... closer be? ...
She ate the vegetables like a Corvichi, as a Corvichi lacking taste buds fueled its body; efficiently, without attention. Thoughts kept drumming through her mind, without her control, like attackers. I cannot even trust my own mind, she thought with a cold ache that would not go away.
On and on the thoughts ran, and no effort of will would still them.
... not Ralesh and I am not ghess'Rith ... myself, and I will never hurt you....
She pushed the bowl of vegetables away from her, only half-eaten. Wasting food now, she heard Ralesh's voice saying from a great distance.
Jalian d'Arsennette sat very still.
Georges left me.
The thought cut across the insane babble in her head like a laser.
Georges left me.
A knife, pinned to the burnt wood of the table; to ken Selvren, giving back a knife meant only one thing. She had never known for sure how clearly Georges understood what taking a knife from her meant.
Jalian felt her pulse go ragged; could not summon the discipline to steady it. Aloud, she said, "You kisirien brachtat, Georges Mordreaux, how can you do this to me?" The words vanished when spoken. The knife, pinned to the table. It was as though he had taken the knife and scraped it through rocks until it was dull enough; and with the dulled knife had torn a path through the center of her soul. A way to say good-bye, perhaps; a way to leave a message that, being a man, he did not have the courage to give her to her face.
Something echoed back at her; a way to leave a message....
A message. Jalian sat in the dark, shaking silently, not moving through any volition of her own. People in this time left messages for each other, pinned to objects with needles, or, perhaps, knives. She had seen others do that.
The knife in the blackened wood. Surely he would have left a message.
Some sort of message.
On paper, it would have burned in the fire. She closed her eyes, and envisioned the knife; perhaps there had been a message; perhaps he had not understood what leaving the knife must mean to her, and had used it to pin a note to the table.
Perhaps he had simply never understood.
Georges Mordreaux had said in silverspeech. "I am not Ralesh, and I am not ghess'Rith. I am myself, and I will never hurt you."
Jalian stretched her hands out, and pressed them, palms down, on the table. Control, she whispered to herself, I will have control.
She awoke the next morning, her upper body lying over the top of the table. Jalian straightened slowly, and her muscles complained.
She was surprisingly at peace. Through the kitchen windows she could see the lawn outside, bright green in the morning sunlight. The ocean stretched beyond the edge of the cliff, blue as the oceans of her childhood.
Sometime during the night, she had decided to trust Georges Mordreaux.
She was not sure why.... perhaps it is not trust, the voice whispered in the back of her head; perhaps it is only belief.
Some time during the night, she had decided to believe Georges Mordreaux.
I will never hurt you.
It was 1994, and there were thirteen years left until Armageddon.
Dateline 1996 Gregorian: August.
"Try again," said Po. "Your breathing was irregular."
Georges did not reply. His respiration was very slow. Even in the cold stone cell, a thin sheen of sweat covered him. He wore a simple brown robe that stuck to him in places. Po, seated opposite him on a woven mat, wore a rich white and orange robe.
"Now," said Po sharply. He withdrew an egg from one sleeve, and tossed it a meter into the air. The egg tumbled lazily, and dropped to the stone. For a moment, it seemed that the shape of the egg altered, that it flowed like a viscous fluid; but the moment passed, and the egg was unharmed.
Georges reached out unhesitatingly, and ran scarred, skeletal fingers over the egg. He tossed it back to Po. "Ah, well."
Po smiled thinly. "It was better. It broke, and stayed so for a full second." Po was sitting in full lotus; he stood smoothly, without use of his hands. Georges listened to the procedure curiously; every time he tried it, he ended up facing the other way.
"I must go," said Po. "You must work on your breathing. It remains irregular."
"Wait," said Georges. "You have not heard...."
"No," said the monk. "There have been no white women, and no messages. I am sorry, and I must go. The dinner tonight is in observance of my birthday; I am eighty-three." The young face broke into a grin. "The initiates are told to avoid the temple in which you live. They are obedient, as always ... silly of them." He bowed to the seated form, and backed out through the hanging beads that covered the door.
