Shuttered Sky ss-3

by Нил Шустерман

  A powerful impulse swept through the crowd, latching onto each nervous system, usurping control. It was an impulse to move. To gather. The spectators found themselves turning from the race, becom­ing a circle pushing inward toward the girl who had suddenly become their center of gravity.

  For Lourdes, it was like screaming into darkness, for the place was so dense with bodies, she had no clue what the response would be. She feared her bid for control would be so diluted, it wouldn’t take hold. But as more and more faces turned to her, she realized she had succeeded in seizing them, just as her three “angels” had instructed her to do. She thought it a victory, until she realized that the crowd wasn’t just focused on her. They were pressing toward her, tighter and tighter—and it wasn’t just the crowd standing by the rail.

  On the track, as the horses tore past the tote board, they veered from the finish line, bearing right, following a new command. Lourdes could see the wild eyes of the animals; neither the horses nor their jockeys able to control their tons of flesh. Like the curl of a breaking wave, the horses hurdled the rail and came down on the crowd. Spec­tators were trampled beneath their hooves, and crushed beneath the weight of their falling bodies.

  Lourdes panicked, struggling to release the crowd from her grasp, but she had gripped them so tightly, she could not release them. A woman in front of her pressed up against her. Squeezed by the crowd behind her, the woman began working her mouth, trying to draw a breath of air, but her chest had collapsed under the pressure of the crowd. Lourdes, constricted and unable to move, craned her neck toward the grandstand, where people found themselves climbing down over rows of seats against their own will until reaching the front. Doz­ens upon dozens of people hurled themselves from the upper level like lemmings, their bodies obeying the command to draw close to Lourdes, even if that command resulted in death.

  This was not what she wanted. She had meant to call the mob to crisp attention, but instead they were moths drawn to her flame.

  “Stop!” screamed Lourdes, her voice a faint warble. She could barely breathe now within the growing pressure of the crowd. “Help me!” She knew the angels were somewhere watching, but if they heard, they did not lift so much as a finger to help her.

  The woman who pressed painfully against Lourdes’s breast now showed no signs of struggle, and although her eyes were open, there was nothing there. She was dead. The man to her left and right were dead. She was surrounded by a minion of corpses crushed by the press of the crowd, unable to fall. In less than five minutes a simple day at the races had become an ordeal surpassing her worst nightmare, and although she tried to scream her terror, she found her own breath squeezed out of her.

  Then she realized there was a way to stop this. She had pulled the crowd to her, and she couldn’t simply turn off that physical impulse: it had to be replaced by another impulse equally persuasive. So she closed her eyes and pushed forth to every one under her control a simple physiological imperative: the irresistible urge to sleep.

  It took hold immediately, and bodies began to drop. Soon the pressure around her eased, and the dead pressed so tightly against her slid to the ground, like petals falling from a flower. She gasped a deep breath, filling her lungs over and over again until she was dizzy from hyperventilation.

  In the orange glow of sunset, Lourdes regarded her personal Ar­mageddon. The grandstand was almost clear, bodies piled beneath, too deep to count. A dozen yards away, the head of a jockey protruded from beneath the carcass of his horse. Eagles Dare. The favorite. The lethal weight of the horse had forced a deluge of blood from the jockey’s nose and mouth.

  Only three figures remained standing. A man, a woman and a child. Cerilla, Carlos, and Memo, or at least those had been the names of their human hosts. They waited in the winners’ circle.

  Lourdes stepped over the carnage. It was impossible to know how many slept, and how many were dead—trampled by horses, or suf­focated by the press of the crowd. She leapt over the obstacle course of flesh, crying at the magnitude of the disaster.

  “I can’t do it!” she screamed at her mentors. “I can’t—look at this, I can’t do it!” The boy came forward and dispassionately smashed the back of his small hand across Lourdes’ face. It came as a shock, and hurt more than she expected.

  “She’s a disaster,” said Carlos.

