by Scott Mackay
It was in this atmosphere of looming disaster and potential salvation—another dichotomy, disaster, salvation—that military authorities gave Pittman some civilian clothes at Peterson, along with his dishonorable discharge, and then had an officer drive him back to his home five miles away.
The next morning, when he woke, he didn’t know what was wrong with the sky. Was it gray? Was it blue? Was it brown? Was it green? It was filled from horizon to horizon with an awful haze, and the wind was strong and blowing dust and tumbleweeds across the desert. He felt ill in a way he had never felt ill before. Enervated. Weak. Tired. As if his body was simply too heavy for Earth’s gravity.
He went outside in jeans and an olive USMC T-shirt, walked to his chin-up bar, and tried to do some chin-ups. He could only do three before he gave up. He wondered if the radiation from his unprotected excursion in Crater Cavalet was starting to catch up with him, or if, like Dr. Conrad, he was having a Builder-related attack of some kind.
When he dropped to the ground, his legs crumpled beneath him and he sat cross-legged in the dirt while the wind blew around him. He felt diminished. His hand, with a mind of its own, wrote two words in the dirt. Existence. Nonexistence. He had no idea he was doing it until he had finished. He was surprised that they were in his head, because he was convinced they had made him write those words. He was their sworn enemy, and he thought they would try to stay away from him. But maybe the old adage was true. Opposites attract.
He took his cell out and tried Philadelphia for the twentieth time, the old familiar 215 exchange coming automatically to his thumb. But he got the same message again. Service was currently unavailable. Bell Atlantic was working on the problem. Because Philadelphia and its environs were now under military control, Ma Bell had no idea when the problem would be fixed. Then he looked at the words again. Existence. Nonexistence. The two necessary and counterbalancing principles of war. Maybe he was a lot more like the Builders than he wanted to admit.
He closed his cell and put it in his pocket. He dragged himself to his feet. Too many weeks on the Moon. Or was it the radiation, the megadoses not only from Crater Cavalet but also the copious becquerels slipping through the slowly shredding twin magnetic girdles of the Van Allen belts? Maybe he was getting old. Next month he would be fifty-five.
He glanced at his garage. Time to go.
He went into his house and packed some clothes. His gun. Some extra rounds because who knew what kind of lawlessness he was going to encounter in postholocaust Philadelphia. Packed his raft, because he planned on paddling into town via the Schuylkill River to avoid as much of that lawlessness as he could.
Then he went to his den and looked at the yin-yang symbol carved in stone. It reminded him of two tadpoles swimming around each other, one white, one black, darkness and light, life and death, yes and no, existence, nonexistence. He felt certain he was the dark part, the yin part. As well-meaning as he had always tried to be, he had ended up bringing evil into the world. He was negation. A destroyer.
He reached up and touched the symbol.
After a few more moments of nearly religious contemplation, he got his bag, went out to his truck, and started the long drive to Pennsylvania.
25
Cam was weightless in the scientific command vehicle Tecumseh.
He couldn’t sleep because he had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right. Ever since the Builders had fiddled with his sylvan fissure, a sense of precognition pervaded his consciousness, perhaps the filter needed to discern the higher dimensions and rarefied space-time continuums in which the Builders operated. He opened his eyes, his anxiety mounting.
Across the tiny dorm, he saw Lesha, upright, strapped in her cot. Her face looked younger than it usually did, puffed up by constant free fall, edged in the scarlet murk of the night lamps. He heard the steady hush of the ventilation, and smelled the faint reek of vomit—a few crew still hadn’t gotten their space legs.
He felt scared but didn’t know why. He was in deep space, at a midpoint somewhere between the Terran and Venusian orbital planes—but had been here for the last week. Guarneri—his deep-space field array named after another famous Italian violin maker in honor of string theory—was about to go online, and all systems checked out, and he anticipated great success. He had all the people he wanted, all the original surviving crew of Stradivari. So the work was fine. Still, something was bothering him.
