Strings

by Dave Duncan

  “Mr. Secretary General, this is indeed an honor.” She offered both hands. Her fingers showed her age, though.

  “I am a little early, I fear, Director…”

  The flunkies departed, the door was closed. He leaned over, keeping his weight off that tricky right knee and touching dry lips to well-moisturized cheek. Then she was all business as usual, waving him to a seat at the table and taking one close by.

  He felt very conscious of the bloodless appraisal behind the business-grade smile. As always, she wore a faint aura of impatience, as though she had already foreseen everything that anyone else was going to say and had long since made the right decision on the matter anyway.

  “You look as lovely as ever, Agnes. Not a day over forty.”

  “Rot. It must be five years since you were here.” She spoke with more emphasis than he had expected.

  “Three and a bit. And we met at the NASA Embassy, remember?”

  “So we did. Well, we have a moment before the conference—I am flattered to see I still have the power to bring you running. File for attention next week.”

  The last remark had been to System, in reply to some private query. She would not stop working just because she had a visitor. It was a widely-used technique, but he had never met anyone who did it better than Agnes, and she faked it less than most. Back in her younger days, Agnes had been able to read eight hundred words a minute and listen to a three-way conversation at the same time.

  “Blame it on my insatiable curiosity,” he said.

  Two of the five walls were floor-to-ceiling holos, displaying incredible vistas of peaks shrouded in pale pink ice, beetling against a violet sky—undoubtedly recorded on some world of lower gravity than Earth. The room was an eyrie perched high above the darkling valley. Willoughby leaned back and regarded her with sudden amusement.

  “Why the senile leer?” she inquired acidly.

  “Remember skiing? I never thought of it before, but these absurdly tight clothes we have to endure nowadays are almost exactly what we used to wear for skiing when we were kids.”

  “When I was a kid, you were not. Besides, throughout history, recreational style for clothes has become formal costume a couple of generations later.”

  “I didn’t know that!”

  “Well, you do now. Thank you for coming, Will.”

  “But you’re not going to tell me why?”

  Compared to Agnes, the sphinx was an open book. “Trust me.”

  “The last hundred men who did that are long dead.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Some of them have barely stopped bleeding.”

  He laughed—time had not blunted her. But he knew her ways well enough to guess that she was suppressing some strong emotion. The sharpness of her voice was one sign; the way she kept tightening her lips was another. Nothing trivial would so disturb Hubbard Agnes. Big stakes today, then.

  “You have the holo channels humming like hornets,” he said, probing gently. “Goodson Jason says it’s a Class One world at last. Eccles Pandora is claiming you’ve uncovered sentience, and everyone else thinks asepsis has been broken—monsters have escaped and are eating Labrador.”

  She shook her head in impatient disbelief. “Refer to Security.”

  “If you’re planning to retire, then I refuse to accept your resignation.”

  He should not have said that. She eyed him with a sharper appraisal yet. “Your presence naturally makes the occasion more solemn, Will. I should warn you, though—your dignity may suffer.”

  He turned that ominous remark over several times before answering it. God alone knew what was about to happen, then. “Do I come out ahead in the end?”

  She shrugged. She was still a fine figure of a woman, and she had to be well over seventy.

  “I hope so. There are risks.”

  “I never knew one of your schemes not to contain risks. I’ve watched you skirt the jaws of disaster a hundred times.”

  She pursed her lips again. “I think you tangled your metaphors, there.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and suddenly he wondered if what she was hiding might be anger. He had never known her to allow emotion to influence her actions, but he could see that she was jumpy about something.

  “Cuthionamine lysergeate.”

  “Never heard of it—wait! LSD? Isn’t that something lysergic?”

  She nodded, surprised. “Ergot fungus? That fits. There’s fungus involved in this…Well, all will be revealed in due course.”

  To ask for more would be futile. For a moment they sat in a silence that neither wished to break. Then suddenly Agnes said, “Would more money help?”

  He shook his head. “I’d have asked. We’ve bought everyone except the fanatics. There are too many fanatics, that’s all.”

