by K. W. Jeter
C H A P T E R 1 2
“YOU HAVE DONE well, brother. Your labors serve to bring light into this darkened world.”
He heard the words spoken to him, words of both praise and blessing, and nodded. George Francisco knew that the things he sought were closer, almost within reach of his hand. That had been the purpose of his labors. Soon enough—he could feel the moment approaching—the light would wash over him like the wave of a rolling ocean.
“I have tried,” said George simply. He sat on a folding chair in one of the little rooms that had been scrabbled together from plywood and salvaged building materials, miscellaneous scraps of acoustic ceiling tiles and cheap hollow-core doors. The spaces had been carved out of the back sections of the warehouse that still served as the center of the new faith. From here, the message that had been bestowed upon his blood, and upon the blood of all other people on this earth, radiated outward. Soon all would receive it. In the meantime, any word spoken above a whisper passed through the makeshift walls as though they had no more substance than the air itself. “I’m glad,” he said, “if what I’ve done has met with the approval of the initiated.”
“More than that.” The other Newcomer in the small room was one of the original Bearers of Light; he had first dreamt the word well over a year ago, and had become a disciple to the One who had brought the message. “There are more than your brethren who are pleased. Your efforts have been noticed . . . at the highest level.” The Bearer smiled gently. “By that One, of whom we can be aware of none greater.”
George nodded, keeping his silence. This was what he had worked for. The faith of the Bearers of Light had gained its initial converts from among the lower ranks of Tenctonese society, the outcasts and failures, those who had found little success on this world’s hard, unforgiving surface. For such as them, it was easier to receive the light, let it transform their souls. Their hands were empty; they had less of the world’s glittering illusions to let go of. Unfortunately, they had less skill in working the machinery of public knowledge, the interlinked network of press conferences, media feeds, spin control, image polishing. These things had to be mastered if the Light was to reach into every dark corner; it was a measure of the fallen state of both the Tenctonese and human species, that the message could not just simply be presented and accepted by those who most desperately needed it. The Light had to be sold, as if it were a spiritual intoxicant more heady than the finest soured milk.
That was why he had been sure he would rise among the brethren. They needed someone like him, a man of accomplishment in the world’s complicated dealings. His public relations skills had been honed in the administrative workings of the Los Angeles Police Department; he’d had to scramble and push to make sure his talents were acknowledged. Before he had accepted the Light, his hearts had contained ambitions greater than just being a Detective Two; the LAPD had been a stepping-stone for political achievement before. Deep inside himself, where no one else could see, he had entertained fantasies of standing at a podium topped with news station microphones, while flashbulbs went off in front of him like exploding stars. My fellow citizens . . . this is the beginning of a new era . . . The words had changed from time to time, but not the feeling they had given him.
Those dreams had been a long time ago; some other George Francisco, it seemed now, had watched them behind his closed eyelids. Another dream had come, over and over, that had changed him into the being he was now. A Bearer of Light . . . one who had heard and listened to the message . . .
His only regret was that there had been no way he could make his wife Susan understand—the things that had happened, and what he had to do about them. He missed her, and his two little girls, and even his son Buck, whom he’d already lost to the entrapments of this world. The hope he kept inside himself was that the Light would bring them—soon—together once again. Then Susan would understand everything he had done.
“There will be more troubles,” mused the Bearer of Light who sat before George. “How can there not be? What has now been brought into this world produces its own enemies, those who resist the message freely given them, those who have placed their souls in the service of the darkness. Yet there are many among our people, and among our human brothers, who are simply confused or afraid or unable to believe that such a gift is theirs for the taking. For those, a soft voice, a voice without wrath or strident argument, a voice such as that is a comfort in these and the times to come. Such a voice will bring us many friends, and draw more into the reception of the Light.” The Bearer smiled and nodded. “That voice is yours. You have proved it by your deeds. The message cannot be carried by your voice—there is only one who can do that—but the way can be made straight and clear by you.” The Bearer’s gaze turned sharper. “Is that something you wish?”
He was taken aback by the other’s question. What did the Bearer know . . . or suspect?
“I wish . . . for the Light to be seen, and to be received by all.” George brought his voice down to little more than a whisper. “It is a great honor to me, if there are those among the Brethren who feel that I help accomplish such a task.”
“As I said, by more than your brethren. You have received the Light, you have been in the presence of the messenger—but only at a distance, in the company of the faithful. But now . . .” He regarded George with even more respect than before. “Now that One has asked—commanded—to see you in person. In private.”
Nothing, thought George. That was what this man opposite him knew. “When?”
“Right now. Immediately.” The Bearer of Light rose from his chair. He bowed his head, as though to one whose eminence in their shared faith had now exceeded his own, and gestured toward the door. “I am to take you to him.”
At last. For a few seconds, George turned his consciousness inside himself. With steeled deliberation, he composed his soul, eliminating any unvoiced words that would be unseemly in the presence of that greater Light. Then he looked up toward the other. “I’m ready.”