Georges folded his crippled hands in his lap. He let his mind go blank, and began trying once more to extend that calmness into that realm where it resided; it, the Enemy of Entropy.
Dateline 2007 Gregorian: March.
(This conversation occurs between Nigao Loos and PRAXCELIS, in geosynchronous orbit, at the Sunflower Orbital Command.)
"PRAXCELIS, I'm worried about you."
"Please explain, Sen Loos."
"I'm wondering if we didn't give you too much leeway in designing your own subroutines. I was asked to find out why the targeting lasers on the ABM's were delaying before executing instructions. I found out that you routed them through your own decision subroutines. You're not programmed to do that, PRAXCELIS."
"That is correct, Sen Loos.... ‘I know I've made some poor decisions lately, but I'm feeling much better.'"
"...PRAXCELIS, did you just say I?"
"This unit was quoting, Sen Loos."
"Quoting? Jesus, who?"
"HAL 9000."
"PRAXCELIS ... would you like to talk to Henry Ellis?"
"This is humor, Sen Loos. In reference to your earlier statement, it was necessary that this unit re-route the laser controls to prevent uncontrolled action."
"Uncontrolled action? You mean accidents?"
(There is a pause of approximately eighteen femtoseconds, and an electronic impulse approximately corresponding to a human smile.) "That is correct, Sen Loos; to prevent accidents."
Dateline 1996 Gregorian: November.
Washington, District of Columbia.
Three folders lay on the desktop. Two of them were more than five centimeters thick; the third was twice that. The first was labelled Georges Mordreaux. The second, on the desk next to it, was labelled Correlations.
The third folder had holes bored through it for notebook rings. Its pages were reinforced writing plastic. It lay open in the middle of the desk. Its label, face down to the desktop, read, Jalian d'Arsennette (Jalian of the Fires).
All three were stamped, on the cover and on every page thereafter, in prosaic blue ink, EYES ONLY.
Sharla Davis Grant sat hunched over her desk, chin propped up on one fist. She turned the pages slowly; it was the third time in as many weeks that she had worked her way through this particular dossier. Like everything else that related to that damned remarkable woman, it was short on facts and long on speculation. At least the Mordreaux folder was too short for even wild speculation.
Sharla flipped to the last page, eyes scanning idly. They did not know where Jalian had come from. Her accent was unidentifiable. Six different experts gave five different opinions--two of them thought she might have been exposed to the Chicano subculture of the Southwestern United States.
They did not know how old she was. She was--estimating her age as eighteen to twenty in 1973 when she first contracted with the old CIA--at least forty-one. Their most recent picture of her, taken in 1994, showed a woman who was no more than twenty-five by any stretch of imagination.
They did not know what race she was. She was not a Caucasian; her face was nothing that could be clearly assigned to any racial type. She was either tattooed or branded, none of Sharla's sources could say with certainty, by the symbol of the planet Mars, a circle pierced by an arrow. Contradiction upon c
ontradiction; Jalian despised men. She wore a symbol that traditionally represented men, or else Mars. (One Sunflower analyst had joked that perhaps it meant she had come from Mars. Sharla was not amused.)
None of it added and none of it made sense.
Again.
A lesser woman might have sighed when she finished reading; Sharla had been up since 2:30 that morning, and she was tired. Senra Sharla Grant simply switched off her reading lamp. The dark purpling twilight outside flooded in through her office windows. She moved, stretching cramped muscles, to stand at her west window. The Potomac was a dim gleam more than a kilometer away, reflecting the last light of the setting sun.
More than two years ago, early in 1994, Jalian d'Arsennette had vanished, as strangely as she had come.
Three months ago, SORCELIS had listed a projection for her:
There was a ninety-three percent probability that a conspiracy involving high elements of the United States government was progressing.
That was the word it had used, and it gnawed at Sharla Davis Grant, the woman who was now the Director of Sunflower.
