Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

Steward hesitated for a moment, feeling a wave of coolness moving through his nerves. He looked at the carnival, the flags. The colors and the sky seemed different, as if a cloud had passed across the sun. There was a sense of motion inside himself, a movement like a thrown switch, that suddenly he was on a different side of things, as if he’d crossed a bridge without knowing it.

  “I’ll carry your package,” he said.

  Griffith dropped his cigarette, stepped on it. “Good,” he said.

  “I want something else, Griffith.”

  The other man didn’t look at him. Just stood with his hands in his jeans, watching the glass urban horizon, the mirrors that reflected the scarred sky. He was making Steward say it.

  “Sheol. I want Sheol.”

  A shudder moved through Griffith at Steward’s words. As if they hurt him, somehow.

  “Yeah,” Griffith said. “I knew you’d say that.”

  Steward’s mouth was suddenly dry. He tried to summon saliva, failed, spoke thickly. “What’s your answer?”

  Griffith was still looking away. “Tomorrow,” he said. “When I give you the package.”

  Relief flooded Steward’s limbs. He could feel himself getting closer.

  “I need to know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Griffith looked down at the grass beneath his feet. “No you’re not,” he said.

  Steward reached in his shirt pocket for a Xanadu. He wanted this high to last awhile.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not sorry in the least.”

  *

  Steward was on the roof of Ardala’s condeco. It was late at night. Grass-colored carpet, stretched over concrete, scraped against his feet. The open deck was lit by the fluttering blue-and-gold radiance of the swimming pool and by colored spots planted behind metal tubs that held scentless bushes.

  Sweat dripped on the carpet. Steward punched forward, repeating the movements over and over, trying to achieve a perfection in his balance, the slick flow of his muscles, the rhythm of heart and breath, his concentration perfect on the invisible target before him, the phantom objective toward which he directed his controlled violence.

  He came here often, usually at night, for the long solitary workouts. In the daytime there were too many people, too many distractions, too many disturbed looks. At night there was just the darkness, the nuclear blue glow of the pool, the cold distant hum of the city.

  Steward began alternating his punches with kicks. He was full of adrenaline, but he’d been drinking earlier with Ardala and was on the edge of a sugar crash. The result was a strange, disturbing high in which he felt perpetually on the edge of losing control, adrenaline battling insulin for command of his body. The feeling was unsettling but exhilarating, a perpetual fight for possession of his own actions, something like he’d felt when he’d been peddling wetware from his moped and didn’t know whether his customer would pay him with a hot credit spike or a knife, when his arms and legs were trembling with the urge to run but he’d just given the boy a smile from behind the comfort of his shades and asked him if he’d had any money down on the jai alai….

  Colors began to flicker at the edge of his vision. The sugar crash was coming in like the shock wave off the ablative nose of a commercial shuttle. Steward decided to face it, ride the shock wave to a last attempt at Zen, at perfection. He set himself, balanced forward, leaning toward the target. His knee cocked up, his foot thrust out, his balance going forward as the kick delivered, as one arm punched forward, withdrew as the other arm drove his power through the target, the target that seemed, for a fractional hallucinatory moment, to bleed like a torn artery at the dark edges of the swaying earth, and then the crash moved through him and the glider swung out of control, spiraling down into the darkness of the dream. As it spun, Steward laughed.

  He was there. At the center.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  L.A. Night. Steward looked down from the window of his descending aircraft and saw a web of Earthbound stars that marched from the mountains right into the rising ocean, stars that blurred with heat shimmer and promise.

  The plane began to buffet as its plastic and alloy skin changed configuration, braking from supersonic to landing-approach speed. Below, Steward could feel Los Angeles reaching up for him with mirrored fingers.

  He smiled. At home, though he’d never been here before.

  *

  Steward put the package in his pocket. He was to deliver it to Spassky in LA tomorrow evening.

  “Beer in the refrigerator,” Griffith said. “Make yourself at home.”

