Voice of the Whirlwind

by Walter Jon Williams

  Steward grinned and thought of connections coming into being, springing into existence at the speed of light from the first moment he’d bounced a communiqué to Marie Byrd Land. “Sit down,” he said, and nudged a chair away from the table with his foot.

  Stoichko sat down, put his coffee and biscuit on the table. “First thing is,” he said, “I don’t particularly care that you took those files. In fact, the people I work for think it was a pretty good trick.”

  The trailing willow burned down Steward’s throat, merged with the humming warmth that moved through his body. Business. Connections. All that was represented by Tsiolkovsky’s Demon.

  “Since you brought it up,” Steward asked, “who is it you work for?”

  The man shook his head and laughed. “Those files got incredible distribution, Steward. Your friends in Antarctica had one hell of an auction. One price for exclusive rights to the file, one price for nonexclusive rights. It went on for days. People in the Pulsar Division were having apoplexy. They kept trying to buy their stuff back.”

  “The Pulsar Division wasn’t supposed to find out.”

  “The auction was too public. Of course they found out. After a while, the people I work for told them.”

  Evidence fell into place. “You work for Group Seven,” Steward said.

  Stoichko was still reminiscing, a happy smile on his face. “Pulsar got what they deserved. A bunch of dumb cowboys is what they were. To get taken by a drive rigger. You’re smarter than all the cowboys put together.” Tears of mirth were sparkling in his eyes. “You never saw such panic.” He shook his head. “Vesta deserves people with more delicacy running things, not all those ex-military types. A policorp in Vesta’s position requires individuals capable of subtlety.”

  Steward tried to repress his own smile. Stoichko was too jolly to be quite real. “Group Seven,” he said again. “Right?”

  Stoichko raised his biscuit as if in salute. “The professional Brighter Suns intelligence service.”

  “And you want to recruit me. To work for the people who tortured me.”

  Stoichko laughed. “Pulsar tortured you, buck. Not us.” He bit into the biscuit. “You’re really too good to stay in Starbright, you know. And as for your friends in Antarctica—well, they’re amateurs. They’d never have come up with anything like this on their own.” He leaned back in his chair, stretched his arms. “We wouldn’t want you on staff. You’re too independent, and your talents would be wasted. We’d just want to hire you for special contract work. You could always refuse.”

  “I could retire. I made a lot of money on those files.”

  Stoichko’s expression remained benevolent, but Steward saw his pupils contract just the slightest bit. “You could,” Stoichko said. “But you’d never see the Powers.”

  A warning chimed through Steward, resonating in his bones. This was important. He looked down to conceal the knowledge from Stoichko, then sipped his drink to gain time. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like to see them again.” Steward let his eyes drift away to a point above Stoichko’s shoulder, remembering how Griffith looked when he talked about the Powers, how Sereng’s eyes had seemed clouded, turned inward. He tried to will himself into that state, that dream.

  “Look, Steward,” Stoichko began. Steward snapped his eyes away, stared at Stoichko as if in surprise at being startled out of a reverie. The agent went on. “I don’t know what your plans are while you’re on leave. You probably want to do some partying. Here.” He unzipped a pouch on his jacket sleeve and pulled out a gleaming rectangle of brushed aluminum bound in dark plastic insulation. He pushed it across the table toward Steward. Steward reached a hand toward it. The object was cold to the touch. A wave of recognition passed through him as if in response to the chill. He’d seen this before, in the box that Sereng had taken off the Power ship. It was a drug inhaler, the same sort Griffith carried, but it had a refrigeration unit built in it, with a small rechargeable power supply and a socket to take a power jack.

  “Take it with you to your party,” Stoichko said. “Have fun. I don’t want to put any pressure on you. But if you want some work for a lot of cash, and maybe see the Powers again, give me a call.” Steward took the inhaler and put it in an outside jacket pocket. His fingers were chilled even through the plastic insulation. He wondered how much it would cost to buy the use of a chemist.

  “Thanks,” he said. He tried again to pretend he was seeing the object of his desire over Stoichko’s shoulder.

