by Robert Reed
“I wouldn’t pass through the agency’s security checks,” Trinidad allowed.
Porsche had to laugh, for a moment.
“What’s funny?” Uncle Jack asked.
“You,” she said. “The situation. Everything.”
Trinidad laughed quietly to himself.
“It’s the irony,” she explained. “We despise each other, yet here you are. Coming to me for help.”
“Affection isn’t a consideration,” Uncle Jack warned her. “Trust matters, and I genuinely don’t trust you.”
“I suppose not.”
“Except who else can I ask? Most of your cousins, like your two brothers, have homes and spouses, and children, too.”
“The agency wants family-free recruits,” said Trinidad.
Uncle Jack said, “You haven’t been home…in how long?”
She glanced at her uncle, then her own hands.
“You owe your family a great debt,” her uncle reminded her. “And, I think, you owe yourself just as great of a debt.”
Porsche nodded, slowly, calmly.
“Join the agency, tell me what’s happening on these wild worlds…and the debts will be paid. Eventually.” He glanced at his son, then found Porsche’s eyes again. “Afterwards, we won’t have to like each other. But we can dislike one another as equals. Which, in my experience, is usually the best way to make peace.”
Cornell and Porsche were nearly home.
The hills and windbreaks and occasional houses grew more familiar by the mile. Porsche found herself anticipating frozen ponds and the dilapidated bridges, and when she saw the old white farmhouse in the distance, she felt a palpable relief. The elderly structure had stood up to the wind for another day; shelter was in easy reach.
Since they had left the paved highway, neither had spoken.
Cornell adjusted his hands on the wheel, then asked, “Do you know? Was that courier responsible for you-know-what?”
“No one knows. Still.”
He chewed on the words for a moment, then said, “Interesting.”
“What is, darling?”
He smiled with a sideways glance. “If the agency had ever realized what you are, what would have happened to your folks and brothers?”
“They would have been protected. Before the agency could have acted, I hope.”
“And you?”
“I was Trinidad’s assignment. He was watching over me, just in case.”
“On High Desert?”
“Just on the earth,” she allowed.
“And what about now? He’s still watching, isn’t he?”
“Day and night.”
Through the skeletal windbreak, they could see the metal outbuilding, and nearby, Nathan’s old Chinese sedan and Timothy’s bullet-shaped Brazilian sugar-burner.
“Has the debt been paid?”
“Mostly,” Porsche admitted.
“But you didn’t get your final answers, did you?” He removed his foot from the accelerator, allowing the rough road to slow their truck. “Is that what you’re hoping for here? Timothy stumbles over a file that incriminates the courier, or clears her?”
“That would be nice, but it’s very unlikely. Impossible, even.”
“Because the Few have better tools than Timothy’s.” He turned the wheel with two fingers, creeping down the long dirt drive to the farmhouse. “And if the Few can’t find the truth with their fancy tools…that implies…implies that they’re up against someone who understands what you can do…”
Porsche said nothing.
With a confessional tone, Cornell admitted, “I’ve always wondered if it was something like this. Something bad.”
She saw Nathan step out on the front porch, waving and smiling, shouting a string of incomprehensible words.
“Is that the secret you wanted to tell me?”
Her voice sounded distant and a little too stiff. “No,” she said. “There’s something else, too.”
“Yeah?”
“After you and I got back from High Desert, I contacted my uncle. I explained what you wanted to do—investigating the agency, then expose them—and he thought it was a wonderful idea. But not for your reasons.”
“What reasons, then?”
“If there is a traitor, and if the agency uses her, or him, to try to stop what we’re doing—”
“She’ll expose herself,” Cornell muttered.
Porsche said, “That’s the hope.”
“In other words,” he said, “we are bait.”
Timothy emerged from the utility building, plainly relieved to have them home again.
“Worms on a hook,” Cornell whispered with a bleak fascination.
Then Porsche turned to ask him, “What do you think? Should we tell the others?”
Cornell nearly spoke, coming close to giving a reflexive, “Of course we tell them.” But then he paused, realizing that the circumstance had no easy answer. “Because of you,” he remarked, “Timothy believes that he’s perfectly safe. If he isn’t, he might run off. Or at least, he’ll pout like a seven-year-old.”
“And Nathan?”
Cornell parked and waved at his father, then watched in the mirror as the gray-haired man walked around the back of the truck, lifting a blanket to see what they had purchased.
“For now,” he said, “let’s keep it our secret.”
“Fine.”
Over the thrumming of the engine, they heard Nathan shouting, “It’s a beauty!”
Timothy stopped short of the truck, cold hands shoved into cold pockets. “Don’t leave me alone with him again!” he screamed, with his suffering stance, his accusing eyes.
Cornell had another thought. “Is there anything else that you’re keeping from me?” he asked.
Then almost as an afterthought, he said, “Porsche?”