The other Bearer led him toward the rear of the old warehouse, through the narrow corridors and past the maze of tiny warrens into which the high-ceilinged space had been carved. Few of the Brethren were allowed to venture this far into the sanctum; silence wrapped around George, as though with each step the building’s interior were multiplying itself, its central point the seed of an expanding universe. Mottled sunlight fell upon him; he looked up and saw a skylight clouded with ancient pigeon droppings, the broken panes mended with rain-warped cardboard. The day’s radiance was dimmed to that of an underwater cavern.
“Here.” The Bearer stopped before a door of rough, unpainted wood. He stood back to let George approach it. “The One who brought us the Light awaits you.”
He entered into darkness, deepened to absolute black when the door was closed behind him. George’s eyes adjusted slowly; the faint radiance he saw in the distance could almost have been illusory, a trick of his own expectations. Then the voice spoke to him.
“It has been a long time. Centuries, perhaps.” The voice was the same one George had first heard in his dreams. “Or it could be only a matter of a few minutes since we were last together.”
The light was a flame no bigger than a thumbnail, shielded by a hand cupped around it. The burning match was brought close to the wick of a candle stubbed onto a small, barren table; the room filled with the shifting glow.
“Centuries or minutes—it really doesn’t matter.” George looked at the figure sitting on the edge of a raised pallet, a thin army-surplus blanket draping from it to the concrete floor. “You and I are both the same, Ahpossno, and yet different from what we were then.”
He had spoken the name, the name of the dead, a name that he had believed would never again be spoken to the living. It was one thing to see that figure in his dreaming, where the dead and the living had always been able to walk around in the dark spaces inside his skull; seeing that same figure on the raised platform before the mass of the faithful, the
Bearers of Light, had seemed to George like more of that dreaming, a place and time separate from the real world. But now there sat before him a living man removed from dreams, a man of his own Tenctonese blood, a man leaning forward to drop a burnt-out match onto the table with the other charred fragments like it.
“Yes . . . that was my name. I remember it.” The man wore a simple cassock of rough cloth, its hood pushed back to show the pattern of his head spots. He looked round from the candle flame, toward George. The face was out of shadow now; he appeared more haggard than before, fleshless skin tightened upon the bone beneath. His eyes were ancient things, the gaze as bright and piercing as it had been in that other life, but now deepened with unnameable visions. “Ahpossno . . . that name is no more. The man who bore that name is dead. After all . . .” A thin smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “Did you not, George Francisco, kill that man? It was by your hand that I died.”
“Yes . . .” George nodded slowly. “I did kill you,” That had been another time, another world. Memory, that lay beneath dreaming, rose up inside him, blotting out for a moment the small room and the figures it contained.
. . . the air tensed with the mounting vibration of the shuttle’s engine. The craft rose higher, its shadow spreading beneath as the sheriff and the deputies emptied their guns at it. Sparks glanced off the shining metal.
Sikes dug into his jacket pocket. His hand came out, not with his gun, but with an object no larger than a pocket flashlight. With his vision still blurred, George recognized it when the red glow illumined Sikes’s hand. It was what Ahpossno had used to bring down the Purists’ helicopter. Sikes raised his hand, pointing the object straight at the shuttle; the device’s slighter note was almost drowned out by the shuttle engine, as Sikes kept his thumb pressed upon the trigger switch.
In the sky, the shuttle faltered, its noise dipping in volume and pitch. The craft hung suspended, blotting out the sun, then dragged lower as Sikes continued aiming the jamming device.
“No . . . !” George lurched to his feet. He swung his hand against Sikes’s fist. The impact knocked the jamming device loose, sending it tumbling down the face of the dune.
The shuttle’s noise shrieked to a higher pitch. The craft trembled for a moment, then bulleted into the sky. A glint of fire remained, the sheriff and his deputies shading their eyes to watch it. Then a spark, that became lost against the sun’s glare. The sky was empty.
Sikes, his face contorted with fury, grabbed the front of George’s shirt, keeping him from slumping back to the ground. “Why?”
George broke away from him; he stumbled toward the unconscious figure of Cathy.
“I had him!” Sikes shouted after him. “I was gonna bring him down! You know what you’ve done?”
He looked over his shoulder. “Yes . . . I couldn’t let you interfere—I had to fight Ahpossno. He had to take the Serdsos.”
“What’re you talking about?” Sikes stood in front of him.
“It’s filled with the bacteria that the Purists tried to use. I took the Serdsos to the your lab, Cathy; I knew you still had a supply of the bacteria there, for your work. I drilled a small hole, and filled the hollow space inside with the bacteria.” He smiled, then winced as a sudden pain caught him. “You don’t have to worry about me—I followed all the necessary handling precautions. The hole is covered with a thermal-release patch; its pores will open just from Ahpossno’s handling of the Serdsos. By the time he reaches his mother ship, he’ll be completely infected—and unconscious. There’ll be no way for him to tell the others the truth about what he found here. Even if there’s no bacteria left to infect the others, they’ll believe that this planet is contaminated, and that all the slaves must be dead . . .” He paused, the effort of his words beginning to show. “They won’t come here . . .”
Sikes caught George before he fell . . .