  “Something else, Steward,” Stoichko said. “We’d want to hire you first for ice work.”

  There was a bad taste in Steward’s mouth. “I don’t know if I’d want to do that.”

  “You might, if I told you the name of the target. It’s Colonel de Prey.”

  Steward’s heart lurched. He was suddenly aware of small details, all of them somehow important—Stoichko’s level gaze, no longer quite so jovial, the pattern in which one of the fluorescent lights over the bar was flickering, the way the liquid surface of his trailing willow reflected a blue hologram advert gleaming from all the way across the room. Steward gazed at Stoichko and controlled his words carefully. “He’s dead. They couldn’t revive him.”

  Stoichko shook his head. “He’s dead to Vesta. But three weeks before de Prey was shot, Consolidated Systems bought a hidden controlling interest in LifeLight as part of a friendly stock exchange. When de Prey died, he was revived successfully, but Consolidated took possession of the clone and brain recording. They told Pulsar the revival failed.” He laughed. “Consolidated’s been getting some of the best people out of Coherent Light’s old operation that way. Sometimes, if their information is valuable enough, they just revive them without waiting for the Alpha to die. It’s a good trick. Pulsar doesn’t know about it yet.”

  Steward’s mouth was dry. He tried to summon saliva. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Hey,” Stoichko said, and smiled. “I didn’t mean to dampen your party. Have fun. Use the stuff I gave you. No one else onstation has what’s in that inhaler, so make the most of it.” He reached out and touched Steward on the wrist. “We’ll talk,” he said. “I’m at the Hotel Xylophone. Just call when you want to talk.”

  Steward licked his lips. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Sure.”

  Stoichko grinned and finished his biscuit. He zipped up the pocket on his sleeve. “Be seeing you,” he said, and ambled away.

  Stoichko, Steward thought. A face and manner to set one at ease. His genes must have come from ten generations of salesmen. Friendly, jovial, complimentary, and inside nothing but liquid helium. There should have been a chill mist rising from his eyes.

  De Prey, he thought. Still alive. Cold revulsion tugged at him. He felt sick. The inhaler was heavy in his pocket. He wondered if it was poison, if Vesta’s revenge was supposed to be self-administered.

  He left without finishing his drink, and then followed an elaborate escape and evasion procedure to make certain he wasn’t being followed. He didn’t think he was.

  The Charter directory gave him the names of a number of chemists. He jacked a credit spike into a telephone and called the first.

  *

  “Interesting.” Zhou gazed with clear plastic artificial eyes at a three-dimensional hologram of a complex molecule. The model of the molecule looked like a geometric abstract of a sperm cell, with an indole ring making up the bulky head and a hydrogen-carbon chain forming a long tail. Something deep in Zhou’s eyes gleamed silver.

  Zhou was twenty years old and a pharmacology student. One of the chemists Steward called had suggested he might be available for hire. He lived in a cubbyhole apartment crammed with apparatus, with computers and cryogenic units and chemical synthesizers. He wore bright stripes of fluorescent paint on his cheeks and forehead. The chemist looked at a comp printout, then back at the hologram model.

  “It’s a neurohormone of some sort,” Zhou said. “The kind that’s on the juncture between hormones and B vitamins. But it’s
not registered. I’d say you got hold of an experimental hormone that hasn’t been trademarked yet. It’s complex, and it would cost a lot to synthesize.”

  “Is this artificial or natural?” Steward asked.

  Zhou shrugged. “Can’t say. But I don’t think something like this would appear in nature. I’ll show you why later.”

  Steward had told Zhou that he’d got the chemical from a rigger friend of his who didn’t know what it was. He suspected Zhou didn’t believe him, but if Zhou was skeptical, it hadn’t affected his work. It had taken Zhou only a few minutes to analyze the sample Steward brought with him. It had taken him two hours to decide what the analysis meant.

  “Any guess as to its effects?” Steward asked.

