by Jerry
“Max,” she says courteously. “Hello.”
The throaty catch, the hesitation, is gone from her voice. For some reason, it is this which breaks me. Go figure. Her accent is still there, even her scent is still there, but not that catch in the voice, and not Daria. This is a shell. In her eyes, nothing.
Rosie takes my hand. It is the first time in forty years, except for when she was crazy Mrs. Kowalski, that Rosie Adams has ever touched me. In her clasp I feel all of the compassion, the life, that is missing from Daria. Nothing could have hurt me more.
I can’t look anymore at Daria. How do you look at something that isn’t there? I turn my head and see Agent Alcozer round the corner of the hallway outside the apartment, running toward us.
And then, at that moment and not a second before, I remember what stank about San Cristobel.
The scam went through fine. But afterward, Moshe came to me. “They want to do it again, this time with a mole. They’ve actually got someone inside the feds, in the Central Investigative Bureau. It looks good.”
“Get me the details,” I said. And when Moshe did, I rejected the deal.
“But why?” Anguished—Moshe hated to let a profitable thing go.
“Because,” I said, and wouldn’t say more. He argued, but I stood firm. The new deal involved another organization, the one the mole came from. The Pure of Heart and Planet. Eco-nuts, into a lot of things on both sides of the law, but I knew what Moshe did not and wouldn’t have cared about if he had. The Pure of Heart and Planet were connected with the second big attack on LifeLong, on that Greek island. The Pure of Heart and Planet along with their mole in the feds, altered and augmented in sacrifice to the greater glory of biological purity, a guy from what used to be Des Moines.
Alcozer runs faster than humanly possible. He carries something in his hands, a thick rod with knobs that I don’t recognize. Weapons change in ten years. Everything changes.
And Daria knows. She looks at Alcozer, and she doesn’t move.
The bodyguards don’t move, either, and I realize that of course they’ve reactivated the force fence around the apartment. It makes no difference. Alcozer barrels through it; whatever the military has developed for the Central Investigative Bureau, it trumps whatever Sequene has. It handles the guard ’bot, too, which just shuts down, erased by what must be the jammer of all jammers.
The human bodyguard isn’t quite so easy. He fires at Alcozer, and the mole staggers. Blood howls out of him. As he goes down he throws something, so small you might not notice it if you didn’t know what was happening. I know; this is the first weapon that I actually recognize, although undoubtedly it’s been upgraded. Primitive. Contained. Lethal enough to do what it needs to without risking a hull breach, no matter where on an orbital or shuttle you set it off. An MPG, mini personal grenade, and all at once I’m back on Cyprus, in the Army, and training unused for sixty-five years surfaces in my muscles like blossoming spores.
I lurch forward. Not smooth, nothing my drill sergeant would be proud of. But I never hesitate, not for a nanosecond.
I can only save one of them. No time for anything else. Daria stand, beautiful as the moment I saw her in that taverna, in her green eyes a welcome for death. Overdue, so what kept you already? But those would be my words, not hers. Daria has no words, which are for the living.
I hit Rosie’s solid flesh more like a dropped piano than a rescuing knight. We both go down—whump!—and I roll with her under the antique table, which is there after all, a heavy marble slab. My roll takes Rosie, the beloved of my faithful friend Stevan, against the wall, with me on the outside. I never hear the grenade; they have been upgraded. Electromagnetic waves, nothing as crude as fragments. Burns sluice across my back like burning oil. The table cracks and half falls.
Then darkness.
Romani have a saying: Rom corel khajnja, Gadzo corel farma. Gypsies steal the chicken, but it is the gaje who steal the whole farm. Yes.
Yes.
I wake in a white bed, in a white room, wearing white bandages under a white blanket. It’s like doctors think that color hurts. Geoff sits beside my bed. When I stir, he leans forward.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.”
“How do you feel?”
The inevitable, stupid question. I was MPG-fragged, a table fell on me, how should I feel? But Geoff realizes this. He says, quietly, “She’s dead.”