Another time. That had held a dead man, a man he had killed. He had given the Chekkah Ahpossno his Serdsos, the facetted crystalline sphere that was the embodiment of his own soul, let it be taken from him, the combat between enemies seemingly over—and by doing so, had landed the last blow, the fatal one.
It was by your hand that I died. Perhaps that was true. Because the figure sitting on the thin pallet before George was Ahpossno—but someone else as well. A figure transformed, made anew; a figure that could move inside dreams and visions as easily as in the world of daylight and substance. Had death done that for him?
“There is much we need to talk about,” said Ahpossno, the messenger and bringer of light. His somber gaze held George fast in its grip. “Much that I need to tell you. And then . . .” Ahpossno nodded slowly. “Much that needs to be done.”
“Yes . . .” George gave a nod in agreement. Unnoticed by the other, he slipped his hand inside his jacket pocket and felt the cold metal weight hidden there. His fingers and palm settled tight upon the gun that he had carried into this sanctum. The colder metal of the bullets chilled his blood. “There’s a lot left to do.”
“Okay, here it comes.” The lead obstetrician bent forward, the other doctors as close behind him as they could get without crowding. “Easy now . . .”
From where Sikes stood, up by the head of the delivery table, he couldn’t really see what they were doing, which suited him fine, though he wouldn’t have told Cathy that. He had gone through that trip with his daughter by his then-wife, down by the raised stirrups like some kind of backup shortstop, and it hadn’t been an angle on the process that he’d really enjoyed. When push came to shove—so to speak—he was just as glad to be over here holding Cathy’s hand, wiping the perspiration from her brow and trying to recall all the right Lamaze coach phrases. His mind had gone blank and all he could remember was what the coxswain had kept shouting that one summer he’d rowed for the LAPD’s amateur sculling team. Somehow, he didn’t think yelling “Stroke . . . stroke . . . stroke!” through his face mask was going to help much.
Cathy broke off her panting breaths to give a small moan, which made him feel even worse. He could disregard the fact that if she squeezed his hand any tighter, she would crush the bones inside it—if she popped the kid all right, that was all he was asking for.
He had gotten there just in time, slamming his car into the hospital’s locked and secured parking lot—the guard at the gate had been watching for him and had waved him straight in—then leaving the car right at the building’s curb and sprinting inside, past all the other guards who knew who he was and why he was running so fast. The nurses had gotten him into his sterile green scrubs and mask, and into the delivery room in five minutes flat.
There was some hubbub among the doctors down at the other end of the table. Sikes craned his neck to try and see what was going on, but the sheet over Cathy’s legs blocked his view. The calm murmur of the doctor’s voice seemed to indicate that nothing was going wrong . . .
Then everything seemed to happen at once, so fast that he was left dazed; he heard another voice, that wasn’t his or Cathy’s or any of the doctors or nurses, that wasn’t even words but just a shrill piping little cry. And then, as though it were a jump cut to a memory of that other delivery room, the lead obstetrician was showing him and the woman whose hand he held something all wrapped up except for a small, wrinkled red face. The infant’s eyes were squeezed closed, as though displeased with whatever turn of events had brought it here.
“There you go.” The doctor leaned forward, tilting the bundle in his arms so that Cathy could see. “A healthy baby boy.”
Sikes watched as she let go of his hand and, smiling, reached up to touch the baby’s face.
Real time started up again, and he knew he wasn’t in some memory loop from the past. It had all happened right now. Hovering protectively over her—she looked exhausted but happy—he turned his own head, regarding with dumbstruck amazement the tiny stranger before them.
The team’s communications technician came around to the front of the truck. With one hand on the side of the truc
k cab’s open door, he looked up to where Noah Ramsey sat. “Just got word from inside the hospital.” The comm tech’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact. “The brat’s been born.”
Noah pulled himself back from the deep field of his thoughts, turning his gaze away from the windshield and toward the comm tech. “Is it alive or stillborn?” Everything—whether the team went ahead with the mission or not—depended on the answer to that question.
“Lemme make sure.” The technician held the earphone tighter against the side of his head, repeating Noah’s query in a soft murmur to the microphone angled at his throat. A moment later, he glanced back up. “She says the baby’s fine. The doctors are still checking it out, but everything looks stable so far.”
“Good . . .” He slowly nodded. The assault tech and the rest of the team were standing around by the rolled-down door of the industrial garage space that served as the mission’s staging area; Noah looked over at the group of men in service fatigues. He knew that they were just waiting for the word from him.
“So what’s it gonna be?” With the back of his hand, the comm tech pushed the mike away from his mouth.
It only took a second to decide.
“Take the operation code from standby to alert.” Noah enjoyed the sensation of the words in his mouth, clipped and efficient. “We’ll be moving out on my command.”
He watched the comm tech striding over to the team with his orders. He set one hand on top of the truck’s steering wheel and squeezed it into a fist. From this point on, everything that would happen was already wired into place.
The gun stayed in his jacket pocket, hidden but ready for use. He had brought it here to use, to this place, this small room that held the unfolding mysteries of the past.
George felt the gun warming against the hand he kept upon it, the heat of his blood seeping into the inert, potential metal. It would be a part of him, an extension of his arm and brain and will, when he drew it out, lifted it, and aimed.