Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  All he said was, “It’s fatuous to brag about what you can’t help, Justine. It’s worse to apologize.” But what I saw in his expression was not self-pity.

  It was clemency. The hell with him. . . .

  Let’s face it: Howie wasn’t interested in bettering himself. That’s another reason why I wasn’t interested in keeping my options open with Howie. I stopped outside the door to his tiny office, took a few sniffs from my compact, and feeling suitably mellow, stepped inside. Into chaos.

  Fax notes everywhere, cassettes underfoot, Howie in shirtsleeves capering at his data terminal with a light pencil like some scrawny shaman crooning a non-tune. That would’ve been enough by itself, but humming and twanging through it, the speakers played something just far enough from sensible music to set my pearly-whites on edge. “Howie, have you gone . . .” I began.

  His wave cut me short and suggested I shut the door in one motion. Before he turned back to the terminal, I caught his glance. It was whimsical, guilty, appraising. And like a fool I thought his office bedlam was the reason.

  Howie was talking. Or rather, his terminal was, synthesized from his voiceprint and contrapuntal to the music. But it didn’t have Howie’s educated Yorkshire diction; it spoke in standard CanAm, which didn’t seem to bother Howie but nearly drove me wild. How could I tell which voice should take precedence?

  “ . . . not sure whether the Greeks did it first. But Porta proved you can write music to be played right side up or upside down,” said the Howie terminal.

  “Invertible polyphony,” the real Howie said to me, eyes agleam, his light pencil marking time. “Bach tried it in this fugue.” He punched an instruction. His grin invited me to enjoy it.

  Instantly the terminal voice stopped and instead we were hearing what Howie claimed was Bach. I could take it but preferred to leave it and said so.

  “Ah, but listen to it inverted,” he begged. Another punched instruction. More Bach-I guess.

  Howie closed his eyes in bliss. I closed mine too, and raised my fists and shouted, “HOWIE, WHEN WILL YOU LEARN SOMETHING AS EASY AS A PROGRESS REPORT?”

  Finger jab, and a silence of anechoic chambers. Then as I waited for his apology: “Justine, when will you learn something as easy as calling me ‘Howard’?”

  “If the diminutive fits, wear it,” I snapped. “I’m here to do your paperwork, since you prefer to play with your stolen ditties.”

  “Ah, no,” he breathed, smiling at a private whimsy, no longer appraising. “Not stolen; lost, and now found.” He let the smile fade while I whiffed at my compact again. It’s easy to overdo a hit from a compact, which is why Howie disapproved of my doing it, which is why I pretended to overdo it. Instead of an apology, I detected patronage. Nobody patronizes Justine Channing. Nobody.

  “So you must work, because I play,” he murmured finally. “If you hate that so much, Justine, why do you do it?”

  I shrugged. Why did everybody do it? To get somewhere. Too elementary to repeat.

  “Answer one question,” he prodded gently, “and then I promise to help you draft a report synopsis.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Why do you do it? Help me draft the report, I mean.”

  Well, he’d promised a quid pro quo. “The federation gets your report, Delphium gets its quarterly check, and Cabot Hawke gets off the hook.” Howie just looked at me. “All right, and then Hawke lets me off the hook! More or less,” I hedged.

  “Hawke and you. More and less.” He nodded like a wronged parent. “And I, less still.”

  “Life is a billion-way parlay, Howie. To be a winner, you pick winners. I don’t care what you think about me and Hawke.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant, we fool ourselves about our motives. A good turn has a selfish component; we try to be more, while the system is biased to make us less.”

  “Hell, if you don’t push for number one, you’ll never amount to anything.”

  Howie looked at, then through me, and then began to laugh a soft hollow-chested wheeze that lasted a long time. “We obviously wouldn’t be as we are,” he said at last, terminating his private joke. “Very well; into the breach of the report, as it were. What tale did we spin for the analysts last time? Must have a clear sequence,” he added, as if he’d said something clever.

