by Jeff Long
Abbot finished. In one movement, he flipped shut the phone, stood, and thrust out one hand. Handshakes had fallen from fashion, too, but he didn’t hesitate. “Nathan Lee Swift,” he said. In the pool of his gaze, Nathan Lee saw that everything that could be known about him, Abbot knew, including his latest blood analysis. Arguably the most powerful man on earth, Abbot had probably had his daughter’s lover all but dissected.
“How does it feel to rejoin the living?” he said. His grip was powerful. The release was equally powerful. He ruled by that hand.
“The leaves were turning when I left,” Nathan Lee said. He kept it simple. “Now they’re gone.”
“Miranda told me about your tragic discovery in Denver.” Abbot waited. He was trolling. He wanted to hear Nathan Lee speak. He wanted, Nathan Lee realized, to see his grief…or grit.
“Dad.” Miranda tried to intervene. Abbot didn’t take his eyes from Nathan Lee’s.
“I don’t know why I didn’t know,” Nathan Lee said to him. “Now it’s over.”
Abbot offered no further condolences. The world was full of lost souls and mournful tribes. He was steeled against the outsiders. His borders were confined, his hoard rich, but finite. His domain was for the privileged few, and he was unapologetic about it.
Miranda hovered to one side. She didn’t know what to do with these two men. They took up all the space in her kitchen, Nathan Lee could feel it. They were wearing her out. “Sit,” she said again.
Abbot stayed on his feet. He was amused. “Did Miranda tell you?” he asked Nathan Lee. “She’s the new director.”
“No,” said Nathan Lee. Cavendish was gone? Had he died? But what about his clone, Nathan Lee wondered. The thought streaked by, a whimsy. In past times the succession of power might have gone to a wife or son, and the clone was said to be identical in every way to Cavendish except for his physical perfection. But Miranda had inherited the throne, handpicked by her father. She was being groomed for command. He said, “Congratulations.”
Now he understood her ferocious defense of the city. It really was hers. And yet the new director did not look pleased. Bureaucracy and politics had not been positive experiences for her.
“It will mean less time in the lab. But it was time to close down this cloning business,” Abbot said. “In the end, it was just a big U-turn back into ourselves. And Cavendish had to go. Everyone said so. The man’s missing in action. Wouldn’t take a meeting. I don’t know what he’s up to in South Sector.” Not dead, thought Nathan Lee. Out of sight, out of mind. “Mischief, that’s all I’ve seen,” said Abbot. “No leadership. No presence. We need unity. Shared purpose. Clear science. Especially now, with people afraid. Soon enough the sanctuary will be ready.”
“I heard about the setback,” Nathan Lee said.
Abbot’s face changed. His eyes narrowed. “Which would that be?”
“The flooding. The collapse of floors.”
Abbot snapped a glance at his daughter. “You told him?”
But Miranda was staring at Nathan Lee. “No one’s supposed to know that,” she said to him. “How on earth did you find out?”
“In decon,” said Nathan Lee. “One of the doctors.” He gestured at the cube with the Sera-III inside. “He told me about that, too. The three-year immunity.”
“Which one of the doctors?” Abbot demanded.
“A psychiatrist. I never saw him, only heard his voice.”
“His name,” said Abbot. “I want his name.”
“He never gave it. I asked the staff. They thought I made him up.”
“What is going on up here?” Abbot muttered darkly. “Are you sure this isn’t your doing, Miranda?”
“I want people to stay, not panic,” she snapped back at him.
Abbot rapped his knuckles on the table. “Look into it,” he told her. “The last thing we need is some provocateur….”
“Cavendish,” said Miranda. “He was stripped of power. Maybe he’s leaking secrets, sowing chaos.”
“I don’t think so,” Nathan Lee volunteered. “It didn’t seem like his voice. It was too strong.”
“He wouldn’t try anything so direct,” said Abbot to Miranda. “But don’t let your guard down. He’ll try to sabotage you, but not the sanctuary. I know that much. He’s lost his nerve. He wants what the rest of the city wants, a roof over their heads. Shelter from the tempest.”