  Lightsource’s apartment in Flagstaff was furnished in a utilitarian way, very like a hotel room: bed, sturdy chairs, video, refrigerator, cooking range—just like a hundred other apartments in the same building, most owned by corporations. Steward sat on one of the chairs. He felt scratchy brown fabric against the backs of his arms.

  Griffith stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared into the bathroom. Steward watched a silent vodka ad on the vid. The vodka was photographed so that it looked like liquid chrome. Griffith reappeared after running the sink for a while. The Welshman took a Negra Modelo longneck from the kitchenette refrigerator and twisted off the foil top. “Want some?” he asked.

  Steward shook his head. He watched as Griffith walked to a cloth-covered chair placed next to the vid. He sat down, sipping at his dark Mexican beer.

  Steward took a breath. “Tell me about Sheol,” he said.

  Griffith looked at him for a long moment. “I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “You know that.”

  “You said you would.” Steward felt a kind of pressure on his neck, like a brush of wind from distant exploding stars. “I need to know what it did to—to the Captain. What I became, out there.”

  Griffith looked away. “I know. I wasn’t trying to weasel out. I was just telling you this was going to be hard.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  Griffith’s voice was low. The words came slowly. “I don’t think you can know. Even if I tell you. It was just…not a thing you can understand secondhand.”

  Steward just watched him. On the vid, a small child was choking on a piece of food at a birthday party. Adults moved in silent, screaming panic; other children were crying. Colors from the silent drama bled over Griffith’s face. Without looking up, Griffith flung an arm up and snapped off the picture. He looked up. He was pale. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Steward waited. Saying nothing.

  “First thing to realize,” Griffith said, “is that the psychological dimension isn’t all there is. It’s not just a matter of forgetting, or learning to adjust. I got married when I came home. She was a nice lady. Had herself, her life the way she wanted it. Knew where she was going. We tried to have kids, and each time it was a miscarriage…and that turned out to be lucky, because they were all monsters. My genes are all screwed up. From what happened out there. There were biological and chemical weapons that fucked with chromosomes. A lot of the medicines we took with us were experimental Coherent Light pharmaceuticals, and the manuals that gave the dosages were just guessing. Some didn’t work, some had side effects. Some broke chromosomes. Coherent Light didn’t care. The Icehawks were an experiment, too, and even if we failed, we’d generate some interesting data.”

  Griffith put a hand on his chest. “I’m marked, wherever I go, by what happened on Sheol. Not just in my mind, but on the microscopic level, in the little bits of DNA that made me. Poisoned. I could die of some new kind of cancer, and that would be Sheol. Or some kind of chemical I’d breathed in years ago could strip the myelin sheathing from my nerves, and I’d be crippled. That would be Sheol, too. It’s happened to other survivors. Like we’re all carrying little time bombs inside us.” Griffith was sweating. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That’s something I can’t forget, that I’m carrying those little bombs. And the bombs keep reminding me of everything else.” He looked up at Steward. “You’re lucky, you know? You don�
�t have that stuff in your body.”

  “Can’t you get a new one?”

  “I didn’t buy the clone insurance, the way you did. I didn’t have family. I just took my hazardous duty bonus and had a big party the week before we took off. And now I can’t afford a new body.” Griffith looked at him. “You knew that,” he said.

  Steward pointed a finger at his temple. “Not this memory. These are old recordings.”

  Griffith breathed out, a harsh sigh. “Yeah. I keep forgetting. That you’re so much younger than I am. Even if you were born before me.”

  *

  Ardala leaned back on pillows. She was wearing a white T-shirt, smoking a Xanadu. Guys was open, lying unread on her stomach. “Two thousand Starbright,” she said. “Not bad for a day’s work.”

  “Not bad,” Steward agreed. He had one of her cram books open in front of him, but he hadn’t looked at it in a while.

  Ardala drew up a leg, scratched a bare calf. “I assume this is against the law.”

  “It isn’t. I used your comp and checked the library.”

  “If it isn’t illegal, then it’s dangerous.”

  Steward frowned. “Maybe so. Griffith says not.”

  Ardala handed Steward the Xanadu. He inhaled. “How well do you know Griffith?” she asked.

  “At one time, very well.”

