Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  At the end of the corridor Yasmin paused. “I hope this goes all right, but it may not. A couple of days ago I had a horrible screaming fight with the man inside this room. We said some pretty awful things to each other. I want to patch things up, but if I can’t, please remember that it’s nothing to do with you.”

  They entered a smallish room, whose only occupant sat at a cluttered desk before a thick-paneled door of dark wood. He stood up as they came in, an unusually handsome young man whose face was a picture of uncertainty. He and Yasmin stared at each other for a few seconds.

  “Want to go on working here?” she said at last.

  He grimaced. “Is that what he said to you? It’s exactly what he said to me.”

  “Me, too. What did you tell him?”

  “I said, yes, I want to work here. More than anything I can think of.”

  Yasmin nodded. “That’s pretty much what I said, too. He made me feel about two inches tall.”

  “I know. The worst thing is, he was absolutely right. Can we have lunch today?”

  “I’d like that. We’ll compare wounds.” Yasmin turned to Art and Dana. “This is Auden Travis. Auden, this is Art Ferrand and Dana Berlitz. They were at the syncope facility, too.”

  Travis nodded, but he hardly glanced at the two visitors. He was looking appalled at Yasmin. “I heard,” he said. “I should have mentioned it before, instead of talking about our jobs. I’m really sorry about Raymond. It must have been awful.”

  “It was. Worse than I thought. But it’s over.” Yasmin swallowed and looked toward the paneled door. “Anyone with him?”

  “Not at the moment. They found another big store of RAM chips, way underground at Cheyenne Mountain. Giga capacity, not tera, so they’re all pretty much out-of-date. But we had a few million flown in yesterday. A technician slapped a bunch of them together in parallel, and was in here earlier trying to get the holo projection unit up and running. He left about fifteen minutes ago. He said he’d be back soon. So it’s a good time.” He glanced back to Art and Dana. “They were checked?”

  “Back at Indian Head. All we could with the deep scanners out of action. They’re clean.”

  That meant little to Art, but Auden Travis nodded and said, “It’s what we have to settle for at the moment. Go ahead.”

  Yasmin moved to the door, knocked, and opened it. She ushered Art and Dana in ahead of her.

  Art found himself in a big, airy office with a high ceiling. That’s all he had time for, because once his eyes reached the man standing by the window he could look at nothing else.

  Saul Steinmetz. Not quite as tall as he seemed on media releases, thinner, and with the stoop of a scholar. As he turned, penetrating eyes of pale gray skipped rapidly from one person to the next.

  “Very sorry to hear about your brother,” he said to Yasmin. And, to Art and Dana, “And you lost a relative, too. Terrible business. I wish I could think of something better to say.”

  He did not go through the charade of pretending that they might not know who he was. And he obviously knew who they were and where they had been. Art immediately wondered what else Steinmetz might find out. That they were not related in any way to the dead Desmond Lota? That they had no valid personal reason for a visit to the Q-5 Syncope Facility? He glanced at Dana, and saw that she was having the same worries. Her eyes were wide, fixed on Saul Steinmetz.

  Very deliberately, Art forced himself to turn his head and look over to the corner of the office. Something odd was there, something he had caught from the corner of his eye as they entered. It was a ghostly projection, an insubstantial hologram of a man with the wall showing through his head and body. The head and mouth and eyes moved in stop-action jerks, like an old-fashioned clockwork figure.

  The tick-tock man, Art thought.

  “That monstrosity is supposed to be Benjamin Disraeli,” Steinmetz said. He had caught and followed Art’s look, and he spoke in the friendly and informal tone that came across so well at public meetings and press conferences. “Not quite what he was before Supernova Alpha. But maybe none of us is. I’m promised something better before the day’s out.”

  He gestured to an oval coffee table surrounded by chairs at the other side of the office. “The more I hear about Pearl Lazenby and the Eye of God and the Legion of Argos, the less I like the sound of them. Look at this.”

  He held out a black-and-white photograph. “Taken with a long focus camera from a high-flying military aircraft over North Carolina. See the lines of dots, like columns of ants? Those are people, coming out of one of the Legion of Argos strongholds. So far as we can tell, they’re moving north. Did you know that her followers have been saying for years that she prophesied her own return from judicial sleep? She was sentenced to six hundred and fifty years. All logic said that she would die of natural causes, centuries before her time was served. But she was right, and logic was wrong.”

  He turned to Art and Dana as they all sat down. “Yasmin tells me that you were the first people to come across Pearl Lazenby’s empty body drawer. I’d like you to tell me exactly what you saw in and around the syncope facility. What direction you approached from, what condition the ground was in, tell everything. Take as much time as you want, and try to forget that you are in the White House. Yasmin asked for only a few minutes, but you have as long as you want.”

