Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Avram nodded, not knowing what to say as he stared at Luis’s caseful of magic in the trunk.

  “While a hajji,” Luis continued, “the most important papers you carry will be these, Mister Fayez. This is a certificate, in compliance with Saudi embassy guidelines, issued by the imam of your local mosque in Buenos Aires. Here is an additional ID card, issued by your muallim. We’ve had extra photos of you made up, in case you should need them for other Saudi documents, or if you lose your visa, or what have you. These should get you past the checkpoints.”

  Surprise, relief, and caution tugged Avram in different directions even as he stood perfectly still.

  “And then?”

  “Then pray that your studies with Professor Ankawi serve you well. Non-Muslims, discovered to be such while in Mecca, have been ripped to pieces by the Hajj crowds.”

  “That will certainly motivate me to learn all my Hajj prayers.”

  “As it should. You are a devout pilgrim, Mister Fayez, so thoroughly learn the traditions and history of Hajj. Don’t just memorize the prayers, understand their meaning.”

  “I’ll do that. Saudi riyals and American dollars, too, I see. And one credit card?”

  “Only one. In your name, Mister Fayez. Here’s your ihram cloth and instructions for it, along with a variety of Argentinian travel sundries. Also a full travel itinerary, shuttle buses and cabs, with stops outlined for Mina, Muzdalifah, the Plain of Arafat, and Mount of Mercy. You probably won’t get to visit all those sites, but handy for your cover story.”

  “I’m impressed, Luis. Very impressed.”

  “ De nada. You should also pick out the traditional men’s gown, the thawb or dishdasha. You can buy one like any tourist, almost anywhere—and without arousing undue suspicion. You might want to do it before leaving Riyadh.”

  “I will.”

  “One more thing,” Martin said. He took something that looked and buzzed like an electric razor and placed it against the back of Avram’s neck, near the hairline, for just a moment.

  “What was that all about?” Avram asked as they closed the trunk of the car.

  “I just put your implant into a more active mode. My friends under the domes in Tri-Border tell me that it will automatically ramp up four days prior to your target date, by which time you should be on the outskirts of Mecca. When the lowest circular error probability we can achieve indicates you are within ten meters of your target, it will become fully homing-activated.”

  “My target?”

  “Let’s just say I have it on good authority that the men responsible—at the highest levels—for the death of your daughter will be on Hajj this year. In Mecca, when you are in Mecca. You might want to keep that in mind.”

  Before Avram had time to really take that in, Luis was passing on to other subjects.

  “If at any time the implant reads your physical condition as approaching the last extremity, it will step up its activity and go to final phase on its own. A fail-safe mechanism.”

  “Wait! You’re way ahead of me, Luis. How will I even know when it’s time for me to leave Wabar for Mecca?”

  “Professor Ankawi will let you know—and show you the way.”

  “Ankawi?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll see. Farewell, Avram. We’ll be in touch.”

  Only after Luis Martin walked away and Avram was alone in the car did he begin to suspect that there might have been more motives involved in sending him to Riyadh than just his serving as convenient delivery boy for Victor and Yuri. He pondered that possibility on the drive back to the airport to return the car, and while buying a thawb at a tourist shop there.

  He had been thinking about it now for a good part of the return flight too, in Victor’s chartered and expensively modified helicopter, as it headed home to Wabar.

  Out the window, as the helicopter descended in the twilight, Avram at first didn’t recognize the pattern of lights from the yomes and the modular at their Wabar camp. He admonished himself for having been unobservant on previous approaches, but then he saw the rims of the ancient craters and knew that he was right: this was the right place, but the outline of the camp had changed during his absence.

  Another modular building—what he and his colleagues had taken to calling a “modulab”—had been helicoptered onto the site. Getting to be quite a little settlement, way out here. He wondered vaguely if the camp might be visible to satellites from space, should anyone happen to be looking for them.

  As the helicopter settled toward the earth, Avram decided to let other heads worry about that. He wondered who or what the new building might be for, and grew even more curious as he made the short rappel out of the helicopter. As he did the bent-over scurry away from the helo, under its blades, he saw half a dozen men standing at what looked suspiciously like guard positions, around the new modulab.

  Things must indeed be “heating up,” as Luis had put it.

  SIX

  FORCES CONVERGING

  They’d returned to Paul’s compound in Tahoe to find it ablaze with color. The flowers of the late mountain spring—brodiaea, western azalea, monkey flower, fivespot, columbine, Indian pink, phlox, and lupine—bloomed everywhere about the grounds, all bending very quickly toward early summer.

  Michael and Susan were buzzing with what had happened in Montana. The raid on the lab and how Darla Pittman had been caught up in it. The surprising outline Pittman had given them, especially on their second rock-climbing trip, about her own research, with its restriction fragment length-data and crystallographic images of what looked like hyperstable genetic material of otherworldly complexity.

  “She suggested she might be able to learn more about the attack on the tepui,” Susan told Paul almost as soon as they’d dumped their luggage in the entryway, “and pass it on to us.”

  “The prospect of her becoming a real ally, despite all past differences—that might be worth a lot,” Michael said.