She turned and kissed Cornell, kissed him with a tenderness that was unlike her, her mouth flush against his mouth for an age; then they pulled apart and found tears on their cheeks, damp and warm, fallen from anonymous ducts, and orphaned.
10
In a military hospital at an undisclosed location, a madman sat alone.
“A veteran of a different kind of war,” declared the narrator.
Hawthorne’s voice remained synthetic, but everything else about the segment couldn’t have been more genuine. Without adequate staff on hand, the hospital had resorted to simple AI software running on heavily padded terminals—in effect, electronic psychiatrists. A few weeks ago, Timothy had opened a lightline to the patient and borrowed the security cameras to serve as eyes. Then Porsche had interviewed the patient, her voice translated into Hawthorne’s deep rumblings. “Hello, sir,” she had said to the patient. “I’d like to speak to you for a moment, sir. If I may.”
A twisted, pitiful face gazed off in a random direction. Thinning red hair was cut short. He wore a simple hospital gown. Drugs and diet made his cheeks and neck puff out. The patient was perhaps twenty years old, or fifty, or anywhere in between. With a voice like shattering glass, he said, “Do you? Speak with me?”
She identified herself as a reporter, then confessed, “I’m eager to hear about your employer. We understand you once worked for Tangent, Incorporated.”
The patient dipped his head, as if startled.
“Except I know there is no Tangent, Incorporated,” she continued. “The company is a branch of the CEA. Isn’t that right, sir?”
He took several deep, thorough breaths, then said, “I didn’t tell you that.”
“They hired you,” she said, “and sent you far away.”
“Maybe.”
“To another world. Isn’t that right?”
Again, he dipped his head. “High Desert, we called it.”
“And something astonishing happened to you when you traveled to High Desert. Am I correct?”
Silence.
“You were changed. Physically changed. Am I right, sir?”
In a strong whisper, he said, “I was t
he same…inside…where you can’t see; I was…I was me…”
“But I’m talking about what I can see.”
Trembling hands covered his face, green eyes peering through white, sun-starved fingers. “Cross over,” he allowed, “and your body changes. That’s how you survive. You look alien, except you’re always human. Even when you forget, you still are.”
“What did you look like?”
“I had bodies. Six bodies. And I dragged my brain behind me.”
“Is that how the aliens looked? That planet’s natives?”
“I guess.”
“What was your job on High Desert?”
“I hunted.”
“For food. Is that what you mean?”
“Sometimes.”
“What else did you hunt?”
“Them.”
“Who?”
“Those aliens. The natives.”
“The creatures shaped like you?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you find them?”
Silence.
“Did you?”
The patient glanced at the camera fastened to the top of the terminal. Despite the puffy face, there was a wasted, raw-boned quality, particularly around the bright eyes.
“No,” he finally admitted. “I never found them, no.”
“How long were you stationed on High Desert?”
He considered the question, then admitted sadly, “I’m not sure.”
“Where did you go?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Did you visit the Breaks?”
He brightened suddenly. “You know about the Breaks?”
“And the Rumpled Mountains. Is that where you went? Into the Rumpleds?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
He hesitated, then said, “No.”
“What happened in the mountains?” A pause. “Something happened. I know it did, sir. I would very much appreciate it if you could tell me.”
“We got lost.”
“It’s a strange, bleak landscape,” was Porsche’s assessment. “I find it easy to believe that someone would get lost.”
“And hungry…”
“There’s not much food on the Rumpleds, is there?”
“No.”
“You found yourself in a famine.” Her voice, and Hawthorne’s, were more than sympathetic. There was a tangible appreciation for what the patient had endured. “You had to eat. You ate bravely…everything you could find, and that’s the only reason you survived.”
The eyes grew large, suffused with a hopefulness. “The others didn’t. Eat. I told them to, but they couldn’t make themselves!”
“Then you came back to this world,” said Porsche. “Outside and inside, you were human again.”
“Always, inside.”
“I bet you looked like yourself, and sounded like yourself. Except sometimes, or maybe a lot of the time, you feel as if some part of you is still walking across that cold dead desert. Am I right about that?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“You went home,” she continued. “Did you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you were hungry, weren’t you?”
Shame swirled with astonishment. “I ate something bad,” he confessed.
“What did you eat?”
“Bugs.”
“A lot of people eat insects,” she offered.
“And a dog, too.”
“Someone’s pet dog?”
“I guess so.”
“But those aren’t bad things,” she assured him. “What did you eat that was bad?”
Silence.
“On High Desert,” said Porsche, “sometimes the hungriest people would consume one or two of their extra bodies. If they wanted to live, they had no choice.”
“None,” he whispered.
“Back home again, living in your own house again, and one day you woke up and discovered that you’d eaten every last scrap of food. Is that what happened?”
The patient nodded, gazing downward.
“Couldn’t you go to the store?”
“No,” he mouthed.
“Why couldn’t you?”
“I couldn’t remember…how to get to the store…”
“So what did you do next?”
Silence.
“Tell me,” she said.
Nothing.
