Beneath the Gated Sky

by Robert Reed

  “Everyone will be home again soon,” Latrobe kept assuring Porsche.

  Or himself.

  “Know what, Aunt Porsche?”

  She swallowed, then asked, “What, Clare?”

  “I’ve got something pretty. This man gave it to me.”

  Porsche felt her heart ache and her blood clot, and she shuddered, asking, “What did he give you, Clare?”

  “Look.”

  In a single motion, without a shred of embarrassment, Clare pulled her oversized shirt up to her face, exposing her chalky white chest and the brilliant ruddy-gold image of the sun, the fresh ink looking almost wet in the wet light.

  “Pretty,” said the shirt-muffled voice. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  Because nothing else would do any good, Porsche hugged her niece again, saying, “It’s very pretty, dear. It’s beautiful.”

  8

  Porsche and Cornell were led away from the tents, down through the dripping woods.

  The foliage was sun-fattened and sloppily exuberant, every long leaf polished to a black metallic sheen and every stem bowing under the cumulative weight. Masses of brilliant flowers promised the world gifts of cocktails and pollen. Cackling roars and musical wails filled the rain-saturated air. Sometimes there was a squawk or grunt underfoot, in warning, and sometimes there was nothing—no sound but the distinct impression of something behind the brush, calmly watching them pass.

  Occasionally the lead soldier would pause, crouching as he lifted his free hand, waiting for an excuse to fire his rip-gun.

  A trailing soldier caught Porsche’s eye. His build and demeanor felt familiar, and there was something incriminating in the way he wouldn’t look at her directly. Drifting back toward him, she asked, in a whisper, “Were you beside me in the helicopter?” Then, catching his scent against the roof of her mouth, “That other man called you…Alvarez, was it?”

  He said nothing, and everything. Alvarez gripped the rip-gun until the handle creaked, and he tilted back his mask, as if expecting paratroopers to attack.

  “Thank you,” she offered. “For helping the children open their toys, I mean.”

  “Go on,” he croaked. Then, “Ma’am.”

  They came upon a sudden mountain road. It was narrow, hacked from rock and titanic gray-green roots, and it was crowded with float-cars, armored and camouflaged, each one battered by collisions and cratered by rip-gun rounds. Porsche and Cornell were delivered to the smallest car, climbing up to the rear door, then down inside. A pair of masked figures sat in the front, on matching seats, singing a pop song popular on the earth ten years ago. When the door was sealed, sunlight dropping to an endurable glow, the driver lifted his mask and turned. “So how’s the bass fishing here, Miss Neal?”

  Beneath the jarrtee face were traces of his human appearance. “That ugly cut healed,” she observed.

  “Till I’m home again.” He smiled only with his eyes, like a true jarrtee. “Isn’t that how it works? Unless I’m gone for several weeks, in which case I’ll have a sweet little scar.”

  There was a sudden bang.

  The drivers dropped and sealed their masks, then struck the ceiling twice. The rear door opened with a little shriek, and a burly jarrtee climbed inside, shaking off the first drops of a fresh torrent. Filling a pivoting seat in the back end, Latrobe had barely settled when he barked, “Go!” And as they accelerated, following a tanklike vehicle, he lifted his mask and told the prisoners to do the same.

  He was a simple-faced jarrtee, just as he had been a simple-faced human. But his eyes were no longer tiny, closing and opening again with a strange liquid satisfaction.

  From beneath his robe, he produced an elegant piece of jarrtee engineering. A wrist cuff. “Precautions,” he purred. “Show me your hands.”

  Porsche’s left wrist was fastened to Cornell’s right.

  Latrobe sat back, totally at east. Gazing through a blackened side window, he said, “I forgot to ask. Have I mastered your old language?”

  “You sound…reasonable…”

  The man snorted, then said, “Better than reasonable, and you know it.”

  Cornell stared at Latrobe, then as if bored, closed his eyes.

  The forest vanished abruptly. Below them, the entire rain-soaked slope had pulled free of the mountain, acres of mud and shattered tree trunks choking a narrow valley. The newest storm was already eroding the fresh slope. Sudden little streams carried silt, and gravity pulled at the streams, using the silt like the teeth on a power saw.

