Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  Lourdes sat on her own private verandah one deck up, with a grand view of the partying pool deck below.

  Pushing past the gyrating bodies on the dance floor, he made his way toward her, noticing that among the perfect physiques on this pleasure cruise were reminders of that other class that inhabited this ship. A towel boy with an unpleasant bloat about him, lumbering like a troll on the perimeter of the deck. A worker polishing the brass railings with turgid limbs and fleshy folds, his body drenched in acidic, malodorous sweat. These were members of a bizarrely obese servant class that greased the machine, and kept Lourdes’s movable feast afloat.

  Winston climbed to Lourdes’s private deck perch. She reclined on a plush lounge, and was attended by two topless men with pectoral muscles the size of turkey breasts. Although she saw Winston approach, she made no attempt to acknowledge him. She simply waited for him to come to her. She had never looked better. Not exactly svelte—her frame would never allow that—but shapely, and well-contained within the smooth blue satin of her bathing suit. He now noticed that the two dark-haired, dark-eyed glamour boys who attended her were, in fact, twins. They threw him a disinterested gaze before returning to their duties. One rubbed Lourdes with tanning oil, the other dipped shrimp in cocktail sauce and held them to her lips.

  “Cleopatra, I presume?” Winston said.

  Lourdes bit the dangling shrimp off at the tail, and her shrimp boy dropped the tail into a silver bowl already brimming with them. “She was just Queen of the Nile,” Lourdes said. “I’ve done a bit better.”

  A few feet away was a very large man in an expensive suit that was four sizes too small. Like the crew, he had that bloated look, but instead of being flushed, his face was a pallid shade of green.

  Winston indicated her twin studs. “I see you’re into matching lug­gage these days.”

  “Only way to travel.” Lourdes ate another shrimp. The fat man in the fancy suit moaned.

  “Lourdes, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’m on vacation,” she said, coldly. “Is that so hard to grasp?”

  “And when does this ‘vacation’ end?”

  “That’s the best part, Winston; it doesn’t.” And then she gestured to the pained man in the bulging suit. “Meet Mr. Peter Marquez,” she said. “Monarch Cruise Line’s Vice-President of Operations. He just joined us yesterday.”

  The man seemed only able to move a pair of pleading eyeballs set deep within his porcine face.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “We’re in the middle of negotiations,” Lourdes said. “After test-driving the Blue Horizon these past few months, I’ve decided to buy it, and redeem my outlaw status.”

  “And how can you afford a cruise ship?”

  “We’re negotiating a steep markdown.” Her shrimp boy hung another cocktail shrimp before her and she took it in her mouth, chew­ing slowly. “Very steep.”

  The cruise executive moaned. “Please,” he said. “No more.” His voice came from deep in his throat, sounding as Lourdes’ voice had once sounded in the throes of her own obesity.

  Lourdes licked her lips. “Recently, I’ve found a depth to my ap­petites I never knew I had.”

  “And yet it’s the crew that gets fat,” observed Winston. “Not you.”

  Lourdes shrugged. “I eat quite a lot; all that fat has to go some­where.”

  Winston shuddered. There was no end to the way they could abuse their powers, when they chose to—here was the proof. First it was just Lourdes’s ability to control metabolisms; put people to sleep, change the pace of their body functions. Then she found she could manipulate their muscles, as if they were puppets. And now this; she stayed slim by imposing her weight on others. A perverse conservation of matter. Winston wondered how many times her own body weight she consumed in food a day. Did she ever stop eating?

  “What happened to you, Lourdes?”

  She sat up, pushing away the hand of her shrimp boy. “I grew up, Winston. I finally realized that the only person I owe in this world is me.

  “What about Dillon?”

  “To hell with Dillon! He’s the one who screwed things up. Whether he meant to or not, he set the world on auto-destruct, and if the world is falling apart, I intend to suck every last drop out of it.”

  Winston regarded her pretty-boy twins. The dark hair and wan expression on their faces was uneasily familiar. “Your matching luggage both look like Michael,” he goaded. “Should I ask what that’s about? Or do I already know?”

  Her tanned cheeks began to flush at having been so easily read. He could feel her anger, and perhaps a hint of shame, charging the air between them. Her feelings for Michael had been no secret—but en­listing these surrogates into her harem was a desecration of Michael’s memory, and she knew it.

  She stood suddenly, and like a petulant child grabbed the platter of shrimp and hurled it at Winston. It bounced off his chest and clat­tered to the ground, rolling down the steps to the pool deck.

  “This is MY ship!” she screamed. “MY life, and MY reward for the hell I’ve been through!” On the dance floor, the music stopped and all eyes turned to Lourdes. “And if you had half the brains you claim to have, you’d stop taking your marching orders from Dillon, or it’ll kill you like it killed the others!”

  Then her eyes darted around to the spectators, as she realized she was, as always, the center of attention, but this time in an unflattering light. As if to add to her embarrassment, several gulls winging high over the ship cawed in the silence like mocking laughter from above. Lourdes turned her eyes to the sky, the birds’ wings went limp, and they plunged, dead, into the sea. Then she turned to her profligate partiers.

