Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  The chopper came down to the ground and the yelling gringos ran around them. She couldn’t feel their minds, couldn’t see inside them, because they had no love that she could touch. They were red clouds of evil, red shadow men. All she could see was what they did.

  They struck Sax with a gun when he wouldn’t drop her on the ground. She felt the spinning dimness in his head. They put cruel irons on his wrists, and cursed him with ugly gringo words and dragged him into the chopper. It roared into the air, and she lost him in the redness when they carried him away.

  They had no irons small enough for her, but they cut pieces of the rope to tie her ankles and her arms. They threw her on the ground and pointed guns at her head and let her gasp for air in the foul hot wind of the machine while they waited for another machine. They wanted to keep her far from Sax.

  When the chopper came, they threw her on its rough floor and carried her back across the fence, to a place near the terrible polvo, the dust that had killed Vic and the whole city called Enfield. There they took away the dress Panchito had found for her—torn to rags now. They laid her on a hard table in a tiny, white-walled room. They found irons to fit and locked them on her ankles and her wrists to keep her there, lying naked under a hot glare of light.

  A dull-red danger-cloud hung in one high corner of the room. It was behind her head, where perhaps they hoped she wouldn’t see it. It was thick and cold and evil. When she searched inside the cloud, she found a gun barrel jutting through the wall. Beyond it, she discovered another tiny room, clogged with thicker fog. Two men stood behind the ugly killing machine, watching her through mirrors in the wall.

  In spite of all the red-feeling badness, she felt sorry for some of the men around her in the room, because they were afraid. She felt them shiver when they had to touch her, heard the quivering in their voices, felt the chill of fear deep inside their shadow-shapes. Afraid of her, they thought she might bring them the deadly polvo to kindle its killing fire again and turn them all to crumbling dust.

  She wanted them to know she would never hurt them. All she knew about the dust was the terror she had seen and heard and shared. Killing the dear Vic, the dust had hurt her terribly. She knew no way to start it or stop it. Yet she didn’t speak, even now when she could breathe, because she was afraid for them to know she could talk- They would want her to tell them how Vic had made her in the lab and what he wanted her to be.

  They would kill her and Sax and el pobre Panchito when they had learned what they wanted to know. She kept silent, lying still in the irons, but nothing could keep the red haze of danger out of the room, or shut out the red shadow men. They had rough hands and ugly voices and no faces, and they came to do ugly things.

  They weighed her and measured her. They pushed cold instruments into her and stuck cold electrodes to her body. They stabbed her with sharp needles to take her blood. They took pictures with flashing light and stinging rays that burned through her body. They shouted hateful questions at her. Cruelly, they tricked her. There was a woman who came to clean the floor One night she stopped to whisper: “Ah, niñita! Una palabra de su amigo, Pancho Torres. El tiene enfermedad. Quiero saber lo qué pasa para usted.”

  Panchito ill, begging for news of her.

  “El pobre!” She felt the badness in the room, but Panchito lay somewhere in dreadful pain and the woman was not a gringo. “Dele todo mi cariño. Give him my love.”

  “Si! Si! Pronto!”

  The woman hurried out, and the red shadow men burst in. Shouting curses in their ugly gringo language and curses in their awkward Spanish, they brought machines to catch her words and tried to make her speak again. One of them slapped her.

  “Okay, baby!” He slapped her again. “You habla hey? Habla plenty spic to your sick spic friend? Now you’re gonna habla to us. Before I’m through, you’ll be begging us to let you habla more.”

  Trembling, she shrank from his hands.

  “If you want me to talk—” She had to search for his gringo words. “Bring my friends to me. El Señor Torres and El Doctor Belcraft. Let me see them well and free where you can’t hurt them. Then hablémos. Then we speak.”

  “Fat chance, baby!” His hands began to hurt. “Your friend Señor Torres, he ain’t in no shape to go anywhere at all. Except maybe to the morgue, where his dirty carcass ought to be. Your pal Belcraft won’t be no better off, not unless you habla mucho.” He hurt her more. “Savvy that?”

