Well, the experiment had failed; she could not recapture her own faith, but she would insure that other people kept theirs. She would sacrifice herself as Christ had for the sins of the world. There was no heaven at the end of it, but this was how she wanted to die.
She squeezed herself through the crowd, murmuring apologies in her strangely accented Russian, a kind of Russian that wouldn’t be invented, ever, if she could manage it. She wondered if her parents would still be born and meet and have a child and call it Maria. No, too unlikely; if they lived at all, they would meet other people and marry them. Everything would be different. She felt a strange, dark satisfaction in thinking that she would not merely die here in the Kremlin; in some sense, she would never have existed at all.
She had reached the front of the crowd, and stood pressed behind a bulky policeman. Fortunately, when the first gleaming limousine turned in through the Gate of the Savior and slid to a stop before the Duma, the policeman moved a little to get a good view of the notables. On the far side of the car, President Rostoff emerged and turned to wave at the crowd. On this side, a young and apparently nervous security man emerged and glanced briefly at Dyeva’s face. Other security men appeared too, jumping from cars, stepping briskly through the snow.
Rostoff, instead of going inside, crossed behind his own car and came to the crowd, reaching out to shake hands. People were cheering, arms reaching out and waving like limbs at the edge of a forest in a windstorm. From a second limousine, Razumovsky approached, also smiling, but keeping a few steps back to avoid upstaging the President. Dyeva shifted the pistol in the deep pocket of her coat and prepared to fire.
Then a gaggle of odd-looking people ran up, carrying primitive cameras of some sort. A sudden spotlight flashed on the crowd and Dyeva was blinded by the light. The long barrel of the impact pistol slipped through the hole in her coat made by her last shot. Shielding her eyes, she aimed as well as she could at Razumovsky. The little sound Phut! vanished in the roar of the crowd.
But the young security man had spotted the gleam of metal, and without the slightest hesitation he shoved the President the wrong way, into the path of the exploding bullet. Suddenly half of Rostoff’s large body was gone, shredded.
Unaware of the disaster, the security man raised his own right hand, which was holding the newest M91K police automatic, 7.8 mm and loaded with superteflon hollowpoints. The first of six bullets hit Dyeva. They were not impact ammo, but they were sufficient.
She toppled backward, firing a last around that skated upward and blew a meter-wide hole in the marble facing of the new Duma building. The chips were still flying as she hit the snow, feeling nothing but a strange lightness as if she had become a woman of air that would shortly disperse. She looked up into the faces of the security man and Minister Razumovsky as the two bent over her.
But you’re supposed to be dead, she thought. And died.
Razumovsky glared down at her Tartar face.
“The goddamn Chinese did this!” he roared, and turned away.
Half a dozen people in the crowd were down, bleeding and crying for help, because the young security man and the others who had rushed to help him had managed to hit not only Dyeva but everyone near her as well. Razumovsky ignored all that, the screams, the confusion. Roughly he shook off the hands trying to drag him this way or that way to safety. Alone of them all, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.
He plunged into the President’s armored limousine and shouted to the driver, “Get me out of here!”
While the driver, weeping and blinded by tears and lights, tried to find the gate, tried to force a way through the crowd without killing anybody else, Razumovsky took a key from around his neck and drove it into a lock in the back of the front seat. A small steel door fell open and he pulled out a red telephone.
“Razumovsky here!” he roared. “Chinese agents have wounded the President! I relay to you his exact words: ‘We are at war! You will launch now!’ Codeword: Ivan the Terrible.”
He sank back on the upholstery and passed a shaking hand over his squashed-frog face. At least in dying the glupetz Rostoff had inadvertently chosen the right policy—for a change. Had he lived, who could tell what might have happened?
“Goddamn,” said Oleary. “I still can’t believe he managed it, all alone like that.”