Then it came to him—the way Mark Fuller had looked at him today. The turn of his head as his long blond hair had danced in weightlessness, the usual light in his eyes gone, his pupils dilated, the overall insensibility of the young researcher’s expression unnerving in its immobility.
His heart rate climbed. He leaned forward.
He looked down the dorm, a cramped space that was more like a corridor, the sleeping harnesses with blue padded nylon straps staggered from one side to the other. In the sanguine dimness of the red night lamps, he saw that Mark was gone, his harness straps floating free like the tentacles of an underwater creature, his small paper-wrapped pillow drifting above like a blue packing envelope.
He looked around and saw other sleeping crew members: Dr. Jeffrey Ochoa, Lieutenant Colonel Oren Fye, Blaine Berkheimer, Lewis Hirleman, and a few new technical support personnel, Stella Watson, Daniel Uttal, and Jacqueline Ceci. Many were under the influence of a mild sedative, the only way they could sleep in weightlessness.
He unclicked his harness straps. The presentiment of bad things to come wouldn’t leave him alone.
He pushed himself free and maneuvered to the throughway below everybody’s feet, a tube that was made crowded by personal hampers Velcroed here and there. He maneuvered around the hampers. His mouth was like a desert and his eyes ached from the dryness inside Tecumseh. He reached the end of the throughway and somersaulted into the much wider hub tube.
The hub was a cylindrical shaft that ran up and down the whole length of the spacecraft. He looked up, saw tiny violet lights quartering the shaft into four ninety-degree sections, the lights, like Christmas lights, providing a sense of space and orientation. Then looked down. Below he saw the access hatch to the Tecumseh’s engineering section, and heard the hum of its fusion generator beneath the disk-shaped bolted door.
He looked up again and sensed Mark somewhere up there. Intuiting things in more than the usual four dimensions, a gift the Builders had inadvertently bestowed upon him.
He reached for a handhold and pulled himself along. He suffered momentary vertigo as the violet guide lights flicked by one by one. His uneasiness persisted. Drifting upward, he had the unsettling sense that all of Tecumseh had suddenly become a death trap, and that he would be lucky if he ever saw Earth again.
He passed the various bays—exercise, navigation, kitchen, sanitation—and slowed as he came to the PRNC observer bay. He peered inside. He saw John Quang, Loftus Hua, Carol Ng, Betty Hum, and Foster Chong. They were all asleep. Safely bundled in their blue straps.
He continued upward until he arrived at the science bay, dubbed Cremona, after Bartolomeo Guarneri’s hometown, the largest bay in the whole craft.
He went inside, and the narrow aperture immediately opened into a large polycarbonate sphere with a comprehensive view of outer space. Fit into the interior was a gridwork of girders. Various workstations had been installed along these girders without due regard for the official up and down, so that some were at right angles to others, and a few stations were even upside down from their neighbors. Through the polarized dome, he saw the sun, an angry white ball that now looked as if it had an infection, throwing off the occasional gold, orange, and red spectra, the view filtered by the protective magnetized field around Tecumseh.
As with the hub, violet lights outlined the various girders in Cremona. These should have been the only lights burning. But in the sphere’s designated northeast quadrant, he saw the glow of white halogen lights emanating from behind Station A, the largest and most important Guarneri interface.
Like a monkey in a monkey house, Cam pulled himself from girder to girder until he finally maneuvered to Station A. He peered around the partition and saw Mark strapped to one of the stools. The stool’s base was snug in a locking rail, the brake pulled into position so Mark wouldn’t drift up and down the rail.
Mark typed with unsettling speed at the main interface, his fingers so quick they were a blur, his rapidity unnatural. The young physicist’s face looked gray in the blue light coming from the screen. His blond hair was tied in a ponytail with a red elastic band, and it floated straight out from the back of his head. His eyes were insensible. Though Cam was well within Mark’s peripheral vision, Mark didn’t turn.
‘‘Mark?’’
Mark still didn’t turn. It was as if the young man was in a trance.