  He kept on hurting her, till another gringo voice called him out of the little room. She was alone for a time, enduring her pain. Then another, smaller shadow man came where he could see her through the door. He stayed back from her because he was afraid.

  “You there! Hear this!” He spoke from the doorway, his voice a brittle rasp and his quick gringo words hard for her to understand. “Along with your fellow conspirators, Belcraft and Torres, you are now in the custody of Task Force Watchdog, which is a special agency of the United States of America. Our actions are fully supported by armed forces and the President, and you have no right of appeal. Got that?”

  She lay still.

  “I am Peter Kalenka, recently commissioned a major in the United States Army, now commanding the special science force investigating the Enfield plague. You are now the focus of our inquiry. We want certain information from you. I expect cooperation. We do not intend to cause you needless suffering, but I want you to understand your own situation.

  “Here in our custody, you have no rights. We have obtained a summary opinion from the Supreme Court that you are not a human being. Rather, in the judgment of the court, you are a laboratory specimen to be used as we see fit. I am warning you not to expect aid or legal intervention, from any source whatever.

  “Understand?”

  The long gringo words seemed cold and cruel as his sharp voice was. They carried nothing she wanted to understand. She withdrew into herself.

  “We know you were named Alphamega. We know you are a nonhuman genetic artifact, engineered in the EnGene Labs by Dr. Victor Belcraft. We have abundant reason to believe that his insane experiments resulted in the plague that killed your criminal creators, along with many thousand innocent human beings.

  “What we require from you is everything you know about the men and the processes that created you, everything you know about the history and the purposes of the EnGene labs, everything you know about the incidents that resulted in the plague. In particular, we must ask what you are.

  “Do you hear that?”

  She lay quiet, and his voice rose higher.

  “We require your own complete definition of yourself. You will assist our team of experts in a complete scientific analysis of your biological and psychological nature. You will have to answer all our questions about the purposes and the processes of your creation. You will describe your powers of perception and action, which appear to be extraordinary.

  “Our study of the catastrophe has a top priority. We require everything you know about the origin and the biological nature of the lethal agency—if the thing is biological. Was it designed for warfare? Was its release a tragic accident? A deliberate act? By whom? This Belcraft? Or who else? With what motivation?”

  He stepped farther back.

  “Or are you yourself the killer?” She felt his fear surge higher. “Murdering your own creators? Are you in fact at war with mankind? Do you threaten that you will start a new contagion to escape our inquiries?

  “Speak to me!”

  “Puedo hablar.” Her voice came thin and small. “Pero yo no sé—” She felt his puzzlement and stopped to grope for the gringo words. “I don’t know all you want, but I will tell you what I can. But not till I know my friends are safe. El Señor Torres y el Doctor Belcraft. They must be free.”

  “Impossible!” Perhaps he saw her flinch. His tone grew calmer. “I’ll be honest, because we will require total honesty from you. Regardless of any legal rights they may claim, or any appeals for clemency, Belcraft and Torres can never be li
berated. That’s because of what they may know. Understand?”

  “No entiendo.”

  “You had better understand. Our mission is to see that the Enfield disaster doesn’t happen again. Its origin and nature are still unknown. We expect information from you. We also require Belcraft and Torres to reveal whatever facts they may have learned from you. We can never tolerate the risk that their liberation might lead to some recurrence of the plague. However—”

  His red shadow came a little closer.

  “Whatever you may be, we are not inhuman.” He tried to soften his voice. “We can make concessions. You will want food and water and rest. So will your friends. Torres will continue to need medical attention —his condition is reported critical, from an infection in his shattered knee. If you will help us, honestly and fully, we’ll do all we can for them and for you.

  “Fair enough?”

  “Not fair—” The whisper took all her nerve. “Not fair!”

  “If you won’t talk—” His voice came low and slow. I’m sorry for you. Sorry for them. You must cooperate.”

  “Nunca! Never! Not till they are free!”