The Secret Committee had assembled to hear Yama’s final report on Stef’s mission to the past. Xian, Ugaitish, Hrka, Oleary—they were all there but Kathmann. Except for Xian—who already knew the story—the fromazhi were leaning breathlessly over the gilt Martian table, listening to the story of how their world had been saved.
“Well, here’s the evidence,” said Yama. “First, we recover Stef’s body, dead, obviously shot by a modern weapon, oké? His own gun has been fired once. The world we live in does not vanish, but on the contrary looks as solid as ever, at least to me. Just to eliminate any doubts about what happened, we use the wormholer one more time. We pull back from Moscow, 360th day of 2091, an air sample which is full of intensely radioactive dust and ice particles.
“Now I ask you, Honored Grandees. What can we conclude, except that Stef and Dyeva killed each other, that with his last gasp, so to speak, he signaled us to recover him because his job was done, and that the Time of Troubles proceeded to happen on schedule?”
Xian turned to Yang, standing in the shadows, deference in every line of his big, weak body. “What do you think, Honored Professor?”
“I agree. The evidence is absolutely irrefutable, and I have spent my whole life evaluating evidence.”
“Well, I guess we have to accept it,” fretted Oleary. He still hoped to take back Stef’s million, but he could see that it would be difficult now.
“I am obliged to add,” Yama continued, “that a sealed envelope was found on Steffen’s body containing a note to Solar System Controller Xian.”
He glanced at her and she nodded.
“It reads as follows,” said Yama, spreading a copy on the arm of the shozit.
Facing death, Dyeva states that Kathmann cooperated in the theft of the wormholer. He expected to win promotion by crushing the conspiracy afterward, but Crux was too clever for him. Ever since, he has been desperately trying to wipe out those few who know of his treason.
Steffens Aleksandr
The fromazhi drew a deep collective breath.
“Is it possible?” demanded Ugaitish. “The head of Earth Security? What could he hope to gain from assisting a conspiracy, then destroying it?”
“He told me once,” said Yama, who had been waiting for this moment for many years, “that he dreamed of being Solar System Controller.”
“Honored grandees,” said Xian, “you must know that at first I, too, found this accusation hard to believe. But the evidence is great. The paper, ink and handwriting prove that Steffens wrote this note. In his own defense, Kathmann made the claim that Steffens was seeking revenge because he had been tortured. But Kathmann’s own record of Steffens’s interrogation certifies that the questioning was ‘exceptionally gentle.’ This was a troubling contradiction.
“We all know that Kathmann, in spite of his many virtues, was too zealous, too ambitious. I ordered him to bring me the scientist who stole the wormholer for questioning. The man had been beheaded. That seemed an extremely suspicious circumstance to me. Was Kathmann trying to ensure his silence? All the builders of the wormholer were also dead. I questioned the only two Crux prisoners who were still alive, but they were mere children and knew nothing—which was probably why they had kept their heads.
“In the end, to resolve the matter I ordered Kathmann into the White Chamber. With the needles in his spine, he made a full confession. Every statement made by Steffens in this note is true. Kathmann knew too many state secrets to be permitted to live, and so I had him beheaded.”
She looked around at the others, as if waiting for a challenge. Yama smiled a little. Admiral Hrka remarked that he had never liked the fellow. Aside from that,
Kathmann’s harsh fate produced no comment whatever.
“Is there any other business, then?” asked Xian, preparing to end the meeting.
Yang had been waiting for this moment to step forward from the shadows. “Now that Crux is finished, Honored Grandees,” he said smoothly, “I would suggest going public with the story and making Steffens a hero.
“The heroes we honor all lived a long time ago; they are almost mythic figures—indeed, some of them, like the Yellow Emperor, are entirely myths. But here we have a hero of today, one that people can identify with, one who brings the glory and splendor of the present world order home to the common man. It’s true, of course,” he added, “that certain aspects of Steffens’s life will have to be edited for public consumption. But the same could be said of any other hero of history.”
