Looking for the Mahdi
Page 4
He looked at it, turned it over, then held it back out to me. “It’s unmarked,” he said, as if that explained anything.
“So what? It’s obviously for you, open it.”
Something flickered through his eyes, expressionless and glacial. Totally inhuman. “You are in charge,” he said. “Until the proper documents have been signed and provided to His Excellency, you are still the legal owner of record.”
“Like hell,” I muttered, but took the envelope back anyway. I slid my no-longer-tapered-and-Chrysanthemum-Amethyst-polished fingernail under the flap and tore it open. Inside were several official-type visas and credentials for Khuruchabja, one set for K. B. Sulaiman, GBN Journalist, and another for John Halton, GBN Photographer, as well as a passport card in the name of one John Halton, American citizen. Another was a set of blank Bill of Sale-Transfer of Ownership documents in both English and Arabic, with the particulars to be filled in at a later convenience. No mention of what the specific merchandise might be, of course.
And an unmarked microflake.
“Oh, goody,” I said sourly, holding it up to the light and watching the rainbow colors sparkle through its translucent surface, “now we get to play international smugglers as well as spies.” I slipped the flake back into its holder, and put it in my wallet next to my cherished Visa Express card. “This wasn’t mentioned in the job description. Maybe I’ll just flush the damned thing. I didn’t agree to risk my ass smuggling for Uncle Spam.”
I handed Halton his passport card. “That might create some unpleasant repercussions for you later,” he said absently. He wasn’t being funny. He was holding his forged passport almost warily, examining it with minute care. I paused, watching while he touched the back of the card gingerly, as if he could feel the data stored within it with his fingertips.
“Now you have a valid passport,” I said quietly.
He looked up. “It’s not valid,” he said. “Simply an adequate enough imitation to pass any inspection.”
“What’s the difference?” I snorted.
He looked back down at the card before putting it away in his own wallet. “Everything,” he said in a lifeless voice.
It was an awkward moment, at least for me, as we stood silently, looking at each other. I wavered for a moment, unable to let my guard down even when I wanted to. Finally I gestured with my chin toward the HoloPak equipment. “You know how to use that stuff?” I said gruffly, changing the subject. “All of it?”
We would be traveling as the usual stripped-down field crew; Halton would double as his own sound man, and I would be my own director. Not that we were doing anything more than playacting.
“Yes, pretty much.”
“Fine.” I closed the storage locker, key in the lock, and we walked away, heading back out to the hotel to drop off Halton’s extraneous equipment. “Then I don’t have to waste my time teaching you. Let’s dump this crap.”
We went to his room first. I noticed how abnormally clean it was as he set the equipment down carefully on the hotel’s ersatz Louis XIV desk. Even after the maids get through with a room, there’s usually some indication that there’s someone actually occupying it. The usual accumulation of spare change on the night stand, odds and ends scattered on the bureau, a bathrobe draped on a door hook, an extra pair of shoes sticking out from under the bed, anything.
While Halton busied himself unzipping and reorganizing the HoloPak sections into their proper units, I strolled over to the bathroom door, pulling it ajar with one finger to peek in. In mine, I had toothbrush, toothpaste, mint-flavored waxed floss, hairbrush and comb (superfluous), a brand of men’s cologne I could tolerate as “after-shave,” armpit grease, shampoo and conditioner, nail kit, shaver (also superfluous, but good camouflage), a bottle of “prescription antihistamines,” which would actually harmlessly suppress my menstrual cycle for a few extra weeks, another of real aspirins and a shaker of pink-tinted medicated talcum powder, all spread out over the marble counter with haphazard negligence.
Halton had a single navy blue ditty bag, brand-new, zipped shut and set neatly on the shelf below the spotless mirror.