  “Means exist.” He drew back to look at the shadow men waiting behind him. “Means to make you tell us all you know. Ugly means! I don’t like them or those who use them, but we are driven by imperative necessity. You will talk. When you are ready, just call for me. Ask for Peter. Dr. Peter Kalenka. Don’t forget.”

  Then he was gone.

  “Okay, baby!” The shadow man who had hurt her was back in the room, a huge red cloud-man with those terrible hands and a face she couldn’t bear to see. “You and I, baby—we’ve got a game to play.” His thick gringo laugh rolled like dull thunder in the red-blazing cloud. “When you want to admit I’ve won the game, you can yell for Dr. Peter. That is, if you’re still able to yell for anybody.”

  When she couldn’t bear what he had begun to do, she left herself and reached away for Sax. She found him in a room with no windows, and iron bars to make the door. Two guards with guns stood outside the door. Breathing very slowly, el pobre Sax lay flat on a narrow bed with irons on his wrists to hold him there. Reaching, she couldn’t touch his mind. A tight bandage was wrapped around his head, and all she could feel was his pain.

  She left him and reached out again. She found Panchito in another strange bed-machine. He wore no irons, but two shadow men with long guns watched from the end of the room. His hurt leg was wrapped in white and lifted high. Bottles and plastic bags hung above him. Tubes ran down to needles in his arms, and a nurse stood watching green symbols winking on strange instruments above his head.

  He lay breathing hard through tubes that ran into his nose. She felt the dead ache in his leg. Reaching deeper, she touched his sleeping mind. He was dreaming. Dreaming of her. He didn’t know about the hoyo or Sax or the shadow men. He thought she had been hiding in the thickets near his home. In the dream his wounded leg had healed. When the pain still came, he thought un avispo had stung it.

  He thought she was hiding in the brush, with the gringos hunting her. He found her and carried her in his arms to an avión. The gringos came yelling to hurt them, but the strange flying machine lifted them safely away and far across vaster lands than she had ever imagined, over wide green fields and places of dry brown flatness and long dry brown mountain ridges, to the dear little town that once had been Panchito’s home.

  The gringos were left far behind, and his fat little mother came running out of the little mud house to meet him, still patting out a tortilla between her quick brown hands. Estrella and Roberto ran after her, fat little Jose toddling behind, all of them wide-eyed and screaming with joy. He held her in arms and told them she had come to be their new sister, nuestra hermanita Meg, and then they were all happy together.

  New pain broke Panchito’s dream, and she found two doctors in white jackets in the room. No red badness wrapped them because they had come to help, not to harm. Yet one was doing things that hurt Panchito’s wounded leg. She tried to feel the meaning of his hard gringo words.

  “—desperate to save him.” He spoke to the younger doctor. “Afraid they started too late. Shattered patella. Staph infection in the lesion, neglected far too long. Now we’ve got a bad reaction to one of the antibiotics, running into anaphylactic shock. Prognosis not good.”

  She tried to reach Panchito again, but all she found was the dead ache in his hurt leg. When she went back to her own poor body, lying where she had left it, the cruel shadow man had gone away. Her hurt body needed her, and she stayed, trying to heal the terrible harm his bad hands had done.

  A long time later, the Dr. Kalenka came back to feel her body and study it with his cold bright instruments. A nurse took blood. A young man came pushing a machine on wheels. It had wires ending in cold, sticky patches that he fastened to her body and her arms and her ankles. They all stood frowning at dim-winking dials.

  “That animal Harris!” Love shone out of the angry nurse. “He left her a mess!”

  “I thought she was dead.” Kalenka bent to feel her wrist. “Any human would be. Even she’s close to it, with that EKG. But now the vital signs are coming back in a way I never expected.”

  The nurse asked a question.

  “I’ll keep him out for now.”

  “Just for now?”

  Love had flickered in him, but now the redness washed it out. “An ugly business, but necessary. If she lives, we’ll have to let him back.” He moved toward the door and turned to speak again. “Watch her. No drugs. No IV. Nothing. We don’t know what might help or what might finish killing her. Just chart everything.”