“Rosie?”
He looks blank—as well he might. “Who’s Rosie?”
“What did I say? I don’t feel . . . I can’t . . .”
“Just rest, Dad. Don’t try to talk. I just want you to know that Daria Cleary’s dead.”
“I know,” I say. She’s been dead a long time.
“So is that terrorist. Dead. It turns out he was actually a federal agent—can you believe it? But the woman you saved, Mrs. Kowalski, she’s all right.”
“Where is she?”
“She went back downstairs. Changed her mind about D-treatment. Now the newsholos want to interview her and they can’t find her.”
And they never will. I think about Stevan and Rosie . . . and Daria. It isn’t pain I feel, although that might be because the doctors have stuck on my neck a patch the size of Rhode Island. Not pain, but hollowness. Emptiness. Cold winds blow right through me.
When there’s nothing left to desire, you’re finished.
In the hallway, ’bots roll softly past. Dishes clink. People murmur and someplace a bell chimes. Hollowness. Emptiness.
“Dad,” Geoff says, and his tone changes. “You saved that woman’s life. You didn’t even know her, she was just some crazy woman you were being kind to, and you saved her life. You’re a hero.”
Slowly I turn my head to look at him. Geoff’s eyes shine. His thin lips work up and down. “I’m so proud of you.”
So it’s a joke. All of it—a bad joke. You’d think the Master of the Universe could do better. I go on an insane quest for a ring eaten by a robotic dog, I assist in the mercy killing of the only woman I ever loved, I save the life of one of the best criminals on the planet—my own partner-in-law in so many grand larcenies that Geoff’s head would spin—and the punch line is that my son is proud of me. Proud. This makes sense?
But a little of the hollowness fills. A little of the cold wind abates.
Geoff goes on, “I told Bobby and Eric what you did. They’re proud of their grampops, too. So is Gloria. They all can’t wait for you to come back home.”
“That’s nice,” I say. Grampops—what a word. But the wind abates a little more.
“Sleep, now, Dad,” Geoff says. He hesitates, then leans over and kisses my forehead.
I feel my son’s kiss there long after he leaves.
So I don’t tell him that I’m not going back home any time soon. I’m going to have the D-treatment, after all. When I do have to tell him, I’ll say that I want to live to see my grandsons grow up. Maybe this is even true. Okay—it is true, but the idea is so new I need time to get used to it.
My other reason for getting D-treatment is stronger, fiercer. It’s been there so much longer.
I want a piece of Daria with me. In the old days, I had her in a ring. But that was then, and this is now, and I’ll take what I can get. It is, will have to be, enough.
THE HUM
Rick Hautala
“Can you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That . . .”
Dave Marshall rolled over in bed and struggled to come awake. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes in the darkness as he listened intently.
“I don’t hear anything, Sweetie,” he said as he slid his hand up the length of his wife’s thigh, feeling the roundness of her hip and wondering for a moment if she was interested in a little midnight tumble. He felt himself stirring.
“Don’t tell me you can’t hear that,” Beth said irritably. Dave realized she was serious about this although he’d be damned if he could hear anything. It didn’t matte
r, though, because the romantic mood had already evaporated.
“Honest to God, honey, I don’t hear anything. Maybe it was a siren or—”
“It wasn’t a siren. It’s . . . I can just barely hear it. It’s like this low, steady vibration.” Beth held her breath, concentrating hard on the sound that had disturbed her.
“Maybe it’s the refrigerator.”
“No, goddamnit. It’s not the fridge.”
Dave was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Pressures at the office, he supposed, were getting to him. He sure as hell didn’t need to be playing “Guess That Sound” at 2 am.
“Just put the pillow over your head and go back to sleep. I’ll check it out in the morning.”
“I can’t sleep with my head under the pillow,” Beth grumbled, but she turned away from him and put her head under the pillow just the same. He patted her hip one more time, feeling a little wistful.
“Isn’t that better?”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
Ignoring her sarcasm, Dave leaned over and kissed her shoulder as he whispered, “Goodnight, honey.”