I took a step back into the room, regarding the pristine bathroom and feeling vaguely affronted. Halton stood watching me. Wordlessly, I crossed to his closet, sliding the doors open. His single suitcase was set neatly on the top shelf, the combination lock reset at 0000. Three dress shirts with ties, a suit jacket, two pairs of pants. All hung with painful precision. Pulling open the drawers, I examined various pairs of socks, rolled immaculately, and several pairs of underwear, as neatly folded as the day they came out of their shrink-wrap package. One impeccably folded sweater. One equally impeccably folded sport shirt. An extra pair of shoes were squarely aligned next to the drawers. I stared at them with a clouded sense of outrage.
I closed the closet doors, scowling, then brushed past Halton to yank open the drawer of his bedside stand. Nothing but the hotel’s usual Interdenominational Spiritual Guide in Seventeen Languages. No pen, no scraps of paper with doodles or numbers scribbled on them, nothing. Halton hadn’t been carrying anything more than his suitcase—no valise, no pocket PC, not even a bookreader. The only personal object in the room was the romance novel, and a borrowed one at that. There was nothing in his room that indicated a human being lived here.
“Is there something I can help you find?” Halton asked.
“Nope,” I said, slamming the drawer shut. “Just snooping.” He had his head tilted as he studied me. “Is it because I’m a fabricant, or are you rude to everyone?” he asked. There was no insult or anger in his voice, only curiosity. But he’d caught me off guard. Whatever vacillation I’d felt vanished.
“You’re a CDI agent,” I snapped. “That’s reason enough.” It was as close to the truth as I cared to go.
“I see.”
I stepped up close to him, having to crane my neck to look up as I stared at him in growing anger. “Do you?” I asked sarcastically. “Do you really? I doubt it.”
His eyes were mild, looking back at me without fear, without reproach, without much of anything, actually. I looked at those innocuous brown eyes and saw nothing in their depths. Just like the room, nobody home. At least he wasn’t smiling that goddamned pretentious smile.
My hands had balled into fists, and I was shaking with a nameless, irrational rage. Thinking I’d fly apart if I didn’t get the hell out of there, I stalked over to the connecting door and slammed it behind me as I entered my own messy, very humanly disheveled room.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ,” I breathed to myself, “pull it together, girl…” I was sweating, prickly heat and adrenaline trembles making my head throb. I sucked in several deep breaths before I could trust my fingers to handle a fragile cigarette. “Pull it together…”
If I lost my temper this early in the game, what would happen by the time we landed in Khuruchabja?
FOUR
* * *
Idon’t know what Halton did for the rest of the afternoon, but I ended up prowling the length of the Station arch, already feeling cabin-feverish. There was only a moment of embarrassment; I stopped to look at a display of ladies summer fashions in a shop window with a bit more interest than most men might exhibit. The clothes had a nice cut. The tailoring, I thought, might make me look a bit more tall and svelte, if you can imagine a tall, svelte toad. A passing salesclerk glanced out at me with a strange expression that jerked me back into my adopted persona. Besides, I’m an autumn person, and they didn’t have a thing in my colors.
By evening, I’d walked out my jitters, gotten my head back on relatively straight, started thinking about what the hell I was going to do for the next five days before we headed for fun and sun in Khuruchabja.
I went back to the hotel room to change into some decent clothes for dinner. It had been a long time since I had masqueraded as a man, and my reflexes were still very much in female mode. To most women, men’s clothes look comfortably simple, almost bland when com
pared to strapless pouf dresses and high-heeled shoes. But there’s a style and specific manner to men’s wear that is nearly as complicated as women’s, if more subtle. Halton knocked on my front door as I was struggling with the snaplinks on my dress shirt.
“Open,” I called out, knowing if it wasn’t him, it certainly wasn’t someone I was going to be able to keep out anyway.
“Have you had dinner?” he asked. He gave no indication that the earlier unpleasantness had ever occurred.
“No,” I said, and the snaplink popped off. “Goddamn it, help me with this thing.” I shoved my sleeve out at him as he retrieved the fallen link off the carpet. As he slipped it into place through the fabric, I asked, “You?”
“Not yet.” The snap clicked securely.