  “Worthless,” said Cerilla.

  But Memo said, “She’ll do better . . . won’t you, Lourdes.”

  She had once flawlessly controlled half a dozen people on a vol­leyball team. She had turned a group of twenty into a kick-line for her own amusement. She had forced dozens to dance, and kept a shipload of beautiful people emotionally dependent on her, irresistibly drawn to her magnetic personality. But all that was child’s play. She had never stretched her self as thin as this task required.

  “There were too many people!” she told them. “I’ll never be able to do it!”

  “You’ll practice.” Memo said calmly. “You’ll get better. You will master your control of fifty, then a hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand.”

  “But why?” she demanded. “Why have you asked me to do this? How many people do you need me to control?”

  “When you succeed, you will understand,” Memo told her. “And once you understand, you will revel in it.”

  Cerilla shook her head, her chilly look made arctic by the grimace of her cleft lip. “She won’t succeed. We need to find another way.”

  Carlos nodded his agreement, but little Memo waved them both off dismissively. “That’s for me to decide,” he said.

  The other two nodded in reluctant acquiescence. If it had not been clear to Lourdes who was in charge among them, there was no longer a question.

  Faint groans and cries around them indicated that Lourdes’s sleep was wearing off. “We should do something,” she said. “People are dying.”

  “Since when did you care about human suffering?” asked Carlos.

  She had no answer for him. For a year now, Lourdes had cultivated insensitivity and indifference. Compassion was never her strong point, but she still had to work hard to purge it, clothing herself in an attitude of disdain. It took a calamity such as this to remind her that she was human, or at least once had been. Perhaps it was easy for these creatures to see humans as nothing more than fodder, but it wasn’t so easy for Lourdes.

  There were other people approaching now—people who were blessedly beyond the rim of her event horizon, and were not under her control; late arrivals, and curiosity-seekers who had heard the com­motion and came to investigate.

  Memo glanced at the people wandering in, then turned to Lourdes. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Gather us some dinner.” Then he left with the two others, heading toward their limousine waiting behind the grandstand.

  Lourdes took a deep breath, and released it. For days she had watched these angels dine, trying to desensitize herself to it, trying to see their feast of souls as something other than awful. There was a higher purpose to all this—or if not a higher purpose, a practical one. Why align herself with humanity, she reasoned, when she could align herself with something higher on the food chain? If the universe was indifferent—even hostile—what end was there besides self-preservation? No, it wasn’t easy to see people as cattle, but she was working on it.

  A woman clinging fearfully to her husband approached Lourdes. “Did you see this here?” she asked in a rich Jamaican lilt. “Do you know about it? Were you here?”

  “I was right in the middle of it,” Lourdes said.

  The woman began to shiver. “This a dark happening here,” she said. “A dark happening.”

  “It gets worse,” answered Lourdes. Then with a flick of her head, she took control of them, sending the couple marching toward the limo, where the angels waited to devour their souls.

  PART IV -SYNTAXIS

  24. Sins Of Omission

  There was only so much recreation Maddy could take, and although she knew she was free, in theory,
to leave the building, both she and Dillon had grown accustomed to the security of Tessic’s high sanctuary. She found herself losing track of the days, and feeling more and more a prisoner of the tower.

  Dillon on the other hand luxuriated in his new-found freedom. With all of Tessic’s resources left completely at his disposal, Dillon was like an overstimulated kid in a toy store. Much of his days were spent in Tessic’s media room, scouring five hundred some-odd stations for news of the world, analyzing patterns and trends of the decline, but now from a detached, enlightened distance.

  Maddy found herself absorbed in Tessitech’s computer network. Tessic had given her enough access to his computer system to tempt her to look, and enough restrictions to tempt her to look deeper. In two weeks she had racked up enough information about his organi­zation, in both R&D and trade secrets, to be either a substantial threat, or qualify for a high corporate position. It annoyed her no end that she was beginning to fantasize about the latter, and she wondered whether or not Tessic had planned it that way.

