by Tad Williams
"Christabel seems okay," she reported. "She's sleeping. The little boy's curled up on the floor. I got him bathed again, but I couldn't even get him to use the other bed."
"She's been through a lot," said Michael Sorensen. "If I had imagined . . . God almighty, what have we gotten ourselves into?"
The strange, wizened figure in the rented wheelchair looked up. "I am truly sorry to have involved your family, Mrs. Sorensen. Desperation forces us to do shameful things."
The woman wrestled for a moment against her obvious urge to say something polite, and won. She had clearly not recovered from the horror of hearing Major Sorensen's cleaned-up version of what had happened in Yacoubian's suite. While Ramsey had tried to entertain a shell-shocked Christabel and the rather sullen little Hispanic boy, she had taken her husband to the adjoining room and, as Sorensen put it afterward, "let me know she wasn't very happy about how things were going."
In his own exhausted state, Ramsey was having trouble coping with the tension and unhappiness in the room, not to mention the bizarre story that Sellars had just told, full of the kind of conspiracy theories that even the loopier chat nodes would scorn. He needed a few moments to clear his head.
"I'm going out to grab a soft drink," he said. "Anybody want anything?"
Kaylene Sorensen shook her head wearily, but Ramsey couldn't help noticing the flicker of suspicion across her husband's face. It stung. "Oh, for God's sake, Sorensen, if I were going to bail out on you or betray you or something. don't you think it would be easier for me to wait and do it when I go back to my own motel?"
To his credit, Sorensen looked shamefaced. "I didn't mean to look that way. I'm just . . . it's been difficult, today."
Ramsey forced a smile. "It sure has. Back in a second."
He caught himself as he started to swipe his card through the drink machine's reader.
Sorensen's paranoia is better sense than you've got, he told himself. That was a real brigadier general that had us kidnapped out of a public restaurant Whatever this is, it isn't entirely someone's overheated imagination. He found he had a few coins, and even briefly considered trying to wipe his prints off them before dropping them into the slot.
Sellars' story, whether Sorensen and his family believed it or not, was patently impossible. Ramsey had been dubious but had tried to remain open-minded about the idea that Tandagore's Syndrome might be a purposeful human creation. He had even begun to suspect that there really was some connection between Orlando Gardiner's condition and the reports of the boy's software agent about some kind of network where Orlando was conscious but trapped. He had been willing, in short, to believe in a strange set of circumstances, even collusion between powerful people. But this? This was something out of a fever dream—a conspiracy among many of Earth's richest men and women to become gods. It was beyond belief that such a thing could exist, let alone that it could be kept silent for years, especially when the mechanism seemed to depend on destroying innocent children. The whole insane notion was like something out of a potboiler—a gruesomely overblown net drama. It simply could not be.
If he had been hearing it all for the first time, Catur Ramsey would have courteously thanked everyone for their time after ten minutes and gone home, keeping his thoughts about the sanity of these people to himself. But he had been living with the strange online world of Orlando Gardiner for weeks, and had begun to think of a software agent in the shape of a cartoon bug as a reliable informant. Before she closed up her house and disappeared, he had heard a woman who by her own admission had spent time in a mental health facility tell him that one of the world's most successful children's entertainment companies was part of a hideous experiment on those selfsame children, and he had begun to wonder if she might be correct. It wasn't as though he was close-minded—hadn't he first met Sellars in the back alleys of a VR gameworld? Where he, Catur Ramsey, respectable attorney, had been running around dressed as a barbarian swordsman? He had to admit that Sellars had told him things about Orlando Gardiner and Salome Fredericks that even Ramsey himself, with total access to both families, hadn't yet discovered.
He sipped his drink and watched the traffic slide past.
Sellars was asking him to believe in something that made the worst pamphleteering nonsense about Freemasons and Rosicrucians seem unambitious. And just to cap it all off, what had Major Sorensen said about Sellars? That he wasn't even human?
