David nodded. "We will, Father."
They'll hesitate when they see you. They'll hesitate before they'll shoot children.
Denice was aware of the tears tracking down her cheeks, but her voice was steady. "We won't hesitate, Daddy."
Carl sagged back against the wall of the corridor. Good. Remember that you're tougher than they are. The word reached out to them, burned itself into the depths of Denice's mind with all the strength of the dying man's pain and lifelong rage: Better.
David nodded. "We'll remember."
Good. Carl's head sagged back against the wall. Go.
David rose and punched for the maglev. Denice hugged her father suddenly, fiercely, felt the pain that rolled through him at the contact. Blood covered her when she let go. "Good-bye, Daddy." She rose and ran to the maglev when the doors opened.
Carl Castanaveras' last thought reached out to them after the doors to the maglev had rolled shut upon them. Kill the fuckers.
As the maglev descended, David Castanaveras said grimly, "We will."
I've lost touch with upstairs.
It took Charbonneau a long moment to understand what D'Argentan had said to him. His father was growing angrier and angrier over Maurice's insistence that he was dead; Logrissen had ceased walking and now simply stood motionless at the entrance to the hotel, staring in at Maurice. Charbonneau could see Logrissen's lower intestines, hanging out of the hole Charbonneau's autoshot had made in him back in the summer of '59. Finally Maurice said, Sergeant? Did you say something?
Yes. I've lost touch with Conseiller Carson.
Want me to go up and see what's happened?
Sergeant D'Argentan hesitated, then said reluctantly, No. No, don't do that. I'll go. Watch the door, make sure nobody enters the hotel. Maurice nodded, and D'Argentan turned to the maglevs.
The door to the center maglev flexed slightly before D'Argentan had even touched the pressure point that controlled it.
The door curled open.
Maurice watched D'Argentan jerk as though he had touched a live wire, one hand still reaching for the pressure point, as the converging beams reached him and his uniform burst into flames.
They came out into the lobby slowly, cautiously, stepping across Sergeant D'Argentan's burning body. As Maurice had heard, they were mere children; it was the first time Maurice had seen them since their kidnaping. Maurice sat with his autoshot, watching the genegineered telepath children move across the lobby, toward the entrance. The boy had his laser trained on Maurice, and Maurice smiled at him. The girl was very pretty, but she did not look at Maurice after the first quick glance to make sure her brother had him covered. Maurice said politely, in heavily accented English, "Hello."
The boy hesitated at the door after the girl had ventured outward, onto the slidewalk in front of the hotel. For the first time Maurice seriously considered the possibility that Sergeant D'Argentan had told him the truth; neither of the children seemed to notice Nils Logrissen's grinning corpse standing just outside the hotel's entrance.
The girl turned back. "David, come on!"
David Castanaveras took one slow, halting step toward Maurice Charbonneau. Maurice smiled at the boy one more time as David brought the maser down to focus on the center of Maurice's chest.
"Hello," Maurice said again. "I am Maurice Charbonneau."
David Castanaveras whispered; Maurice had to strain to hear him. "Hello. My name is David Castanaveras, and this is for my father."
Then for the barest instant Maurice felt a pain so great that he thought for a moment it was something else entirely--the touch of God, perhaps, calling him home. And perhaps it was. The maser beam swept across him and then there was no pain, nor anything else, for ever and ever again, amen.
The twins ran out into the night, into the riots.
Into the first hour of the Troubles.
Trent was not certain what caused him to look back. He was out of sight of the Peaceforcer station, running through the rain as fast as he was able. Behind him something moved too fast for his eyes to track.
Brass balls.
He ducked into an alleyway, ran to its far end and turned out onto another street. He found himself on Westway Street, across the street from the Hudson River. The wind whipped the river strongly, and its waves splashed up and onto Westway Street. He was the only person on the slidewalks for three blocks in any direction. If the Peaceforcers came this far--
He ran straight across the street, down to the water.