  Zhou gave a taut, self-satisfied smile. He bent over his computer deck and tapped the keys a few times. A slightly different molecule appeared. “There,” he said. “That’s Genesios Three, the new Pink Blossom neurohormone. B-44, or Black Thunder.” Soft surprise whispered through Steward. He remembered the hum of a neurosword, his reflection in Spassky’s teeth, a steel needle slippery with blood. Zhou took a credit spike from his pocket and gestured at the model. “The head of the stuff you brought is the same, with a carbolic functional group here replaced by a nitrite functional group. And the structure of the tail is slightly different, with the same aromatic groups, but in different locations in the chain”—the spike moved deftly among the illusory atoms—“and there’s another very curious difference. Watch here. Let me show you.” He touched a key on his comp deck and the hologram shifted to the earlier model, then back again. One structure disappeared, then appeared again.

  “See?” Zhou asked. “That side branch of the molecule. It’s present in your sample, and missing in Genesios Three. That’s the major difference, I think.”

  “What would it do?”

  “Genesios Three is stable. Degradation won’t occur at normal temperatures. That’s why it’s a perfect street drug—you can carry it around in a plastic bag for months and it’ll remain potent. But this stuff”—he flicked back to the first model—“that additional side branch makes the tail unstable. This whole tail wants to break off from the indole ring and float away. It’s so unstable that it’s going to do it within a short time, a matter of days. Especially if it’s exposed to air, light, or heat. That’s why your source refrigerated the drug, to keep it from breaking down. In a week, your neurohormone would be inert. Useless.”

  A pulse of distant music invaded the apartment from next door. Zhou’s expression did not change. Steward watched the molecule as it rotated.

  “What do you think it does?”

  “My guess is that its effects would be similar to those of Genesios Three: enhancement of brain function, stimulation of neural connections. But it would be much easier to metabolize, so you’d need a lot more of it.”

  “Would it have the same depressive effect on the brain’s own neurotransmitters?”

  “Hard to say. I wouldn’t be surprised.” Zhou looked intently at the model. Something in the depths of his eyes reflected the bright neon colors of the hologram. He smiled and reached into his pocket for a nicotine stick. “I’d like to keep a small sample of it,” he said. “Do some checking.”

  “That might not be wise,” Steward said. “If this is an experimental hormone, that means someone put a lot of work into it. And if it’s not trademarked, that means they’d have to defend it without recourse to the courts. Some of these groups kill people.”

  Zhou seemed offended. “I’m not a fool,” he said. “There might be some reports in the literature. I’d be able to connect the reports with my knowledge of the drug and put two and two together.” He sucked in a fine spray of liquid nicotine and smiled coldly. “A very interesting problem you’ve set for me.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow,” Steward said. “I don’t have a place where I can be reached just now.”

  A slow smile crossed Zhou’s face in answer to Steward’s lie. Steward assumed he didn’t care—the problem, or the dollars, were enough to buy his interest.

  “As you wish,” Zhou said.

  Steward took the refrigerated inhaler from Zhou’s tabletop, slipped it into his pocket. His fingers tingled with the chill. “I’ll call,” he said.

  He stepped out into a narrow apartment corridor. The life of Charter hummed distantly in the walls. The inhaler hung heavily in his pocket. Stoichko had advised him to have a party, and probably he would. But first, Steward had to reach a decision about what was in his pocket.

  He went to a restaurant first of all, a place that catered to Earth tastes and that didn’t serve vegetable paste flash-fried in a high-pressure oil cooker. He figured he might as well get used to being rich, and ordered rôti de veau au céleri-rave. The veal was fresh, shot up from Earth in the luxury space of the daily shuttle. Before the waitress brought his wine, he went to the bathroom. He washed his hands, then took the inhaler from his pocket and looked at it.

  Vee addict. Y.

  This was the stuff, he assumed, that had addicted the Alpha, the neurohormone that the Powers had brought with them from their alien labs. Steward knew that he had the vee tag, whatever it was, and that the hormone was potent. Memories of the Powers flooded his mind, the long, oddly proportioned arms with their quick, unlikely movements, the scent of the heavy hormone-saturated air, the look in Sereng’s eyes. If he took the drug, he’d know what Sereng had seen.

