“And rejecting me was part of his stratagem,” Rick mused. “Well done, Ganton.” Well done indeed. And all the more reason for me to make haste in clearing out of here. “Thank you.”
“And our request? For now Caesar asks only that you do your best to protect his heirs,” Lucius said. “We understand that more may not be possible. But we ask that much.”
What the hell should I do? Tylara would know. But I can’t stall.
“That much you have,” Rick said. “I’ve always accepted Publius as heir to Marselius. I continue to do so, and I will do what is in my power to protect Prince Adrian. This I can do without any disloyalty to Wanax Ganton. Beyond that I will have to consider the matter.”
“We thank you,” Lucius said. “Caesar will be pleased.”
“And I thank you, Lord Rick,” Publius said.
“How soon will your troops be at Taranto?” Rick asked, and Publius looked thoughtful.
“I would say before you can be there,” he said. “Particularly if you intend to abandon this castle and move all your holdings west.”
“You do have good sources,” Rick said. “All right. What about ships?”
“At least one small squadron with a quinquireme flagship will be there now,” Lucius said. “I will send word that it is to be made ready, and if there is not a full complement of marines now there will be when you arrive. Messengers will go to the other ships of the Inner Sea to converge on Taranto. I take it you wish to appear formidable when you visit Nikeis.”
“Appear and be,” Rick said. “I’ll load enough star weapons to make your quinquireme invincible, and put musketeers in one of the other ships. But I still can’t figure what made Nikeis decide to shuck the alliance.”
* * *
Rick lay down in his bed in the alcove off his study. He was grateful to be sleeping in an actual bed, even a small one, inside and not in a field cot or worse on the ground.
If only Tylara was next to me, Rick thought to himself. There is so much I need to talk to her about. Not to mention I’ve gotten used to sharing my bed with her again . . .
His mind raced as he thought about all of what Publius and Lucius had shared. What am I missing about Nikeis? How far will the waters really rise? Do we really need to continue fighting the Five Kingdoms?
Eventually exhaustion caught up with him and he drifted off.
* * *
Rick stood on the great redoubt on the hill near Vis. He peered into the billowing clouds of smoke created by the burning of white phosphorus. Screams of agony and fear came from the cloud.
What was left of a man shuffled out of it. Smoke rose from burning phosphorus covering his body. Black burnt flesh and clothing sloughed off, revealing bones and internal organs. Even as his body burned and shriveled, the figure kept walking towards Rick. Finally it looked up at Rick. The face was mostly gone, leaving the grin of a human skull behind. The eyes were burning coals. Rick could feel the rage in them—rage directed at him. He felt frozen in place. And then charred hands reached out. They gripped his throat. He began to choke, unable to breathe.
He awoke from the nightmare gasping for breath.
PART TWO
THE EDUCATORS
CHAPTER ONE
SAN FRANCISCO
“Change? Spare some change?” Bart Saxon’s upper lip curled in self-contempt even as he shook the two quarters and a dime that rattled in the Styrofoam cup. He’d pocketed nine dollars, mostly in quarters. It hadn’t been a very good day, but it was a lot better than some had been this last year.
The November sky was dark. He shivered as a cold wind drove a light drizzle into every corner and doorway on his side of the street. The wind smelled musty, not fresh like rain at all. Momentarily the rain fell more heavily and obscured the tall column across the street in Union Square. Then it slacked off to drizzle again. It was a miserable day to be on the streets in San Francisco, but for nearly a year every day had been miserable for Bart Saxon. This one wasn’t a lot worse than most. Just worse weather.
The cable cars were almost empty, and the wind and rain kept the few tourists scurrying past Saxon’s doorway to their expensive hotels. Sometimes bad weather helped. Saxon had taken the corner doorway usually occupied by a younger and stronger man Saxon called Lenny after the Steinbeck character. Lenny hadn’t showed up today. He didn’t often come when the weather turned this nasty. Lenny had a car, or access to one. Someone drove Lenny to within a block of his regular corner on Union Square. Not today, though.