“I know what you did,” she promised, her voice cracking. “But show it to me. I want to see it.”
The patient lifted his pale white hand. Suddenly, the paleness of the fingers took a new significance, and when he rolled the fingers to the palm, making a fist, the hand creaked like tired furniture. Then his second hand grasped the first one’s wrist, jerking once, then again, disarticulating the prosthetic hand from a bone gnawed clean of flesh.
In the distance, alarms sounded.
Disabling strobes began to fire.
Timothy killed the strobes and changed cameras. The patient was sobbing, fighting to cover his eyes with his partial forearm. For the first time, they could see him sitting in a sturdy wheelchair, his gown falling limply over the edge, no legs left to give it shape.
More than legs were missing.
According to a report uncovered by Timothy, the man’s neighbors had heard his pitiful screams and called the police. Forcing his front door, the police found him wielding a steak knife in his surviving hand, fighting agony while attempting to saw off his testicles.
Another day of dedicated feasting, and he would have reached a vital organ.
A luscious last bite of liver, perhaps. Or the kidneys, maybe.
The man was someone who should never have passed through an intrusion, and as punishment, his soul had been left a mangled, mad ruin.
It was a madness unlike any other. A madness without cure.
“What that poor son of a bitch went through,” said Cornell. “I know I’d go insane, if it happened to me.”
“Would you?” Porsche replied.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“No.” She answered, then reconsidered. But she had to say it again, telling him, “No, I would survive it,” because she couldn’t envision any other answer.
Cornell lay beside her in the dark, conspicuously saying nothing.
Yet Porsche could imagine the madman lying in his invalid’s bed, feeling the soft strong bindings around his good hand. She could practically hear him thinking of nothing but that glorious, inevitable moment when his nurses and orderlies forgot to secure him. Then with his own fingernails, he would tear at his chest, at the frail white flesh and living ribs and he would reach into the gore of his chest, and as he died, in that instant, he would take a cherished bite out of his own vivid red heart.
When they arrived at the farm and began to work, Porsche knew what they were fighting, and why, and everything that she had learned had simply reinforced what she knew about the enemy.
Whatever its shape, ruthless ambition was unacceptable.
Sentience without conscience didn’t deserve the keys to the universe. What could be more self-evident?
Yet after the most wrenching days, Porsche would sit at the antique table, watching the others mix meals with idle conversation, and she would suddenly think of her birthworld—its relentless sense of clan and territory; its treasured paranoia and tradition-bound horrors—and what was wrong with her that she could actually miss such awful things?
One day, sitting at a very different table, she asked her companion, “Do you ever feel homesick?”
Trinidad was glancing over his shoulder, and perhaps he hadn’t heard her. Or more likely, he thought the question was inappropriate, ignoring both it and her, waving at their waitress and half-shouting, “Miss? Cream? The real kind, if you please.”
Another question came to mind.
“What is it with you and truck stops?” Porsche inquired.
Her cousin looked at her, revealing a broad smile. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Making a
sweeping gesture, he said, “A pageant of the plain and potent, and all we have to do is sit and watch…”
“Is that so?”
“That, and I like the cuisine.” He paused as the waitress appeared with his cream, throwing up a smile in thanks. The young woman—a nineteen-year-old child—seemed taken by her customer’s face and manner. Did he need anything else? Trinidad said, “Eventually. But not now, thanks.”
Porsche tried to look at the scene with her cousin’s romanticism, but all she saw was a sloppy, virtually empty restaurant.
“Pretty.”
She blinked, asking, “What’s that?”
“The girl. Don’t you think?” He laughed at his own lechery. “Different circumstances and I might try to build a friendship.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Why not? Spreading seed is basic to our nature.”
“Human nature, or the Few’s?”
“The seed’s, actually.” He roiled his eyes, then changed subjects. “I was hoping that you’d bring Cornell again.”
“He’s got a pressing assignment.”
“Riding the agency’s ass?”
“No,” she confessed, “our toilet went critical last night. That takes precedence.”
“I guess I can understand why.” He started reaching for the floor, for his trim, nondescript briefcase. “Otherwise, how’s the work going? Timothy and Nathan still at each other’s throats?”
“That’s blown over,” she said hopefully.
“Well, good.”
“Things are going well now. In another week or two, we’ll be ready to wrap up.”
“No shit.” Trinidad wasn’t particularly surprised, or interested. “Well,” he began, “maybe you don’t want this. Or need it. But here’s my excuse for coming all this way. In the mood for a gift?”
She was handed a simple brown notebook made from flash paper and smart ignitors—the ignitors put to sleep, hopefully.
“I’d keep it closed till you’re home,” he advised.
“What’s in it?”
“The official, unofficial policies of the CEA, including what’s acceptable behavior for keeping the intrusions to themselves.”
She laid her hand across the cover. “What behaviors?”
“Manipulation of the press. Intimidation of witnesses. And sweetest, how to maintain their independence from the government watchdogs.”