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by Greg Bear

  ‘You’re translucent. Milky blue. I can hardly see you.’ Rebecca waved her hand in front of his face. ‘Agent Griffin, is that you?’

  ‘Anything else?’ asked the bartender, a slender brunette with huge eyes.

  ‘Some food,’ Rebecca said. ‘We’ll take the buffalo wings.’

  ‘We call them angel wings,’ the bartender said. ‘Hot, mild, or boring?’

  ‘Hot,’ Rebecca said. ‘Olives in parmesan. Goat cheese plate. Anything that tastes good to hungry people who are blue.’

  ‘Blue cheese dip for the wings,’ the bartender suggested.

  ‘Right.’

  The bartender asked if they wanted more drinks. Rebecca asked for club soda, William, tomato juice.

  ‘This will not be a problem, not for you,’ Rebecca told him. ‘This will be a void, a blank space in your record. You’ll go to New Jersey and act as if nothing happened.’

  ‘Flaming TP,’ William said.

  ‘No, seriously,’ Rebecca said. ‘Start over again.’

  ‘It’s real, though, isn’t it?’ William asked. ‘Something’s going on. Something bad.’

  ‘Of course it’s real. Would Hiram Newsome lead you astray?’

  ‘I know you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Ah, well. That’s a pity.’ She took the club soda and downed it. ‘I seldom drink this much,’ she said. ‘White wine with dinner. I have a delicate metabolism.’ She set down the glass with a thunk, blowing an ice cube onto the bar. ‘We’ve known about biohackers since at least 2000, but in the last ten years, they’ve grown unimaginably more common and powerful. They have journals, websites, they exchange little tricks of the trade. Right now, you can buy a gene sequencer on eBay for five grand. Using online recipes you can make your own RNA, your own DNA, which means you can make viruses—real ones, not computer viruses—including smallpox or Ebola. You can create plasmids that turn ordinary bacteria into killers. Amerithrax was probably one of the first killer hackers. We were too blind to see it. Now, it’s international. People will die, and there is nothing we can do. We’re focused on a single nuclear explosion—still chasing old nightmares. But some screwball S.O.B. who doesn’t give a damn about atom bombs is up to something that could kill hundreds of millions, and six months from now, a year from now, if any of us are still alive, OPR will have us on the carpet, testifying about how the FBI missed another sterling opportunity. Congress critters will dine off our carcasses—if any of them are still alive. Maybe by then I’ll have slipped into early retirement. I’ll drown while fishing in a lake in Minnesota. But that won’t help you, dear boy.’

  ‘Crap,’ William said.

  ‘You dare disagree with the drunken blue lady?’ Rebecca asked, eyes intense.

  ‘It’s not a tasty future. How do you hunt down a thousand killer nerds?’

  ‘All I want to do is find one—just one—and make an example out of him.’ Her slate chimed. She put on reading glasses—the first time William had seen her do this—and examined the small screen at arm’s length. ‘My God,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hiram Newsome has been dismissed. The director’s purging the Ay-Dicks.’ She scrolled through the message and her face turned gray. ‘I need to go to the little girl’s room.’

  Rebecca left him at the bar. The food arrived but William was no longer hungry. Still, he picked at a chicken wing and, despising blue cheese, dipped it in his tomato juice, hoping it would dilute the spiciness. It did not. But globs of chicken grease made the juice undrinkable.

  Rebecca returned ten minutes later. ‘I made myself throw up,’ she informed him. ‘An old trick from my bingeing days in college. You should go do the same.’

  William shook his head. He had never seen Rebecca Rose look so vulnerable, even when she had had her blouse ripped in half, soaked in sprinkler water and tussling with a man twenty-five years younger. It made him sick inside.

  Rebecca called to the bartender. ‘Got a pot of coffee?’

  ‘Always,’ the bartender answered from the end of the bar.

  ‘We are going to make phone calls,’ Rebecca said to William. ‘You will talk to New Jersey and tell them you’re on your way. Don’t make waves. And don’t mention News or me in your résumé.’

  ‘Is it official?’