Dave awoke early the next morning with every nerve in his body on edge. His eyes were itchy, and he could feel a headache coming on.
This is really weird, he thought. I was in bed by 10 last night. That’s nine freakin’ hours of sleep. I shouldn’t feel like this.
He went downstairs to the kitchen. Beth was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked at him bleary-eyed.
“How’d you sleep?” she asked, and he caught the edge in her voice.
“Before you woke me up or after?” He forced a grin.
“Very funny. That goddamn hum kept me awake most of the night.” She took a sip of coffee and opened the newspaper, making a point of ignoring him.
“Beth . . .”
“Yeah?”
Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he could hear something. There was a low, steady vibration just at the edge of awareness. He could almost feel it in his feet.
“Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know . . .? I think I can hear it.”
“Really?” Beth looked at him like she didn’t quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I might be going insane.”
Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn’t in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound always seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth in the middle of the yard, crying.
“What’s the matter, honey?” He put his arms around her, feeling the tension in her body.
“I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house, “she said, sobbing into his shoulder.
“So?”
“So . . . That means it’s not coming from inside the house. It’s out here somewhere. It’s like it’s coming from the ground or the sky or something.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I’ll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It’s gotta be a problem with the wires.”
“Sure,” Beth said, not sounding convinced. She wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve, then turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her leave, knowing she didn’t believe it was a wire problem.
He wasn’t sure he believed it, either.
Over the next few days, things got worse. A lot worse. Like a sore in your mouth you can’t help probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, noticed how distracted he was. At first he commented on it with amusement, but that changed to concern and, finally, exasperation. But Dave noticed that everyone in the office seemed a little distracted and, as the days went by, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone was sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at the edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn’t talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.
Over the next few days, sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors, who were already on edge.
Dave’s commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for over an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to back roads going to and from work.
Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper and TV news with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was applauded instead of prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was a global phenomenon.
“It’s only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting. Mike from Purchasing glared at him.
“Who died and made you Mr-Know-It-All?” he snarled.
“Jesus, Mike, quit being such an asshole,” Dave snapped back.
“All right. That’s enough,” said Jeff. “This isn’t kindergarten. Let’s try to be professional here, okay?”
“Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat’s ass anymore, anyway?”
“I said that’s enough.” Jeff thumped the conference table with his clenched fist.
Sherry from Operations burst into tears. “Stop it, stop it now! Jesus, stop it! I can’t take it any more! I can’t eat. I can’t sleep, and I sure as hell can’t stand listening to the two of you morons!”
Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and shouted at him, “It’s none of your goddamned business‘.”
“What’d I say?” asked Dave with a shrug.
“That’s it!” roared Jeff. “You’re fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”
The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bulging. In the moment of silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mention that it had changed subtly. Now there was a discordant clanking sound, still just at the edge of hearing, but the sound was penetrating.
“The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, wavering voice. “It’s the music of the spheres.” Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.
Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell’s she talking about?”
“Go home. All of you. I’m closing the office until they figure out what this sound is.” Jeff’s fists were
clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don’t, I’m going to have to kill every single one of you . . . unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly, then slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he sobbed quietly.
Mike and Dave left the conference room without speaking.
That afternoon, Dave drove home, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn’t help but listen to the hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn’t come up with an answer.
When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.”
She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.
“What’s her name?”
“What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. It’s nothing like that. Look, Beth, I’m trying to save us, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”
Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that for a brief moment he forgot all about the noise.
“Jeff closed the office. This sound is getting on everyone’s nerves, and he’s afraid we’re all going to end up killing each other. He’s probably right. I was thinking—we gotta get out of here. Let’s go up to your folks’ place in Maine or anywhere, as long as it’s far away from here and from all these people.”
“But the news says this hum is everywhere. There’s no escaping it, Dave,” Beth said. Her face contorted, but she clenched her fists and regained her selfcontrol. “What’s the point of going anywhere?”