“Superb,” cried Xian at once, ending any argument before it began. Raising a tiny, thin hand that looked with its many rings like a jeweled spider, she declared: “Steffens will be buried with full honors. Someone with talent will write his biography and Yang will sign it. Scenes from his life will be enacted on every mashina. A great tomb will be built—”
“Honored Solar System Controller,” muttered Yama, “we’ve already cremated the body and disposed of the ashes.”
“What difference does that make? Do you suppose Genghis Khan sleeps in what we call his grave? Now, bistra, bistra!—quick, quick! Get a move on. Remember that heroes are made, not born.”
Professor Yang, smiling over the adoption of his idea, left the cabinet room with Yama.
“In some ways,” he remarked, “the most intriguing supposition is that the world we live in has always been the consequence of the Crux conspiracy and its outcome. Wouldn’t it be interesting, Honored Colonel, if time is, so to speak, absolutely relative—if this episode has been embedded in the past ever since 2091, and all our world is the long-term result of what, from our point of view, has only just happened?”
Yama, hurrying to carry out Xian’s order, paused long enough to stare at Yang.
“What complete nonsense,” he growled.
Pending appointment of a replacement for Kathmann, Yama was combining Earth Central duties with his own. Most of his day was taken up with Stef in one way or another. Yama launched the process of glorification, then carried out a more personal duty: as he’d once promised Stef, he ordered the release of Iris and Ananda from the White Chamber. He did not see the young people, and so never knew that their brief stay beneath the Palace of Justice had turned their hair the same color as the tiled walls of their cells.
Weary and ready to go home, Yama was thinking of Hariko and his children when a piece of copy containing two lines of script was hand-delivered to his desk. Thus he learned that the woman Lata, last survivor of Crux on earth, had been tracked down at a village near Karakorum. She had committed suicide before the polizi and the Darksiders arrived and had left this note.
“It is all over,” she wrote, “and I know it. This world endures as if protected by a god. But what sort of god would protect this world?”
Yama slid the paper into a port of his mashina.
“Copy, file, destroy,” he said.
On the next Great Genghis Day, Government of the Universe Place was crowded with people. From every flagpole hung nine white faux yaktails in honor of the famous Unifier of Humankind. But the event of the day was not honoring Genghis—though President Mobutu burned incense on his grave—but the dedication of Stef’s memorial.
As the veil over the statue fell, Dzhun and Selina stood together looking at an idealized Stef striding ever forward, holding an impact pistol in one hand and a globe symbolizing the world order in the other.
Since Dzhun was only semiliterate, Selina read the epitaph that Yang had composed: “Like the Great Khan in Courage and Like Jesus in Self-Sacrifice.”
“Yang’s been made a grandee, you know,” Dzhun said. “They needed somebody to purge subversives from the University, and he just dropped into the slot. We’re lucky to have him for a customer.”
She had used the million Stef had left her, not to buy a cottage or get an education, but to open her own brothel. She called it House of Timeless Love. With clever Selina to manage it—and to serve a few select customers, such as the now famous, rich and powerful Yang—it had rapidly become the most popular of the newer houses, with capacity crowds every night.
Selina smiled down at her friend and employer.
“Anyway, the statue’s nice. Of course he never walked stiff-legged like that. Stef just lounged around.”
“I think I preferred him as he was,” mused Dzhun. “Alive.”
“You loved him, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. I really don’t know much about love. I know that I love you.”
She and Selina had been sleeping together for years. Sometimes they made love, but sex wasn’t really the point. After the night’s work was done and all the customers were gone, they lay together for comfort, holding each other close.
“Can I ask you something, Dzhun?”
“Anything. Almost anything.”
“How’d you get Stef to leave you all that money? Was it just telling him that you had a senator on the string?”
“That was part of it. But also I made up a sad story about myself and fed it to him. You know, in spite of everything he was sentimental. That’s why he was thrown out of the Security Forces. I was working for the polizi then, keeping them informed about my customers. When I reported that Stef was working on an important secret project, I got a bonus. Kathmann himself told me about Stef’s weakness,” said Dzhun proudly. “Even way back then I had powerful friends, Selina.”
