by Ben Bova
Baker remained utterly still. “You’re not going to use that thing. It’s probably not even loaded.”
Perfectly calm, her eyes flaming, Nicole said, “It is fully loaded, I assure you. And I know very well how to use it.”
The Aussie’s grin returned slowly to his face. It looked more than a little forced to An Linh.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll shoot us. Come on, love. Time for us to go.”
He turned slowly and started for the door. An Linh followed him, feeling the gun and Nicole’s eyes focused on her back. Baker hesitated at the door and turned back toward the Frenchwoman.
“I’m really sorry about this. G’bye now.”
He opened the door and allowed An Linh to go out into the hallway first. Nicole raised her arm and fired once. The shot sounded enormous in An Linh’s ears, like a cannon blast. Baker lurched through the doorway and stumbled against her.
“Sonofabitch!” he screamed. “The damned cunt shot me!”
An Linh staggered under his weight. Blood was spurting from his shoulder. Past his half-collapsed form she saw Nicole Appert coolly surveying them, her lips almost smiling.
“Bon,” she said. “Et maintenant la police.” And she slammed her door shut.
Fortunately the elevator was still at this level; no one had used it since they had come up in it. An Linh tottered toward it, with Baker in her arms, and let him fall in a heap to its floor. She slid the cagework door shut and punched the down button. The elevator whined to life while other apartment doors popped open and nervous, curious, suspicious faces peeked out.
“Come on,” An Linh said when they reached the street level. “We’ve got to get out of here before the police arrive.”
Tugging him up to his feet, she hauled Baker out of the elevator, across the marble-floored foyer, and out into the rainy street where their rented car was parked.
“She shot me,” Baker kept muttering. “That crazy old lady shot me.”
An Linh nearly slipped in a curbside puddle as she dumped him into their compact sedan. She could hear the singsong wailing of approaching police cars. She slid behind the wheel and drove out of the narrow street, heading for the Champs Élysées and the hotel that Madigan had booked for them. Two police cars passed them, sirens blaring, as she swung out onto the broad avenue, windshield wipers flapping. Baker gripped his shoulder and swore through clenched teeth all the way to the hotel.
By tugging his raincoat over his shoulders, An Linh got the Australian through the hotel’s minuscule lobby and up the tiny elevator to their room. It was also small, with barely enough space for a double bed and a bureau.
Baker collapsed on the bed, groaning. An Linh pulled the raincoat away and saw that his tweed jacket was soaked through with blood. She reached for the phone terminal on the night table beside the bed.
“Who’re you calling?” Baker asked weakly.
“Madigan…he’ll get the local Vanguard people to take care of you….”
“No. Not Madigan.” He propped himself up on his good arm, wincing. “Gimme the phone.”
An Linh swiveled the picture screen toward him and lifted the keypad from the terminal. Handing it to Baker, she watched him tap out a twelve-digit number.
The phone screen stayed blank, but a voice said, “Yes? May I be of assistance?”
“Blood,” said Cliff Baker. “Blood.”
Immediately the voice replied, “Keep this link open for thirty seconds.”
“Aye.”
The voice sounded strangely flat and sexless to An Linh. A computer’s synthesis, she guessed. And the single word “blood” was probably a code signal that the computer recognized as an emergency.
“Terminate link,” said the voice.
Cliff leaned a thumb on the phone’s off button.
“What was that?” An Linh asked. “Whom did you call?”
“Those friends I told you about. They’ll have a medical emergency crew here inside of an hour.”
He sank back onto the pillows and closed his eyes. “Christ, it hurts!”
“Let me call a doctor,” An Linh said.
“No! We’ll both end up in a Frog prison. And don’t call Madigan, either. What we learned isn’t for Vanguard. It’s for the movement.”
An Linh sat on the edge of the bed and watched the pain scribe his face with deep lines.
“Cliff,” she blurted, “I’m scared.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Not me! It’s you that I’m worried about.”
“They’ll take care of me.”
“But you’re still bleeding. How long should we wait—”
The phone chimed.
An Linh started to reach for it, but Baker stopped her with an upraised hand. “Keep the picture off. If it’s Madigan, stall him. Don’t tell him what that trigger-happy old lady did, and above all don’t tell him what she told us about Stoner!”
It was the concierge, not Madigan. A gentleman and a young lady were downstairs, asking to see them.
“What’s their names?” Baker whispered. An Linh asked the concierge.
“Monsieur Van et Mademoiselle Gard,” the concierge’s raspy voice answered.
Baker grinned against the pain of his shoulder. “They’re okay. That’s the code.”
Van and Gard. As An Linh told the concierge to allow them to come up, she thought, At least somebody in the World Liberation Movement has a sense of humor.
Van was an Oriental. Chinese or perhaps Korean, An Linh judged, from the size of him. He looked like a professional athlete, a football player, perhaps, or a boxer. He said nothing at all, simply took a position by the window and watched the street as silently and intently as a robot would.