  “I’m sure we can trust her,” Susan said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have broadly hinted to her that some of the Mawari might still be alive somewhere.”

  “I think we should consider inviting her out here to Tahoe—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute, both of you,” Paul balked. “I’d love to say ‘Sure, if you think she’s trustworthy, then I raise no objection.’ I can’t do that.”

  “Why not, Uncle Paul? We think she’s on the up and up.”

  “Because no matter how eager I might be to broaden the circle of the trusted, I frankly don’t see what would make Pittman burn her bridges so completely. It’s not like she’d be going into hiding here, now would it? She’d still have her old connections. She might be the perfect plant for people wanting to get in close to the children—for their own reasons. We can’t risk that. Not yet. Invite her for a visit, certainly, but don’t mention the children.”

  Before the day was at an end they had done so, and Darla had agreed, promising to arrive in three days.

  The situation was changing so fast. Michael was surprised by the speed at which things were moving, despite Paul’s caution. Had something happened to make the old guy so circumspect, something he hadn’t told them about?

  Over cocktails that evening, Michael and Susan discovered some of the reason for that change in Paul, at least in regard to what he had learned about Alii, Aubrey, Ebu, and Ka-dalun.

  “Remember what I told you about what Jacinta said? That among the Mawari, language was for children, for only children have need of it?”

  Susan and Michael nodded.

  “They were certainly friendly and talkative enough when we got here this afternoon,” Michael said.

  “In the presence of ordinary adults like us, yes, they communicate on a relatively ordinary level—pretty much what you’d expect for kids their age.”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” Susan asked. “Ordinary, twenty-first-century adults have been their surrogate parents for months now. All creatures react to that sort of nurturing.”

 
“That’s not what I meant. Among themselves these kids seem to be talking less and less, and their normal body language has almost disappeared. Not like they don’t still communicate with one another—they do, and plenty—but that they’re doing it through some other channel.”

  “I know that, after seeing that little levitation trick last time we were here,” Susan said, “I should probably take your word for it. But still, what’s your proof?”

  Paul stared into his martini and sighed.

  “Sometimes of late I’ve felt very strongly that the kids have been ‘beaming’ me—not in dreams, but while we’re all wide-awake. As a playful test of their ‘emergency broadcast system,’ almost.”

  “What’d it feel like?” Michael asked.

  “Nothing very clear, but I got the impression of someone else thinking or dreaming inside my head. Just the way Jacinta said, but not so sharply or distinctly as she experienced it. Afterward I got the sense that the kids were a bit frustrated with me. ‘Poor stupid adults, they just don’t seem to get it.’”

  Paul smiled sheepishly. Michael and Susan laughed.

  “I think that’s generally termed adolescence, “ Michael said.

  “Oh, no! It’s more than that. Stick around and you’ll feel it, too.”

  “Any idea what physiological basis there might be for such paranormal abilities?” Susan asked. “Assuming they’re real?”

  “Only what I’ve been able to glean from Jacinta’s notes and my time with the kids. I think the myconeural complex, and the way it links activities in the raphe nuclei and the pineal gland, in new and unusual ways—that’s what gives them the capability. Remember, those kids are old enough now to be entering puberty. If Jacinta’s notes about the tepui people are correct, development of the myconeural complex must be getting pretty close to complete in them.”

  Susan still wasn’t convinced, but Michael interrupted them with thoughts of his own.

  “Paul, remember when we first brought the kids to you, you asked us if we’d experienced any ‘odd mental phenomena’ while we had the kids in our custody? We didn’t mention it at the time but, before we saw you, Susan and I both talked about some mutual experiences that might fit into that category.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Very detailed, vivid dreams of the massacre at the tepui. Susan and I both had them.”

  “At the time we decided it was just because of the bloody horrors we’d seen there,” Susan said. “I still think that’s the most logical explanation. It’ll have to do, for this late hour of a long day.”

  Michael agreed, but on slipping into bed beside the already sleeping Susan that night, he did not drift off to sleep without a moment of apprehension as to what dreams might come.

  “Yes, they finally fell prey to those tech-specs,” Paul said, gesturing to a pair of augmented reality glasses perched on the edge of a table, the morning of their second day in Tahoe. “Inevitable, I suppose, given their fascination with all things Argus.”

  “Before we went to Montana I saw the kids working with something called ‘Argus Point,’” Michael said.

  “I thought it might be some kind of interactive Web game.

  “It might be,” Paul agreed, “but I can’t say for sure.”

  When Paul asked the kids to explain their fascination with Argus to their aunt Susan and uncle Michael, they at first just showed the three adults some sites that talked about how Zeus sent Hermes to free his beautiful paramour, Io. Zeus had changed her into a beautiful heifer to deceive his jealous wife, Hera, but Hera had managed to take Io captive anyway and place her under the ever-watchful guard of Argus All-Seeing, with his hundred eyes. Hermes, disguised as a simple herdsman, played his panpipes and told the story of how that instrument was created, until disguise, lullaby, and bedtime story put Argus enough at his ease that he shut all his eyes in sleep—at which point Hermes made the shut-eye permanent by killing him.