On the other side of the street, the Peaceforcer Elite seemed to appear out of nowhere.
A single pier stretched out into the water of the Hudson River; Trent could not see a boat on the side facing him, but there had to be one on the other side. The logic did not strike him as even slightly strange; if there was no boat the cyborg would catch him. He ran the thirty meters to the pier's entrance and reached the boardwalk only seconds ahead of the Elite and ran down its empty length without looking back. His gaze swept left and right, left and right.
There were no boats moored anywhere on the pier.
The Peaceforcer made a long arm and snagged Trent's shirt. In a single instant of movement too fast for Trent to comprehend, much less resist, the Peaceforcer gathered Trent in and picked him up from the boardwalk.
Trent did the only thing he could think of; from a lifetime of martial arts instruction, he grasped the Peaceforcer, hugging him for traction, and kicked down at the invisible blur of the Elite's legs. It was like thrusting his hand into a rotor. He felt his right leg snap like a stick and then the Peaceforcer went down, and together they skidded across the slick boardwalk. They did not even slow before they went over the edge into the choppy water.
There was no air in his lungs; he had not had time to draw a breath. The Peaceforcer was still holding him, and the cyborg's great weight drew them both down into the warm summer waters.
The iron grip of the Elite's hand on his shoulder eased as though the Peaceforcer were considering the situation, and then the grip loosened further and let Trent go. With the last energy in him, Trent kicked up, to the surface of the water, and drew in a great gasping breath when he broke through to the air. A huge roaring filled his ears, and he swallowed water several times. Bright red dots hung before his eyes, and he considered, as though it were a problem that did not concern him, how to get back to land when he did not have the strength to swim.
The waves brought him smashing up against one of the columns that bore the pier's weight, and then again. The third time he grasped the column when he struck it, lacerating his arms against rough barnacles. The water washed over him and took his air away, and he held his breath until it receded. With his last strength he held on to the pier as the water washed over him, and held on, and held.
Interlude: Earth
* * *
2062-2067
They did not find the boy.
They did not find the twins.
In later years it was estimated that nearly half the population of the New York metro area was rendered permanently insane in the moments when the telepaths struck back.
The PKF moved in.
By the seventh decade of the twenty-first century following the death of Yeshua ha Notzri, the population of Earth alone totaled eleven billion human beings. That number was not as large as it had been earlier in that century; the efforts of the Ministry of Population Control had trimmed the Earth's total population from a high of nearly thirteen billion.
There have been larger populations of humans, across the span of Time. Seranju, capital of the Out-Empire, was home to more than thirty billion humans in the last century before the Out-Empire shattered itself upon the Great Anarchy. The crucial difference lay in the technology available to the Out-Empire; it fed its tens of billions, and was never in danger of not doing so.
Twenty-first-century Earth is notable, if for no other reason, in that more humans died of starvation in that one short century than in all the rest of Time put together.
Of the twenty-three billion human beings born between the years 2000 and 2100 Anno Domini, some eight billion died due to a lack of food to eat.
Five-and-a-half years separate the summer of 2062 from the winter of 2067. On the surface, a world cannot change much in so short a span. Inertia alone prevents it. But in detail...
SpaceFarer technology became more common; room temperature superconductor, monofilament fineline, and electric ecstasy made the transition from technological rarity to everyday reality. In 2062 there was nobody on Earth or off it who was addicted to electric ecstasy; by the end of the decade there were over half a million juice junkies across the globe, and the number only grew higher with the passage of time.
The Patrol Sectors were designed by the Peaceforcers as an interim measure to maintain order during the riots that followed the destruction of the telepaths. But the Peaceforcers found them useful, and instead of restoring patrol service to the entire metropolitan area, concentrated on the areas surrounding Capital City and Manhattan, and left the rest of the great decaying city to the underfunded, underequipped American police.
It was cheaper that way.