  Steinmetz had noticed Art’s and Dana’s discomfort, and read it as nervousness in the presence of the President. But that idea wouldn’t last. Art knew Steinmetz’s reputation, as someone with an uncanny gift for reading people far below the level of words. Now he and Dana were proposing to lie to the man — and hope to get away with it. It would never work, not in this world. Those pale gray eyes were frighteningly luminous and knowing.

  Dana was staring at him, expecting him to take the lead. Well, he would — in a direction she might not like at all.

  “I’m going to do what you ask,” Art said slowly. “Even though at first you may not think I am. And this will take a little while.” He looked again at Dana, and was encouraged by her nod. She understood, and she approved. “My name really is Art Ferrand, and this is Dana Berlitz. But we are not related to each other. And we didn’t have a relative at the Q-5 facility. We went there for a quite different reason.”

  Tell everything.

  Art began to describe telomod therapy, and was surprised by Saul Steinmetz’s quick, “I know about that. Experimental, right? Go on.”

  Art started over, this time with his call to Dana from Joe’s house in Catoctin Mountain Park. Then it was the journey to the Treasure Inn, the ruined Institute, the decision to look for Oliver Guest ("Guest and telomeres? I thought he was the clone man.” “Telomeres, too, Mr. President."), the trip through the echoing storm drains, and the scow and tobacco runners’ boat down the Potomac, all the way to Maryland Point. The story sounded unreal, as much as the events themselves now felt unreal.

  Steinmetz said hardly a word. A couple of times he nodded, and once when a buzzer sounded he told Yasmin, “Tell ’em not now, no matter who it is.”

  Art described the river landing at Maryland Point, the discovery of the trails from that side of the fenced facility around to the front, the broken gate. He told how they had found at first only corpses, but at the higher level at least some of the sleepers were alive.

  He looked Saul Steinmetz straight in the eye. “We didn’t try to save them. We kept moving.”

  The President nodded. “We’re on to that. Don’t worry. What next?”

  It was the finding of Pearl Lazenby’s body drawer, empty. Then the resuscitation of Oliver Guest, interrupted by noises from below.

  “We didn’t want to be discovered, doing what we were doing.”

  “Of course not.” Steinmetz spoke as though that were obvious. “For one thing, it might have been Pearl Lazenby’s followers again. Then you’d have been in real trouble.”

  “So we left Seth with Oliver Guest, back in the body drawer.”

  “
You weren’t worried about him? Left behind with Grisly, Guest?”

  “You don’t know Seth. Anyway, that’s the last that Dana and I saw of them. We came down, and we met Yasmin. And she brought us here.”

  “She did, indeed.” Steinmetz stood up and walked across to the window. “You’re telling me the truth. Why?”

  Why? Art and Dana stared at each other. “We’d never have convinced you with a lie,” she said at last.

  “You might have, if you kept it simple and agreed to your story ahead of time. I’m pretty good, but I’m not infallible. Ask my mother, she’ll tell you. But you told the truth. I’d like to know the reason.”

  “I didn’t decide to tell the truth,” Dana said. “But I’ll tell you why I agreed with Art when I realized where he was going.”

  “That will do fine.” Steinmetz came back, sat down, and speared her with that luminous gaze that made her feel pinned in her chair. “Why?”

  “You said that telomod therapy is experimental, and you are quite right. Nobody knows the possible side effects, or what will happen to the patients in the long term. But the hell with the long term. Who cares about that if you’re dead?”

  “ ’In the long run, we are all dead.’ Not the words of our quantized friend over there” — Steinmetz glanced across at the spectral shade of Disraeli — “but of the economist, John Maynard Keynes. I agree with him completely. We have to worry about now, today, and worry about later if and when we have time.”

  “Well, without telomod therapy I would be dead today. So would Art, and so would Seth Parsigian. Every doctor I went to before I found the Institute for Probatory Therapies said the same thing: try to put your mind at ease and prepare for death. I wouldn’t do it, and I won’t do it. We may not seem to be dying to you, but we have no idea what might happen next. The Institute is gone, the genome-scanning equipment is useless, and our doctors are dead. The only person we know who has a prayer of telling us anything is Oliver Guest. But suppose we can’t find him? Suppose he gets away from Seth, or kills him, and disappears?”

  “Given his past history, that’s not at all improbable. People have said many things about Dr. Oliver Guest, but no one ever said he was less than brilliant. Now I think I see it, but let me make sure. You are telling me all this, so that if you are unable to find Guest, the government might help you?”

  “Yes.” Dana glanced to Art for confirmation. “That’s exactly it. We agreed to try to rendezvous with Seth north of here, and at the moment we don’t even know a way to get there.”

  “We could certainly help with that.” Steinmetz’s voice was gentle and understanding. “But don’t you see that what you are asking is both illegal and impossible? You want me to sanction the continued liberty of a convicted criminal. Not just a minor felon, one who did not deserve his sentence” — Steinmetz bound Yasmin to silence with a strange glance — “but one of the most demented and horrifying murderers in history. How am I supposed to justify that? What will my political enemies say when they find out?”