  I passed him “his” last progress report-I had written it-and waited while Howie scanned it. Half of his work was unraveling Cetian arts. Every child knew that the quasimammals on Tau Ceti’s major planet had been nuts about communication. Their color sense had been so acute that the Cetians could leave a complex message with a single dot of color. Hue, shape, size, sequence of spots; all affected Cetian message content. The trouble was that nothing that remained of Cetian media told us why they weren’t still there.

  Picture a planetful of garrulous ground sloths, carefully documenting each war and yardage sale, every farce and footrace of a dominant culture. Now picture them disappearing suddenly without trace or announcement, centuries before our Egyptians built Abu Simbel. Cetian science yielded no clue. Cetian art, someone guessed, might yield some hints.

  Howie worked, or rather played, overtime for months before he discovered that Cetian communication went to hell just before their disappearance. The Cetians produced one final piece of abstract visual art, a huge blob of varicolored tiles by some philosopher-priest, and they reproduced it as proudly and as often as we copy the Mona Lisa. And then their commentaries began to decay fast.

  Howie’s last report had concluded: “Cetian language became more chaotic with each sleep period. The hue variable was abandoned, and we infer that the Cetians fell prey to some epidemic that first confused, then consumed them. During the next quarter we will run content-analytical surveys of late Cetian story mosaics,” and made other vague promises I’d added.

  “Hawke must be glad that I’m not making much progress,” Howie mused as he read the last paragraph.

  I donated a cool smile. “Just enough, not too much. The riddle’s been there a long time, Howie. Why work yourself out of a job overnight?” Wink. Even if he rarely made heavy passes at me anymore, Howie liked my little winks and nudges-and they didn’t cost me much.

  He studied me without expression except that the broad nostrils flared and contracted, reminding me of a skinny little hippo lost in thought. Then he grunted and began to read my write-up of his Proxima Two translations.

  The Proximans had disappeared several million years ago; so long ago that it took two expeditions to discover remains of a race that had vanished, like the Cetians, suddenly. They’d been sea-dwelling invertebrates with enough savvy to build pearlescent craft that explored their land-masses, then build others that took them into orbit. We hadn’t a clue to Proximan language until a xenologist suspected there was meaning in all the bubbles.

  I mean, of course, the bubble generators that were still blurping away in the coral cities Proximans had built. Give our pickaninny his due: it was Howie who thought to run analyses of covariance of the size, frequency, gas composition, and absorption rates of the bubbles. Those little isotope-powered bubble generators, he figured, hadn’t been put there just for decor. And Howie was right. They’d been for entertainment and news; Proximan media broadcasts.

  Thanks to Howie, we knew the Proximans had a strict caste system, high art, and a suspicious nature, even in those bubble messages. Howie’s current work was often a case of guessing what the Proximan sea-cities didn’t want to talk about.

  Howie sighed while reading my last paragraph: “ . . . further study of a long, curiously-wrought sequence that was found programmed into bubble generators in widely-separated cities. The sequence may have been a rare cooperative effort by Proximans to unify several mathematical theories. The effort was barely underway when, after a brief period of linguistic decay, the Proximans vanished.”

  “Most of that is eyewash, you know.” Howie tapped the fax page without rancor. “Oh, it’s glossy enough, and harmless-but who
told you all that sodding rubbish about unifying theories? My work suggests the Proximans were studying a single message.”

  “Pity you didn’t write this yourself, then,” I flared, and waited for my apology.

  And got it. “True. If I leave it for someone else I must expect something to get lost in translation. I really do apologize, Justine. We might do better this time, eh?”

  I remarked that it was up to him. He edited what I’d written, then spent the next hour extracting bits on the Ceti problem from his computer terminal, putting them in order for me. Sure enough, Howie had fresh surmises which I arranged, then rechecked.

  At first I thought I’d misplaced a fax page. “Damn, this passage isn’t Ceti. It’s Prox stuff.”

  “No, you’ve got it spot-on,” he said with a final inflection that teased me to continue.

  “But-it was the Cetians, not the Proximans, who went gaga over a piece of art.”

  “The Cetians,” he replied, nodding and leaving his chin up as he added, “and the Proximans.” And he watched me with that damnable catch-me-if-you-can smile of his.