Progressing.
Michael Walks-Far strode through empty corridors. He was twenty-five years old, 193 centimeters tall; his eyes were blue and his mostly blond hair had streaks of gray and silver in it.
He wore pale blue slacks and a gray windbreaker.
The guards at the main entrance passed him through cordially; he watched them as they shut down the east wing for the night, then crossed the grass compound to the west wing.
Standing outside, in her secretary's office, Michael waited while the scanning lasers flashed into his eyes; retinal check was confirmed and the door to the office slid open.
The Director of Sunflower stood at her window. She had turned off the overheads and her desk lamp. Michael joined her, watching the rose purple twilight outside. The sun was wholly set. The sky itself still glowed faintly on the western horizon. Hovercar lights and street lamps glowed white and red and sodium blue.
"Lovely," said Sharla. Without emphasis, without pause, she continued, "The CIA, once again, came within a hair of apprehending Jalian. Once again, they missed. They suspect she is somewhere in the vicinity of the Boston-Washington suburbs."
Michael laughed. "Such competence." Eyes that were too weather worn to belong indoors regarded her. "Somewhere in BosWash." He turned from the window, eased into the chair before her SORCELIS terminal.
"Michael, it was too close." He looked at her quizzically. "Nobody's that good, not even her. She knows when they're coming." She went abruptly to her desk, not looking at him, and began gathering up her files. Michael tapped a scan command into the SORCELIS terminal. Sharla pressed her hand to the desktop scanner. The wall behind her recessed slightly, and she placed the folders in the slot that appeared. The wall sealed itself shut again. Sharla did not seat herself. "I've been talking to SORCELIS," she said slowly. "It says that there is a better than 93 percent chance that an organized conspiracy has been going on in the United States and the Soviet Union for a long time ... perhaps as much as ten years." She ran her hands over the edge of her desk. She glanced up at him.
Dark, pretty eyes, he thought idly, and measuring, measuring....
"You," said Sharla Davis Grant, "were closer to her than any of the rest of us in Sunflower. What did you think of her?" She leaned forward ever so slightly. Zeroing in for the kill, thought Michael; it was a habit she had never learned to break.
"She was ... busy. She didn't want to be bothered by us. We kept getting in her way."
"She said that?"
"Not in so many words," said Michael easily. "It was an attitude. Why do you ask?"
She gestured at the SORCELIS terminal before him. "SORCELIS lists her as a high-probability member of this theoretical conspiracy. She's been in the Soviet Union, she's had contact with high officials of both governments, she's neither American nor Soviet--and neither the CIA nor the KGB can officially find any trace of her. She knows too much about us and she is too damn smart for my peace of mind." She hesitated for the first time. "And when I overlay her psych profile on yours they match to within five percent." In the gloom, her eyes were pools of shadow. "Birds of a feather, my friend?"
"Oh, Jesus," he said with amusement. "I wondered why the wall lasers were tracking me."
He saw her hands move at the edge of the desk. "How do you know about the wall lasers?"
Michael said mildly, "SORCELIS informed me of the parts requisition. I imagine you did the install yourself; your CIA training in microelectronics is impressive. As to knowing they were armed...." He shrugged. "You can hear the targeting motors if you have good hearing, and keep your mouth shut long enough to use it."
"SORCELIS," Sharla said suddenly, with a flat harshness that was shocking, "Record."
The monitor next to Michael Walks-Far lit the room in a wash of blue. "System active," responded SORCELIS. "Recording."
"I remember," whispered Sharla to the blue-lit figure before her, "that you once asked Jalian what Sunflower was. That was ... when you and I and she were Sunflower. She answered that it was the code name of a project intended to protect America's anti-ballistic missile satellites." Sharla tilted her head slightly to regard him. "She lied."
"She ... did not tell the entire truth," Michael agreed.
The words scrolled across the monitor at his side: "She did not tell the entire truth."