“Thanks.” I looked at him as I shrugged into a dinner jacket. He simply waited. I shoved my hands into my pants pockets and sighed. “So let’s go eat something. I saw a place up the main arch seemed like it had a decent menu.”
Actually, it hadn’t looked all that wonderful, but I hate eating in hotel restaurants all the time. If I was going to be stuck here another five days, I might as well check out the competition. The wine list was pretentious, entirely French and atrociously overpriced, but so long as Halton’s playmates were picking up the tab, who cared? I don’t even remember what I ate; it was neither bad enough nor good enough to be memorable.
For the most part, our initial conversation stayed in the safe zone with Halton asking benign questions and me telling the usual amusing Press Club anecdotes I’d garnered for just such mindless activity. But somewhere between the main course and the cheese, Halton put his wineglass back on the table with the same precision with which he folded his socks.
“It has puzzled me,” he said, both voice and eyes level, “why you haven’t asked me more questions. About myself. You certainly seem to have some strong feelings about fabricants, but I would have thought a journalist would have had more curiosity.”
I was pleased that I had walked out the major part of my tension and hostility that afternoon, and easily kept my ternper under control. Truth was, I was angry at being forced to return to Khuruchabja, angry with CDI and Arlando both, but most of all I was scared pissless. Not that I’d admit it to anyone, especially not Halton.
Of course, I was curious; not many civilians had ever seen a fabricant, never mind having dinner with one. Some people still believed they were an elaborate hoax, like the moon landing had been a sham filmed somewhere in the Arizona desert. But I’d read the investigative reports and the Congressional hearings transcripts. I damn well knew there was a listing for fabricants in the U.S. Military’s secret mailorder catalog, under Weapons, Biological.
I finished chewing whatever delicacy we were sampling before I spoke. “Being lied to annoys me,” I said in a reasonable tone. “So why bother? What are you going to tell me that I can’t look up in Jane’s, or get out of the Government information service? I’m doing my best to take notes, and I’m sure there’s far more to you than the approved official literature covers. But would you really tell me something they won’t? Any juicy classified confidential secrets I could ferret out?”
“Is it really the same thing reading a manual about a new military fighter as it is to see it up close, interview the pilots, try to talk your way into a personal flight?” he countered.
I held up my butter knife, conceding the point. “Touché.” I thought for a moment, then grinned wickedly. “Okay… so tell me something about your love life.”
He blinked, probably the closest he got to an offended expression. “What would you like to know about it?” Cool, real cool. Imperturbable.
“You a virgin?”
“No.” He paused. “Are you?”
I laughed. “No. Believe it or not, there are men out there who get off on fucking really ugly women. Make porno magazines, even, find them right between the animal sex and transvestite bondage issues.” He didn’t seem to find that funny. He didn’t seem to find much of anything funny. “So—” I lobbed the conversation back into his court. “You got a regular girlfriend, or do fabricants just indulge in mindless orgies with each other?”
He leaned back in his chair, scrutinizing me as if trying to come up with the correct answer to give his college biology professor.
“I don’t know about other fabricants,” he said slowly. “My sexual experience has been limited to human beings. There are also, it seems, women who get off on fucking fabricants. I wouldn’t know if there are any porno magazines made about it.” His voice was calm. I was the one blinking with astonishment. He smiled, that ghastly little smile. “I’ve been told I’m a fairly decent ‘lay,’ however. One woman called me a miracle of modern science, technology’s most advanced dildo.”
“Jesus,” I said, shocked.
His expression didn’t change as he said, “It doesn’t bother me. I’m used to cruelty.” He looked down to pick up his wineglass, sipped, and resumed eating his dinner as if this conversation had never happened.
My face burned with sudden shame, chagrined by my own malice glaringly mirrored in the casual heartlessness of that unknown woman. His hand rested on the table and I reached out to cover it with my own. “I’m sorry, that was mean.” Apologizing to your microwave oven, Kay Bee? Maybe…
He froze, studying my hand for a moment. I had to make an effort to keep it there. Then he turned it over, placing his palm against mine. He inhaled, and looked up, appearing more human than I’d seen him before.