  I made a dozen intuitive leaps, all into black holes of confusion, in ten seconds. I could feel the hair begin to rise on the nape of my neck until I decided Howie was kidding me.

  He decoded my glance and began quickly: “That massive Cetian colorburst? Its title translates roughly into ‘Rebirth’ or equally well as ‘Climax.’ The work of one individual who couldn’t explain it. Pure inspiration. Also,” he added slowly, “pure message. Our Cetian artist just didn’t understand his own message at first.”

  I tapped an extravagant fingernail against my faxes, denying the gooseflesh creeping down my spine. “But you understand it?”

  “Lord no,” he laughed. “It has a level of abstraction that escapes me.” More seriously then: “Exactly the same as the Proximan problem, Justine. It involves a different idiom.”

  I swallowed and sat down. Mostly, I wondered how to tell Cabot Hawke that his prize egghead had cracked his little shell. “No. You can’t seriously imply that-that the Ceti mosaic has any connection with a string of bubbles. In another star system. Five million years apart. It’s beyond reason, Howie!”

  The little monkey was grinning. “ ’Tis, isn’t it? I keep trying to decode that mosaic and what the Proximans called their ‘Coronation Lyric,’ but so far I haven’t the foggiest.”

  “The hell you don’t.” My mouth was dry. I compared his conclusions again. “The short bubble message commentary that preceded the Coronation Lyric: any room for error in your translation? I mean, saying their lyric thing was an inspired piece of art?”

  “Not much. I gather it unfolded like Coleridge’s vision of Xanadu-only our Proximan wasn’t interrupted. He got to finish undisturbed.”

  “Just before the Proximans all disappeared.”

  “Not quite. Proximans considered it only great art at first. They didn’t tumble immediately, as the Cetians did; they had a puzzle to solve.”

  In the back of my head, a small voice reminded me that none of this was on my faxes. Howie didn’t want it in the reports. What else had he held back? I half-closed my eyes and smiled. “You think the Cetians and Proximans were communicating,” I said.

  “Unlikely. There are other possibilities.”

  I persisted. “But a direct connection between the art and the disappearances?”

  “Between the messages buried in the art and the disappearances,” he corrected. He was glancing at me: hair, cleavage, mouth.

  I moistened my lips with my tongue and said softly, “If you’re right-Howard-how big is this news?”

  He was still focusing on my mouth, pole-axed with desire. “Pick a number,” he said like a sleepwalker. “Quite a large one.”

  “But only if you can translate those messages.”

  “Can you keep a secret, Justine?”

  “Try me.” If he missed that entendre he was no translator.

  “I suspect neither message can ever be decoded by humans. There’s something missing, as if each message were tailored exclusively for a given species. A Cetian, I suspect, could never have translated the Proximan message. And so on.”

  “But who could have sent such messages?”

  “Ah,” he said, a forefinger raised, and then turned the gesture into a wave of helplessness.

  I let it all sink in, and let Howie take my hand while I raced over the possibilities. If Howie chose to report that the translations couldn’t be made, his study contract might be terminated. That meant major problems which Hawke would pass down to me. If Howie did break those codes, assuming he wasn’t march-hare mad with his whole scenario, it might mean a Nobel.

  There had to be some way I could profit from this thing, without risking anything. As Howie interlaced his fingers against mine with his sad, tentative smile, I squeezed. “You realize I’m obligated to report all this,” I said.

  He jerked away. Carefully, voice shaking: “You don’t have to report pure oral conjecture, Justine. That’s all it is right now. I shared it with you in strictest confidence.”

  Time to set the hook. “If it’s ever discovered that I held back crucial information, it will ruin my career,” I said. As though Cabot Hawke hadn’t shown me that the reverse is true! “You’re asking me to be a full partner in this, Howard.”

  “I suppose so,” he said. “All right. Yes, I am.”

  I’d landed him. Ruffling his kinky thatch with one hand, I stood up. “You won’t be sorry, Howie. Just keep trying to decode those messages.” I stacked my faxes neatly and headed toward the door.