  Then just as abruptly they were back under the canopy again, the storm blunted, no road beneath them, the way carpeted with felt grass and weedy flowers.

  “Where’s Trinidad?” asked Cornell.

  Latrobe laughed. “Everywhere?”

  The men up front laughed, too. It was an old joke.

  “No, really. He’s riding in that machine up ahead. We’ve laid down a line of eavesdroppers, from here to the City, and he’s watching for trouble.”

  “I hope he’s being helpful,” she growled.

  “Nothing but,” said Latrobe, cheerfully.

  Cornell’s new hand felt slick and hot. Sometimes Porsche would glance at him, and sometimes she felt his eyes on her. But they avoided trading looks, and they never spoke to one another.

  After a little while, Porsche looked back at Latrobe. “Can I ask something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why bother with me?” She looked forward again, watching the colorless, endless rain turned to fog by the car’s force field. “Trinidad has the Few-made tools, and he has the expertise. He knows this world as well as I do. Better, since he’s obviously been here recently—”

  “All true,” said Latrobe.

  “I’m weight. I’m a wild element. You’re using more than a dozen hostages to keep me under control, and they must be a complication, too.”

  “You must be important,” Latrobe assured.

  “It’s something that I offer, that Trinidad can’t give you.”

  “Indeed,” the singsong voice replied. “In fact, we went to considerable trouble to have your timetable and ours match up. Remember your cousin’s extremely charitable gift? The agency’s guidebook to acceptable mayhem?”

  “It was a fake,” Cornell groaned.

  “Hardly, but that’s not my point.”

  “You were delaying us,” said Porsche. “You wanted us busy while you were getting everything set up here.”

  “It was your cousin’s idea,” Latrobe confessed.

  “A good one,” she grumbled.

  A big hand casually patted her on the shoulder, as if trying to give comfort. “But what about your first question? What would make you so damned important for us to go to this incredible bother?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Of course I’ll tell,” Latrobe responded. “Why else do you think you’re here?”

  The driver and his buddy were laughing again, almost cackling. Nothing in the world could be funnier, it seemed.

  “There is a man,” Latrobe began. “A jarrtee, naturally. He happens to live in your old City. The poor shit. He has a thankless job and a dull, dreary life. A marriage gone stale. Children who barely notice him. The kind of life that might drive someone to suicide, provided he had the courage.

  “A few days ago—jarrtee days, I mean—the poor shit receives a very peculiar, utterly unexpected communication. A voice on an audio line refers to him by name, asking how he’s been. ‘Who are you?’ he responds, although maybe he recognizes the voice. Just a little, maybe. ‘Where are you?’ he asks, trying to trace the call to its origin, and finding none.

  “The voice won’t identify itself, but it asks about the man. How is he? Is he happy? The voice hopes that he’s happy, which is nice to hear. Then the voice apologizes. It apologizes for past sins, never exactly saying what those sins are, and it hopes that the man will find reason to forgive.”

  Porsche sat motionless, barely breathing.

  “Jump ahead one
jarrtee day,” Latrobe continues. “Our poor fellow works an unpopular schedule because it means relative wealth for his ungrateful family, and on the positive note, he’s learned that he prefers a measure of solitude. His job gives him that cherished solitude. And it’s a rather important job, I should add.”

  He paused for an instant, then continued.

  “Like I said, it’s the next day. And again he receives another mysterious call. Again, audio only. But the voice talks to him for a long, long time, giving away its identity through what it knows. He might have suspected who it was, but now he knows. And the man finds himself thrilled to hear the woman.”

  No one spoke, or moved.

  “Longing,” said Latrobe.

  He said, “The poor shit discovers a longing. A delicious romantic love. ‘Are you nearby?’ he asks her. She says, ‘Yes.’ ‘Can I see you sometime?’ But she’s playing it coy, making no promises. ‘It wouldn’t be a good idea,’ she warns. Then suddenly, as if frightened by her own romantic ideas, she says, ‘I have to go now.’