For a moment he truly considered walking to his car and driving home. Telling Jaleel and Enrica Fredericks that he'd found nothing to explain their daughter's coma, deleting Olga Pirofsky's name from his call list. Putting the whole thing into the "who knows what the hell that was about?" category and getting back to his other clients, his more-or-less life.
But he could not forget the face of Orlando Gardiner's mother, bright-eyed with tears, or her voice as she told him that they had always thought they'd have a chance to say good-bye to their son. He had just heard that same voice two hours ago, cracked and hoarse now, whispery as dry grass, leaving a message on his system with a date for Orlando's memorial service. He had promised them he'd find out what he could. He had promised.
He hesitated for only a few more seconds, then crumpled the squeeze-pak and dropped it into the trash slot beside the machine.
Sellars was inhaling something from a damp rag. He looked up when Ramsey came in and smiled, a horizontal distortion of his strange, rippled face. "The Sorensens will be back in a moment," he said. "The little girl had a bad dream."
"She's been through a lot," Ramsey said. "Too much for a kid her age."
Sellars dipped his head sadly. "I had hoped her part in this was finished." He inhaled from the rag again. "Please forgive me. My lungs . . . they do not function as well as they should. It will be better when I can get filters for my humidifier. I need to keep my breathing tubes moist." Something in Ramsey's expression brought back the smile, larger now, as Sellars let his withered hands fall to his lap. "Ah, I see something is troubling you. My lungs? Or just me? Let me guess—Major Sorensen told you something about me?"
"Not much. And that's sure not the worst of what's bothering me. But just because you brought it up, yeah. He said. . . ." Suddenly, ludicrously, it seemed a simple piece of discourtesy. Ramsey swallowed and forged ahead. "He said that you weren't really human."
Sellars nodded, looking like some ancient mountain hermit. "Did he tell you my nickname on the base? 'The Man from Mars.' In fact, they were calling me that before Major Sorensen was born." The smile surfaced and then was gone. "It's not true, of course—I've never been near Mars."
Ramsey suddenly felt weak in the knees. He reached out for support and found the arm of a chair, then lowered himself onto the seat. "Are you telling me . . . that you're some kind of alien? From space?" Now, as though a lens had changed, he could picture the disturbing texture of Sellars' skin as something far stranger than scar tissue—the mottled pinkish hide of some unknown animal. The scrawny old man with the misshapen head and strange yellow eyes would have made a wonderfully grotesque illustration in a children's book, but at the moment it was hard to tell which sort of supernatural creature he would have been, kindly or cruel. When the door to the adjoining room suddenly popped open, Ramsey flinched badly.
"Kaylene just fixed some sandwiches," said Michael Sorensen. "Ramsey, you should eat something—you look sick."
His wife came through behind him carrying a picnic tray, the too-perfect picture of traditional womanhood from an earlier century. Ramsey could not relax; suddenly everything seemed sinister.
"I was just about to tell Mr. Ramsey my story," Sellars said. "No, thank you, Mrs. Sorensen, I eat very little. Has your husband told you about me yet, Mrs. Sorensen? Surely you have wondered."
"Mike's . . . Mike's told me a bit." He clearly still made her uncomfortable. "Are you sure I can't get you anything. . . ?"
"Come on!" Ramsey's resources had been stretched to the fraying point. "I'm just sitting here, waiting to hear this man
tell me he's an outer space alien. Meanwhile, everybody's talking about sandwiches! Sandwiches, for God's sake!"
Kaylene Sorensen frowned and lifted a finger to her lips. "Mr. Ramsey, please—there are two little children sleeping next door."
Ramsey shook his head, subsiding into his chair. "Sorry. Sorry."
Sellars laughed. "Did I say I was an alien, Mr. Ramsey? No, I said that my nickname was the Man from Mars." He held the rag close to his mouth, inhaled, then reached out and dipped it in a cup before bringing it to his mouth again. "It is an interesting story, and might conceivably help you understand a little more of the strange tale I've already given you today."