Four tourists got off the cable car. They had already turned up the collars of their overcoats. They dashed for the Hyatt.
Saxon rattled his cup.
“Change? Dollar for a place to sleep?”
The knot of tourists hurried past. It was easy for them to avoid eye contact in this weather. If you didn’t get eye contact you didn’t have a chance.
“Spare some change for a veteran?” Saxon wasn’t a veteran, but it made a good line, and he might have been one. Too young to have been in ’Nam, and he hadn’t even considered volunteering after they ended the draft.
He had the timeless but aged look of one habituated to the streets. That bothered him, sometimes, when he let anything about his present situation bother him. He hadn’t been out here that long. Long enough, though. Long enough.
The tourists dashed onward. Stingy bastards.
“Got a minute?”
Saxon turned away from the futile task of watching the tourists and imagining how much they might have given him. A man was standing quite close to him, too close, within his personal space, and Saxon had never heard or felt him coming. He was a little shorter than Saxon’s six feet. Clean shaven, at least on the upper part of his face. The London Fog raincoat and Burberry scarf hid everything below the chin. The brim of a London Fog tan rain hat didn’t quite hide the eyes, which were a light brown, almost yellow, and looked vaguely Oriental.
“Change?” Saxon asked.
“You looking for work?” the man demanded. There was a tiny accent, but nothing Saxon could identify.
“What kind of work?”
The man eyed the Styrofoam cup.
“I’ll give you fifty dollars and a pint of Scotch for the afternoon. If things go on past six I’ll buy you dinner.”
Saxon thought for a moment. He could sure use fifty dollars. And whiskey, not cheap wine! But—
“What things? What kind of work?”
“Talk. Fill out some forms. Take a test.”
Saxon grinned wryly.
“You from Berkeley?” This man looked old for a student.
“UCLA. We’re doing a comparative study. Look, it’s not far. I’ll give you twenty just to get out of the rain while we talk about it.”
Saxon felt a twinge of hunger as he contemplated what he could do with twenty dollars, but tried to feign indifference.
“Sure. Where to?”
“This way.”
* * *
The man led off at a rapid pace down Mason, then around the corner past Lefty O’Doul’s, a cafeteria and bar where Saxon liked to eat when he had money. They scurried past the Hilton, and into the tenderloin district. A block past the Glide Memorial Church the man turned into a doorway between two sex shops. He used two separate keys to open the outer door, then led up two flights of badly lit stairs into a dingy hall that smelled of urine. He needed two more keys to open a door marked 3B.
The room inside was neat and freshly painted. There was a bay window, partly hidden by soiled lace curtains. The window was protected by iron bars. An open door to the left led to a tiny kitchen, where he could see a refrigerator. To the right was a bathroom, clean and white, with what looked like a new linoleum floor. Clean towels hung on towel bars.
There was a large couch against one wall. Across from it was an oak veneer fiberboard computer desk holding a Dell desktop personal computer. The logo on the front said “Intel Inside.” There was an animated Star Trek screen saver on the seventeen-inch monitor sc
reen: Mr. Spock being gassed by a flowering plant. In the middle of the room was a table and two wooden chairs. Another wall held ceiling-high bookcases, with a rolling ladder attached to a rail at a little below eye height. There was room for an entire library, but most of the shelves were empty, no more than a dozen books in all that shelf space. One was a new biography of Virginia Woolf. The rest seemed to be computer reference books.
All the furniture looked new, and clearly came from one of the discount furniture houses that advertised in inserts to the comic pages of the Sunday paper: sturdy, neat in appearance, good value without big expense.
“Familiar,” Saxon said. “I once had a study furnished just like this.” Except there was a lot more clutter, and it was mine, the only room in the house that I could clutter up . . . .
“Did you now?” the man said. He indicated one of the chairs at the table. “Coffee?”
“More books, though. I’d rather have that whiskey.”
“After we talk.”
Saxon nodded.
“What do I call you?”
“Dr. Kroeber will do.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Problem?”