  Senility had not yet reached Hubbard Agnes. Her mind went to the heart of things like a harpoon. “The Chamber? That self-proclaimed gang of shysters? The elections are all rigged! Besides, it has no legal standing whatsoever, and never had.”

  “Nor do we, really,” he reminded her. “Unilateral abolition of the Security Council was a very shaky move.”

  “That was long before your time. Send him in.”

  He chuckled. “Why is time relevant?”

  She dismissed that argument with a toss of her head, and then suddenly uttered a rueful laugh that surprised him. “You have Cheung and the Chamber. I have Grundy and BEST.”

  “They’re in cahoots, of course.”

  She nodded. “Probably. But this time it’s gone too far—I have a score to settle!”

  He shivered at the look in her eye. He had a sudden vision of Agnes with a stiletto, counting ribs. Whose ribs? He could not shake an uneasy suspicion that they might be his.

  The door opened. She rose, almost concealing a smile. “Forget them for now. There is someone you must meet.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Your grandson.”

  Who? “I never…You mean John and Rita…”

  But Agnes was already advancing to the door. A massive redclad bull had entered and was looking around in proper form to confirm that his client might enter safely.

  “Dr. Bagshaw!” Agnes reached out two hands in greeting, a personal trademark.

  The bull, naturally, looked astonished. “Yes, Director?” That brute could never be any relative of his, Willoughby decided, and was certainly too old to be John’s son.

  Agnes had clasped his great fists in her thin fingers. She dropped her voice until Willoughby caught only a few scattered phrases. “…only met her once…Christmas party…talked at length…”

  The man’s face was rigid as a granite boulder, and his voice was a gritty rumble. “Thank you, Director.”

  “We all share your sense of loss—and outrage.”

  “Deputy Fish tells me that the matter is not closed yet?”

  “It certainly is not.”

  He nodded, and for a moment the two of them held their pose, eyes and hands locked. Whatever else was being said did not require words. Her ability to enslave men had not faded with age; if this one had not been a devotee before, he certainly was now.

  Then a green-clad youth ducked through the doorway and stepped around the guard like something emerging from Sherwood Forest—possibly one of the trees. He smiled nervously down at Agnes. He was very skinny and enormously tall, even taller than Willoughby himself. His brush of tawny hair had apparently missed its daily appointment with a comb, making him seem even taller. Every bone showed through an expensively tailored suit of a screaming green color that suggested its wearer must be color blind.

  John and Rita’s son?

  Possible, Willoughby thought, just possible; but whatever Mother Hubbard is up to with this unfortunate youngster, she is not telling the truth, the whole truth, or anything like the truth.

  The bull departed, evidently reassured by those cryptic condolences. The gangling kid received the icy blue-eyed smile and the two-
handed greeting. He hesitated, then stooped awkwardly to place a kiss on the upturned cheek. Agnes was a tall woman, but she did not reach his shoulder.

  “You had an interesting journey, I hear, Cedric.”

  He blushed in deepening waves of scarlet. “I’m sorry, Gran. Truly, I—”

  “Sorry? What is there to be sorry about?” Agnes turned and headed back to the table.

  “I didn’t do what you said…”

  “Of course not. No real man would. I’m glad to see that my grandson is not a ninny.”

  “Oh!” He grinned in wide juvenile relief and took a couple of long steps to catch up with her. Then he noticed Willoughby.

  “You know who this is, Cedric?”

  He started to shake his head, but there were some faces everyone knew. He gulped audibly. “The Secre—sir!” He almost bowed. Then realization struck, and all the color drained from his bony face, leaving a faint sediment of faded freckles. “Hastings Willoughby? My father…” He looked at his grandmother—the woman he thought was his grandmother, at least. Willoughby was not so sure.

  “Your father was Hubbard John Hastings. This is your grandfather.”

  Willoughby pushed himself to his feet, taking his time. They shook hands.

  The kid had calluses, dirty fingernails, and an unthinkingly powerful grip. “I am honored, sir. I never knew!” His eyes were very wide; gray eyes, like John’s, and they held an understandable hurt.

