In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “The chair is not that weird,” Van muttered. “It’s the whole world that’s weird now. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” He picked up his wireless laptop. “I’m going to Google the guys who made it.”

  “You really want this thing, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I want ten or twelve of them.”

  “Derek, that’s seventy-two hundred dollars for chairs. That’s not good sense.” Dottie sighed. “Tony Carew keeps saying that we should diversify our investments. Because the market is so down this season.”

  “Okay, fine, we’re not stock freaks like Tony is, but folks still need wires and bits.” Van shrugged. Van owned Mondiale stock because he put his own money where he himself worked. His work was the one thing in the world that Van fully understood. Whenever it came to the future, Van would firmly bet on himself. That had certainly worked out for him so far.

  Dottie smoothed the glossy magazine page. “Derek, my grant expires this semester. That’s not good. I’ve got everything publishable that I’m going to get out of that cluster survey. The peer review people are saying we need better instrumentation.” She wiped at Ted’s spit-shiny chin with Van’s spare paper towel.

  Van struggled to pay attention to her words. Dottie’s lab work meant everything to her. She had been working for four solid years on her globular cluster survey. Dottie had colleagues in Boston depending on her. Dottie had grad students to feed.

  “Derek, it just didn’t break wide open the way I hoped it would. That happens sometimes in science, you know. You can have a great idea, and you can put a lot of work into the hypothesis, but maybe your results just don’t pan out.”

  “People love your dark energy nucleation theory,” Van said supportively.

  “I’ve been thinking of spending more time here at home.”

  Van’s heart leapt. “Yeah?”

  “Teddy’s going to walk soon. And he’s talking now, listen to him.” Dottie stroked the baby’s wispy hair as Ted’s jolting head banged at her shoulder. “A little boy needs a normal life in some kind of normal house.”

  Van was shocked to realize how much this idea meant to him. Dottie, living with him and Ted, every single day. He felt stunned by the prospect. “Wow, being normal would be so fantastic.”

  Dottie winced. “Well, Helga is never around here for us when we need her. I think maybe I made a mistake there.”

  “We could put out an APB for her.” Van smiled. “Aw, don’t feel bad, honey. We can make do.”

  “I should do better,” she muttered. “I just don’t look after you and Teddy the way that I should.”

  Dottie was plunging into one of her guilty funks. The oncoming crisis was written all over her. Pretty soon she would start lamenting about her mother.

  Dottie only allowed herself these painful fits of insecurity when she was really, really happy. It had taken Van ten years of marriage to figure that out, but now he understood it. She was spoiling their perfect day because she had to. It was her secret promise to an ugly, scary world that she would never enjoy her life too much.

  Normally this behavior on her part upset Van, but today he felt so good that he found it comical. “Look, honey, so what if you got some bad news from your lab? What’s the worst thing that can come out of all that? Come on, we’re rich!”

  “Honey bear,” Dottie said, looking shyly at the spotless tabletop, “you work too hard. Even when you’re not in your office, you let those computer cops push you around all the time.” She picked up the other catalog again. “This funny chair you like so much? It’s waterproof. And we do need some kind of porch chair. So get this one, and you can keep it outside. Okay?”

  “Two?”

  Her mouth twitched. “One, Derek.”

  “Okay then!” One chair, just as a starter. One chair would be his proof-of-concept. Van beamed at her.

  The television grew more insistent. Dottie glanced over her shoulder at it. “Oh, my goodness! What a terrible accident.”

  “Huh.” Van stared at the smoldering hole in the skyscraper. “Wow.”

  “That’s New York, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Boy, you sure don’t see that all the time.” Van could have walked to the little TV in three strides, but on principle, he spent thirty seconds to locate its remote control. It was hiding in a heap of catalogs.

  Van turned up the TV’s volume. An announcer was filling dead air.

  Some big jet had collided with the World Trade Center.