“Tu nespravimy, Dzhun,” said her friend, smiling and shaking her head. “You’re incorrigible.”
“What’s that word mean?”
Selina told her. Dzhun smiled; she liked the sound of it.
“Well, honey, if you ask me, we live in an incorrigible world.”
The Cure for Everything
SEVERNA PARK
Here’s a disturbing look at an all-too-likely future, where, as usual, we don’t know what we’ve got until we’ve lost it … .
New writer Severna Park has sold short fiction to markets such as Event Horizon, Sci Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Black Heart, Ivory Bones. Her critically acclaimed novels include Speaking Dreams, Hand of Prophecy, and The Annunciate; Speaking Dreams and The Annunciate were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Coming up is a sequel to The Annunciate, called Harbingers. She lives in Frederick, Maryland, and maintains a web page at http://users.erols.com/feldsipe/index.htm.
Maria was smoking damp cigarettes with Horace, taking a break in the humid evening, when the truck full of wild jungle Indians arrived from Ipiranga. She heard the truck before she saw it, laboring through the Xingu Forest Preserve.
“Are we expecting someone?” she said to Horace.
Horace shook his head, scratched his thin beard, and squinted into the forest. Diesel fumes drifted with the scent of churned earth and cigarette smoke. The truck revved higher and lumbered through the Xingu Indian Assimilation Center’s main gates.
Except for the details of their face paint, the Indians behind the flatbed’s fenced sides looked the same as all the other new arrivals; tired and scared in their own stoic way, packed together on narrow benches, everyone holding something—a baby, a drum, a cooking pot. Horace waved the driver to the right, down the hill toward Intake. Maria stared at the Indians and they stared back like she was a three-armed sideshow freak.
“Now you’ve scared the crap out of them,” said Horace, who was the director of the Projeto Brasileiro Nacional de Assimilação do Índio. “They’ll think this place is haunted.”
“They should have called ahead,” said Maria. “I’d be out of sight, like a good little ghost.”
Horace ground his cigarette into the thin rainforest soil. “Go on down to the A/V trailer.” he said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of minut
es.” He made an attempt to smooth his rough hair, and started after the truck.
Maria took a last drag on the cigarette and started in the opposite direction, toward the Audio/Visual trailer, where she could monitor what was going on in Intake without being seen. Horace was fluent in the major Amazonian dialects of Tupi-Guaraní, Arawak, and Ge, but Maria had a gut-level understanding that he didn’t. She was the distant voice in his ear, mumbling advice into a microphone as he interviewed tribe after refugee tribe. She was the one picking out the nuances in language, guiding him as he spoke, like a conscience.
Or like a ghost. She glanced over her shoulder, but the truck and the Indians were out of sight. No matter where they were from, the Indians had some idea of how white people and black people looked, but you’d think they’d never seen an albino in their lives. Her strange eyes, her pale, translucent skin over African features. To most of them, she was an unknown and sometimes terrifying magical entity. To her … well … most of them were no more or less polite than anyone she’d ever met stateside.
She stopped to grind her cigarette into the dirt, leaned over to pick up the butt, and listened. Another engine. Not the heavy grind of a truck this time.
She started back toward the gate. In the treetops beyond Xingu’s chain-link fence and scattered asphalt roofs, monkeys screamed and rushed through the branches like a visible wind. Headlights flickered between tree trunks and dense undergrowth and a Jeep lurched out of the forest. Bright red letters were stenciled over its hood: Hiller Project.
Maria waved the driver to a stop. He and his passenger were both wearing bright red jackets, with Hiller Project embroidered over the front pocket. The driver had a broad, almost Mexican face. The passenger was a black guy, deeply blue-black, like he was fresh off the boat from Nigeria. He gave Maria a funny look, but she knew what it was. He’d never seen an albino either.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection Page 38