  Toward the end of the second week, Dillon called Maddy down to Tessic’s sixty-second-floor workshop.

  “This is great, you’re going to love this!” Dillon told her as he led her down three flights of stairs, not patient enough to wait for the elevator.

  Tessic had been gone for three days, jetting abroad to take care of business, but had left Dillon a whole arsenal of gadgets to toy with. Today’s objects of fascination were two glass cylinders filled with brown sand, which he pulled out of a heavy metallic container. Both were about a foot high, on a heavy base, like two high-tech blenders. A closer inspection revealed that the sand was, in fact, colored granules blended into a homogenous muddy melange.

  Maddy crossed her arms. “So what am I looking at?”

  Dillon set them at the two ends of a large work desk. “Tessic had me working with these before he left.” He grabbed a remote control, backed away then positioned himself about five paces away from the table, equidistant from both cylinders. “Watch.” He clicked the re­mote and the two glass cylinders began to vibrate in unison. The sand shifted, and the blend of colors began to separate from one another until what remained were two cylinders filled with rainbow strata of sand that would no longer blend, no matter how much the cylinders vibrated. Dillon hit the remote to shut them off.

  “I came down to watch you do sand art?”

  “No—see, look.” He pointed to a timer at the base of each cyl­inder. “This measures the time of separation. It’s a way to quantify the strength of my field. The closer I am to the device, the faster the color separation occurs. I can place myself behind different objects, and test what inhibits my field, and what amplifies it!”

  “Interesting,” she said with a smirk. “A Dillonometer.”

  “But here’s the really exciting thing.” Dillon pointed out the two timers again. “The right one is two-point-three seconds slower than the left.” Dillon looked at her proudly.

  “And?”

  “Don’t you see? I was able to control it. When I first started, both times would be identical, but I’ve been able to alter that. I’ve been able to control and focus my field.”

  There was something unpalatable about Dillon’s enthusiasm, and even though Maddy was impressed, she found herself downplaying it. “It’s just sand, Dillon; sand in a perfectly controlled environment. It has no bearing on the real world.”

  “It’s a start.” Dillon grabbed the colorful cylinders, returning them to their metallic case, which was no doubt some shielded material that would allow the sands to mix. “Before, it took a damned vault to contain me. This is one step closer to containing myself.”

  “If that’s what you want, I hope you succeed.”

  Dillon took a good long look at her, his enthusiasm overripening into irritation. “What’s wrong with you lately?”

  She shook the question off. “Maybe I’m just tired of watching you puttering your days away.”

  “What would you rather have me do? Live in shadows, playing hide and seek with the FBI?”

  Maybe, she thought. There was an intensity to him then; a wildness that had now been tamed. But then, wasn’t it she who told him to slow down and accept Tessic’s hospitality?

  Maddy sighed and turned to see how far she was from the stairs. “Listen, just forget it. Forget I said anything.” She kissed him on the cheek, and made her way toward the stairs, hoping to get there before Dillon spoke, and knowing she wouldn’t.

  “You need me helpless,” he said.

  She found her feet slowing in spite of herself.

  “You prefer me locked in a chair, or running from the Feds, or tormented by thoughts I can’t control. It’s the only way you can deal with me. If I’m helpless.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, forcing herself to turn to him.

  “Of course it’s true.” Dillon scoffed. “I know you—don’t forget that. I can see right through you.”

  “Well maybe I don’t enjoy being transparent.”

  The back door to the workshop opened with a conspicuous squeak. They turned to see Tessic standing there, feigning to have just arrived. There was no telling how much he had heard, and Maddy wondered why she cared.

  Dillon spared one more look to Maddy before hurrying to Tessic as if he were Daddy home from work.

  “Elon! I’ve had some breakthroughs while you were gone.’

  “How was Poland?” Maddy asked, flatly.

