“Gods,” Steward repeated. Tasting the word. They passed a heavy freight elevator that apparently connected with the warehouse above.
Ready, Steward thought. He was ready for this. So in sync with the Zen of it that all he had to do was move with it, follow the series of events as they wound toward their conclusion.
The tunnel leveled off. Steward sensed he was under the Pacific. He saw an airlock door ahead.
“We put the Prime in a sunken caisson,” Griffith said. “At first we had to launder a lot of money and Power goods to pay for it. But now the Powers have a base out beyond Pluto, just a big piece of rock they found out there, and they’re sending goods to us in quantity. If they have the right markings, no one knows they don’t go through Vesta or Ricot first. Now we’ve got our own companies Earthside, and they’re starting to make a big profit. We can finance this ourselves now. Soon we’ll be too big for any Earth government to move against. A few decades at the most. And that’s nothing on the kind of time scales we’re talking about.”
The airlock door was a big one, capable of handling cargo. Griffith pressed the code into its lock and the party stepped in. The thick smell of the Powers flooded into the chamber, stronger than on the outside. There was a blissful expression on Griffith’s face as he breathed it in.
The inside of the caisson echoed to the organ-pipe sounds of the Powers. The unpainted supports of the roof curved above Steward like the ribs of a metal beast. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, the wires taped to the beams. Shipping crates were piled on pallets, obscuring vision. The place was as attractive as the interior of the warehouse next door.
Hell of a place for a god to live, Steward thought.
He tried to avoid shrinking back as a Power came rushing out from among the boxes. He had forgotten how fast they were. The Power raised its head, inflating it, the two eyes focused forward. “This is Steward,” it hissed.
“Yes, cousin,” Griffith said.
The spines on the Power’s back arched. Its hands scissored near the floor. “You will come,” it said.
Steward followed the Power, moving fast to keep up with the Power’s four scurrying feet. They came to a cleared space. The floor was spread with dark plastic sheets. Portable heaters and computer consoles were plugged into snaking cables. Three Powers waited there. One of them stepped toward Steward. The others made ducking, shrugging movements. The smell of Power was particularly strong.
“I am the Prime,” the Power said. The muscles on its back twitched in rhythm.
Steward looked down at it and thought of Vesta and Ricot and Sheol and places beyond, places where the Prime’s word was law, where its schemes and plans had set millions of its species dancing to the music of its organ pipes. He thought of the thousands of years of struggle for power, the hordes of ranked Powers marshaled in their chorus, disciplined by chemistry. The gleam in Griffith’s eyes as he spoke of godhood, his bliss as he breathed in his hormones. He thought of Ashraf lying dead in his office, Stoichko bleeding in his armchair while the vid glowed, the Alpha turning toward the bullet that perhaps he welcomed…
“Pleased to meet you,” Steward said. And he took out his handkerchief and sneezed into it.
*
The organ sounds had changed. There was a strange keening in them, something that set Steward’s teeth on edge, and Steward knew the second the airlock opened what it was.
He had been out on the second of his trips to the outside to make his call to Janice Weatherman. Spassky and the goon had driven him at his instruction to a public phone, then stood ten feet away while he transmitted the codes.
Steward had been interviewed twice by the Prime. He talked to the Prime about his qualifications, about how he had penetrated both Vesta and Ricot and could improve the Prime’s own security here and, as the Prime’s base expanded, elsewhere. He talked about the shape of the future, about the Power-human synthesis that was bound to dominate in both spheres. He remembered Curzon’s discourse on the same subject, the way he flushed and gestured and paced, and he tried to imitate Curzon in the way he talked and moved. The Prime had let Steward talk, and watched Steward from its strange goggling armored eyes, its back muscles twitching. Other Powers moved in the background. Steward thought there were perhaps a dozen of them. Groups of humans appeared from time to time, standing diffidently in clumps, breathing their fix from the air. Some of them seemed to live here, in crude barracks in the back.