"Even if you claim you're the Grand Duke of Alpha Centauri," Ramsey said feelingly, "I don't think things could get any weirder than they are."
Sellars smiled gently at him, then smiled also at Kaylene Sorensen, who had settled in next to her husband on the couch. "You've all been through a great deal. I hope you can understand how important it is. . . ."
Ramsey cleared his throat.
"Yes, sorry. I've had little company lately except Cho-Cho—not much practice for adult conversation." He stretched his knotted fingers before him. "First, I will reassure Mr. Ramsey that, whatever may have happened to me since, I started out as human as anyone. Alien has many definitions, but I am decidedly not the outer space sort.
"In fact, for the first thirty or so years of my life, the only interesting thing you could say about me at all was that I was a pilot—a fighter pilot. I flew for the US Navy in the Middle East, and later in the Taiwan action, then in peacetime I trained new pilots. I was not married, was not even particularly close friends with my comrades, although during combat I trusted them with my life every day, and they did the same with me. I was a naval aviator. That was my life, and I was more or less content with it.
"This is before any of you were born, so you may not remember the dying days of what used to be called the manned space program—how the private consortia who funded most of it decided there was a lot more money to be made in satellites and remote mining than actually putting a live human being into a ship and sending him or her somewhere. Also, the world's populations weren't very interested in the whole matter—I think the human race had begun to turn inward, in a way. But the idea of exploration and colonization didn't die completely, and one rather quiet project went forward after the rest of the better-known operations had folded. It had to get private funding, of course, but it was still nominally under United States government control, back in the days when the UN didn't even have a space program.
"Word went around that military fliers with no close family ties, willing to undertake dangerous duty, were being evaluated for something called PEREGRINE. I was bored with training and, looking back on it, a bit bored with my life, so even though I suspected I was past the optimum age—everything I heard suggested it was a very physically-based selection process, which usually meant reflexes—I thought it couldn't hurt to volunteer." Sellars smiled again, self-mockingly this time. "When I found out I was one of the first dozen selectees, I was pretty impressed with myself.
"It's tempting to tell the whole story in proper detail, because it's interesting in itself, and no one but me really knows the truth now. No books, no net documentaries, no records at all to speak of. But everyone here is tired, so I'll try to keep it brief. PEREGRINE turned out to be a novel approach to human space exploration, a program that would permit human crews not only to travel long distances—with cold sleep along the way, but with connections still to the ship—but also to be able to explore likely planets in a more robust way than the old-fashoned astronauts. There were several planets they were interested in—one in 70 Virginis is the only one I remember now. Many of the signals have since proved misleading, and humankind seems to have lost its interest in exploration—a great shame, I think—but at the time it was very exciting. In any case, even back then we had instruments that could survey planets far more elaborately than anything a live human could do, but the people in charge of the program thought that you could never get the same level of funding and public support for exploration unless you were sending a real, live, breathing human whose life was being risked on behalf of the whole human race. You can almost hear the speeches, can't you?
"So, PEREGRINE. We reported to Sand Creek, a secret base in South Dakota. . . ."
"I've heard of that," Ramsey said slowly. "Sand Creek. . . ."
"No doubt you have. It's been talked about a lot over the years. But whatever you've heard is almost certainly not true." Sellars closed his eyes. "Where was I? Ah, yes. We began undergoing a very complicated process to make us capable of all kinds of rigors—and, most importantly, to hard-interface our brains with the ship's computer systems. You almost never hear that word 'computer' anymore, do you? They're part of everything now. They used to be boxes with keyboards, you know." He shook his head, so that it looked like a dry sunflower wobbling on its stalk. "Technology wasn't very sophisticated—this was half a century ago, after all. Much of what they did was surgical—actually opened me up and applied microcircuitry directly to my skeleton, implanted various devices, you name it. People take it for granted now that they can connect to the net with a neurocannula, but then the idea that a human being could channel computer information directly into the brain was mostly considered science fiction. Except at Sand Creek, where they were actually doing it.