  “Neither did I, lad. Agnes…explain!”

  That was another shock, of course, and Willoughby wondered if the old vixen appreciated what she was doing to her wretched victim, God help him. He was very young to withstand such treatment.

  She might not have expected him to hear the truth blurted out so brutally, but she recovered easily. “Your father and his father were not on friendly terms, Cedric. So it is true that Dr. Hastings was never informed of your existence. I respected your parents’ wishes, but now that you are no longer a child, of course, you must make your own decisions.”

  With no visible effort, she contrived to seat all three of them in almost a straight line, with the kid in the middle. This was to be a massacre of the innocent, but just to sit and watch her in action felt like the good old days. Willoughby was almost glad he had come.

  “I am very honored to have two such distinguished ancestors, Grandmother…Grandfather…” The lad’s head was snapping from side to side, as he tried to deal with an impossible situation. “Tell me about my mother’s family?”

  “You can get all that from System,” Agnes said firmly. “Begin the commeeting.”

  Then she stopped talking—the silence test. Willoughby was busily trying to analyze her play, but old age must have been slowing him, for he was making no progress. The presence of the supposed grandson made a difference to him—she had warned him that his dignity might be in jeopardy. He felt much less happy now about being included in whatever sensation she was plotting. If he withdrew, would that turn her against him? Would it upset her plans? And was that young beanpole really his grandson?

  He wondered how many games she was running simultaneously. The curious regrets to the guard, the epoch-making press conference, the sudden revelation of a putative grandson—were those independent or related? And where did the unpronounceable chemical come in? Or Grundy Julian Wagner and his Brotherhood of Engineers, Scientists, and Technicians?

  As the silence dragged on, the youngster twisted restlessly, looking from one to the other, white-knuckling the arms of his chair. His Adam’s apple bobbed several times before he spoke. “You have a job for me here, Gran?”

  “Yes. Some media relations work, I thought.”

  With great difficulty, Willoughby stiffled a laugh. Agnes’s media relations were the worst on the planet, and she liked them that way. Tendons tensed in the kid’s stringy neck, but he was not cowed yet.

  “I have always hoped to become a ranger like my father, Grandmother.”

  Ranger? What garbage had the old woman been feeding the kid all these years?

  “So you’ve told me often enough!” Agnes said with distaste. “It must run in the family, then. It was your father’s fixation on that which led to his quarrel with your grandfather.”

  There was a remarkable absence of truth in the conversation, but if Willoughby began throwing denials around, he might spoil whatever Agnes was up to. The kid was easy meat—far too easy for her to be bothering with for his own sake, so she was cooking him up for some other table. Cedric had swung around to look apprehensively at his alleged grandfather; he suddenly frowned, rose, moved his chair back two paces, and sat down again. A little late, but not bad under the circumstances.

  “Can you read and write, Cedric?” Agnes inquired brusquely.

  “Of course.” His knuckles whitened again.

  Certainly Agnes had been keeping this unreported grandson—if that was what he was—under wraps, and almost certainly at an organage. Green was an appropriate color for him, then. It was astonishing the kid could even talk in sentences.

  “That’s good! What I had in mind was some public relations work. The Cheavers report that you are very personable. You were well liked by everyone—from ranch hands to small children.”

  Hubbard Cedric reddened and squirmed as any young male would under such torment. “But, Gran—”

  “To give you an example,” Agnes said firmly, “a lot of important visitors call on us. There’s a princess arriving here shortly. Someone has to squire her around. That sort of thing. She’s about your age.”

  The boy’s mouth sprang open as though he were being throttled, but Willoughby did not hear whatever sounds emerged. Another piece in play! He could guess where that princess came from, and so he knew at least one of the games in progress. He was amazed that the old harridan would dare attract media notice at such a time. She was obviously plotting a diversion—something outrageous. His skin prickled. He must be crazy to trust Hubbard Agnes when she was in this mood. She was capable of anything.

  With a ping! of warning, a hologram appeared on the far side of the table—a short, plump man with hair gleaming like black steel and a pudgy face as pale as cream.