  “Dance!” she ordered. Suddenly their arms began to jerk and their bodies undulate, involuntarily pulled by their puppeteer’s unseen strings. Flustered, the band quickly kicked into another number. Sat­isfied, she released the dancers with the slightest flick of her head, and although their steps missed a couple of beats, they quickly took over for themselves, regaining the rhythm, and not daring to leave the dance floor for fear of what Lourdes might do.

  “Don’t look at me like, like I’m a monster,” she told him. “All of my guests are here by choice, because they appreciate me, and the pleasures I have to offer.”

  “What about the crew?”

  She hesitated before answering. “They know their place.” Then she turned and walked to an open-air bar further back on her private deck, while her Michaelesque boys both hurried to clean the shellfish scattered on the ground. Even before she arrived at the counter, the bartender had mixed her a red and white “Miami Vice,” heavy on the Bacardi.

  “Aqui tiene, Seňorita Lourdes,” said the bartender, stuffing a paper parasol and a pineapple wedge into the drink. He took a quick glance at Winston, “¿Uno para su compaňero?”

  “No—apenas es un niňo,” Lourdes said, irrespective of the fact that she, too, was underage. She sat on a stool, ignoring him as she sucked down her drink, its daiquiri head flowing like blood into the Pina Colada beneath.

  What troubled Winston most was how easily Lourdes had seized control of her guests’ bodies on the dance floor. Used to be it took incredible concentration for her to control such a large group of peo­ple, but, like himself and Dillon, her powers were still exponentiating toward an end he still didn’t know. It frightened Winston to think what Lourdes might do if she ever really got angry.

  Maybe it was best after all for her to be queen of her own little ship, her dominion limited to the souls on board, slaves and followers who were resigned to subjugating their will to hers. Let her have her ship, so that she might be satisfied, and extend her grasp no further.

  Leaving her to vanish again to the horizon would certainly be the easiest thing to do, but for the Shards, the path of least resistance always led to disaster. Winston knew that if Lourdes slipped off of his radar again, it would be a dangerous step backwards.

  He came up behind her, wait
ing for her to turn around, but she didn’t, so he sat beside her at the bar. “There is something we need to do, Lourdes. You, me and Dillon. I’m not sure what it is, but it keeps me awake at night, and when I do sleep, I dream about it. You have to be feeling it as much as I am.”

  She slurped down the bottom of her drink. “I don’t feel a thing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  She turned to the bartender. “Gerardo, una mas, por favor.” Winston dimly recalled that she had a brother named Gerardo, and Winston found himself not wanting to know if she had put her whole family to work here. The bartender mixed her another drink, but by the time he slid it onto the counter, Lourdes had lost interest. She sauntered past Winston to the railing, looking out at the Ensenada shoreline.

  “You’ve been dreaming, too, haven’t you Lourdes? About some­one in a purple chair. And three figures on the ledge of a building.”

  Lourdes sighed. “It’s not a ledge, it’s a stage. Three performers taking bows at the edge of a stage, surrounded by the flowers thrown by the audience. I can smell them. And the chair’s not purple, it’s lavender.”

  “I thought it was perfume,” Winston said. “What do you think it all means?”

  “I don’t care.” That was a lie, too, but this was one she was sticking to. She had almost softened, almost shown a hint of her old self, but now the expression on her face solidified to granite. She strolled back to her lounge, and, resuming her position of leisure, she called to her boy toys. “Paul, Eric, it’s time for our visitor to leave. Throw him overboard.”

  The two brawny men advanced on Winston.

  “What?!”

  “No—wait!” said Lourdes. “After all this is a pirate ship. Make him walk the plank!”

  Gerardo brought her the drink she had left at the bar, and she began to suck it down gleefully.

  While the boy toys held him, two fat crewmen bounded off, re­turning with a long table from one of the decks below, and cantilevered it out over the side. By now the event had drawn the attention of Lourdes’s guests and they crowded the rail, chattering and laughing as if this were just another bit of entertainment.

  They prodded Winston onto the makeshift plank.

  “Lourdes, don’t do this!”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “We’re barely half a mile from shore, and the water isn’t that cold. Humor me.”

  Winston stood at the end of the plank, seven decks above the Pacific, being cheered on by Lourdes’s hordes. No, thought Winston, the fall wouldn’t kill him, and neither would the swim. But it was not his death he was considering. It was Lourdes’s. She was dead—or at least the girl he once knew. They had all been affected by the events of their lives, misshapen in many ways by what they had been through. Lourdes was broken, and he doubted even Dillon could fix her now.

  “Good-bye, Lourdes.”

  With the cheering crowd behind him, and without looking back, he jumped into the sea.

  The fall seemed to stretch on for a sickening eternity, and then the sting as he hit the water was quickly numbed by the chill. He surfaced beside the great ship, still hearing the cheers from above. The water was cold but not frigid, and although half a mile was a long way for an untrained swimmer to go, Winston stroked, finding his desire to put distance between himself and Lourdes enough motivation to pro­pel him to shore.

  5. Catching Rays

  Transcription excerpt, day 193. 13:45 hours

  “Pigeons pray. Did you know that, Maddy?”