  He had to know. Addiction couldn’t result from just a single dose—addiction didn’t work that way. And if the stuff was poison, there were a lot of simpler poisons, easier to manufacture, that Vesta could have chosen from. He watched himself in the bathroom mirror as he raised the inhaler to his nose. The touch of the chill metal on his upper lip made him shiver. He triggered the device once up each nostril.

  Biting frost flooded his sinuses. The pain brought tears to his eyes, but through the cold he could smell the Powers, their heavy essence. Memories flooded him again: the uncanny way the aliens moved, spoke, flew bounding through the air wailing discordant cries from their organ nostrils. Steward shivered again. Blood roared through his veins as his heartbeat thudded in his ears.

  His heartbeat slowed. Nothing was happening. He looked at himself in the mirror, and the face that looked back at him seemed surprised. Stimulation of brain function, enhancement of neural connections—he should feel that.

  Adrenaline hit him then, the aftereffects of terror, and he could feel his knees turn watery. He controlled it, bending over the sink with his weight supported by his trembling arms. The neurohormone didn’t do anything, at least nothing that he could detect.

  He gave his mirror image a shaky grin, raised the inhaler, fired again.

  Nothing.

  It was a good dinner.

  *

  Steward found his party later, after dinner, when he went to the light-grav bars near the docks. He wanted to laugh, to dance, and he found a partner in a Pink Blossom recruit named Darthamae, onstation during the last part of a thirty-six-hour leave. She was genetically shaped with ultraefficient heart and lungs for adaptation to a low-pressure environment, and through biofeedback techniques she had gained conscious control of her dive response. Her legs and arms were long and delicate, her dark-skinned face unnaturally placid, Madonna-like. She was surprised when he didn’t want to take a room in one of the inexpensive dockside hotels, but moved instead deeper into the old spindle, to the King George V, and got a low-gravity penthouse room with a transparent roof that gave a view of the arched habitat above them. The other side of the spindle was in night, and streetlights glowed above like new constellations.

  Darthamae moved with the fluid grace of the altered, and when she spoke, she talked as well with her hands, a language she used among her peers in airless environments, her arms and fingers moving like flickering tactile signposts in the air. She hardly seemed to breathe at all. When she spoke, she often had to inhale first, to get enough air in her lungs to say what she wanted.
Her hands often got it said before her lips.

  She wasn’t at all like Natalie. Steward preferred it that way—he wanted Darthamae’s placidity, her calm. She was his exorcism. He wasn’t certain it was successful.

  The landscape overhead grew light, grew new patterns of green and brown rectangles. Steward ordered champagne with breakfast, jumped out of bed, stretched. There was a persistent soreness in his ligaments. The light gravity here was a mercy. Darthamae was watching him from the bed.

  “How did someone with your money end up as a rigger?” she asked.

  “I just got lucky. Got a good stock market tip.”

  Her hands floated in the air, gracefully encompassing the penthouse, the glass ceiling, the distant habitats in the sky. She breathed in. “Must have been a hell of a tip.”

  He smiled. There was a knock on the door. “Ever had champagne?” he asked.

  “Not out of a glass.”

  “It’s better that way. Gives it what we call nose.”

  A slow smile appeared on her placid face, then burst into a laugh. “I’ll have to remember to breathe it in, then,” she said.

  *

  After Darthamae returned to her ship, Steward left the George V and went to a public phone. Identifying himself as Captain Schlager of the Security Directorate, he called passport control and found out that Stoichko had come to Charter on a trans-lunar shuttle originating in Tangier. Stoichko was a citizen of Uzbekistan. His tickets showed he had appeared in Tangier on a flight originating in a town called Mao, in central Africa.

  No one at passport control questioned the existence of Captain Schlager. Charter Station was living up to its reputation.

  Steward called the library and referenced Mao. It was a small place, its major advantage the remoteness that permitted research to take place in Saharan isolation. Its only industry was Express Biolabs, a wholly owned subsidiary of Policorp Brighter Suns. Brighter Suns was forbidden to own territory, and Express didn’t have policorporate nationality or customs, and at least officially was run under local law—Express was just a very private investment.