In 2063, the summer following the summer in which the telepaths were destroyed, the Unification Council outlawed manually operated vehicles. The Speedfreaks revolted. It was a brief rebellion. The Speedfreaks who led it--Nathan St. Denver, Conchita Alatorre, and Angel de Luz--thought of it as civil disobedience. They never offered more than passive resistance to the Peaceforcers, and it did not matter. They made a Long Run, most of the Speedfreaks on Earth, starting in San Diego. They took their hovercars out across the ocean, across the Pacific, through Japan and New Zealand, up north across India, through Israel, and continued north through France itself.
Public sentiment was with them; the media coverage was favorable. When the convoy left France and made its way west across the Atlantic Ocean, it had good reason to expect a favorable reception upon reaching Capitol City.
The Speedfreaks never had a chance. The storm struck them midway across the Atlantic. Not one car in a hundred survived. The survivors were rounded up by members of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force and charged most formally with treason. Over 200 Speedfreaks, including Conchita Alatorre and Angel de Luz, were executed on that charge.
In September of 2063, Emile Garon returned to Earth, a Peaceforcer Elite.
In the summer of 2064, for the first time in the history of the human race, the full-blown Gift of the House of November unfolded within a human being.
Her name was Denice.
It wasn't supposed to happen like this.
Denice lay in bed, almost unable to move. Her limbs felt swollen. The fever left her delirious and shaking with weariness. After three days of sickness the administrators of the MPC's Young Females Public Labor barracks in which she lived finally sent for a doctor. The administrators were, for the most part, not cruel people, merely underfunded and overworked. It was only when it was obvious that the child was not getting better on her own that they requested that a doctor come examine her.
Denice Castanaveras, lost in a world of her own creation, did not know it when the doctor came. The doctor who examined her finally gave up in exasperation, injected the child with a wide-spectrum antibiotic, and left to examine another patient elsewhere in the barracks, a girl who had undergone complications following her MPC-mandated sterilization.
Denice did not know when the doctor came, and did not know when she left. She was somewhere else, only vaguely aware of what was happening to the far-away body in which she was confined.
She walked across a crystal black plain that ran away to infinity. In the region around her a vast number of minds flickered like candles, screaming and crying and laughing, endless and unknowable. Some of the candles wavered at her passage, humans with some minor telepathic skill reacting to the presence of the storm that Denice Castanaveras had become.
Denice could not find silence.
Thoughts tumbled through the back of her mind, and she could not tell whether they were her own or belonged to the minds among which she was passing. She fought desperately for stability, for some center from which she could make sense of the maelstrom of existence, of the thoughts and emotions, the fear and pain that tore through her constantly. Denice remembered talking to the telepathic children among whom she had been raised; they had never told her about anything like this. Her knowledge of genetics was sketchy; but she knew that she and David were the first of the telepaths to receive the telepathic gene complex from parents rather than from the work of genegineers. It seemed clear that there were powerful recessives in the genome, masked in her parents but coming to completion in her.
One of the candles near her flickered out in a sudden burst of horror and pain; it had been murdered. Denice felt the death throes as though they were her own.
Time ceased to have meaning. She did not know when the ordeal had begun, did not know any longer even who she was with any clarity. The thoughts wouldn't stop.
She called into the darkness, and found no response.
David, where are you?
Trent?
Some great time later, the danger called her up out of the darkness, and back into herself.
It was night; the barracks lights were dimmed, and the thirty girls in the barracks were mostly bedded down for the night.
The danger was close.
Somebody held her hand. The contact seared, burning. The pain had been going on for a very long time. Denice was vaguely aware that her sheets stank. With an effort she opened her eyes and attempted to pull her hand free.
The girl holding her hand tightened her grip. She said with real pleasure, "Deni? You awake finally?"
"Karen?" Denice had trouble focusing on the form sitting at the edge of her bottom-level bunk. "Let go of my hand. You're hurting me."