Mlle. Gard was very French, younger than An Linh by at least five years, and talkative enough for all four of them. She was pretty, too, except for the misfortune of a Gallic nose. Nothing that a bit of plastic surgery could not fix, though. She was the paramedic, and she jabbered and clucked and tsked as she worked on Baker’s shoulder. An Linh helped her to ease Cliff’s jacket off. Then she cut away his shirt, jabbed him with an anesthetic, and probed for the bullet—blathering blithely away all the time. An Linh decided she was covering up her nervousness, although the young woman’s hands were as steady as her flow of chatter.
“How did you get to us so quickly?” An Linh asked, as Mlle. Gard sat Baker up on the bed and started bandaging his shoulder.
“We are your backup team,” the girl replied, cocking her head slightly toward the Oriental still staring out the window. “That one and I. We were parked outside the apartment building when you came out. If the police had tried to follow you, we would have cut them off and given you time to get away.”
“Then if you saw that he was injured, why didn’t you come into the hotel with us?”
“That was not our assignment. We were told to back you up and then await further orders. When we received the command to give him medical attention, we came immediately to the hotel.”
Discipline, An Linh realized. And organization. Whoever these people are, they’re not amateurs.
“But who gives you your orders?” she asked.
The young woman smiled at her. “If you need to ask such a question, you must not be told the answer.”
“Security, love,” said Baker, sitting up on the bed. “No one knows more than they need to know.”
The Oriental and the Frenchwoman left as swiftly as they had arrived, but only after Mlle. Gard assured Baker that his shoulder would be stiff for a week or more and left him with a small bottle of pain-killers.
“Adieu,” she chirped from the doorway. “Bonne chance.”
An Linh closed the door behind them, then turned to Baker. “You’ve got to tell me more about this organization, Cliff. I want to know…”
But he was stretched out on the bed, eyes closed, snoring lightly.
CHAPTER 22
From the landing at the top of the stairs that led into the station�
�s restaurant, the Gare de Lyon looked like a frenetic zoo. Stoner leaned both hands on the metal railing and watched the people rushing to and fro, lining up at the ticket windows, hauling luggage to the gates where the trains departed, knotting in little groups, running, gesticulating, and talking, talking—always talking, incessantly.
The noise was almost painful, and without letup. A thousand voices all going at once. Loudspeakers blaring announcements. Vendors calling out their wares. Even the people sitting at the tables spread out around the foot of the ornate la belle epoque staircase did more talking than eating or drinking.
A young couple embraced passionately at one of the gates, while the train—an aging TGV—thrummed with impatient power. Stoner tried to guess which of the pair would run to the train and which would stay behind. It was the man who dashed out along the platform. The woman waved to him briefly, then turned and walked slowly away. Stoner could not tell from this distance, but he guessed there were tears in her eyes.
Stoner’s train would not leave for Marseilles for another fifteen minutes. It was one of the new electric specials, gleaming silver as it stood waiting on its track, powered by the cheap electricity generated by the new fusion power plants.
A gift from the stars, Stoner mused. A gift of the stars: in the heart of each fusion reactor is an incandescent plasma hotter than the core of the sun, he knew.
And I helped to bring this to Earth, he thought. I did. But which me? The man who was born on this world, or the alien within me?
He blinked his eyes, and the scene before him seemed to shift, change focus. The people crowding the train station were still there, the trains lay stretched along the tracks, the noise and muted light slanting through the rain-spattered glass roof did not change. But now it seemed as if he were examining an exhibit in a museum, observing a strange tribal ritual. Far back in the recesses of his memory, Stoner recalled once as a teenager peering into a microscope for the first time and discovering the teeming world of living creatures that bustled and scurried within a drop of water.
He watched the humans bustling and scurrying through the train station, hyperactive monkeys jabbering away their lives, not a shred of dignity about them, living on their emotions, letting their glands and their mammalian brains dictate the ordinary moments of their existences. It’s not fair to think of us that way, said one part of his mind. But that’s the way you are, replied another voice within him. You have the power of abstract thought, the capability of comprehending the universe—yet you behave like the monkeys in the forests.
Stoner shook his head, as if to drive the alien voice out of his thoughts. It went silent, but he could feel its presence inside his skull, watching, observing, analyzing. There was no hint of censure in the voice, no anger or disappointment with the human condition. No pity, either. Nothing but precise objective measurement.
Then his eye caught a scene below him, one individual encounter out of the hundreds happening simultaneously in the tumult of the busy station. A woman with three young children and as many pieces of odd-sized luggage—plus a heavy pack strapped to her back—was trying to take a table among those spread out on the floor of the station at the foot of the staircase. She was wrapped in a shabby overcoat that was much too big for her and had a fringed shawl over her head. The children were bundled in old, stiff, quilted winter coats; to Stoner they looked almost like miniature astronauts in space suits that had been pressurized to the point where they could hardly bend their arms.
The waiter was yelling at her in French and waving his arms at her. She obviously could not understand him. The children were very young, the smallest of them barely a toddler. They looked frightened and about to cry.
On an impulse, Stoner hurried down the stairs toward them.
“These tables are for serving cocktails only,” the waiter was insisting. “For dinner you must go upstairs, into the restaurant.”