  “I never noticed.”

  “They did a study. Take a pigeon, put it in a cage, then feed it at random intervals regardless of its behavior, and pretty soon it starts to do some weird things—like hopping on one leg, or spinning in circles, or bowing its head over and over, as if that’s what brings on the food. ‘Religious behavior’ they call it.”

  “The prayers of pigeons.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What makes you think their prayers aren’t answered?”

  “You know, Maddy, sometimes you remind me of someone.”

  “Do I remind you of Deanna?”

  “She also would have championed the prayers of pigeons. And she’d make you believe they were answered.”

  “I’m a poor substitute for the goddess of faith.”

  * * *

  Today Dillon was faced with a dead horse on a veterinary gurney.

  Flies buzzed in a hazy cloud about its body and in and out of its nostrils. By the stench that filled the cylindrical expanse of the cooling tower, Dillon could tell the beast had been dead for quite some time.

  Zero Team had been replaced by a single “zeroid,” as Dillon called him. A few minutes earlier, the zeroid had assiduously wheeled Dillon from his cell, through the connecting corridors, and out to the now familiar spot in the center of the cooling tower. The only difference was that Bussard attended his transit now to make sure that Dillon did not speak to this man. Once positioned in the center of the cooling tower floor, the zeroid exited to his ready room, to wait in an infor­mational void, never knowing what went on in his absence. Then Dillon would be alone with Bussard—an unpleasant circumstance, even if he hadn’t been locked down in an exoskeleton of tempered titanium. Sometimes Bussard would take the time to brief him on the nature of the “therapy session.” Other times he wouldn’t bother, since it was Dillon’s presence, and not his comprehension, that mattered. Then from his custom-built remote control, Bussard would open the door to the guest waiting area, and the circus would begin.

  Usually it was dignitaries and statesmen of any and every nation­ality. Some walked in under their own power, others were so weak from the ravages of disease they needed to be wheeled in. Bussard would then show off Dillon like a trophy to those conscious enough to care. They would be allowed the honor of basking in Dillon’s pe­culiar incandescence for up to an hour. Then, regardless of how they came in, they would walk out under their own power, their vitality restored. They would then go for blood tests and MRIs elsewhere in the plant, tests administered by military physicians who, like everyone else, were insulated from the purpose of their task, never seeing those test results, or knowing their significance.

  “Funny that people come to a nuclear plant to get cured,” Dillon had once commented during a well-attended session. Bussard didn’t find it funny, however, and when the guests were gone, he had hit the red button on the side of his remote, sending a surge of raw elec­tricity through him. Now Dillon didn’t say anything during the ses­sions. He saved his comments for those times he was left alone with Bussard.

  “What do you get from these people?” Dillon once asked him, for it was obvious that this kind of operation was not an altruistic en­deavor—but Bussard merely invoked the “it’s a matter for military intelligence” clause, and left it at that. But Dillon really didn’t have to ask—he knew; he could read the pattern in the parade of visitors. Thanks to Dillon, life was now a bankable commodity. Every second spent in his presence was a quantum of health doled out with due diligence to those whose health best served the interest of American security. What diplomat or world leader would not mortgage their nation for a shot at eternal life?

  And now there was the dead horse; a lump of flesh and bone not ten feet away from Dillon’s exoskeletal chair. Not even Bussard could stand the stench, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief drenched in cologne. But the stench quickly faded, and a cold wind swooped down the wide throat of the cooling tower to clear its residue. It only took but five minutes, and the horse whinnied in terror. Bussard quickly called in a team of wranglers as the animal flipped itself off the gurney, sending it clattering against the concrete wall.

  “Subdue it,” Bussard instructed, “and bring it to the loading dock.” No doubt there was a horse trailer waiting. The men set themselves to the task. By the unremarkable look on their faces, it was obvious that these men did not know the horse had been dead just minutes before; they were only given orders to remove a horse. And the zeroid never kn
ew there was a horse at all.

  Once the animal was removed, Dillon spoke.

  “Why? Why this, of all things?”

  He half expected Bussard to ignore him, but today Bussard deigned to give him a response, perhaps more out of embarrassment than any­thing else. “It belonged to the daughter of the senior senator from Texas. We were asked to give it treatment, as a special favor.”

  “I didn’t know you took requests.”

  Bussard considered the punishing red button on his remote control, but didn’t depress it. Instead, he hit the button that unlocked the ready room, where the zeroid waited to wheel Dillon back to his plush little cell. His dinner would be waiting for him there, cold as always. But at least now he knew the face of the one who delivered it. She was young—only a few years older than he. Twenty-three, perhaps. But then Dillon didn’t know if she was even on that detail anymore. After all—the entire zero team had been replaced; Bussard could have re­placed her, too.

  That Dillon was responsible for Gerritson’s death weighed on him heavily. With all the death he had seen and had caused over the past two years, he thought he would have become desensitized to it. The fact that he hadn’t was some comfort. He had not been robbed of his compassion, nor would he let this imprisonment numb his spirit now. He would pick the lock of this fortress. He had to believe that he would. And once he was free—even being out there in a world he had set on auto-destruct was better than being Bussard’s instrument.