“That’s crazy,” I said. I told her I loved her. I told her I would always love her no matter what.
She looked at me for another long time, and then she said, “If I don’t make it, will you take care of my dog? She’s so beautiful, and she needs someone who will really take care of her.”
I said of course she was going to make it.
“But in case,” she said.
“I swear it.”
She closed the eye. The nurse shoved the drape aside and looked in and told me to go.
She didn’t make it, for some reason. Couple of days later I sold the dog and got out of town. I mean, LA really has no character.
The Patterns of Dorne
The dart was a miracle of miniaturized precision. A tiny sliver of a thing, it contained a laser generator, a proximity device, and a destruct mechanism so efficient that it would, on the instant, separate all its parts down to the molecular level. It would deliver to its target that one brief blast of intolerable heat, from close and lethal range, and would then cease to exist. A dissection of the murdered man would reveal the almost microscopic puncture burn—but then the exit wound would be almost identical and everything between them cooked into a sort of soup. There would be no marks on anything behind or around the victim; even the bright glare of almost-solar heat would be concealed within the victim’s body, and as he fell, he must turn one way or the other; who could reconstruct the trajectory?
The little gun designed to throw the dart was equally a miracle—so small that it was dwarfed by the telescope mounted at its top. The propellant was a series of cryptocryogenic solenoid rings, silent and lightless, wound with tens of thousands of turns of all but invisible, superconductive wire. In the ’scope was a complete light-amplification system, with automatic range-coupling with the focus. Anything found at the intersection of the radiant crosshairs and brought into focus was going to be killed. And all of it, gun and missiles, was made of materials well below the allowable error of the finest detection devices, and demountable into small unnoticeable parts which could be, which had been, distributed in and around the neatly fitted uniform of a Senior Lieutenant in the Leader’s Guard. The Leader was Dorne, and in the bright image in the ’scope was the open balcony door of Dorne’s suite, and all that was lacking to complete the picture, to complete this careful plan, was the appearance in it of Dorne’s famous face.
The stone room in which the Lieutenant leaned yearning into his ’scope was more suited, perhaps, to the fifteenth century than to the twenty-first, with its ironbound oaken door and its single arrow-slit window. It was tomb-dark except for the tiny spot of light in the eyepiece, and empty except for half a lifetime’s worth of hate and purpose and absolute certainty … and now, and now it was complete; now there was a shadow-flicker in the door across the inner courtyard, now it swung back and the face on the coins, the face of stamps and placards and statues and Government edicts, the great gentle-seeming lion-maned powerful face of Dorne appeared in the crosshairs as the Leader came out exactly on schedule (of course!) for his midnight breath of air.
The Lieutenant’s life and career peaked in the two tiny movements of a finger slipping through the trigger guard and a thumb on the focus rotor. The image sharpened into pore-clear detail, and, as the thumb moved to the second rotor, zoomed to fill the frame with that detested about-to-laugh countenance, its muscular cheeks, the hint of crow’s feet around the wide-spaced brooding eyes. The joining of the crosshairs settled on the bridge of the Leader’s nose, the finger tensed on the trigger, the image steadied—
And went out.
Went out, was blank, was gone.
There was a split second then of endless time, a black universe composed entirely of total disbelief, and then he moved his eye back, which did nothing but emphasize the blackness with the dim presence of the arrow-slit. He slid his hand away from the trigger guard and up along the ’scope to the lens, to find what was obscuring it.
It was a hand. He had time enough to touch it and know it for what it was, when something blunt-pointed struck him on the side of the Adam’s apple. He fell, the gun seemingly fastened into the darkness by darkness, staying suspended while he fell away from it, fighting for two impossibilities—breath, and silence. His knees struck the stone floor, and as he bowed his head over the agony in his throat, something struck him across the exposed nape, and he went down. Pain was a brief blaze of even darker darkness, which swallowed him up.
Time skipped a beat then. He was never to remember how he had been moved from a collapsed heap on the floor under the window to a sitting position against one of the side walls. Either it was still dark, or he was blind … No; it was just the dark, for he was aware of the dim arrow-slit. His eyes felt scalded. He had not cried for years, not since his father and two brothers had been taken by a patrol one night, never to be seen again; he had been only a toddler then. What touched him now was all the anguished grief and loss and frustrated anger he had denied himself during these careful years; he was, for the moment, denied anything else. The one thing he did not feel was shame, and that was supplied shockingly as soft cloth touched a cheekbone, one eye, the other, wiping away tears. No one should have known he had tears. He tried to raise two angry hands and could not; tingling agony in a spot just above each collarbone told him the nerves had been expertly pinched, and he knew from experience that his arms wouldn’t belong to him for a while.
Something ringed his head, settled over his brow and eyes.
He gasped. The light, as lights go, was not bright, but any light at all in this place was a dazzle. Understanding was a dazzle too—that these were blacklight goggles—a UV converter, and that with them and the invisible beam from the lamp between the lenses, he had been watched from the moment he entered the stone room in the battlement. He had been seen—photographed? —assembling the weapon and taking his aim. He had been, oh God, seen weeping, and his tears had been wiped away so that he could see through these goggles.