“I don’t believe you. Not that it matters, call yourself anything you want.”
“I’m more interested in why you don’t believe me?”
“Come on. Kroeber was the best known anthropologist America ever produced. I know he had a daughter, but I never heard about sons. Anyway. You don’t look like him, and you don’t look like you ever had any ancestors named Kroeber.” Saxon sniffed dismissively. “Maybe a coincidence, but I doubt it.”
“All right. Call me Dr. Lee, then. Or George will do for that matter.”
“George Lee.” That name was probably as phony as the other, but maybe not. Lee might fit, provided you thought of Lee as an Oriental name. Saxon took a closer look at the man and thought he looked vaguely Oriental. Eurasian, probably. “All right, Dr. Lee, you said twenty bucks up front.”
“I did say twenty, didn’t I? All right, you’ve earned twenty. You can earn thirty more—”
“And a pint of whiskey.”
“And a pint of Scotch whiskey,” Lee said.
“What do I do?”
“Start with this.” He sailed some papers across the table.
“Raven’s Progressive Matrices,” Saxon said. “An IQ test? You want me to take an IQ test?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“What do you care? Actually, we want to get a handle on just what kind of people end up in the streets.”
“People down on their luck,” Saxon said reflexively.
“Right.”
“Real down. You know I’ve taken this test before,” Saxon said.
“Have you now? Any idea of how well you did?”
“No.”
“Just a minute,” Lee said. “Before you start, want some coffee?”
“Sure, since you’re making me wait for the whiskey.”
“Back in a minute.” Lee went to the little kitchen.
It was still raining outside. Saxon looked at the test booklet. It was warm and dry here, and even twenty bucks was more than he usually made. Lenny did a lot better than that, but Lenny was aggressive in a way Bart Saxon never could be, although he’d tried. Saxon thought about how to drag things out past dinner time—
Assuming that Dr. George Lee would keep his word about dinner. Or about anything. Saxon hadn’t seen any money. His head hurt, and he wasn’t likely to do well on this stupid test, which he remembered as one of the hardest he’d ever taken. Or thought he remembered. He’d spent the best part of a year trying to forget that he’d ever seen a college or an IQ test. Now here he was in a room with a college professor—anthro or sociology? But what the hell, at the worst he’d get a cup of coffee and be out of the wet for the afternoon, and maybe the son of a bitch would give him the fifty bucks.
“When do I start?”
George Lee came back with two cups of instant coffee.
“After you’ve finished this.” He opened a brief case and took out a sealed bottle. “Thiamin and B-complex. Want some?”
Saxon thought that over. Why not? It might help clear his head. Thiamin was supposed to be the sobriety vitamin. Or at least B deficiency was part of a hangover. Did he want to be sober? But again, why not? There would be a bottle of Scotch later.
“Sure,” he said.
Lee went to the kitchen and came back with a glass and a bottle of Évian bottled water. Fancy, Saxon thought. He opened the vitamin bottle and shook out two capsules, saluted Lee with the glass, and downed the vitamins. He handed the bottle to Lee, but Dr. Lee shook his head.
“Keep them. They may come in handy.”
“Thanks.” Saxon sipped at the coffee. It wasn’t as good as the real coffee in Lefty O’Doul’s, but it would do. Taster’s Choice. Not as romantic a situation as the TV ads for Taster’s Choice. He’d seen those on the TV in the Glide Memorial lounge. Outside the wind came up and rain spattered on the bay window. Saxon sipped at the coffee again.
* * *
The test was harder than he remembered it. There would be a series of figures, abstract shapes, and he was supposed to guess which one would be the next in the series. Some were easy, simple alternations of circular and square shapes. More were hard. Some were damnably hard. Eventually he was done.
George Lee took the score sheets and fed them into a scanner. The PC screen flashed a couple of times. Lee cleared it before Saxon could read what it said.
“How’d I do?”