Cam maneuvered farther into view, and he thought that he might sense the Builders, that maybe this was the beginning of it, the Builders communicating through Mark now instead of him. He glanced at the screen to check what Mark was typing, and saw that it was dense machine language, the amber lines crawling onto the screen with lightning speed.
‘‘Mark?’’
Mark didn’t turn. What was going on? Was this the Builders? This didn’t feel like the Builders. This felt like something bad, and Cam’s enhanced sylvan fissure seemed to quiver with apprehension. It looked like Mark was writing new code into the Guarneri nodes. Those nodes were so precariously balanced that any new background language was bound to destabilize them.
‘‘Mark, what are you doing? Any new code has to be strictly authorized by me, you know that.’’
But Mark remained insensible. Only when Cam put his hand on Mark’s shoulder did the man stop typing. His fingers lifted from the keyboard and remained poised there. Then Mark turned.
He was pale, and had dark patches of exhaustion under his eyes. Cam had to wonder if he had spent other evenings unattended in Cremona. Mark, whom he had known for the last eight years, and whom he had mentored at Brookhaven, looked as if he didn’t recognize Cam at all.
‘‘Mark, are you all right?’’
‘‘Fine.’’
‘‘What are you doing?’’
Mark didn’t respond. He turned back to the screen, his head swiveling as if on poorly greased ball bearings, and began to type at the same phenomenal machinelike speed.
‘‘Mark, you’re going to have to stop.’’
He put both hands on the junior scientist, but this time Mark swung quickly and pushed him away with considerable force.
As Cam wasn’t latched to anything, he flew end over end through the three-dimensional gridwork of workstations, knocking his elbow badly on one of the girders before he stopped himself. He again stared at Mark, his heart pounding, his fear like a sudden fever, and saw that the young man had resumed typing, raised slightly off his stool, as if, like a predator, he was getting ready to pounce at something.
Cam logged on to the nearest comlink and sounded a general alarm. A tone, something like the lowest note on a marimba, resonated throughout Tecumseh. As he waited for others to arrive, he realized the success of the mission was now in jeopardy.
Oren Fye and Dr. Jeffrey Ochoa were the first to come. Then Lesha, Blake, and Lewis, followed by the new recruits. At last the Chinese observers arrived.
After a considerable struggle, and a few contusions and scrapes, Dr. Ochoa, with a daring lunge, administered an injection.
Only then were they able to pull Mark away from the console.
Only then could they start assessing damage.
26
The science bay was cleared and all the stations secured.
While Mark was taken to the surgery to be examined by Dr. Ochoa, Cam stayed in Cremona and went over the various Guarneri nodes with Lesha.
Lesha had strapped herself into the stool next to him. ‘‘Node one is clear.’’
‘‘Just because it appears clear doesn’t mean it really is. It just means we can’t find any evidence of tampering. But it’s got to be there somewhere.’’
They went over node 1 a number of times but couldn’t find anything even remotely suspicious, so finally went on to the next node. Line by line they went through it. He found no sign of modification, or corruption, or . . . sabotage? Node 2 appeared to be clear as well. So did node 3. Yet he sensed it was like going into an old house in a bad area of town— the cockroaches had to be right behind the walls. Where had all Mark’s furious typing gone? And why would Mark want to sabotage?
Cam turned to Lesha. ‘‘You befriended him more than I did. When you were doing the basic Stradivari research protocols together, did he ever exhibit any untoward behavior about anything?’’
Lesha shook her head. ‘‘He was always fun. He always knew how to joke.’’
‘‘Did he ever express any resentment toward me? Or the role I had him play in Stradivari?’’
‘‘No. Never. He has the highest regard for you. We all do.’’
‘‘Then what’s gotten into him?’’
She shook her head once more. ‘‘I have no idea.’’
He motioned at the screen. ‘‘And where did all his extra background language go?’’
She pondered the screen. ‘‘He must have hidden it. Or encrypted it.’’
‘‘If it’s encrypted, he’s done it so well it’s invisible, or locked away, and I don’t have the key to open it.’’