"So they . . . built me, as it were. Rebuilt me, certainly, strengthened my bones and shielded my skin and various organs to better resist gravitational hardships and radiation, implanted tiny chemical pumps that would add synthesized calcium and other important supplements to my body if I had to go a long time in zero gravity . . . all kinds of things. But even more profound was the way they wired me—head to toe, like a Christmas tree! They used the latest alloys and polymers—although with all the changes in molecular engineering since then, the original stuff they put in me would seem positively antique now. But at the time, we PEREGRINE volunteers were works of art. That's when I first learned to love Yeats—the line about the emperor's mechanical birds in 'Sailing to Byzantium' caught at me:
". . . Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enameling. . . ."
He paused for a moment, lost in thought. "I cannot tell you what it was like the first time I simply closed my eyes and found myself online. The net was tiny and primitive then, the early days of virtual interfaces, but still. . . ! Still. . . ! Already, without leaving Earth, we were explorers, flying where others had only crawled. We PEREGRINE volunteers began to talk about the net among ourselves as though it were a place, a universe that others could only visit, like tourists staring through a fence, but which truly belonged to us. When you can swim through information as though it were a physical medium, when access is instantaneous, you begin to see things, learn things. . . ." His voice was getting dry and thin; he stopped and inhaled from the rag. "I promised myself I would not be diverted, didn't I? I apologize. In any case, our ships were built at the same time we ourselves were built—in parallel, as it were—custom-tailored to our particular physiological needs. They were small, sophisticated, using primarily antimatter drives for the long, black distances, but able to use other sources of power as well, including solar wind. There was to be one for each of us, each named for an explorer—the Francis Drake, the Matthew Peary, I cannot remember them all now and it's too sad to try. Mine was the Sally Ride. A lovely name for a ship, and a lovely ship she would have been—my bride, you might say, on a permanent honeymoon. But it did not happen that way.
We only had a few orbital nights, practice runs, before. . . . Oh, dear, am I boring you?"
Michael Sorensen had fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, his head lolling on his wife's shoulder. "He's just exhausted," she said apologetically, as though he had nodded off at some subu
rban card party. "He must know all this already, doesn't he?"
"All but the fine details," Sellars told her gently. "He's looked through my file a few times since I made contact, I'm sure."
"I think it's fascinating," she assured him, although she looked quite tired herself. "I . . . I had no idea."
"Please go on," Ramsey said.
"Well, you both must know something about what happens when you work for the government, and this was in the early days of the private/public partnership, so-called. The administration in Washington changed. The UN grew snippy about a major project with so little international participation. And the corporate angels began to grumble about how much money was being spent with no returns in the foreseeable future. PEREGRINE was nearly canceled several times.
"There were nights later on, years worth of nights, when I used to wish with all my heart it had been.
"The solution was not really surprising, especially with large defense corporations involved. It was decided to streamline the operation, to get 'more bang for the buck,' I think the phrase of the day was. It would have been very difficult to make the project smaller at that fairly advanced stage, so instead they folded it together with something called HR/CS—Human Robotic Combat Systems. I think that project also had a code name—'Bright Warrior' or 'Bright Spear' or something, but the engineers started calling it HARDCASE and the name stuck. This was straight military, what was probably one of the first attempts to create biomodified soldiers—basically humans who could be plugged into extremely sophisticated combat armor, who could use these systems as extensions of their own bodies, go places even an ordinary armored soldier couldn't go. You get the idea—it was like something out of an old comic book. The military was much more intent on their timeline, so the shared resources—mostly engineers, medical personnel, and supercomputer time—began to flow in their direction. The pace of PEREGRINE slowed dramatically.