  “Ah…Cedric,” Agnes said. “I want you to meet the senior staff. This is Deputy Director Fish, in charge of Security.”

  Cedric sprang to his feet and leaned across to offer a hand before he realized that he was making a fool of himself.

  “Good morning, Mr. Secretary General,” Fish’s image said in a voice like oil—oil of vitriol, perhaps. “And Mr. Hubbard? I hope we can meet in the flesh soon. Will you be coming up to Cainsville in the near future?”

  Crimson-faced, Cedric said, “Er…”

  He looked at Agnes, who said, “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, sir.”

  Fish Lyle was as mild and inscrutable as a bowl of milk. He peered across at Cedric through thick glasses that likely served no purpose except to frustrate any clear view of his eyes. He was devoted to Agnes. He was also one of only three men in the world whom Hastings Willoughby truly feared, a slick assassin with a silk-smooth smile.

  The mutual greetings had hardly ended when another ping! produced another holo and the greetings began again.

  The new image was that of Moore Rudolph. He was faded and dessicated now, but he had always been unobtrusive—a brilliant accountant and operator of the greatest graft net the universe had ever known. The fires of stars flowed in through the transmensor at Cainsville to power all human civilization, and Willoughby had once calculated that at least a tenth of the proceeds were distributed illicitly by Moore’s unseen hands. For a quarter of a century that flood of corruption had helped keep them all—and especially Willoughby—on top of the world heap.

  Agnes ruled 4-I through a team of aides commonly known as the four horsemen. The door swung open to admit another—after her bull had inspected the room, of course. In her youth, Wheatland Mary had been an embodiment of the Earth Mother. Huge and black and voluptuous, she had co
nveyed to every man she had ever met the understanding that she wanted to rape him as soon as possible. It had all been a fake—U.N. Security, which knew everything, insisted that she was still a virgin, even now.

  As Willoughby rose to greet her in old-fashioned courtesy, he wondered if women lasted so much better than men did only because they spent more money on repairs, or if the cause was deeper. Age had not withered Wheatland Mary. Her joyful roars of welcome filled the room, her massive arms were outstretched, and an infinite smile spread over her plump ebony face as she flounced across to envelop him in a rib-cracking embrace that proclaimed to the world that they must be fervent lovers. He wondered how he would have reacted had he not been expecting this.

  “Good to see you again, Will,” she repeated several times, still clutching him like ivy, pressing her cheek against his chest, thumping his back. “It’s been much too long! Good to see you…”

  She broke loose at last and turned to the wide-eyed, wide-mouthed Cedric. “Oh, aren’t you gorgeous! Come to Mama, sonny!” When he courageously stepped forward into her embrace, she gave him much the same treatment. Willoughby tried to estimate what the effect would have been on him at the kid’s age, but the very idea trashed his mind. Probably Agnes had planned all this.

  Was the lad being tested? Tested for what, and why? Tested for whose benefit? Certainly not his own. Willoughby thought of an old technical term from his college days and shivered at the memory: tested to destruction.

  Wheatland Mary’s arrival left one to come, one whom Willoughby had never met. The Institute’s original Deputy for Operations, Bieber Marvin, was two years in his grave. That was another sign that time was rolling on. His replacement was…Willoughby had forgotten the man’s name.

  Cedric had not. He had been visibly impressed by meeting so many powerful people—understandably so, for Agnes and her band of helpers would impress anyone—but when another guard had glanced around and withdrawn to admit a fourth deputy director, the kid looked ready to fall on his knees.

  Tall and broad, brazenly moustachioed, and immaculate in rangers’ safari denims, Devlin Grant was a self-made legend. Unlike Agnes, he was a master of media relations. Explorer of a dozen exotic worlds, hero of fierce battles against carefully holographed monsters, Devlin had been the only possible replacement for Bieber. Without waiting for an introduction, he strode forward to squeeze Willoughby’s hand too hard and boom that he was honored. And then he turned his charisma on young Cedric like a battle-ax.