During the interviews the Zen seemed to do the talking, not Steward. He was latched into it now. He had become the whirlwind, a force larger than himself, moving in self-contained perfection.
Now, as the airlock opened, he heard the high grating overtones in the piping of the Powers, and it sounded like the wail of the whirlwind.
Griffith waited behind the airlock door, panic in his eyes. “Something’s happening,” he said. He wiped sweat from his forehead. “The Powers are getting sick.” He looked at Steward and his eyes widened. His mouth opened.
Steward stepped back with his right foot and drove his right elbow into Spassky’s solar plexus. The little Russian, he thought, should never have followed so close. Steward grabbed Spassky’s nape and swung him around to the left, between him and the tall goon who was only beginning to react as Steward grabbed for the pistol he knew Spassky carried in a belt holster.
The goon’s fist lashed out. Steward swayed back out of reach, and he felt the comforting checkered grips of the pistol against his hand. He closed his fingers, raised the pistol, thumbed the safety. Griffith was moving on the edges of Steward’s vision. Steward drove Spassky toward the goon with a kick, as if the boy were a football.
Steward fired twice: once into the goon’s chest, a second time into Spassky’s neck. The unsilenced pistol boomed loudly in the airlock. An ejected casing bounced off the airlock door. Steward swung the pistol toward Griffith and saw the other man raising a pistol, his wired combat reflexes bringing the weapon into line with unnatural speed….
Steward flung himself backward, his pistol crashing twice. There was a blow in his side, another against the back of his head. Then Steward was sitting on the floor of the airlock, his back to the wall, and Griffith was dropping, his gun clattering on the ground. Griffith sat down with surprise in his watery eyes. Powers were screaming somewhere in the caisson. Steward looked at Griffith and raised his pistol again. He could feel blood pouring like a hot wave down his left side. There was a sad smile on Griffith’s riven face.
“Sheol, Captain,” Griffith said. “Sheol.”
“I didn’t need you to tell me that, asshole,” Steward said. Before he could fire again, Griffith was dead.
The Powers moaned like the whirlwind in Steward’s ears. He reached up to the airlock controls, pressed the button that would seal the door and cycle in the clean outside air. He could hear running feet. The closing door cut them off.
Steward felt cycling air ruffling his hair. He opened his jacket and looked down. Griffith’s bullet had gone into his left side, smashing at least one of the lower ribs. There seemed to be no exit wound, so probably the bullet had bounced around inside him before it came to rest. Blood was soaking his shirt and pants. The signs weren’t good.
Sheol, he thought, is a thing that does not end. It is a process. It is a choice between betrayal and death.
He pressed his handkerchief to the wound and stood up. There was no pain as yet. He took a full clip from Spassky’s body, reloaded, and waited for the airlock door to open, and when it did, he pulled one of Spassky’s shoes off and jammed it in the open outer door. Whoever was sealed in the caisson was going to stay there.
During the long walk down the green tunnel, the pain came, a hot jab so sudden that it took Steward’s breath away. Tears dazzled his eyes. He began breathing carefully, regularly, filling his lungs and then exhaling thoroughly. He could feel broken ribs grinding together in his side, but he tried to keep his mind entirely on breathing, on walking, on rhythm. The pain faded. Blood tri
ckled down his leg.
He could sense the Alpha’s nearness. His breath, his voice. He wanted to smile.
Griffith’s office was deserted. He could hear movement and shouting in the corridor outside. Steward looked through the closets and found one of Griffith’s tailored jackets, a dark one that wouldn’t show blood. Wincing at the sharpness of the pain, he dropped his own jacket on the floor and pulled on Griffith’s. He put one of Griffith’s handkerchiefs over the wound, put the pistol in his belt, and stepped out into the corridor.
The building was full of panic. Guards were moving up and down the corridors with weapons drawn, but didn’t seem to know where to point them. The head had been cut off and the body seemed not to know what to do. He wondered if Power panic was coming up the air vents, affecting the vee tag somehow.
