"Hoshi Aronson?"
"I don't know. Does it matter? He called me up and asked me to take care of them."
"I see," Payne said. "You still have the gerbils, then?"
"Uh-huh. Do you want them back?"
"No, perhaps you should keep them—if you don't mind." Payne glanced at Dee, who shrugged.
"Sure," Mardi said. She paused, then said suddenly, "I just figured that Mozy had gone home, you know, to her parents, or something. I never thought—" Her voice caught.
"I understand," said Payne. "Did Mozy ever mention this Hoshi person to you?"
"Once or twice maybe. Someone she worked with." Mardi looked uncomfortable. She was staring at him. "Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
"Possibly—on television. I work as a newscoper."
Mardi's eyes widened. "Television! Are you doing a story about Mozy?"
Payne explained that his interests were both professional and personal. "Could you tell us . . . what was going on with her in her life, with her and you, for instance?"
"Her and me?" Mardi stared at him oddly, and for a moment, she looked as though she might erupt in tears. Instead, suddenly, she started talking—about time spent with Mozy as a classmate, about Mozy's abruptly leaving school, leaving her, saying she was going to work full time, and then vanishing without so much as a phone call. And finally, weeks later, Mardi's mother telling her she had seen Mozy's obituary in the paper.
By the time it was over, Mardi was crying, and Denine was trying to comfort her. Before ending the conversation, they agreed to meet in the next few days.
Afterward, Payne and Denine sat a while, looking at the apartment mess around them, looking at each other, and then Payne holding Dee as she shuddered, letting go of accumulated tension and grief. Finally she straightened and wiped away her tears. "Let's get this shit finished," she said, turning away to the half-filled boxes.
Payne knelt beside her, helping. For a time, they worked in silence. Then he cleared his throat. "If you can stand it, there's someone else I'd like you to meet."
Denine rested her head on her forearms for a moment. Then she sighed, looked up with reddened eyes, and said, "Who's that?"
"A man named Bill Jonders. No, forget I said that—he's a source. His name's Phoenix. Just Phoenix."
* * *
Darkness was creeping in through the motel room windows, but no one had gotten up to turn on a light. The coffee pot was empty. Jonders was only peripherally aware of these facts, as he was of the acid indigestion in his stomach, as he slumped in his chair, wondering where to go from here.
Payne was flipping through his notes thoughtfully. His girl friend Denine was sitting on the nearer of the two beds, her knees drawn up under her chin. Oddly enough, Jonders liked her. She was depressed and angry, but he couldn't blame her for that. She looked as though she'd heard enough. Heard enough? He hadn't intended to tell her anything.
Hours from now, he knew, he would deeply question the decision he had made here tonight. But it was done, now—and one more person knew the truth about Mozy. And now Hoshi.
"If something happened to her, what right do you have to keep it secret? What right! What is this bullshit about coronary seizure?" She had turned into a tiger before his eyes, the disbelief building to the strain point, as he might have guessed it would—and finally the break.
"I—" he was avoiding Payne's eyes "—there's only so much I'm at liberty to say."
Denine's eyes smoldered with controlled anger. "Not even your name, huh?" she said sarcastically.
"My name's Jonders."
Denine seemed not to hear. "She was my best friend once," she whispered.
Whisper in return: "I know."
Denine's voice was a barely contained outcry. "The girl has died, for god's sake!"
Maybe he had known he would change his mind; maybe it never really needed changing, but moments later, when Payne stunned him with a direct question about Hoshi Aronson's involvement—he'd never mentioned Hoshi to Payne—he turned and asked Denine for a pledge of silence—
"What's hard for me to believe," Payne said—and Jonders raised his eyes, losing the train of thought—"is that Mozy would have just walked into something like this brain-scan—as dangerous as it was—without a stronger motive than a crazy infatuation."
Denine spoke, pulling her hair back in a ponytail, voice heavy. "I can believe it of her. You don't know how stubborn she could be. If Mozy thought she was in love with someone, and doing this would get her what she wanted—" Denine shrugged.
"I don't think she understood how experimental it was," Jonders said. "We never talked to her about it, but it wasn't for nothing that we hadn't tried it on a human subject. There are too many variables that we don't know how to control."
Payne rapped his pen impatiently. "But hadn't you been doing linkup procedures all along?"
"Sure—but that's a lot less intrusive. We'd explored various permutations of the link, we'd been learning details and principles. But the full scanning programs were—are—still in an early stage of development." Jonders was kneading his right hand into a fist. "Hoshi knew that. That's what made it so astonishing."
"He was in love with Mozy," Denine said. "Right?"
"Apparently so. He kept it well hidden."
"But people sometimes do crazy things when they're in love." Denine shook her head, wiping back tears. "Jesus. All those years she was dying for someone to fall in love with her. Then this. I'll bet she never even knew the guy had fallen for her." Blowing her nose, she slid down from the bed and padded into the bathroom.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Payne rustled open a file folder and extracted a piece of paper. "Have you seen this?"