  “You’re assuming,” he said dreamily, “they haven’t already been decoded for us.” I must’ve stared, because he started ticking items off on his stubby fingers:

  “Brancusi’s ‘Bird in Space’ can be expressed mathematically. Maya glyphs. Altamira cave paintings. It may have been what Hesse had in mind with his bead game in Magister Ludi. Or”-he gave a happy giggle-“I could just be bonkers. But I’m in training for the search, Justine. That’s what I was doing when you walked in.”

  “Training for the Interstellar Olympics,” I teased.

  “Or for the twilight of the gods,” he replied thoughtfully. “You understand that secrecy is vital if there’s danger?”

  Well, I thought I did: to keep some other weirdo from jumping his claim. “Trust me,” I said, and left him.

  Two minutes and a broken anklestrap later I was with Hawke, babbling so fast he had to help me open my compact for a settle-me-down.

  As usual, Hawke traded me fresh perspectives for what I gave him. As we lay on his apartment watercouch he blew one of my curls from his lips and reached for a cheroot. He lit it, and fell back beside me puffing happily.

  Wrinkling my nose: “I’ve come to think of that stink as the unsweet odor of your success,” I gibed. At Hawke’s age, he wasn’t always successful.

  “Be glad it doesn’t smell like Howie Prior,” he replied, and I could feel his furry barrel chest shaking with amusement.

  I bit him. “That’s for your innuendo. And for refusing to explain this afternoon.”

  “About Howie’s fear of gotterdammerung? Seems clear enough, Jus’. He thinks there could be some magic formula that wiped out two entire civilizations.” Hawke dragged on the cheroot, studied its glow. Then, reflectively, “Well, well; what a weapon in the wrong hands.”

  Trust Hawke to think in those terms. He was still chuckling to himself as I prompted, “And in the right hands?”

  Long silence. Then, “There probably wouldn’t be any right hands. Classic paranoid fantasy-and I’m not at all surprised to find our little Howie entertaining it.” After a moment he added, “Watch him, Jus’.”

  The idea of Howie Prior being violent was absurd, and I laughed. “I probably outweigh him.”

  “You miss the point. He doesn’t need muscle to be dangerous. Humor him. Keep an eye open for his private computer code. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find him bootl
egging full translations to the highest bidder because he thinks it’s all that important.”

  What good would it have done me to insist that Howie was not capable of such sharp practice? To Cabot Hawke, the world was populated only by Cabot Hawkes-and certainly not many Howies. I promised I’d give all the support Howie asked for, and then changed the subject. My mistake.

  Howie Prior wanted to lie on his bony arse high up in the Sistine Chapel. Not on a muffled skimmer, which wouldn’t have required so many permissions, but on a rickety scaffold which took me weeks to arrange. But Delphium has clout, and Howie got to play Michelangelo. It got him nowhere.

  Howie had more fun as Constantin Brancusi and I had hell finding sculpture replicas. But we found photos of the man’s studio and the airy, white sunsplashed rooms had charm-until Howie put dust covers over the pieces I’d collected, to recreate the ambience the sculptor had kept. When Howie donned outmoded funky clothes and a little pointy woolen cap, I walked out. He said he needed to be Brancusi for his work, but hadn’t told me how far he was willing to take it.

  Well, Brancusi didn’t take him very far.

  When Howie asked me to find him a place in Clarens, Switzerland, I almost called Hawke. Then Howie showed me photos of the view he wanted, and I agreed. A tiny pension in a Swiss hotel was easy enough to locate. Why shouldn’t I make the arrangements over there and enjoy Howie’s madness before Hawke realized how much it cost?

  “Which Swiss are you going to be?”

  “Try and find me some Mahorka tobacco. It’s Spanish,” he unanswered.

  “Picasso?”

  “And get me an appointment with an internist,” he added. “I must know the proper dosage.”

  “For what?”

  “For just a touch of nicotine poisoning, if you must know. We don’t want to overdo it, do we?”

  “We don’t know what the hell you’re up to. We,” I stressed it again, “get queasy thinking about postmortems. So no, goddammit, we aren’t going to find you any poisonous tobacco.”