Steward set himself to walking. It was difficult now, and he had developed a limp. He tried to build a rhythm, breathing and movement, making the limp a part of it. This, he thought, was good Zen. Spittle in the eye of the void.
I have no purpose, he thought. Opportunity is my purpose.
He could taste blood in his mouth. Shit. Nicked a lung.
I have no miracle. Just law is my miracle.
He was forgetting the rest of the poem except for the end. The Alpha filled his soul.
Bright light dazzled his vision. The glass doors were right ahead. He limped past three secretaries and into the street. LA was hot enough to take his breath, again. The sun was so bright he could barely see. He reached for his shades and came up with the pistol instead. He looked at it for a moment.
Merde, he thought. He moved down the street. One foot in front of the other. He heard people shouting.
He remembered a phone in his jeans and he reached for it. His hand seemed to get caught in his pocket. Blood rattled in his throat and he wanted to retch. He sat down.
There were sirens in the distance. Steward hawked up blood and spat. Another in the eye of the void.
He became aware of people standing around him. Staring. He gave them the finger.
“Écrasez l’infâme,” he said.
*
There was a guard on his door, and outside, Steward could hear police arguing with doctors. “The Powers,” someone was saying. “In a bunker.” He couldn’t hear more because there was something wrong with his IV drip, and the monitor kept making bleating noises that sent nurses scurrying. Finally they replaced it.
He sensed the doctors winning the argument. He smiled and went to sleep.
Steward woke to the sound of a footstep. Somehow he knew the sound was wrong.
He opened his eyes, saw burnished copper hair, tanned skin, a lab coat, a gun. Reese. Covering her tracks, and probably having no choice.
“Sorry,” she said, and raised the gun.
Hey, he wanted to say, I owe you one. But he couldn’t make his throat work right, so he just tried to smile.
The Alpha rushed into him with the force of a whirlwind. He perceived the wail of the Powers. Griffith’s smile. The sound of gunfire on a sunny day. Sheol as the blizzards came. The voice of the Alpha whispering in his ear. Blood on the spinning horizon, growing closer, burning in night….
What he had wanted, all along.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Steward felt the regular rush of the air into his lungs, a tube lax and warm in his nose. Coldness receded as they filled him with warm fluids. He heard the hiss of the machine that was breathing for him.
He knew, from the rush of life into his lungs, that he was dead. He wondered how it had happened, how the end had come. Dead in LA, he thought. The terminus of a very long trajectory.
One life, he thought. One arrow.
He hoped the Beta’s action was right.
*
The first nonmedical he saw was Janice Weatherman. She brought a package of pastry and a packet of very good coffee with a machine to make it in. She was dressed in a soft tawny beige jacket. Silver gleamed around her wrists, her neck. “I wanted to bring the bank’s regards,” she said. “We’re hoping to keep your business.”
“In the afterlife,” Steward said. He had to whisper. The machine was breathing through a tracheotomy and he couldn’t use his vocal cords.
Weatherman leaned closer. “I couldn’t hear you,” she said.
Steward didn’t have much money left, not that he knew of. Almost the last of it had gone into the clone insurance. No point in telling her that.
“D’accord,” he said.
She smiled. She was wearing, he saw, platinum earrings. She took his hand. “The trust’s going well,” Weatherman said. “Andrew is responding to Genesios therapy. His spine has grown and fused. He may have partial use of his legs one of these days. They’re using biofeedback techniques to retrain his optical centers to handle speech as well as the visuals, and he’s learning to use a speech synthesizer. That part’s coming along real well. The music helps.”
He nodded. Something decent had come out of this at least. Satisfaction welled up in him.
“I released the information when your code didn’t come,” she said. “The Los Angeles cops had already found a secret hideout for some Powers on Earth, with a lot of dead aliens in it. All the Earth governments are going crazy. Demanding answers.”
Steward tried to laugh. It hurt, so he just grinned up at Weatherman and squeezed her hand. She was smiling back at him.