They investigated the fifth and final Guarneri node and found no evidence of tampering, alteration, or sabotage. With the diagnostic complete, Cam locked the whole system down, unconvinced it was clear, even though their diagnostic routines had told them otherwise. Then he and Lesha maneuvered to the surgery to see Mark.
Mark was now strapped to a wall-mounted gurney, his eyes half-closed, his arms bent at the elbows so that his hands floated in front of his face. As with every other area in the Tecumseh, the surgery was small, with a total of six gurneys that hinged down from the walls, three on each side.
Dr. Ochoa sat at the lab bench going over test results. As Cam and Lesha entered, he turned from his screen, his sudden shifting making him strain against the safety belt he had around his waist. His green eyes had solidified into intense orbs of focused wonderment. Cam inferred that his discoveries had been remarkable. Of particular interest was the way the doctor had his patient shackled by the ankles to the gurney with titanium cords.
‘‘Where’s Oren?’’ asked Cam. ‘‘I thought he would be here.’’
‘‘He’s gone to . . . alert General Blunt. He sure is glad we have that new pierce-communications system to get through all this radiation. It’s perfect for an emergency like this.’’ Ochoa cast a nervous glance at Mark. ‘‘Were you successful in securing any of the nodes?’’
‘‘They look clear, but I don’t think they’re secure at all.’’ He nodded toward Mark. ‘‘His codes are there. We just can’t see them. They’re like a time bomb waiting to go off.’’
Ochoa’s lips pursed. He paused, and finally took a deep breath. ‘‘He’s been implanted.’’
Cam looked more closely at Mark. ‘‘Implanted? What do you mean?’’
Ochoa turned around and motioned at the laboratory readouts. ‘‘His brain is producing abnormally high quantities of adrenaline, cortisol, and glucagon. Before I worked for Orbops, I was employed by VIP-MED at the Directorate of National Intelligence, so I know about these things. Much of my work involved blue-sky implant research. It’s nothing new, really. We’ve been doing it for nearly two hundred years, ever since Dr. Jose Salgado conducted his experiments with his so-called stimoceivers back in the nineteen fifties. Someone’s implanted Mark. It was obvious to me the moment I first saw him typing like that. I didn’t want to say anything until I ran some tests. I’ve got the labs, and I’ve also X-rayed his head.’’ He asked his screen to maximize an image, and a second later a ghostly gray X-ray appeared on the screen. ‘‘They’ve made it out of translucent material, so it’s fairly hard to see, but if you look down
here, at Mark’s cerebral cortex, it’s the lozenge-shaped unit right here.’’
Cam maneuvered closer. ‘‘You guys implanted him?’’
‘‘Us?’’ Ochoa was surprised by the suggestion. ‘‘No. I recognize the design, though. Our operatives were constantly muling plants like this out of the PRNC before, during, and after the war. This one’s autonomous. It’s been modified from a more basic design. It’s complex. It’s loaded with commands. You can see fresh scar tissue up through here, in his sinus cavity. It probably crawled in.’’
‘‘So, wait a minute. The Chinese put it there?’’
Ochoa looked away. ‘‘Talk to Oren. I’m just a doctor.’’
‘‘The Chinese on board?’’
‘‘The PRNC is a complicated place right now. The new government has a tenuous hold at best and there are many loyal supporters of the previous junta. We knew the risks, but the benefits at the time seemed to outweigh them.’’
‘‘How recent is that scar tissue?’’
Ochoa gazed at the image. ‘‘I’m not a radiologist, but I would have to guess no older than a week.’’
‘‘So in other words, we have a Chinese operative aboard.’’
‘‘We vetted them all scrupulously.’’ Ochoa’s lips tightened once more. At last he scratched the back of his head. ‘‘But apparently not scrupulously enough.’’
In free fall, with his skin puffed out, the considerably overweight and bald Fye looked like a man-sized infant. During his time in space, he had developed a soft hacking cough, and this new signature sound now replaced the previous one of a long, lilting sigh.