See what? A bright blur, a blink, a leather-backed escutcheon bearing the Leader’s ubiquitous face, and on each side of it a letter, a scintillant S. Secret Service—Dorne’s own legendary, mysterious secret service, above the law, outside the law; for even Dorne’s law, made by Dorne, represented restrictions on Dorne, and Dorne was a man who would not be restricted.
He nodded, and the goggles were immediately snatched away. Three soft footfalls in the darkness, a breathless moment of waiting, listening, and then the heavy door was opened just far enough to build a black silhouette which slipped outside and closed the door again.
The Lieutenant gaped at where the swift vision had been, and tried not to think—thinking was too terrifying, thinking led to the certain knowledge that he was a dead man, and the even more destroying knowledge that he had been played with like a kitten and backhanded aside like an insect. So much for half a lifetime of care and passion. So instead of thinking he felt—felt the tingling above his collarbones descend to his biceps, forearms, hands, fingers, less an agony each second, until an effort of will was rewarded by a movement in his fingers. He got his hands up and shakily rubbed them together until they belonged to him again; then he pressed himself to his feet and followed the example which had just been set him; he went to the door and held his breath, listening. Nothing. He opened the door a very small crack, peered, slipped out, closed it. No one in sight. He turned to the right and began to walk.
If he had expected the battlement to be in a state of alert or alarm, he was disappointed. It came to him, as he passed a courier, who saluted, and then a noncom, that he had seen their faces at pretty much these places time and again before; that he had slipped back again into his accustomed slot in the intricate workings of the concentric guard. Since he had come on watch tonight he had made his routine contact points each a few seconds early, until he had accumulated a shade under six minutes ahead of schedule. With these six minutes and a weapon it had taken years to design and build, he had meant to change the
world. He now knew it had taken no more than that to become useless and dead, leaving the world, Dorne’s world, unchanged and triumphant; for he was right on his posted schedule. He could go straight to the common room and turn over the watch to his relief, and check out, and no one would know that life and all the reasons for living had been drawn out of him, folded up, filed away—in something less than six minutes.
In the familiar common room, full of familiar faces, he checked across the columns of his report (one was headed Unusual Occurrences, one Unauthorized Personnel; he lied and wrote None, none, none all across the page; what could they do to him now, for lying?) and could appreciate the momentum of familiarity. You could be preoccupied, tired, drunk and do familiar things right. You could be dead. He knew he was watched, as he had been watched. He knew he was more than helpless—he was futile. He turned over the shift to Riggs, a career lieutenant with prominent front teeth and a giggle, and went out into the floodlit night and checked himself out through the familiar gate; and would this be the last time? Perhaps, perhaps not—so much depended on how amusing “they” found the game.
The familiar car was waiting, familiar Zein and Hallowell and Iturbi were climbing in as he reached it, and as the car slid silently along the dark streets, the talk was as usual. Nobody noticed his silence; he was not a talkative man. Iturbi was dropped off. More silent sliding and the new familiarity of the Zein-Hallowell conversation; they always talked about Iturbi. Then they were dropped off at the Shrine of the Leader—they both lived near it, and the car slid away northward on Dorne Boulevard, with the final familiarity of his silent occupancy of the wide rear seat, and the familiar silent presence of the driver.
Northward on Dorne Boulevard? “Hey!”
The car immediately slowed and drifted to a stop against the curb. Well, at last something was different to mark the day of his death. The driver had forgotten that he lived on the South Side. He peered. It was a woman. Well, most of them were. She half-turned toward him and said, “Come up front with me.”
“I’ll stay where I am,” he snapped. “Turn this thing around and—” He stopped, thunderstruck, for with a single casual motion the driver hooked something out of her side pocket and tossed it back into his lap. It was the eyepiece of his telescope.
There was a moment of shattering silence—no repeat request or command, no display of weapons. She simply waited. The whole dialogue was there, back and forth, back and forth—argument, resistance, threat, fear. Then he did as he must—opened his door, got out, re-entered beside her. The car started to move the instant the door clicked shut. He watched her face for a while by the wash and fade, the wash and fade of passing lights. Twenty-something, straight nose, good chin, large eyes—just another woman in uniform among the millions of the same. A thought occurred to him, a question. “Who jumped me in the battlement?”
“I did.”
She drove with enormous competence and she seemed normally healthy, but she was not a large woman. Another few seconds of that silent dialogue: disbelief, could-it-be, who-else-then, prove it!—which she did in words: “You cried.” Not what he wanted to hear, but proof enough.
She turned the car into a cross street and at last looked directly at him. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’d have done the same. I like you for it.”
“Think of that,” he said bitterly.
Ignoring this, she said, “You had no plans, had you, for afterward. After he was dead.”
If she had asked him what his plans might have been, he would have refused to answer. He might even have enjoyed dying for his refusal to answer. But this was a flat statement.
“Who needs plans? Dorne’s a fool.” The heretical words felt good after all these years of reverence. “Any man’s a fool who builds his structure to a single kingpin. Snatch that out and the whole thing falls apart. It looks like strength but it isn’t.”
“And what did you think would happen when it fell apart?”