  ‘Reuters and AP. Keller must have seen this coming.’

  The bartender brought two mugs and a stainless pot. ‘Anything for blue people,’ she said, and winked at William.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Silesia, Ohio

  Sam walked around the park at dawn, making one last check of the wind. Clear skies, a grassy zephyr blowing from the northwest, three to five knots: gentle and perfect. The dispersion plume would be beautiful, a slow, graceful fan descending over at least five square miles of Silesia. Having the Town Talk bakery right in the center of the plume was a plus, he decided.

  To send this kind of message—his kind of message—one had to alter large volumes of flesh. Rotten flesh, killing flesh.

  Meat makes more meat. Meat learns its cruelty from bad meat. In the end, they were all made meat.

  By comparison, this is a kindness.

  He arrived back at the truck in a foul, uncertain mood, his head zinging with sharp spasms of doubt. From the truck’s glove box he took a foil pack of gingko biloba and swallowed three of the supplements, washing them down with bottled water. Pure superstition, he suspected—he could not even be sure he was affected—but what if he was? Then motivation, conviction, even a psychological edge could push him over the finish line, and all he needed was a few more weeks to spare before the blessed curtain fell and he could surrender to the fate he would be wishing on—inflicting upon—so many others.

  He rechecked his plane tickets and the plastic packet of passports. From Cleveland to New York, from New York to Jordan, and from Jordan by way of chartered flight to Jeddah. RFIDs—Radio Frequency Identity tags—with medical and personal info and even DNA markers had been reprogrammed in all the passports. To Homeland Security, and to any foreign government keeping track, he would be a different man, on nobody’s list.

  For most of his adult life, he had kept in reserve his most personal and hidden trait, his mother’s most wonderful genetic accident, as a kind of contingency, a backup plan for a difficult world in which most people had few secrets from the grimly curious authorities.

  There was still a risk, of course—but much reduced.

  One blue eye, one green. Who would know?

  He rolled back and tied the tarp on the trailer, then climbed up and inspected the hedgehog through the wide opening in the roof. Each of the launching tubes had been capped with a plastic cup secured by tape. Opening the rear door, he sidled in beside the launcher and removed each cap, careful not to bump the tubes. The late summer air was dry but not too dry. Static was not likely to be a problem, but one never knew.

  Then he removed the firing board from its box and hooked it up to the base of the hedgehog. On the board he flipped a toggle and ran the wand over the twenty live contact points. At the base of each tube, red diodes lit up, flickered, then faded.

  All it would take was a quick swipe down the contacts, with the toggle reversed.

  Sam unhooked the patch cord, coiled it, strapped it to the bottom of the firing board with Velcro, then placed it in the seat of the truck. Legs stiff, hands shaking, he unhitched the trailer and placed the calibrated brace under the tongue, angling the trailer back a few centimeters to the proper angle. At the last minute, he could rotate the trailer, angle it up or down a few degrees, based on wind direction and speed, within parameters he had calculated months before.

  The park was almost deserted. On the far side he spotted an elderly man out for a stroll with his white Scotty. There would be a few shrieks and loud bangs. Then a pattern of simultaneous starbursts. Glass beads and chunks of clay and talcum would fall rather more quickly than the payload, rattling lightly on some rooftops, rolling down the rain gutters.

 
; He was in the truck when he noticed the branches of the trees swaying along this side of the street, whipping around far more energetically than he liked. He frowned through the windshield, opened the door, and lifted his finger to the freshened breeze. The wind had shifted. It was blowing from the south at about ten or fifteen knots. If he fired now, even with the trailer properly angled, and if the wind reversed again, the plume would go out over the cornfields and empty lots north of town.

  He returned to the truck and waited for an hour. At the end of that hour the wind was still back and forth, all wrong. He switched on the radio. The local weather station was forecasting turbulence for the next day or so—possibly signaling a front moving through and showers late in the evening.

  Sam closed his eyes. He lowered the antenna on the firing box. Then he got out and hitched the trailer back onto the truck, stowing the calibrated brace.

  God did not want it. Not now, not this morning.