“Well enough,” Lee said. “Not quite so good as you did the first time, but within the limits of test reliability—”
“Did the first time? What the hell are you talking about?” Saxon demanded. His head pounded as his pulse rose. There was a knot of fear in his stomach. “Jesus, can’t you bastards leave me alone?”
“I mean, Mr. Saxon, that we have your score from UCLA,” Lee said evenly. “Also your SAT, your grades, and a whole bunch of stuff about you. You’ll be glad to know that you haven’t managed to pickle your brain. Not enough to matter, anyway. You’re still smart. Which is what I had to know before we could talk.”
“What the hell is this? You from the police?”
“Hardly.” Lee shook his head. “No, Mr. Saxon, not the police.” He smiled without humor. “We’re looking to hire someone. You’ve got the right qualifications, provided the booze left you enough brain cells to use your education.” He tapped the score sheets. “Apparently it did.”
“Hire someone? For what?” Saxon demanded.
“A teaching job.”
“But—”
George Lee chuckled.
“Not around here,” he said. “Someplace where they never heard of Sherry Northing. Or Bart Saxon, for that matter.”
Sherry Northing. Just how much did—
“Who are you people?”
“Does it matter? Anyway, you’ll find out if you need to know.”
“Teaching job where?”
Lee shook his head.
“You won’t have heard of it. The point is, there’s this fairly primitive place that needs a science teacher. You were recommended for the job.”
“Recommended by who?”
“Hector Sanchez.”
“Oh. My star pupil,” Saxon said. “Berkeley, then Ph.D. at Cornell—I heard he got a government job—”
“Sort of. He works for the National Academy of Sciences.”
“Is that who you’re with?”
“Not exactly, but we’ve worked with them.”
“I’m surprised Hector remembers me,” Saxon said.
“He does, though. Said you inspired him. Matter of fact, he said if it wasn’t for you he’d probably be running drugs in the barrio. Or in prison, or dead. He remembers you well, and he sticks up for you. That’s why I came looking for you, to see if you can handle this job.”
“Nice of him.” Part of it was true. That was during the ea
rly part of Saxon’s teaching career, the second year he’d had his own classroom. Hector probably would have ended up in the gutter if Saxon hadn’t taken an interest in him. It had taken months to get the confidence of a bright—hell, brilliant—barrio kid, get him to believe he could get somewhere through schoolwork, get him—
“Does he know about—”
“About Sherry Northing? I doubt it,” Lee said. “I didn’t until I came looking for you. Why should he?”
Saxon grimaced. It was true enough, of course. It wasn’t really a big story. High school teacher drinks too much, gets seduced by politician’s underage daughter, surprised in flagrante delicto. Disgraced. Wife leaves him, teacher loses job—it was a big enough story in Black Oaks, at the time anyway.
“No, I don’t suppose it would be a big story in Washington,” Saxon said. “Not an important story to anyone. Except to me.” And to Ann, and Ben, but not anymore. Ben wasn’t old enough to understand why Mommy couldn’t stand Daddy anymore . . .
“And you don’t care?” he asked. “About—”
“Not really,” George Lee said. “Saxon, I’ll be honest with you. It’s not like there’s a lot of qualified people looking for this post.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Lee said. “You might say the end of the world, a very primitive place. And we need somebody fast.”
“We?”
“Your country,” Lee said. “You’ll get the details if you qualify and you want the job. No point in telling you more than you need to know. We need someone to teach science. Your students will be from the ruling class of a very primitive country. Smart but not much education, some are illiterate even in their local language. If you take the job, you’ll have to learn that language. You’ll also have to buy a lot of equipment and get everything together. Books, computers, you name it, if you think you’ll need it, buy it and get it packed up for a long trip. Money’s not a problem, but we need somebody fast.”
“How fast?”
“If you want the job, you leave in three weeks. And there’s a lot to do first. Fact is, that’s the big problem,” Lee said. “There’s just a hell of a lot to do, all kinds of stuff to buy, damn little time, and we don’t know if you can do it all.” He patted the test sheets on the table. “So. We know you’ve got the brain cells. But can you stay sober long enough to get the job done?”
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