“We only want to sit down for a few minutes,” the woman was saying in strangely accented English. Her skin was no darker than a good suntan would produce, but Stoner realized from her singsong inflection that she was Indian.
To the waiter, he said, “They are tired. They need to rest for a few moments.”
“Impossible! These tables are for paying customers, not charity cases.”
Stoner took the man’s right hand in his own and held it firmly. “The children are very tired, you can see that, can’t you? They’ll only be here a few minutes, I promise you.”
He released the man’s hand, and the waiter immediately slipped it into his pocket. Gruffly he said, “Only a few minutes, then.”
Stoner thought about ordering something for them to drink but decided that deluding the waiter into thinking he had been tipped was enough of an imposition on the man.
“Oh, thank you, sir,” said the Indian woman. She made a short shooing motion with one hand, and the three children clambered onto the rickety, wire-backed chairs.
Stoner nodded to her. “You’re very welcome.”
“We have been traveling for three days,” the woman said, easing the straps of the backpack off her shoulders. It clunked to the floor heavily. “My husband has left for a new job in Madras, and I am bringing the children and myself to join him.”
She would have been pretty if she had not been so tired, Stoner thought. She let her coat sag open and he saw that her clothes were entirely Western. So were the children’s. Without an instant’s hesitation she told Stoner her whole story: how she had married the man her parents had selected for her, when they had both been teenagers. How they had left India to escape the strictures of their families.
“I would have had six children by now, instead of merely three!” she said. “And a jewel in my nose, and a caste mark on my brow. Yes, for women in my village the age of freedom has not yet arrived.”
She was only twenty-two, Stoner discovered. Yet she looked much older. The children were very well behaved. They fidgeted and squirmed on their chairs, but they kept silent and asked for nothing. Stoner saw their huge brown eyes watching the adults around them eating parfaits and drinking from mysteriously shaped glasses.
Her husband had been a textile worker, but robots had eliminated the craft that his father had taught him. So she and their growing family went with him to find work, first in Bombay, then in the construction teams building the solar power arrays in Arabia, and finally in Flanders—where some textiles were still made by hand.
“We were so happy there.” She sighed. “He loved his work and I started at the university. I was to be a biotechnician!”
But Belgium is not India, she went on sadly. Her husband grew homesick, especially when the winter cold made them all ill. One winter he stayed. And a second. But by the time spring came, he had made up his mind to return to Mother India.
“I told him I would not go. I would not return to a society that only paid lip service to the rights of women. But he would not listen to me. Finally he told me that he was going home. I could come with him, or I could stay where I was. He was going home.”
Stoner did not have to ask what she had decided; she gave him no time to ask before continuing:
“I refused to go with him. But what could I do? I could not remain in the university; I had to find a job to feed the children. I became involved with another man, but he would not marry me even if I divorced my husband. He did not want to support children who were not his own, you see.”
The loudspeaker blared the announcement for Stoner’s train.
With a painful sigh, the Indian woman said, “So I am returning to my husband, after all. He has found a job in Madras. At least we will not be living in our home village. The city may be better for me.”
“I hope it is,” Stoner said gently.
“It makes no difference,” she replied. Gazing gently at the three silent, big-eyed children, she said resignedly, “They are the important ones. Their life is my life. I must protect them as best I can.”
Stoner walked her to
the train, carrying the toddler in one arm and the largest of the makeshift suitcases in his other hand. She was taking the same southward-bound train, but her tickets were for the cheapest coach. It won’t be so bad for them, Stoner thought. The train will be in Marseilles in less than three hours.
He helped them into the train and saw them settled comfortably in two pairs of facing seats.
“Thank you so much, sir,” the woman said. “I am sorry to have burdened you.”
Stoner smiled at her. “No, no. I thank you. You have taught me what real courage is.”
And he left her, heading farther toward the rear of the train, where the seats were more comfortable and he could watch the landscape blurring past without being interrupted. He needed to think, he told himself; needed to reflect on what the woman had told him. But he was glad to get away from her, happy to find a seat all by himself with no one near him, where he could be alone, isolated from these constantly chattering monkeys.
The train was hurtling through the beautiful countryside, down the Rhone valley, dotted with vineyards and old nuclear power stations. Stoner remembered the furor over nuclear power in his earlier life. The nukes seem peaceful enough now. They haven’t harmed the environment. They don’t even have smokestacks. He saw his own ghostly image on the window, his face frowning in concentration. The conductor stared at him each time he passed, as if trying to remember something important, but each time he went past without demanding to see a ticket.
I must protect them as best I can.
The woman’s words rang in Stoner’s mind. Yes, he agreed silently. We must all protect the children as best we can.
Baker was still sleeping when Madigan came into their tiny hotel room. The concierge had announced him, and An Linh was glad to see the lawyer from Vanguard Industries.
The only sign of surprise Madigan showed when he saw Baker stretched out on the bed, naked to the waist, his left shoulder bandaged, was a pursing of his lips and a low whistle.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice low so that it would not disturb the sleeping man.