  After all this time, I have to listen. I have to be patient.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Seattle

  They say that

  They say that when the front side of your brain is squashed against the backside

  (They don’t say that; who’s talking here, anyway?)

  They say that when that happens, your consciousness retreats down your brainstem into your spinal cord and ends up in your asshole. I can’t smell a thing but for this constant stink of sour blood and shit. All things would be equal, really, if I could smell something else, but then, I don’t really have a nose any longer, do I? so it’s what they call a phantom limb or organ or whatever. And maybe my brain is the same way. Now that it’s squashed it’s a phantom brain and can hurt or twinge or think nightmares are real or do whatever it damn well pleases.

  What a mess.

  ‘Hello, Agent Griffin.’

  This was somebody he probably did not know, standing in front of the bed, blocking out the most interesting part of the room, the part with the television. When the television was turned off and it wasn’t blocked, he could play back anything he wanted on that ancient blank screen. He usually just played back scenes of dating, going through high school, getting drunk after graduating, getting in that car wreck that almost killed his future wife. Them parading around outside the car in the ditch, laughing and crying, then burying the beer bottles and the half-full pint of Wild Turkey before the sheriff arrived. That was back in Praise-be-to-God Silesia, Ohio.

  No, it wasn’t. You drove through Silesia once, but that was not where the accident happened. Someone is standing in front of the television screen and I can’t see it clearly now, where we had that accident, Georgina and myself, our younger selves. William was never that stupid or that wild. He never told me about it anyway.

  It wasn’t Silesia, Ohio, it was…

  ‘Hello, Griff, it’s Kerry Markham. Deputy Markham. I’m here to say…’

  They come through every hour on the hour, keeping tabs on me. I am their awful fate. I am diving into the deep ocean with an anchor chained to my foot.

  What the hell happened in Silesia? It was the Fourth of July and they were shooting off fireworks. No. I never saw that.

  Kerry Markham. I still have a memory of recent events. Let’s use it. I can see the TV now. There’s Georgina and me on the outskirts of Duluth. I was right. It wasn’t Ohio.

  Kerry Markham was still talking. Griff decided to listen for once. ‘I’m sorry. Christ, I’m sorry it had to be you and all the other guys. I wish he had taken me down right at the start, me instead of you—and the bomb and all. It’s been preying on me. Driving me a little bonkers, if you know what I mean, I get distracted so easily. I thought if I could just make it square—I’d get it all back again. My mojo.’

  So what in hell is it with Silesia? All I remember is that it had a lot of churches. Driving through the town, Georgina looked it up in the triple-A and told me Guinness had certified it had more churches per capita than any other town in the country. Surprising, because you’d think that should be down south somewhere. I should write that down.

  Griff took the marker in his hand and scrawled on the legal pad,

  ESIA SILESIA OHIO.

  Someone—Kerry Markham, a Snohomish County sheriff’s deputy, judging by the color of his uniform—picked it up and looked it over. ‘I’ve been making notes myself, just to keep on the ball,’ Markham said. ‘I’ve gotten so distracted lately.’ He rubbed his neck and chuckled. ‘I shouldn’t be losing my mind this early, this young, should I? My mind, my memory.’

  The marker fell to the floor and Griff went back to watching the blank TV until a nurse came in, saw his focus, and turned it on.

  By that time, the deputy was gone.

  His thoughts faded to gray. His hand made random motions over the pad. The nurse put the marker and the pad on the table.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ she said.

  William sat on the hospital chair and looked over the recent stack of scratches and broken words. Rebecca was in the hallway; she had been on her slate for the last two hours. They were checked out, bags packed, ambulatory—as Griff had once called being ready for action.

  Griff lay with the plastic sheet pinned up and his mouth finally free of tubes. Fresh patches of pale green Gro-Guide had been spread over his cheeks and nose. The fingers on his elevated arm twitched, which the doctor said was a good sign, but his free arm lay with hand fisted like a dead bug.

  William touched the fist.

  ‘Silesia, Ohio. What does that mean, Griff?’

