”
“Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps.”
“If you actually came and watched, you’d discover that most people’s imaginations have progressed far beyond that.”
I shook my head, bemused. “If people’s imaginations had progressed, there’d be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It’s a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been . . . provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? What’s the point? There are no laws left to change, there’s no politics left to address. This kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereo- types, year after year.”
Martin said smoothly, “It’s a public reassertion of the right to diverse sexuality. Just because it’s no longer a protest march as well as a celebra- tion doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes is like . . . complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses credit for some intelligence; they don’t watch the parade and conclude that the average gay man spends all his time in a gold lam6
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tutu. People aren’t that literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kin- dergarten, they know how to decode the message.”
“I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street . . . but it means absolutely nothing to me.”
“I’m not asking you to join in — ”
“Very wise.”
“ — ^but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?”
I said wearily, “Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems ... or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so . . . proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer.”
Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.”
I protested, “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was bom with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.”
“So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?”
“Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian politi- cian gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as . . . being left or right handed.”
Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching — but . . .” He mimed incredulity.
I said, “We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal — along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that.”
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“People are still bashed in this city. People are still discriminated against.”
“Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I’m not talking about the perfection of human nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few psy- chotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots . . . most people just don’t care.”
Martin said ruefully, “If only that were true!”
The argument went on for more than an hour — ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then, neither one of us had seriously expected to change the other’s mind.
I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left or right handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap opera writers, and main- stream religious leaders . . . but the same people had been espousing equally high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn’t entirely caught up on that front. I’d suffered very little discrimination, myself — ^by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip, and I’d witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then . . . but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists’ latest attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.
Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been bom into a time and place where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.
What more could anyone hope for?
In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other’s bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.
The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI’s workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for such a professional job — ^but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a little civilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone who’d worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside information — and if I could find just one
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employee who’d turned down a bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.
Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.
The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been canceled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the na- tional phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendel- sohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.
Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtovm, matched the LEI records — but the same address was in the phone direc- tory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.
Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.
Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney divi- sion had always specialized in gynecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashion- able theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the trans- fer, and had been retrenched.
I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde prem- ises late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnolo- gists aren’t uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in store.
Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI’s rivals . . . but
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whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone who’d worked on the fetal barrier project itself — a project which had only come into existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.
I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frus- trating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology indus- try, and they would have been an ideal group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI’s misfortune — but the confidentiality agreement I’d signed meant that I couldn’t disclose anything about the research in question — not even to people working for LEI’s other divi- sions.
The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone had been offered a bribe, they weren’t talking about it — and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen people’s financial records.
Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fiber-optic ex- change, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventu- ally turn out to be invaluable — ^but none of it was going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.
Four days after the bombing— just as I found myself growing desperate for a fresh angle on the case — I had a call from Janet Lansing.
The backup samples of the project’s gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.
The vault in Milson’s Point turned out to be directly underneath a section of the Harbor Bridge — built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn’t arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt like a constant mild earthquake. 'The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.
Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Celluloid movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went digi- tal; the present owners specialized in biological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to impregnable.
Lansing had phoned the storage company. Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that he’d sent someone