  When her body had healed enough to let her leave it again, she reached for Sax. He lay the way he had been, the thick bandage on his head and the irons on his wrists and a needle in his arm. His breath was raspy and slow, and all she could feel was dull throb of hurt.

  Reaching for Panchito, she felt nothing at all. He lay very still. His breathing had ceased. A nurse stood staring at the green-glowing dials. Their winking had stopped. A man in white was bending to open one of his eyes and shine a light into it. He turned to snap at the nurse.

  “Get Kalenka! I’ve got to tell him his prisoner is dead.”

  29

  “Billion

  Dollar

  Beauty!”

  Scorpio had come to the EnGene labs as Herman Doerr, a rootless Vietnam veteran, fond of weapons and outdoor life. Employed as a guard, he moved into a rundown farmhouse just outside the city limits, far from any neighbors. Developing contacts, he became a frequent host for the weekend beer and poker parties of the plant security force.

  His target was Arny Carboni, chief of the computer staff and likely to have good access to research secrets. Arny proved difficult. He didn’t play poker. He didn’t drink beer. He displayed interest in little besides his computers. When Scorpio got to him, it was through another guard, whom he knew as Sam Holliday.

  Holliday was a mild-mannered young man with pale blue eyes and straw-colored hair. Playing amateurish poker, always astonished at his own bad luck, he commonly lost enough to keep himself welcome at the parties. Better with computers than he was with cards, he shared hacker lore with Carboni and struck up an apparent friendship.

  Cultivating him, Scorpio began offering bits of advice on poker play. Holliday seemed grateful. He admitted his lack of skill. Trying to improve his game, he was writing a computer program to play draw poker. He asked for rules of strategy he could build into the game.

  Scorpio gave him hints, tutored him through practice sessions at the computer, lent him money when he lost at the weekend games. When he held several hundred dollars of Holliday’s IOUs, he told his cover story that he was actually a private investigator employed by Global Pharmaceuticals to obtain whatever trade secrets he could. He offered to pay for any clues Holliday could pick up from Carboni.

  Angry at first, Holliday soon agreed to go along. He got to Carboni, who began selling teasing bits of informat
ion, always wanting higher prices. With funds enough from Ostrov, Scorpio kept on paying. Carboni copied Belcraft’s lab notes, fed him fragments enough to let him know they were priceless—and finally made his own impossible demand.

  Freedom for his father, the dissident Alyoshka. Impossible. Alyoshka had vanished from the media. Carboni feared that he was dead. Scorpio promised to have him released alive from wherever he was under treatment or detention, but promises weren’t enough. Carboni held out for a meeting with him, arriving with his wife and daughter in some safe haven.

  Playing the tradecraft game, Scorpio probed for weak points and offered larger and larger bribes. More and more suspicious, Carboni refused to settle for anything except his living father. Scorpio searched his house, bugged it, set traps for possible confederates. All failed. Under pressure from Ostrov and the Center, he grew desperate.

  One of his bugs had been planted in Carboni’s phone, set to ring his own phone when Carboni lifted the receiver. Late on the last night of Enfield, it jarred him out of sleep.

  “Holliday? Arny speaking.” Carboni was breathing fast, his high voice squeaky with tension. “Hate to wake you, but I think EnGene’s about to pop.”

  Holliday’s voice tried to ask some questions, but Carboni rushed on, not listening.

  “Likely some genetic hell let loose. How or why, I don’t know. Got just enough to frighten me. A damned odd phone call from Belcraft to his brother and another to his girl that scared the panties off her. Could be a false alarm, but I’m afraid to stay in town. You know I never learned to drive. Can you pick me up? The sooner the safer!”

  Holliday promised to pick him up.

  “Don’t talk,” he added. “Not to anybody! If nothing actually happens, you can imagine the trouble for us.”

  Scorpio got to Carboni’s ahead of Holliday. The door stood open. He burst in without knocking, to demand the photocopies of the research files. Carboni was white-faced and shaking, but he sneered defiantly, pointing to ashes smoking on the fireplace hearth.