Jonders squinted in the dim light, reading. It was an excerpt from Hoshi's diary. "Where did you get this?" he asked in astonishment.
"Police source. You knew that he was missing, I assume."
"I'd heard. But not about this." Jonders reread Hoshi's words. Eye for an eye, and death for a death. "He took it very hard, I knew. But this—"
"What do you think he'll do?"
"I'm afraid to guess."
Payne nodded and walked to the window, looking out at the New Phoenix skyline. The motel was located on the outskirts of the city, in the hills. Stars were just beginning to appear in numbers. "Where are they?" he said softly.
"Who?"
"The aliens."
Jonders swallowed with difficulty, but remained silent. Payne turned, his gaze questioning. "I told you," Jonders said, "there's nothing I can tell you."
Payne narrowed his gaze, and Jonders glanced pointedly toward the bathroom door. Even if he were willing to discuss the aliens with Payne, he would not do so in Denine's presence. As it was, he had undoubtedly overstepped the bounds of good sense, perhaps even by coming to this motel room—no matter his precautions to avoid being detected. And rightly or wrongly, he had accepted Denine's pledge of silence regarding Mozy.
But he would not talk of the aliens. That was getting too close to the fire.
Payne seemed to accept the limitation. He looked out the window again. "Where is Father Sky now?"
"Serpens Cauda—tail of the serpent. It's in the Milky Way. You can't see it now, it's a summer constellation," Jonders replied.
Payne nodded, and gazed up into the sky, seemingly entranced by whatever he envisioned out there in the heavens. When Denine emerged from the bathroom, she peered at the two of them in the darkness, reached for a light switch, then without touching it, returned to the bed where she'd been sitting. There she took up a silent vigil in the gloom, as though she had already divorced herself from whatever unpleasantness remained to be spoken.
Chapter 52
Since leaving the road, he has had a harder time of it finding his way—but no matter. He will manage. What must be done will be done. Guilt will be cleansed.
Desert floor is hard and dry, sun bright and high over the mountains, though not too hot, really. Eyes
are going bad again; cacti and shrubs dancing like dust devils, shifting positions when his attention wanders. Could have gotten the eyes fixed, probably some small adjustment, they were expecting him at the hospital; but for what? If he is to do what needs doing, then what need of vision? Make it a little easier, maybe; but he's not here to have it easy.
Some distance ahead, a blurry line of dust. Squinting and readjusting, he can see it clearly for an instant before it vanishes in a haze, the haze that mostly defines his view of the world. It's a vehicle, rumbling down one of the old county roads. Squints again, the vehicle is turning off. Good, he thinks. No place for others where he's going. Stay parallel to the road. One step follows another. Ground hard, legs a little unsteady. Feet and ankles aching. Follow the direction of the road.
So desolate, it's hard to keep one's bearings; but don't complain of loneliness, that's what we're here for. Thirst, though, is another matter. The water bottles are empty now, and the throat is parched, the body hungering for moisture. After he's there it won't matter, but he must get there before thirst brings him down.
Must get there before thirst brings him down.
Blinks, trying to shake the muzzy fog that envelops his mind more and more often. Keep the focus, keep the direction. One foot in front of the other.
* * *
He's left the basin for some low hills by the time the sun disappears in a blazing finale behind the mountains. Not clear if he'll be able to keep traveling at night, but he's determined to reach higher ground before dark. If his bearings are correct, this should be the last set of hills.
He scrambles up a brambly ledge, and his foot slips, banging his right knee down on a rock. Pain slams up into his brain, and for a time he can only sit gasping, clutching his shin, as the throbbing slowly subsides. When at last he can stand on it, not without pain but at least without agony, he hobbles on upward to the crest of the rise, and follows the line of the ridge for a while. The sky is a deepening shadow, probably stars coming out, only he can't see them, just about everything is a blur now. Blink, blink. The ground under his feet comes back into focus.
There is an old path, barely visible, angling through a crease in the hills. Despite the ache in his knee, he pushes ahead, climbing—and discovers that what had seemed a smooth path has turned into a dry streambed strewn with boulders and treacherous twists. In the twilight, the landscape seems to shift and change like some phantasmagorical dream. He should stop; but this is no place to seek shelter for the night, here in the midst of Hell's Highway. Press on.
Darkness has come by the time he reaches the top, but his senses seem to have grown with it. He feels the terrain altering—a subtle shift in slope here, a change in the wind there, a difference in the slide and friction of pebbles beneath his feet, a deepening in the darkness ahead; there's no one signpost, but he stops and crouches, favoring the knee—gropes in front of him, feeling only air—and a drop-off. Pauses. Rests his eyes, palming them with his cupped hands, taking slow, deep breaths. When he lowers his hands and blinks his eyes open, shifting focus between near and far, he is rewarded with a flicker of clear vision. Stars sprinkle the sky overhead, and around him, the land glows ghostly in the infrared, and in front of him is only darkness, empty darkness.