  Van scowled. “Hey, that place has the worst luck in the world.”

  Dottie looked puzzled and upset. Even Ted looked morose.

  “I mean that crowd of bad guys with the big truck bomb,” Van explained. “They tried to blow up that place once.”

  Dottie winced. It was not her kind of topic.

  Van fetched up his ThinkPad from the floor. He figured he had better surf some Web news. These local TV guys had a lousy news budget.

  Covertly, Van examined his email. Thirty-four messages had arrived for him in the last two minutes. Van flicked through the titles. Security freaks from the cyberwar crowd. Discussion groups, Web updates. They were watching TV right at their computers, and instantly, they had gone nuts. Van was embarrassed to think that he knew so many of these people. It was even worse that so many of them had his email address.

  Van examined the television again. That television scene looked plenty bad. Van was no great expert on avionic systems, but he knew what any system-reliability expert would know about such things. He knew that it was very, very unlikely that FAA air control traffic at Kennedy and LaGuardia would ever let a jet aircraft just wander accidentally into a downtown New York skyscraper. New York City had a very heavy concentration of TRACONs and flow control units. So that couldn’t be a conventional safety failure.

  However. An unconventional failure, that was another story. An ugly story. Van had once spent a long, itchy, three-day weekend with FEMA in Washington, watching information-warfare people describing the truly awful things that might be done by “adversaries” who “owned” federal air traffic control systems.

  Since there really was no such thing in the world as “information warfare,” information-warfare people were the weirdest people Van knew. Their tactics and enemies were all imaginary. There was a definite dark-fantasy element to these cyberwar characters. They were like a black flock of the crows of doom, haunting an orc battlefield out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Van was reluctant to pay them any serious attention, because he suffered enough real-world security problems from hacker kids and viruses. Van did recall one soundbite, however. A bespectacled infowar geek, all wound up and full of ghoulish relish, describing how every aircraft in the skies of America would “become a flying bomb.”

  Air traffic control was a major federal computer system. It was one of the biggest and oldest. Repeated attempts to fix it had failed. The guys in the FAA used simple, old-fashioned computers dating to the 1970s. They used them because they were much more reliable than any of the modern ones. FAA guys had very dark jokes about computers crashing. For them, a computer crashing meant an aircraft crashing. It meant a “midair passenger exchange.” It meant “aluminum rain.”

  Now, Van realized, he was watching “aluminum rain” on New York’s biggest skyscraper. There was no way this was going to do. Not at all.

  Van drew a slow breath. There was a bad scene on the TV, but he was prepared for it. He had been here before, in his imagination. In 1999, Mondiale had spent over 130 million dollars chasing down Y2K bugs, with many firm assurances from security experts that the planet would fall apart, otherwise. Van had believed it, too. He’d felt pretty bad about that belief, later. When computers hadn’t crashed worldwide and the world hadn’t transformed itself overnight into a dark Mad Max wasteland, that had been a personal humiliation for Van.

  At least the Y2K money had really helped a big crowd of old programmers who had never saved up for retirement.

  Van’s New Year’s resol
ution for the year 2001 had been to never panic over vaporware again. So Van stilled his beating heart as the blasted skyscraper burned fantastically on his television. He was living way ahead of the curve here. He was already thinking in tenth gear. Calm down, he thought. Chill out. Be rational.

  Nothing really important was going to happen unless his phone rang. Some flurry of email from his most paranoid and suspicious acquaintances, that did not mean a thing. Internet lists were no more than water coolers, nothing more than a place for loudmouths to shoot off. His home phone number was extremely private. If that phone rang, then that would mean big trouble.

  If the phone did not ring, then he was much better off not saying anything to Dottie. Let her be happy. Let Ted be happy. Please, God, let everyone just be happy. Look at that sun at the window, that oak tree out on the lawn. It was such a nice day.

  Uh-oh. There went the other tower.

  Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction has won multiple awards, including the Nebula, the World Fantasy, and the Hugo. His Southern Reach trilogy was praised by Slate as one of “the most uncompromising—yet most rewarding—genre series in quite some time” and made the New York Times Best Sellers list.

  “The Goat Variations” features George Herbert Walker Bush, isolation tanks, time travel, and psychic adepts. The New Haven Review described and praised the story this way: “the leaders of a nation falling apart at the seams catch wind that a calamity is coming, but don’t know how to stop it.”

  THE GOAT VARIATIONS

  Jeff VanderMeer

  It would have been hot, humid in September in that city, and the Secret Service would have gone in first, before him, to scan for hostile minds, even though it was just a middle school in a county he’d won in the elections, far away from the fighting. He would have emerged from the third black armored vehicle, blinking and looking bewildered as he got his bearings in the sudden sunlight. His aide and the personal bodyguards who had grown up protecting him would have surrounded him by his first step onto the asphalt of the driveway. They would have entered the school through the front, stopping under the sign for photos and a few words with the principal, the television cameras recording it all from a safe distance.

  He would already be thinking past the event, to the next, and how to prop up sagging public approval ratings, due both to the conflict and what the press called his recent “indecision,” which he knew was more analogous to “sickness.” He would be thinking about, or around, the secret cavern beneath the Pentagon and the pale, almost grub-like face of the adept in his tank. He would already be thinking about the machine.

  By the end of the photo op, the sweat itches on his forehead, burns sour in his mouth, but he has to ignore it for the cameras. He’s turning a new word over and over in his mind, learned from a Czech diplomat. Ossuary. A word that sounds free and soaring, but just means a pile of skulls. The latest satellite photos from the battlefield states of Kansas, Nebraska, and Idaho make him think of the word. The evangelicals have been eschewing god-missiles for more personal methods of vengeance, even as they tie down federal armies in an endless guerilla war. Sometimes he feels like he’s presiding over a pile of skulls.

  The smile on his face has frozen into a rictus as he realizes there’s something wrong with the sun; there’s a red dot in its center, and it’s eating away at the yellow, bringing a hint of green with it. He can tell he’s the only one who can see it, can sense the pulsing, nervous worry on the face of his aide.

  He almost says “ossuary” aloud, but then, sunspots wandering across his eyes, they are bringing him down a corridor to the classroom where he will meet with the students and tell them a story. They walk past the open doors to the cafeteria—row on row of sagging wooden tables propped up by rusted metal legs. He experiences a flare of anger. Why this school, with the infrastructure crumbling away? The overpowering stale smell of macaroni-and-cheese and meatloaf makes him nauseous.

  All the while, he engages in small talk with the entourage of teachers trailing in his wake, almost all overweight middle-aged women with circles under their eyes and sagging skin on their arms. Many of them are black. He smiles into their shiny, receptive faces and remembers the hired help in the mansion growing up. Some of his best friends were black until he took up politics.

  For a second, as he looks down, marveling at their snouts and beaks and muzzles, their smiles melt away and he’s surrounded by a pack of animals.

  His aide mutters to him through clenched teeth, and two seconds later he realizes the words were “Stop staring at them so much.” There have always been times when meeting too many people at once has made him feel as if he’s somewhere strange, all the mannerisms and gesticulations and varying tones of voice shimmering into babble. But it’s only lately that the features of people’s faces have changed into a menagerie if he looks at them too long.

  They’d briefed him on the secret rooms and the possibility of the machine even before they’d given him the latest intel on China’s occupation of Japan and Taiwan. Only three hours into his presidency, an armored car had taken him to the Pentagon, away from his wife and the beginnings of the inauguration party. Once there, they’d entered a green-lit steel elevator that went down for so long he thought for a moment it was broken. It was just him, his aide, a black-ops commander who didn’t give his name, and a small, haggard man who wore an old gray suit over a faded white dress shirt, with no tie. He’d told his vice president to meet the press while he was gone, even though he was now convinced the old man had dementia.