“Not everybody wants what you want,” Miranda retorted. But the handful of scientists who considered the sanctuary to be a death trap was in the minority. Almost everyone else could not wait to get out of harm’s way, even if it meant sacrificing the sun for the next decade, or half century, however long it took.
Nathan Lee looked from father to daughter. They were wary and at odds.
“Dissidents,” said Abbot. “Your little confederacy of optimists. Fools.”
“They’re making the choice themselves,” Miranda said.
Abbot snorted. “You’ll see. When the day arrives, they’ll make their real choice. And it won’t be this noble last stand of yours.”
“If we can make it through the winter,” Miranda said, “we won’t need to bury ourselves in the bowels of the earth. The die-off will be complete. The plague will have passed us by.”
“The plague is passing no one by.”
“We have other options,” Miranda insisted.
Abbot pointed at the Sera-III sealed inside the cube, but did not touch it. Miranda had brought it for him, Nathan Lee surmised. Show and tell. “Like your suicide pill?” her father said.
“It’s not suicide,” Miranda protested. “There are survivors out there. They could hold the answer. But it will take time to find them, and we have to be up here in the open to do it. The vaccine gives us a shield.”
“Then kills you. Three years,” he said. “I’m offering them thirty years. Fifty. A hundred. We don’t have to dose ourselves with poison. If there are survivors, we’ll find them. Or our children’s children will.”
“Buried a half mile deep?”
Abbot abruptly disengaged. He smiled. “There you have it,” he said to Nathan Lee. “My rebel daughter.”
As if noticing it for the first time, Abbot picked up the little jade nude. It was a magical thing. She could be lascivious, or imperial, or restful, depending on who held her. Abbot turned the statue this way and that in the sun, and she became Miranda, undressed in Nathan Lee’s arms. Miranda’s eyes shifted away. Abbot set the statue back in its sunbeam. He looked at Nathan Lee.
“I thought we should have a little man-to-man talk,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk. Outside.”
Miranda started to object.
“We’ll be back in a few minutes,” her father said. Nathan Lee stepped outside. Abbot slid the door shut behind them.
Miranda’s butterflies had died in the cold. Her cage was empty. All that remained were a few pinches of color on the dirt. Abbot walked toward the rim of the mesa. Then he turned, deliberately, ten feet from the edge.
“Close enough,” he said to Nathan Lee. “I don’t have your mountain climber’s footing.” It was neither an excuse nor a compliment.
Nathan Lee waited.
“I’ve studied your file,” Abbot said. “It reads like a high-wire act. You fall, but you recover. You’ve made an art of landing on your feet. You always survive.” His voice turned austere. Dark and hard. “That is why I spared your life.”
The bluntness comforted Nathan Lee. He had not been summoned for brunch with Dad. They were driving to the heart of the matter, and quickly. Abbot had a bargain in mind.
Abbot took a letter from an inner pocket, and unfolded it. “Have you ever seen a deportation order?” he asked.
“I’ve only heard about them.” Deport orders were like arrows that turned to serpents once their victim was gone. They killed you, then vanished.
“I hadn’t either, until this.” Abbot tapped the letter. “It has your name on it.”
He handed the letter to Nathan
Lee. It was formal-looking, with language about quarantine and instructions to the bearer to arrest and transport Nathan Lee Swift to the next city or location targeted for a deck sweep. The warrant had been filled out by Ochs. A notary public had even stamped the box at the bottom. It was dated one day after Nathan Lee’s return from Denver. No sooner had Nathan Lee been plucked from death, than Ochs had condemned him to die again.
But someone had drawn a neat line through Nathan Lee’s name. Above it was written David Ochs. It now read so that Ochs had signed his own death warrant. Nathan Lee looked more carefully at the initials in the margin, and then the hasty signature at the bottom. P.A., it said. Paul Abbot.