  Griff turned his eyes in William’s direction. ‘Churches,’ he said, and moved his eyes back to the television screen mounted near the ceiling. The TV was on but with the sound turned down. Griff’s lips moved. William placed his face between Griff and the TV screen. ‘Hello, Griff?’

  ‘Off,’ Griff said in less than a whisper.

  ‘The TV? Sure.’ William used the bedside clicker to switch off the television. Griff continued to stare at the blank screen. William thought that had his father’s face been capable of expression, he might have been frowning in concentration. His eyes showed that much.

  ‘Torn,’ Griff whispered. His hand relaxed and started to move. His eyes switched left to look at his hand, then, for the first time, Griff looked at William. ‘Map.’

  ‘Torn map,’ William said.

  ‘In barn. Silesia.’

  ‘Map of Silesia…in the barn.’

  ‘Churches,’ Griff said. He was staring at the TV screen again.

  ‘Would you like the TV turned on?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like to sleep?’

  Rebecca came into the room and stood beside William. Her presence did not seem to register. Griff relaxed his fist and wriggled his fingers. ‘Write.’

  William put the marker in his hand and replaced the legal pad. Griff scrawled. ‘It still hurts to talk,’ William said.

  ‘I wonder what doesn’t hurt,’ Rebecca said.

  Griff wrote: JWS IN SILESIA 0

  ‘Jews,’ William said.

  Griff drew a definitive slash through the 0, emphasizing that he meant zero. Zero Jews in Silesia.

  ‘So?’

  XTIAN

  Then, JWS, again.

  ‘Christians and Jews.’

  X THEM ALL.

  ‘I don’t think you mean kiss them all, do you?’ Rebecca moved closer. ‘Griff, let me tell you what we think we know, and you just make a slash if you agree, or a circle if you don’t. Right?’

  Griff made a slash.

  ‘You think the Patriarch wanted to kill Jews, period. Wherever.’

  Slash, then XTIANS 2

  ‘Lions, nothing,’ William said.

  Slash. Then, 0. Griff’s entire arm trembled now. The writing became even harder to read.

  JWS XTIANS

  ‘All right,’ Rebecca said, staring at the pad with a concentrated frown.

  ALL

  Griff was writing on the blanket now. William
paused his hand and replaced the legal pad with one from a box beneath the bed.

  JWS XTIANS

  ‘That about sums them up, Griff,’ William said. ‘So, where does Silesia figure?’

  DESCNT FM JWS

  Then, ALL CHLDRN JWS

  ‘All right.’

  And then,

  SILESIA

  MOST CHURCHES

  Griff’s forehead, just below his hairline—the only part of his face, besides eyes and lips, not layered with Gro-Guide—was beaded with sweat.

  ‘Right, Silesia,’ William said. ‘Most—greatest number of churches.’

  In rapid strokes, firm now, and covering half the page, Griff wrote:

  CLOSE 1

  ‘Close, but no cigar,’ William said. ‘The Patriarch hated Jews and Christians. All right. I’ll believe that—lots of hate to spread around. What about it, Griff?’

  The hand wrote:

  Y MAP

  ‘Good question,’ William said. ‘We can’t see it on the video—but then, the signal was cutting in and out.’

  The marker was still going, but just making squiggles.

  ‘Griff?’ Rebecca said.

  He could not keep his eyes open to look at the TV. Perhaps that was best. The blank TV was sucking away his memory. He did not know whether his son and the woman were still there or not. The woman looked familiar. He wondered if she might be his wife, but probably she wasn’t. Too young.

  The funny thing was, his memories were falling out in broad patches, he could actually feel them sloughing away. The whole process was almost pleasant—bad departing along with the good, fleas with the fur, older memories fading the fastest.

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  Rebecca shook hands with William. In the gray light outside the hospital, she looked ten years older than she had the day before, ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Give me your receipts.’

  He reached into his pocket and handed her his envelope.

  ‘FBI always wants paper, itemized. Guys usually forget these,’ she said. ‘I’ll take care of them.’

  ‘If it’s going to cause any more trouble—’