  The elevators had opened to a rush of stale cool air, like being under a mountain, and, beneath the dark green glow of overhead lamps, he could see rows and rows of transparent, bathtub-shaped deprivation vats. In each floated one dreaming adept, skin wrinkled and robbed of color by the exposure to the chemicals that preserved and pacified them. Every shaven head was attached to wires and electrodes, every mouth attached to a breathing tube. Catheters took care of waste. The stale air soon faded as they walked silent down the rows, replaced by a smell like turpentine mixed with honeysuckle. Sometimes the hands of the adepts twitched, like cats hunting in their sleep.

  A vast, slow, repeating sound registered in his awareness. Only after several minutes did he realize it was the sound of the adepts as they slowly moved in their vats, creating a slow ripple of water repeated in thousands of other vats. The room seemed to go on forever, into the far distance of a horizon tinged at its extremity by a darkening that hinted of blood.

  His sense of disgust, revulsion grew as the little man ran out ahead of them, navigated a path to a control center, a hundred yards in and to the left, made from a luminous blue glass, set a story up and jutting out over the vats like some infernal crane. And still he did not know what to say. The atmosphere combined morgue, cathedral, and torture chamber. He felt a compulsion, if he spoke, to whisper.

  The briefing papers he’d read on the ride over had told him just about everything. For years, adepts had been screened out at birth and, depending on the secret orders peculiar to each administration, either euthanized or imprisoned in remote overseas detention camps. Those that managed to escape detection until adulthood had no rights if caught, not even the rights given to illegal immigrants. The founding fathers had been very clear on that in the constitution.

  He had always assumed that adults when caught were eliminated or sent to the camps. Radicals might call it the last reflexive act of a puritanical brutality that reached across centuries, but most citizens despised the invasion of privacy an adept represented or were more worried about how the separatist evangelicals had turned the homeland into a nation of West and East Coasts, with no middle.

  But now he knew where his predecessor had been storing the bodies. He just didn’t yet know why.

  In the control center, they showed him the images being mined from the depths of the adepts’ REM sleep. They ranged from montages as incomprehensible as the experimental films he’d seen in college to single shots of dead people to g
rassy hills littered with wildflowers. Ecstasy, grief, madness, peace. Anything imaginable came through in the adepts’ endless sleep.

  “Only ten people in the world know every aspect of this project, and three of them are dead, Mr. President,” the black-ops commander told him.

  Down below, he could see the little man, blue-tinted, going from vat to vat, checking readings.

  “We experimented until we found the right combination of drugs to augment their sight. One particular formula, culled from South American mushrooms mostly, worked best. Suddenly, we began to get more coherent and varied images. Very different from before.”

  He felt numb. He had no sympathy for the men and women curled up in the vats below him—an adept’s grenade had killed his father in mid-campaign a decade before, launching his own reluctant career in politics—but, still, he felt numb.

  “Are any of them dangerous?” he asked the black-ops commander.

  “They’re all dangerous, Mr. President. Every last one.”

  “When did this start?”

  “With a secret order from your predecessor, Mr. President. Before, we just disappeared them or sent them to work camps in the Alaskas.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  Even then, he would realize later, a strange music was growing in his head, a distant sound fast approaching.

  “He did it, Mr. President, or said he did it, as a way of getting intel on the Heartland separatists.”

  Understandable, if idiosyncratic. The separatists and the fact that the federal armies had become bogged down in the Heartland fighting them were the main reasons his predecessor’s party no longer controlled the executive, judicial, or legislative branches. And no one had ever succeeded in placing a mole within evangelical ranks.

  The scenes continued to cascade over the monitors in a rapid-fire nonsense rhythm.

  “What do you do with the images?”

  “They’re sent to a full team of experts for interpretation, Mr. President. These experts are not told where the images come from.”