“A memento,” said Abbot. “Miranda called me. She begged me. You have no idea how extraordinary that is. She was sure Ochs might try something. My agents intercepted it.”
Nathan Lee could see the hatred in the ink. “Ochs,” he said aloud.
“Ochs is gone,” said Abbot. “But he will return. Count on it.”
“Here?”
“Salt Lake City was the next deck sweep. Five hundred miles as the bird flies. But that was too far away for my purposes. So I had a discussion with Dr. Ochs. He seemed perfectly happy to leave Los Alamos on his own.”
Nathan Lee heard the edges of deeper cunning. Abbot had spared not one life, but two, both for some larger, hidden design. By sharing this further secret, Abbot was preparing Nathan Lee. A service was going to be required of him.
“Tell me,” said Abbot, “was Ochs always such a lunatic?”
“What do you mean?”
“This messianic fever. It’s like a disease. Or was he like that before?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The miracle.”
“What miracle?”
“Never mind,” said Abbot. “It’s all in motion now.”
Nathan Lee could practically feel invisible wheels turning around him. He had already been inserted into the clockwork. Whatever his part was, it would be revealed in due time.
“Your role is simple,” Abbot said. “For the time being, do whatever it is you do up here. Talk to God. Smell the roses. Sleep with my daughter. Make her happy. Keep her in love. No matter what, keep close to her.”
Abbot handed him one of his cellphones.
“The day is coming,” he said. “E-Day. And I know Miranda. She’ll argue to stay up here. You’ve heard her. But you will bring her to me. She’ll fight you. She may hate you until the end of time. But you will bring her down into the sanctuary.”
Abbot looked over Nathan Lee’s shoulder into the rising sun. His eyes cut to a thin slit. He brought them back to Nathan Lee. “If anyone can understand, it is you,” he finished. “I must not lose my daughter.”
31
The Siege
OCTOBER ENDS
Her father departed, leaving Miranda to guide them back into the sunlight. With a stroke of her pen, she destroyed Cavendish’s culture of secrecy, declassifying all of their research, and scheduling seminars and conferences. From now on the labs were to cooperate, not compete. Like some antique torture device, Cavendish’s notorious deportation order became a thing of the past. Reason, not fear, would rule.
The change that stirred the most controversy was her moratorium on human testing. Miranda suspended the deck sweeps, and announced that no more clones would be grown for medical experimentation. The moratorium upended researchers who had grown used to human guinea pigs. They railed that without human testing, the cure would surely elude them.
Miranda held her ground. “The cure has eluded us with human testing,” she told them. “The end no longer justifies the means. Keep searching. Everything will be fine.” They adapted to her edicts. Human ash no longer sprinkled down when the wind blew the wrong way.
Los Alamos settled into its traditions of hard work, hard play, dinner conversations that could be brilliant or mundane, high school Bach concerts, jazz sessions in garages, and petty office politics. Kids got up in the morning, went to class, played video games. The world seemed further away than ever. No storm clouds brewed. The sky stayed relentlessly blue. During lunch hour, beautiful homemade kites of every shape and color climbed up from the labs, drifting back and forth above the forest and the tan and white canyons.
Every morning, Miranda seemed slightly different to Nathan Lee from yesterday. Her green eyes no longer burned from dark recesses in her face. The stubbornness in her jawline softened. Nathan Lee watched her sleeping, or moving about in the kitchen, and tried to put words to it. She was more and more beautiful to him. But the change was something larger than that. He watched her touching the young widow’s shoulder, listening to the impassioned bench worker, or bulling her way with stubborn Council members. They looked up to her. He had seen it in Alpha Lab. Now it was the whole city, giving allegiance to a woman barely out of her teens.
For a time, their peace was disturbed only by Cavendish. Not a day went by that he didn’t condemn Miranda’s softness or pepper them with doomsday predictions. His gnomelike face infiltrated their cable TV and computer screens. He ranted about conspirators in their midst, about the approach of a great army of plague victims, about research being suppressed. He unsettled them, or tried to.