  She sat up, leaned toward him, propping her elbows on her knees. “He’s changed a lot. You said so.”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s dangerous.”

  Steward shrugged and handed the cigarette back to Ardala. She looked at it in her hand and ignored it. “What was the company he worked for?”

  “Lightsource, Limited.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know it, but I’ll check my files. I should be able to find out something about it.”

  Steward shrugged again. Ardala’s green eyes narrowed. “You act,” she said, “as if you don’t care whether or not your old friend is going to fuck you over.”

  “He’s giving me something else I want.”

  She put the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, made a face at the discovery that it had gone out. She dropped it in an ashtray. “He’s giving you a chance to get into space, right? Money? Lotta good it’ll do if you’re dead.”

  He looked at her. “Sheol,” he said.

  The word seemed to hang in the air for a long moment, like honey dropping from a spoon. Ardala shook her head and fell back to the pillows. “It’s like you want to give Sheol a second chance to kill you. As if it wasn’t bad enough the first time.”

  He reached out, put a hand on her knee. “I can’t do anything about whether the job’s dangerous or not. All I can do is be ready. I’m ready.”

  She turned her head away. He could see her throat working. “Dead man,” she said. “A fucking dead man.”

  Steward took his hand back, gazed down at the book. “I’ll be back in a day or so,” he said.

  Ardala was still looking away. “So you say.”

  *

  “At the beginning it was easy. Sheol was pioneered by Far Ranger, but Coherent Light got the Icehawks into the Wolf 294 system before anyone else. Mobilized, declared hostilities Outward, and went. Only the male Icehawks were sent Outward; the women’s battalions were kept in-system to guard against sabotage and maybe try some themselves. The women weren’t happy about it—what were they trained for, anyway?—and a lot of the men were pissed off because they got separated from their girlfriends.

  “Far Ranger only had a few pioneers down in the northern hemisphere, and a small base on the big moon. We captured all their personnel and got all their artifacts and data. Fortified the moon base, put some ships in orbit, put our people down. We had the Icehawks plus two brigades of corporation grunts that had been recruited and shipped up from Earth at the last minute. Plus support personnel and a couple hundred archaeologists, xenobiologists, scientist types.”

  Griffith let his head fall forward. He passed his forearm across his eyes, wiping away invisible sweat. His voice changed, lost in a grating reverie. “Sheol was…lovely,” he said. “It was summer in the northern hemisphere when we landed. The planet had been tamed by the Powers over thousands of years…they’d arranged it like a garden, landscaped the mountains and rivers. It had overgrown and changed, but the intent was still there. The…harmony of the way they’d set things.”

  He raised his head. “The Powers—they’re not like us.” Griffith’s watery eyes seemed to shine. “They’re older,” he said. “Better. They…they know how to live with each other. What we found on Sheol and its moon reflected that. They built well, but after all the years they’d been away, there wasn’t much intact above ground. But they live in tunnels as well as on the surface, and there was a regular underworld there, hundreds of thousands of tunnels and rooms, some wrecked or collapsed but most intact, filled with stuff that had been packed carefully for storage… and there were tunnels on the moon as well, still pressurized with air we could breathe. The Powers knew they were coming back, even if we hadn’t twigged to that. It was…beautiful. A wonderland.” He shook his head. “And we fought our filthy little war in there. In all that magnificence, amid all the beauty….”

  Steward sat quietly in his plump chair, feeling the scratchy fabric against his forearms. There was a tingle in his limbs, a lightness, as if he’d just warmed and stretched and was ready to move, waiting for the signal that would take him into whatever was waiting…. It felt right. He tried to picture in his mind the waiting planet, green and blue against the black and patterned stars, the surprised Far Ranger personnel, the waiting tunnels where the Icehawks, taller than the Powers, would have had to crouch as they moved….