“There are a lot of people wanting to see you,” Weatherman said. “Diplomats, cops. They seem to think you’ll be able to explain things to them. But they’ll have to take their turn. Bank hath its privileges, at least on Solon.”
“That’s why I like this place,” Steward whispered. “Everyone knows what’s important.” And why the Beta had bought insurance here, just before he’d gone down the gravity well for a meeting with Griffith. The whole place was security-mad, full of paranoid millionaire criminals hiding their funds, banks ever alert for breaches of security, brokers on the lookout for swindles. No one was going to see Steward whom Steward didn’t want to see.
“There are media people, too. I imagine you’ll make some money from the rights, if you want to talk to them. I can handle that for you.”
“Later.”
Weatherman’s eyes cut to one side of the room, as if there was someone there giving her a signal. She straightened. “They tell me I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”
“Bye.”
She smiled, squeezed his hand, left.
Capital, Steward thought. And laughed.
*
Steward found out later what the LA police thought had happened, and he more or less agreed with them. “Why didn’t you—your Beta—just tell us?” their representative wanted to know. “We could have searched the damn place.”
“He wasn’t certain,” Steward said. By now he was used to talking about the Beta in the third person. “And some things were…personal. Between Icehawks. People who had been through Sheol.”
“The Beta,” the police captain said, “wasn’t on Sheol.”
“Sheol,” Steward said, “was the whirlwind.”
The police captain didn’t understand. Afterward, Steward avoided speaking to him.
*
The scansheets were telling him about “Power panic” on Earth. Ricot and Vesta were busy issuing denials that no one believed. Their stock had thundered into the basement. Steward told the diplomats and such that he was only interested in clarifying his Beta’s statement, not amplifying it, that he wanted questions in writing ahead of time. He had temporary Solon citizenship and he didn’t have to give any answers he didn’t want to.
They protested, but they played by his rules. He answered the questions he wanted to.
Janice Weatherman was going to conduct a media rights auction and collect ten percent of what promised to be a ridiculous amount of money. Steward didn’t want to think, right now, about how rich he was going to be.
He thought about Ashraf: Nothing to do with you. He’d b
een right all along. He’d just been talking about the wrong clone.
Weatherman was spending a lot of time with him, more than she really needed to. That was something else Steward didn’t want to think about, not yet anyway. He needed to get his bearings first.
Surrounded by guards, he took a trip to Solon’s hub. He went alone into a room where he could float before a perfect clear pane and look out of the metal humming world of the station. Earth dazzled his eyes, cold amid the emptiness.
His predecessor, the Beta, had twinned his brain and donated a scrap of flesh, and then he’d gone in pursuit of the Alpha. Found him, Steward thought, in the underwater Sheol that had been built in California. Finished what the Alpha had started to do. Become the whirlwind together. And then ended, blew apart.
Whatever the Alpha and Beta had done, it was finished now. Steward had lost them both. He felt the pulse of hollowness, where they had been, deep in his throat.
The Beta, Steward thought, had been created in order to finish the Alpha’s work, pay off his karmic debt. Conclude all business with de Prey, Curzon, Sheol, Andrew. He, the Gamma, was someone else. On a different wheel altogether.
He was, he thought with a laugh, a Zen saint. No karma left, no consequence, no desire. A clean slate. The Beta had done a good job.
Steward floated amid cold Earthlight that shone whitely on his skin. The vast bulk of the station revolved around and behind him.
New life, he thought. New arrow.
He wondered where he was aimed.
The End
BONUS
Special Excerpt
from
Angel Station
by Walter Jon Williams
THE ELECTRON MUSIC SOOTHED MARIA, BUFFERED HER PAIN. THE touch of the current wasn’t as sharp and dangerous as when she was flaming on Red Nine, or as immediate; instead the distant background hum built lovely architectures that patterned across the ship, an invisible electronic skeleton, a lovely lacework continually transforming itself across Maria’s perceptions.
Voice of the Whirlwind Page 31