  “‘Will you call me again?’ he asks.

  “‘Maybe,’ she concedes. But of course, she calls. That very next day, as it happens. At the usual time. Noon. The sun at its apex, and the world looking its most hellish.”

  “She is Trinidad,” Porsche muttered.

  “With his voice doctored, yes. But this time, the third time, there’s a video image, too. Trinidad had his face doctored digitally—a trick that we backwoods humans could pull off—making him look like another. And he smiles at that poor lonely shit. ‘I can’t talk long,’ Trinidad says. And the man asks, ‘Where are you? Where have you been?’ Then the poor shit calls her by the name that he hasn’t used in years. ‘Po-lee-een,’ he calls out, ‘I have missed you so much. So much!’”

  More than anything, what chilled Porsche was the ease with which Latrobe mimicked the voices. In the voices, she could hear herself, and she could hear the deliberate and steady voice that she hadn’t heard since she was a young girl.

  “Jey-im,” she whispered.

  Cornell was staring at her, in astonishment.

  Porsche settled deeper into her seat, numbed to the wobbling of their car and the relentless roar of the new storm. Then just as quickly, she collected herself, straightening her back to show resolve. With a glance over her shoulder, she asked, “How is Jey-im?”

  “Eager,” Latrobe offered. “Ecstatic, even.”

  The men in front were cackling like little children.

  “Why not? His long-lost girlfriend is coming to see him.” Latrobe smiled with the broad wet eyes. “It’s all arranged. The time, the place. And what happens afterwards, too.”

  No one spoke.

  Again, Latrobe patted her on the shoulder, lending strength. “You don’t know this, but you made Jey-im a large promise. You told him that you can take him away from his bland circumstances. You’re going to show him the way to an alien world. A beautiful, exciting wonderland—”

  “But for a price,” said Cornell.

  “I forgot an important detail.” Latrobe relished the moment. “Jey-im works the day shift as a high-ranking member of City security. It’s his job to help defend certain estivating jarrtees in this time of civil unrest. Politicians are under his watch. And the wealthiest families. Not to mention the entire scientific establishment—”

  “Shit,” Cornell muttered.

  “And Jey-im is willing to help us?” Porsche asked, halfway astonished.

  “Without hesitation, it seems.” Latrobe kept laughing, and his men with him. Eyes bounced in their big sockets as he joyfully asked, “Isn’t it delicious? Two worlds, and such different worlds. Yet on both, men are willing to sell their souls for a piece of ass!”

  9

  Latrobe kept up the briefing, preparing Porsche with the smooth surety of an experienced coach. He quoted every word that Trinidad, wearing her face, had said to Jey-im, and Jey-im’s exact responses, and the tone of his voice, and the language of his body and adoring face. Then Latrobe paused, just for a half-instant, before asking, “Would you like to see that adoring face?” And from a blood-colored pouch, he pulled out the jarrtee equivalent of a snapshot, remarking, “I’m not the one to judge, but he strikes me as a respectable-looking man. Even handsome, almost.”

  Porsche stared at the holo image, seeing nothing. Then Cornell pulled the soft crystal sheet out of her hand, asking afterwards, “Can I?”

  Latrobe began to laugh, and as an aside, he mentioned to Cornell, “As I understand it, that thing you’re holding isn’t just a photograph, it’s some sort of camera, too. And it has a huge memory. And it’s nearly indestructible. According to agency estimates, it will revolutionize photography on the earth—a twenty-billion-dollar business overnight, and every patent belonging to US industries.”

  No one spoke for a long while.

  Then Latrobe resumed his work. With a narrowing focus, he explained where they were going and what was expected of Porsche and of Jey-im, and sometimes he would interrupt himself, asking questions, testing her retention of important details, and inane ones, too.

  Her answers were always crisp and correct. Yet Porsche felt detached, remote—as if someone else were borrowing her voice.

  At one point, Porsche asked to see the photograph again.

  Cornell handed it to her without comment.