It is more than that, of course, but he must squint to readjust his eyes again; and then an image appears in the darkness, an image mostly in the infrared. A flatland for miles, a plain. In the distance, there is something different about the glow, something sickly—or perhaps it is only his imagination. The glow, the disease that lives out there is not something that human eyes can see, not even his inhumanly amplified eyes.
It's in front of him now, Phoenix Crater, glowing ever so dimly in wavelengths that are just outside the normal human range of vision. He edges back, groping behind him for a flat place to sit. And then—for a long time, he sits motionless, looking, thinking. Of a city that once occupied that plain. A city that was the birthplace of Hoshi Aronson, twenty-seven years ago. A city that lies now in ashes and ruins.
Thinking of returning home.
In time, he is aware of feeling chilled, and he fishes for the aluminized survival blanket, folded into a small wad in his pack. He shakes it out, pulls it snugly over his shoulders, and in a little while feels warmer. Thoughts of life and death pass through his mind, as he sits looking out over the site that was once Phoenix, Arizona—before the Great Mistake, the Monstrous Error, the Hideous Screwup of 2015, and he thinks of another death, billions of miles from here, linked with yet another, only a few tens of miles from here, both of them his doing.
His thinking is very clear now, this is not self-recrimination, the time for that is past; it's just an acknowledgment of what has been, and is, and is to come. Clarity is everything. It has taken days to reach this point, and one day more will complete the journey. It is a going home, a positive act, an affirmation of life. An atonement, an act of acknowledgment of the sanctity of the life that was taken.
No sleep will come to him tonight. He will sit awake, with his hunger which he scarcely notices any longer, and his thirst which is less, now that the sun is gone. The moon rises bright behind him, and the shadowy realm before him fills with its dim, cool illumination. No man-made lights move out on that plain. This land has been abandoned; but he has come to reclaim it, his birthplace, his birthright. The city is gone now, only a memory and a reminder of the horror, the sunbursts that lasted only seconds each, but shined death on thousands, instant death, and terrible lingering death. And so was born a new Phoenix, not out of the ashes this time, but out of unspoiled land, miles away. The bombs were too dirty, and long years would pass before the soil beneath the ashes healed. That the city might have been saved was the most dreadful realization of all. The orbital lasers had been too busy defending New York, and Houston, and Chicago, and Silicon Valley—and Washington, of course, but there had been too many aimed at Washington, and a few had gotten through—and Phoenix, well, Phoenix just hadn't been high enough on the protection list.
The eight-year-old Hoshi had been out of the city at the time, in the mountains with Uncle Jim and Aunt Edna. But looking in that direction, at that moment, he'd seen the first fireball and felt the others, and it was the last thing he saw for years, until the platinum and doped silicon were implanted in his brain. His parents, of course, had died quickly, instantly. He must always believe that, better to trust instantly, not knowing how they'd died. Painlessly. So he was told, and so he believes.
He's over that horror now, has been over it for years. But now the time has come to pay his respects, to discharge his debts. To return a life that was given to him here. He scarcely remembers how to pray for guidance, but he is certain that the Lord, if the Lord is here and listening, will approve.
Strangely enough, he scarcely needs to think of Mozy now, that's all settled. He loved her, still loves her, will always love her. Mozy, do you care for me? That's all I need to know. He's brought a note-recorder along in his pack, and perhaps tomorrow he will record his last thoughts before setting out—though it is doubtful that anyone will ever find them to read, or will care.
Phoenix is a dark maw out there, and his eyes are growing fatigued; even in the moonlight it is a murky blur. But he can see it well enough in the illumination of his mind, and in the light of day, tomorrow, his eyes will see it clearly, one more time. And peace, at last, will be his.
Chapter 53
The shuttlecraft floated slowly away from the station docking port, its attitude and maneuvering jets spitting flame as it turned. A patrol craft passed across its bow, marker lights winking. The shuttle pitched slightly, came to the correct yaw, and hung for an instant. The main thrusters fired.
The lieutenant scanned the instruments, adjusted the channel selector, and spoke into his microphone. "Traffic control, this is USSF-274, outbound to Tachylab at course one-niner-niner."
The burn cut off, acceleration melted away, and weightlessness returned. He glanced at the officer se
ated to his right. "We should reach Tachylab limits in about thirty minutes, Major. You said there would be a late change in flight plan. Shall I go ahead and dock at Tachylab?"
The major scowled as he fished a document out of his flightsuit breast pocket. "This is your revised flight clearance. Enter the outer approach and radio the change to Tachylab Control—code yellow. We'll rendezvous with two other shuttle vehicles at this location." He tapped a set of figures on the paper. "From there we'll proceed to the assigned destinations."
The lieutenant examined the orders curiously. "The homestead sites? That's private sector."
The major nodded and glanced over his shoulder at the two MPs seated to the rear. "That's right," he said, pulling a notebook from his pocket. "We have some pigeons to snare."
The lieutenant knew better than to ask for elaboration.
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