  “Cold.” Tessic pulled out a stack of pictures from his pocket. “The Ciechanow construction site. Would you like to see?” Tessic spread the photos out methodically on the work table. The images showed a swarm of more than one hundred buildings all much closer to com­pletion than Maddy had assumed. Little more than landscaping re­mained.

  “The first twenty buildings are ready for occupancy. The rest will be done in a matter of weeks. Then we repeat the process at identical sites in Belarus and Lithuania.”

  “Any takers?” asked Dillon. “Anyone moving in?”

  “Not yet.” Tessic finished laying out the pictures. Maddy noticed how he avoided looking Dillon in the eye. “Marketing has not matched the pace of construction, but I’m confident Ciechanow will fill quickly.”

  Maddy wondered why, if she could read Tessic’s evasiveness, Dil­lon could not. Or perhaps he did read it, and chose to ignore it.

  “I’d very much like you to join me on my next trip,” Tessic told Dillon. “Photographs do not do it justice.”

  Maddy watched Dillon’s response closely. He took his time before answering, studying an aerial view of the sprawling complex that looked eerily similar to the model across the room.

  “Sure,” Dillon said, tossing it off like it was nothing. “Sure I’ll go.” Then he turned to her as an afterthought. “Maddy?”

  “Well, since a winter coat magically appeared in my wardrobe a few days ago, I assume I’m to go as well.”

  Tessic put an arm around both of them as he led them to the stairs. “I assure you, you will both be better for the experience.”

  * * *

  Tessic joined them for lunch, listening avidly as Dillon went into detail describing the various tests and experiments he had done in Tessic’s absence. Then, while Dillon buried himself channel-surfing for news of the world, Maddy took to her own analysis, delving once more into Tessitech’s mainframe. Tessic called this Polish construction project a “sideline,” but from what she could see it was, aside from Dillon, his primary concern. It didn’t bode well with her that such a shrewd businessman would put all his attention into a money pit, and leave the rest of his business on auto-pilot.

  In the computer, she found that Tessic’s personal jet was scheduled for another trip abroad in two weeks—but it wasn’t what she found that surprised her; it was what she didn’t find. It brought things into a sharp focus.

  Late that afternoon, she approached Tessic on the roof garden. He was having what appeared to be a heated conversation in Hebrew with hims
elf, but as Maddy got closer, she could see he was talking into a cellular phone headset. A man who spoke with his hands, Tessic’s motions resembled a kind of kinetic art. A corporate t’ai chi.

  When he saw her, he cut the conversation short, and removed his headset, but his anger remained. He grabbed a glass of iced tea from the nearby table. “It’s falling apart, you know. In corporations every­where, there are executives resigning at the highest levels, nightmares in productions, funds disappearing.”

  “Thank goodness for ‘sidelines.’ "

  “Yes.” Tessic took a sip of his drink, and then another, calming down.

  “It’s amazing those buildings of yours still go up with all that’s going on in the world.”

  “Eastern Europe is used to chaos,” he answered. He poured her a glass, and offered her a seat, but did not pull it out for her, as he knew her aversion to such social niceties. “I can’t help but notice the trouble between you and Dillon,” he said.

  Maddy gulped, and grimaced. “Not everything can be as sweet as your tea.”

  “Our roles are rarely what we want them to be,” Tessic said, slip­ping from businessman into philosopher mode. “Have you considered that perhaps your place in each other’s lives lies outside of the bed­room?”

  Maddy laughed at his audacity. “Are you trying to provoke me, or are you always this callous?”

  “Do not misunderstand, Miss Haas. I think what you and Dillon have is wonderful. But a relationship requires a joining of mind, body and soul. If you can live with two of the three, my blessing to you. But if you find your own soul lacking, overwhelmed by his . . .”

  Tessic hesitated, reconsidering his words. “I don’t mean to of­fend . . . but for both of your sakes, please be certain of your purpose in Dillon’s life. For when you are certain, your choice of action will be as clear as it was on the day you rescued him.”