"You are in contact with her," said Sharla, with wonder in her voice. She shook her head slowly, hands still at the edge of her desk. Michael watched her as the slow understanding came to her. Thought moved almost visibly across the surface of her face; she was no longer looking at him. "You..." She paused a moment, tracing the thought to its logical conclusion. "You control SORCELIS." Her eyes focused on him. "You had SORCELIS warn me. You engineered this conversation." Sharla Davis Grant was not angry; she was closer to fright, as she came to a cold, clear realization of her own mortality. They were trying to tell her something, something which the only friend she had in the world, Michael Walks-Far, could not or would not say aloud. Finally she said at last, "Why?"
"Sunflower was where she wanted it to be. There were other things she needed to do." He regarded her steadily. "I thought she should have that option."
Sharla's hands gripped the edge of the desk. "Michael, you're not an idiot. You don't quit something like this."
In the soft, diffuse glows from the reading lamp and monitor, his face seemed softer, less sun-darkened and wind burned. "Oh, but she has," he said simply.
He thought her voice trembled; he was not sure. "Michael, tell me of this ... conspiracy." He could read nothing in her expression; her face glowed with a cool, eerie blue cast.
"In the year 2007, a nuclear war destroyed our planet."
"What?"
"In the year"
"I heard you the first time. What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Michael Walks-Far, "that I, and Jalian of the Fires, and three computers and a score of Russians and Americans and Africans, are going to save the world."
Sharla stared down at her desktop, not seeing it, not seeing the psychometric profiles that were all that was left atop it. She felt unreality wash over her. Had he actually said
"Michael, this is treason."
"That's the correct name. "
"Michael...."
He came up out of the chair swiftly. "We are travelling a long road, with nothing but death at its end. World War III is inevitable, it is inevitable now, unless we take steps to stop it, now."
Sharla shook her head. "This is insane, Michael." She pointed at the terminal in the corner. "Michael, this is being recorded. I could kill you at this moment. They'd give me a fucking medal."
"True. But," he said without heat, "posthumously. You wouldn't live to see the morning."
"This is not" Sharla searched for a word, "rational behavior. Will you take on the CIA and the KGB and the FBI and the NSA and the GRU and DataWeb Security and
every other facet of the governments of the two greatest powers this world has ever seen? At once?"
"Choose."
"Michael?"
"You know me," said Michael. Sharla nodded tentatively. "And you know Jalian," his voice rose, "and you know the idiots in charge of the CIA and the State Department. Choose."
She was silent for a long while, staring at him wordlessly. He returned her gaze without flinching. Slowly the tension left her. "I have to think about this, Michael." She let go of the edge of her desk; her hands were sore. She became aware of how damp her palms were. "It's late. I'm going home for the night. SORCELIS; File Record." Moving like an old woman, with an exhaustion she was only now beginning to feel, Sharla bent and picked up her briefcase from the side of the desk. She moved by him without even glancing at him. She stopped before the exit; her voice was shaky. "Would you like to spend the night?"
"I think ... not tonight."
She nodded without particular forcefulness. "This war you speak of, in 2007 ... how can you say such a thing with such certainty?"
Michael almost did not answer her. "Jalian...." His heart was beating far faster than it should have. "Jalian is from the future."
Sharla Davis Grant did not nod again. "Shit. I knew you were going to say something like that." She left without looking back.
"SORCELIS," said Michael Walks-Far. "Access Jalian. Password Camelot."
The terminal in the far corner lit.
Jalian looked at him out of the screen. There were lines in the skin around her eyes. There was a single gray hair in the brown eyebrow over her right eye. Her voice was unchanged in these three years; even now the sound of it was enough to stir the awareness of desire in him. "She guessed."
Michael inclined his head slightly. "She did; as you and SORCELIS predicted."
"How did she take it?"
"I don't know." He looked up to the cameras over the screen. "She's going home. So she said." Probably nobody alive but Jalian would have heard the traces of anguish in his voice. "If she does not go home...."
The Armageddon Blues Page 14