But the shadowy conspirators never materialized. Marine snipers kept watch off the prow of the Mesa, and there was no army of plague victims, only a few hundred wretched pilgrims who returned to camp on the bright orange valley floor. As for suppressed research, the scientists had never known such freedom.
People began to remark that their former tyrant had never been so alive as when he was, effectively, dead. They also remarked that Cavendish had never looked so dead. His illness had thinned him to a twig. His lip curled back on his teeth. He came and went like a poltergeist, never staying for longer than a sound bite. He would speak his poison, then fifteen seconds later be gone, and they would be watching Jeopardy or Frasier reruns again.
NATHAN LEE WENT BACK to the only job he could think of. He returned to the year zero, or tried to.
The city’s fascination with the clones was ended. The appearance of desperate pilgrims in the valley had robbed the Year Zero Hour of its charm and entertainment value. Antiquity seemed dangerous once again. And so the clones lost the celebrity status they’d never known they had. After a three-week absence, Nathan Lee wasn’t sure the tribe would have him back. Izzy made it perfectly clear: no way. The yard had become much too dangerous for him and Nathan Lee. “Might as well jump off a cliff,” he said. “I’ve been tuning in to our friend Eesho over the yard microphones. He’s told the others what Miranda showed him, the clone in glass, and what she said, that she created him. He made it sound like the bottom of hell. They know we’re somehow part of it. They think we’re demons.”
“Not a chance then?” Nathan Lee said. His regret had less to do with having a job than having a place. He’d grown used to the high walls and the company of misfits, and now he shared their sense of dislocation. He felt confused and, ever since Denver, had fastened on the peace of their little fishbowl in the sun. He wanted their ignorance of the world. He was tired of hope.
“Forget it,” said Izzy. “Ochs poisoned the well.”
“Ochs?” Was there no end to the man?
“Freaking folly. Him and Eesho.”
“What did he do?”
“Got himself reborn. You were in decon. It’s all on tape.”
Izzy guided him through the tapes of Ochs’s interview with Eesho. It had taken place in a room with only a bare table and chairs. The date of the interview was October 11, one day after Nathan Lee’s descent into Denver. The camera showed Izzy sitting to one side of the clone and Ochs, who kept wiping his palms. He looked anguished, but excited, even feverish. Izzy hit fast forward and the three characters began twitching in their seats.
“Skip the first few hours,” said Izzy. “Broken record. Ochs asked the same questions you and I did. Got the same rap. Straight from the Book.”
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“So is Ochs the one who scripted him?”
“Not in a million years. He wouldn’t dare. He makes that poor worshipping fool Ross look downright atheist.”
Izzy slowed the tape, listened a moment, sped it forward, slowed again. “Here we go,” he said. “Ochs asked him about his missing years, the gap between his late teens and late twenties.”
It was one of the great mysteries of the New Testament. For centuries preachers and theologians had wondered about Jesus’ evolution from a precocious kid to the King of Kings. The theories were rife, some even claiming he must have traveled to India for a Beatles-style enlightenment with the gurus.
“How did Eesho field that one?” asked Nathan Lee.
“Claims he went off to university, you know, temple,” said Izzy. “He said his father farmed him out to the Teacher of Righteousness. Don’t know where that came from.”
“The Dead Sea Scrolls again,” said Nathan Lee. “It’s a story about a teacher and his favorite student, who betrays him with some kind of heresy. In the Scrolls, the student is called the Wicked Priest.”
“Well Eesho was no rebel student,” said Izzy. “Much too proper, this lad.”
“Interesting, though. Eesho’s showing another side. He keeps stepping out of the Gospels, into the Scrolls.”
Izzy shrugged. “Safe place to do it,” he said. “The mystery years. You can say anything you want and nobody can really argue otherwise.”
Nathan Lee watched the tape. He could tell Ochs wanted to pursue the missing years, but that he’d come with heavier freight to unload. “Now, as an academic matter,” Ochs said on the tape, “I’d like to visit this issue of miracles and healing. Did you ever perform miracles?”