  Paul asked the Mawari kids several times whether they had found anything linking Argus with meteorites or, more generally, space. The ever more reticent kids at last showed the three of them information on the Argus Radio Telescope at Ohio State University. In science fiction novels featuring endeavors called “Project Argus.” On the SETI League’s actual Project Argus, under which five thousand small, inexpensive, amateur radio telescopes, built and operated by SETI League members throughout the world, were deployed and coordinated to survey the entire sky, real time in all directions, for microwave signals of intelligent extraterrestrial origin.

  In all those contexts the Argus connection made sense, but there was one in which it didn’t seem to apply at all. Argus, the adults learned, was also the name of the only clandestine series of nuclear tests ever conducted by the United States—eighteen hundred kilometers off Cape Town, South Africa, on three different days in late August and early September of 1958. During the tests, each rocket-launched nuclear warhead was detonated at very high altitude.

  Why such nuclear tests might have been named for a many-eyed being for whom sleep was death, the Mawari kids wouldn’t or couldn’t or, at any rate, didn’t say.

  Michael woke to the sound of a knocking at the bedroom door and Susan’s voice calling his name, sounding hushed yet urgent.

  “Wha—?” He had been redreaming the two days since they’d returned to Tahoe and was still groggy enough to be wondering if this was part of his dream, too.

  “Get up, Michael! Paul says we’ve got a problem.”

  Fumbling on a pair of pants and tucking his nightshirt into it, Michael opened the door and saw Susan standing there, in moonlight. There were, in fact, no lights on anywhere except for the dim glow of what looked like airline emergency track-lighting, along the baseboards in the hallway. Michael was surprised he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll let Paul explain. Follow me.”

  The open-floor plan and the numerous windows, which gave the main house such a great view of the lake during the day, meant they were able to navigate the house’s layout by the moonlight alone. As he strode after Susan, Michael was surprised how much detail he could make out, even down to individual small objects, including a pair of ARGUS blinks on a table near one of the windows.

  “In here,” Susan said, snapping him out of his reverie. When they entered, Michael saw Paul sitting before a bank of a dozen closed-circuit TV monitors in what, he now realized, was some kind of safe room. The monitors showed infrared and night-vision images as well as standard video and motion sensor graphics, too. Michael also saw a closed-circuit feed from the kids’ room in the guesthouse. Ka-dalun, Alii, Ebu, and Aubrey all appeared to be asleep.

  “What’s all this tech?” Michael asked.

  “I told you the history,” Paul said. “The first owner here was connected to the Vegas mob, later there was the Godfather-geek surveillance mogul, and then the Chinese diplomat with the big art collection, remember?”

  “So what’s going on now?”

  “Someone cut power to us here,” Paul said, glancing over his shoulder. “The house shifted over to backup generators immediately, thank heavens. Triggered an alarm that woke me up, so I came down here. The power outage isn’t general. Very specifically targeted. Just us—no one else along the shore.

  Then I spotted these.”

  Paul gestured at a screen that refreshed itself at a rapid rate and showed two green dots approaching.

  “What are they?”

  “Boats, approaching at speed from the southeast. The security computer indicates they’re probably Zodiac inflatables, judging from the low radar profiles. Headed toward us. Just before you stepped in, I spotted these others as well.”

  He pointed to a second screen, with its own constellation of dots—three of them. Then he combined the output from the two screens and their course plots. The second group appeared to be on an intercept course with the first.

  “I thought you didn’t have any guards,” Susan said.


  “None on-site tonight,” Paul said, his eyes scanning the banks of monitors, “but I do have some in my employ. They’re on their way; however, we seem to be under someone else’s protection. If that’s what it is.”

  Michael watched the screens.

  “Looks like that first group will reach the shore, here, before the second can intercept them.”

  “Maybe,” Paul said. “We should be able to pick them up on night-vision optics and mikes, now.”

  He flicked a switch. Instantly they heard the night sounds outside. Paul had activated a sensitive directional microphone and was scanning it in an arc across the lake. Over the lap of the waves on the shore and the rush of the breeze in the pines, they heard popping sounds, growing closer, punctuated by an occasional louder whump! and the sound of fountaining water. As the night-vision optics found the scene, Michael saw muzzle flashes and realized after a moment that he had been listening to the sounds of a very mobile firefight, rushing across the lake toward them.

  “Any idea who they are?” he asked. “Or who might be on our side, if this place is the target?”

  “Not a clue.” Paul brought up another screen, on which a dotted line traced a square extending from his boat landing and across the small inlet that was also his property. He clicked on a screen button.

  Something moved on the night-vision screen. After a moment they saw chaos on the water and heard over the speakers a dull crunching sound. One of the two approaching dots flickered.

  “One of the previous owners had an underwater privacy fence installed,” Paul explained. “Its hydraulic stanchions can lift the steel net several feet above the water’s surface—and fast.”

  “Apparently not fast enough,” Susan said. “One of them made it through.”

  “Yes. It’s at the far end of the boat landing.” He brought up a graphical depiction of the landing and pier.

  “Correction. Motion sensors and pressure plates indicate several people on the landing, though I don’t see them. Let’s see if we can’t persuade these invisible folk to stay right where they are.”