  Griffith was fumbling for a cigarette. “I remember that at the beginning, you—the Captain—said we were dispersing too much, trying to hold too much ground. There were just stacks of artifacts everywhere we looked—there was no point in dispersal, he said. We could concentrate and still have more loot than we’d know what to do with. But Colonel de Prey said he didn’t have any choice. That the plans were based on maps of Sheol that our agents had got out of Far Ranger, they’d been set in advance, back in the Sol system. And then the Colonel left, returned to headquarters with the data we’d captured. He said he’d be back, with reinforcements, once he made his report. He left Major Singh in charge.” Griffith shook his head. “The Captain was right. When the next wave came, it was from Far Ranger, and they hurt us bad.”

  As Griffith spoke of what happened next, Steward tried to picture the Far Ranger ships leaping across the blackness, the sudden blossoms of light in the sky that marked the battle in space where the Coherent Light ships were blown apart. The atmosphere cutters coming down, swooping on the Coherent Light positions out of a sky cut by the trails of defensive rockets, rising slow-motion tracer, straight-line bolts of lightning that were particle beams… the arc of the bombs and rockets as they fell, the way the flames leapt boiling from the perfect green landscape. Troopships landing, disgorging soldiers in Far Ranger colors. Fire snapping from ruins, from tunnels. Soldiers groping for one another amid the dense green. Urgent cries on microwave channels.

  And then a repeat as the whole thing happened all over again—first the silent flares in the sky, then the shriek of the cutters, these from Policorp Derrotero, which had come to seize their share of Sheol. More flares in the sky as Derrotero and Far Ranger ships, united in a brief alliance, drove off an assault from Gorky. Then treachery on the part of Far Ranger, a preemptive strike on Derrotero once Policorp Gorky was driven off, a strike that weakened Derrotero but didn’t knock them out. A counterstrike, and Derrotero ships held the sky. The Coherent Light troops, barely holding on, went on the offensive, in an alliance Singh had arranged with Derrotero against Far Ranger. Then a new flood of invaders, Policorps Magnus and OutVentures in alliance, blasting away the Derrotero presence from the system, landing fresh, well-trained troops in vast numbers.

  A flare on the face of t
he largest moon. “We’d put a tactical atomic under the moon base, just in case we lost it. De Lopez was hidden in one of the moon tunnels with the detonator. Killed a lot of people that way. Took out ships that were in for maintenance.” Griffith swallowed. “Maybe that wasn’t good, to be the first to use atomics. Maybe that meant they weren’t inclined to be civilized with us anymore.”

  Then, the winter.

  Griffith was drinking his second beer. “The grunts died like flies. They were tough and smart, but they hadn’t trained together long enough, didn’t know how to work with each other, and their bad deployment at the start just made them targets, isolated them so their units couldn’t support one another. Only the Icehawks stood a chance against the numbers, the weapons they were using. We had the training, the morale. The capability. We could fight a sustained guerrilla war with a limited base, but once the grunts lost their cushy foam bunkers, their fuel-cell heaters and vid sets, they just fell apart.” He shook his head. “Christ. They had no winter training at all.” The parchment skin of his face was pale. His eyes were black and empty, staring blindly into the landscape of his memories. Smoke drifted up from the cigarette in his hand, but he’d forgotten it was there.

  “Winter is bad, there on Sheol. That’s why the Powers built so many tunnels—to hide in the wintertime. It’s a flat planet, mostly, with a lot of ocean…. The winds just build up to hurricane velocity, pushed by Coriolis force and Christ knows what, and there’s nothing to stop them. They just come howling out of the prairie like perdition on a picnic. Storms could go on for days, weeks sometimes. The Far Ranger people, the first pioneers—they had landed in the winter. They knew what they were talking about when they called the place Sheol.” Cigarette ash fell on his trousers. He looked down in an abstracted way, brushed it off. Stubbed the cigarette out with a savage gesture.

  “We were getting messages from home every now and then. A ship coming in-system, firing off messages, then running. Sometimes a supply ship would get in past the blockade. But eventually they stopped trying to supply us. We didn’t know that CL was devoting all its energies to supporting Far Jewel’s fight in another system. That two battalions of women Icehawks and a new wave of grunts had been sent out there, instead of to help us. We had to live off what we captured, that or what we found in the tunnels. Or could grow ourselves in the vats.