“No apology is necessary. I offered to answer questions, and that one certainly wouldn’t be in the official Government guidebook.” He smiled, this time a warm, seemingly genuine smile. “It didn’t hurt my feelings. And yes, I do have feelings, and they can be hurt.”
I felt a strange rush of emotions—guilt, anger, resentment, fear—all swirled up in a nebulous cloud of forlorn desire. At that moment, another couple walked by our table, the woman’s odd glance reminding me that two men don’t generally hold hands in public. I carefully extracted mine.
“I would have thought the Government wonderboys would have designed a homo fraudulentus without emotions, all that sentimental stuff mucking up analytical thought.” I tried to keep from sounding sarcastic, to show I was actually capable of discussing the subject without being confrontational.
“I don’t think the designers would want to, even if they could, which I doubt,” he said. We slipped into the dialogue with no more awkwardness than we would have discussing account ledgers. “Fabricants aren’t mechanical androids or AI computers; they’re a biological construct. The DNA may be off-the-shelf recombinant configurations, but the matrix into which the structure is programmed is based on the fundamental human mold. Fabricant bodies, including the brain, are structurally equivalent to humans. They have a normal cerebrum, cerebellum, limbic system, hypothalamus, pons, medulla, everything that goes into constructing an integrated working brain.”
I noticed that he repeatedly referred to fabricants as “they” rather than “we,” an interesting observation I kept to myself.
“Nature has had millions of years in which to perfect the human machine, and fabricant brains are simply a variant on the model,” he went on. “A fabricant medulla functions to keep my heart beating and my lungs working in exactly the same way as your natural human medulla does for you.”
“Exactly.” My doubt was obvious.
“For the most part, yes. There aren’t too many alterations or additions that can be made on the basic model without ultimately impairing the essential functions. In order for fabricant brains to work properly, each part must be able to perform its assorted tasks in synch with every other part. For me to respond to a danger stimulus, my body temperature must rise, my heartbeat speed up, adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream. In other words, I must be able to feel fear.”
“Your basic ‘fight or flight,’” I agreed. “But what about things like morality, aesthetic appreciation, spirituality?”
It was a strange conversation, very civil in an elegant atmosphere. Other conversations buzzed around us at nearby tables, high-powered businessmen, with frowns and heads bent over pocket PC’s; rich kids in their stylish clothes holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes through the candlelight. We looked like any other normal dining duet chatting, although I doubt anyone else was discussing a subject matter both as esoteric and personal as this.
“My specialization is as a linguist, just to use my particular design again as an example,” Halton continued, using the correct fork and knife on his entreé. “My brain has been specifically tailored to facilitate an increased capability for languages. Most human language and speech centers are predominantly left-hemisphere; both my hemispheres have multiple, integrated speech and language centers. In human brains, the neurochemical secretion which stimulates these speech centers and aids young children in imitating sounds, learning a language fluently without an accent, begins to disappear by about the age of five or six. In mine, it never will.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
He looked at me thoughtfully, not as if he had to stop and count, but as if reluctant to boast about himself at the cost of my feelings. “Not counting differences in regional dialects or accents, twenty-seven.”
“Shit.” I couldn’t help it, I was both jealous and astounded. “All perfect, no doubt?”
He didn’t answer that. “The point I was leading up to,” he said, addressing his plate, “is that if you fiddle with the design in one area, there may be other changes along the chains of integration. Do fabricants feel the same emotions in the same way that humans do? I don’t know. Their brains are different; it’s possible that the way they interpret emotions is different as well. One side effect of my language capability is that I don’t have a dominant hemisphere. I’m truly ambidextrous. That in itself has no particular significance, but I believe the designers themselves don’t know to the last detail what effects other alterations might ultimately have.”