Karen's grip loosened slightly, but she did not release Denice's hand. "I been worried about you, you were talking in your sleep and all." In the hazy darkness, a larger shape appeared, standing behind Karen.
"This is so nice." Shelly, a fourteen-year-old who was due to be transferred to the Young Adults barracks before the end of the summer, sat down on the edge of the bed next to Karen. A smile that was barely visible in the gloom played around her lips. "Everybody's been so worried about you, Deni."
Denice closed her eyes in despair. Before her sickness Denice had rarely had nightmares, but when she did, they were often about Shelly. Denice felt Karen's weight leave the bed in sensible retreat. Shelly's hand stroked Denice's long black hair, and reached down to run a finger over the girl's throat.
"Please," Denice whispered, "stop that. It hurts."
"Well, of all the..." Shelly stared at her. "I was trying to be nice to you," she said. Her hand tightened in Denice's tunic, and she drew the younger girl up until Denice was sitting up in bed. "If you can't fucking appreciate good treatment..."
Shelly struck Denice.
Denice did not know where the anger came from, the vast and glacial rage that descended upon her. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before, an anger to match the rage she had felt toward Jerill Carson, but cold, calculating, reasoning, a fury that cleaned away all doubt and uncertainty. There was no strength in her body, but it did not matter. From another realm she reached out and became, in a fashion even her father could not have emulated, the dim and cruel person whom the world knew as Shelly. The grip in her shirt loosened, and Denice felt herself drop back to the bed, watched it happen through Shelly's eyes.
With an ease that shocked her Denice brought the girl back to stand at the edge of Denice's bunk, and had her lean over so that she could hear the words.
"You don't touch me," Denice whispered. "You don't ever touch me. Do you hear me? Never."
Shelly's eyes were wide with terror.
Denice released her and the girl stumbled backward and crashed into the bunk next to Denice and Karen's.
"Go hurt yourself," Denice told Shelly quietly,
and then called for Karen to bring her a glass of water.
In the years following the destruction of the Speedfreaks, despite the fact that their credibility with the public had been ruined forever, the Weather Bureau wrestled the global weather patterns back to near equilibrium. It was an astonishing accomplishment, considering how nearly they had come to ruining their planet's climactic balance. It did them no good in the public perception; only the babychasers of the Ministry of Population Control were hated more--even the PKF was more popular.
As I have said, on the surface things were little changed. Five and a half years passed, for eleven billion human beings. Some sixty billion years of cumulative experience occurred.
Five and a half years of that time belonged to a boy named Trent, who became a thief, and grew toward manhood.
And did not forget:
* * *
The boy awakes to find himself on the Chessboard. And, as always, it is for the first time.
The squares, alternately black and white, tumble to the horizon on all sides. Countless thousands of squares. Smoothly polished, gleaming endlessly in the white sun.
There is no sound. Only the weight of nonsound. The terrifying weight of silence in a great void.
The boy sits on a white square. He blinks, stretches, and looks curiously about him. He looks up at the sky, empty but for a huge, round sun. Swollen a hundred times the size of the sun we know.
The boy looks at the hard, smooth surface of his perfect white square and can see only his reflection. He smiles down at the image. It has been a wonderful rest, and it is certainly a glorious morning. A perfect morning. Pure and clear and perfect.
The boy has not the slightest thought of where he is to go, of what he is to do.
The others move constantly. At different intervals, in all directions, keeping always to the white squares. The boy is pleased to have begun on a white square. Clearly this is a fine beginning. The boy sits beautifully still for a time. It would be foolish to set out not knowing where one was to go.
He watches the others moving through the endlessly alternating maze of black and white and black, glimmering forever under the hard, white sun. They are dressed in dull, white cloth which does not, or cannot, reflect the brilliance of the white squares through which they move so soundlessly. The boy believes that they are guards. He cannot imagine what there might be for them to guard in the purity and emptiness of such a place.
Emerald Eyes Page 24