  As promised, Jey-im had an attractive, even appealing face. He was wearing nothing but his subclan markings, the colors washed out by the noon sunshine. His belly pouch had roughened lips—a telltale sign of having carried children. The wide black eyes showed a hopefulness suffused with an old despair. Porsche felt pity for the man, but at the same time, she was careful not to feel pity for herself. Or anger. Or anything else useless.

  She handed back the photograph, then looked outside. Their little convoy had left the mountains behind, and in the open, the vehicles had moved apart from each other, as a tactical precaution. The roaring storm had fallen back to a gale-force calm, and she could see the long fields of day-ripened lappa nuts and oil grains, and once, the blockish, half-buried shapes of jarrtee homes. The homes were exactly as she remembered them, except for one sobering detail: Enormous automated rip-guns were set on the steep Tefloned roofs. In case the convoy belonged to the Order, the stubby barrels followed their progress, the house AIs ready to defend their estivating farmers.

  When the convoy passed the houses, the wind suddenly strengthened, a high-pitched roar bringing a wall of steamy rain that crashed over them, erasing every trace of the outside world.

  The men in the front weren’t giggling anymore. Together, as a team, they were driving into the storm, using instruments to keep on course.

  A palpable nervousness lay in the air. The briefing was finished, apparently. Latrobe began to contact the other vehicles in turn, speaking on scrambled channels, in a twisted English, asking questions and offering the same confident, comforting words. It wasn’t just the weather that brought concern; a critical checkpoint lay ahead. If they wanted to enter the City uncontested, they had to pass through it. But if they missed the checkpoint, even by accident, they instantly became the enemy.

  Cornell was looking straight ahead, staring into the maelstrom of furious air and water. Without looked at Porsche, he said, “The City is gone.”

  What?

  “Washed to the sea,” he announced. Then he half-laughed, glancing at her for an instant while admitting, “I can’t believe anything could survive this weather.”

  She wanted the City destroyed, for an instant. She pictured them coming to a newborn shoreline, no one left to kidnap, and what choice would Latrobe have but to order them to turn and drive home?

  But then she thought of the forty million dead and the fish gnawing on bloating bodies, and the daydream collapsed.

  “Now you know why we’re such great engineers,” she mentioned, a whiff of pride in her voice.

  The drivers were concentrating, hunkering over steering wheels with
their shoulders tight and probably tired. Whenever the winds gusted, they would flinch, and the car would settle lower to the ground in response, sometimes slowing—and at least twice, when the howling reached its zenith, leaves and branches and muck and rock battered the force fields and armor, and the car just gave up, dropping to the ground and thrusting spikes into the pavement.

  There was lightning, diluted by the protective windows but still relentlessly, piercingly bright.

  Thunder followed, massive and sudden and rolling down to a sullen low roar that never quite died before the next bolt reenergized the air, shaking the car and its passengers with a god’s malevolence.

  Porsche found herself staring outside, nothing to say.

  Sometimes she caught a glimpse of the armored truck ahead of them, tall and sturdy, and she imagined Trinidad sitting inside it, calmly orchestrating a multitude of Few-made eavesdroppers and weapons. No one else possessed such clear vision. Not in their convoy, or anywhere else in the City, most likely. And with that in mind, she placed her face against the window glass, mouthing words intended only for her cousin.

  “You can’t win,” she warned him.

  “If your father doesn’t stop you,” she assured, “someone else will. They won’t let this go unpunished.”

  Then with her voice rising to a whisper, she said, “I don’t understand you, Trinidad.”

  A sudden face appeared in the window.

  Porsche flinched, for an instant. The black contours of the mask were bright with rain and a sudden flash of lightning. No emotion was betrayed, but one hand touched the glass curiously, silvery fingers outstretched, while the other hand lifted a rip-gun, tapping hard at the window with the stubby barrel, as if trying to break in.

  “We’ve arrived,” Latrobe announced.

  The checkpoint.

  Leaning forward, he placed his head between his prisoners, warning them, “Speak if they speak to you. But keep to the story. Understood?”

  “What about the cuffs?” asked Cornell.