“I didn’t care. Anything would be better than a controlled population living controlled lives. Something would come up out of the ruins—maybe not as neat, efficient, maybe not as comfortable. But it would be something alive and growing, not something perfect and—well, stopped.”
She said, in a tone of perfect knowledge and certainty, “Dorne doesn’t think he will live forever. He does think his system will. He’s been ready for you for a long time.”
“For me?”
“Or someone like you. Newton’s first law operates everywhere, even in politics. ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.’ If you create a society like this one, you create your revolutionaries right along with it. You know perfectly well there’s an Underground.”
“Don’t try to tie me in with that pack of creeps!” he spat.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m not. There are all kinds of revolutionaries, and the ones who make a lot of noise are the easiest to handle. They’re noticeable—that’s the thing. They can be found and picked off whenever the time is ripe. In addition, the people who follow them are usually misfits, and they don’t stop being misfits just because they follow a new leader. They couldn’t get along with the Establishment, and they can’t get along with each other. Your ‘kingpin’ principle operates there, too. Eliminate the leader and you have only a mess to clean up, not a movement to put down.”
“You have it all figured out,” he said, his bitterness increasing.
She nodded serenely. He wanted to smash his fist into her face—but not at seventy miles an hour on a winding road. Where was she taking him? The city was behind them now. She said, “There’s another kind of revolutionary who’s much more difficult to handle. He’s the kind with a personal grudge, with the intelligence to plan his strike and the ability to carry it out. He has no partners or comrades; he can’t be betrayed. The hardest thing of all to deal with is that he has a limited objective. He wants a single thing—let’s say, to kill a man. He isn’t building anything, he isn’t saving the world, he doesn’t even care if anyone ever finds out he’s responsible. How can you guard against a revolutionary like that?”
“How did you?”
She smiled. “Just by knowing that he exists, that he’s as inevitable as the man-the-barricades type of revolutionary hero. Once you know that, any Mark II or III computer can XT a portrait of him—who, why, how, when and where. All you have to do is sit and wait for him. He’ll keep the appointment.”
The wave of futility nearly drowned him. When it receded, he asked, “XT … that’s—extrapolate.”
“Right. That’s what it’s designed for—to predict. It takes all the known factors and casts probabilities, and compares all those and selects the most probable, and does it over again and selects the most certain of those, and so on. And we aren’t using a II or III—ours is a VII. It talks to all the other computers. Lieutenant—it knows.”
She pulled the car off the paved road and into a barely discernible dirt track through heavy forest. She stopped talking and concentrated on driving, tooling the car through unlikely gaps between trees and rock outcrops. It came at last to a cul-de-sac between a house-sized boulder and two giant Douglas firs. She braked to a halt. She made no move to open a door, and therefore neither did he. She must have touched a control somewhere because the ground on which the car stood began silently to rotate, as on a turntable. When the car was pointed between the tree trunks, the turntable stopped and she edged the car through. Looking back, the Lieutenant could see the turntable rotating back to its previous position.
“Come in.” He looked at her, and then where she pointed.
A hunter’s shack on pilings, frame and tarpaper, built against a rock wall. He looked back at her. Starlight and a sliver of moon gave only a little light, but it was enough for him to see the confident way she moved as she came round the car and stood near him. She was taller than he had supposed, and she carried her hands a little away from her body, and her feet were placed so and just so. He realized there was no ne
ed to wonder if she had a weapon. Her hands were weapons—she was a weapon. And for all he knew she might have had a gun as well. He nodded and led the way to the shack. At her gesture he pushed the door open and went in. She followed. She closed the door and a light sprang out from her hand. He saw a bunk, an old stove, rubble on the floor, some firewood. She kicked at the firewood and the wall behind it rolled massively upward, revealing a corridor slanting downward into the hillside.
The Lieutenant paused right there and looked back past her at the flimsy barrier of the shack wall, and then at her. How he telegraphed what flicked through his mind, he did not know. Did he tense, narrow his eyes, flex his hands, set his feet? He almost moved, but she said quietly, “Don’t.”
And caught, he had to shake a rueful head and relax. He asked a straight question, gesturing at the corridor. “If I walk down there, will I ever come out alive?” And she gave him what sounded like a straight answer: “That is entirely up to you.” She made an ‘after you’ gesture, and he sighed and went down the corridor; thinking several things on several levels: That is one hell of a lot of woman, and What’s she got that’s so special? because he had seen many a prettier girl, some who seemed more intelligent, a whole lot that were more fun.… And under it all, They’ve caught me and I am going to die in this place. She passed him after the turn at the bottom of the ramp, looking up into his face, and opened a door. They went in.
Torture chamber? Mad scientist’s lair, with rock walls, steaming retorts, and traveling arcs zit-zitting? Secret martial court, complete with granite-faced officers and an empty prisoner’s dock waiting just for him? None of this … a homey living room. Carpet worn but not shabby, a little rip in a lampshade. Big sofa, two big chairs, three well-chosen small ones and a matching table, a large desk cater-cornered. Home, not office or shop. A cheerful little man in his fifties sprang up and came around the desk with his hand out. “Lieutenant! I’ve been looking forward to this.”
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