  A gargling sound came from the corner. The hologram brightened, and the figure within it became opaque and three-dimensional. After a few seconds the image vanished with a loud sizzling noise.

  Steinmetz scowled at the empty corner. “I take that as an appropriate opinion on the opposition. But now do you understand?”

  Dana nodded slowly. She seemed crushed. It was because of the look on her face that Art blurted out, “If you help us to find Guest and you let us talk to him, we’ll try to make sure he’s captured.”

  He knew it was stupid as soon as he spoke. Steinmetz raised his eyebrows. “Let’s see if I have this right. If we help you, you’ll help us catch him; but you were the ones who let Guest out in the first place. If it weren’t for you, there would be no problem. I assume you’re familiar with the man who kills his parents and asks for special consideration from the court because he’s an orphan?”

  His words were harsh, but the humorous gleam in his eye took the edge off. Art decided that Saul Steinmetz was a very hard man to dislike — and more dangerous because of that.

  “Put yourself in our position.” Art had nothing to lose. He opened his shirt, raised his undershirt, and pulled the front of his pants lower. The clean-edged scar ran from the right side of his ribs down his bare belly to well past his navel. “I have half a dozen more like this, from operations before I found the telomod therapy. The treatment saved my life, but I don’t know for how long. Without doctors who know what they’re doing, I’m under a death sentence. Not just me — Dana, and Seth, and all the others in the program. We three just happened to be near Washington after the supernova zapped the microchips. Wouldn’t you be ready to try just about anything if you were one of us?”

  His shirt was still open. He began to move it across to the left. Steinmetz held up his hand.

  “No need. One picture is worth a thousand words. I don’t think two would be more persuasive.” He turned to Yasmin, who was staring at him steadily. “I have to, don’t I? I know it’s different, but it’s not different enough. And politics is the art of the impossible.” He turned back to Art. “How long before your friends — no names now, even though we’re not being recorded — how long before they’re supposed to meet you up north?”

  “It depends how long it takes them. They could be there now.”

  “They could. But you’re not. Here’s what I can do for you. Government vehicles come and go from Washington all the time. You work out with Auden what’s going tomorrow morning, to where you need to be. I don’t want to know the place. You then have four days. After that we are going to discover that Oliver Guest is missing from the Q-5 Syncope Facility, and I’m going to mount a full-scale manhunt for the famous murderer. If you turn him in before that, fine. But don’t mention me or the White House, because nothing like this meeting ever happened.”

  He stood up. “One other thing. However this turns out, I want you back here to give me a personal report. Whatever you say won’t go beyond this office. And now I must get on to other things. Do you realize that you’ve been here for over an hour?”

  “We’re sorry,” Dana said.

  “No, you’re not.” Steinmetz held out his hand. “Nor am I. Good luck.”

  She took it, but gripped it in both of hers. “Why are you doing this for us, sir?”

  “I am the President of all the people. And if I were in your position, I suspect that I’d have done exactly what you did.” Then he winked at Art and Dana, and the urge to smile back was irresistible. “And sometimes when you’re President, you have to do something that nobody else in the whole damn country could get away with, just to prove you can.” He shook Art’s hand. “You go ahead, I need a private word with Yasmin on another matter.”

  When they were outside the door, Dana asked softly, “Did you vote for him?”

  “No. I liked him, but he was running against the first woman candidate ever. Did you?”

  “No.” She laughed. “I thought he was too rich. You’d vote for him next time, though?”

  “You better believe it. After today, if he asked me nice I’d marry him.” Art realized, too late, that the man who had greeted them — Travis? — was still in the room. He had a puzzled expression on his handsome young face.

  33

  Front the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

  My relationship with Seth Parsigian has undergone a curious evolution over the past several days. It is, to invoke the vocabulary employed elsewhere in this diary, a form of restricted mutualism. We need each other. On the other hand, we both know that our value to the other will at some time cease. We are therefore wary, releasing just enough information to satisfy the other while retaining his dependency. It is bounded symbiosis.

  Initially — I am making this diary entry a few days after the fact, for reasons that should quickly become obvious — initially, as I say, Seth’s and my priorities coincided. We needed to remove ourselves far from the Q-5 Syncope Facility, and find a w
ay to reach my home and laboratory. The tools to produce a simple monitoring device of Seth’s telomeres lay there, together with certain things of mine that he did not need to know about.

  In those first hours, I was perforce almost useless. Weak physically, I was also ignorant of the ways of the world following the supernova. I had to rely on Seth. I also had an opportunity to observe him.

  There was plenty to respect about Seth Parsigian, if not to admire. My roundabout attempts to learn more about the two people with him at the syncope facility produced a genial smile. “No, Doc, you don’t need to know about ’em. You picked up their first names, what more do you want? Anyway, you’ll probably be meeting ’em in a few days. Gotta be patient.”

  Be patient. Good advice; but for both of us, hard to follow. Our need to reach my home and lab as quickly as possible was a shared need. When he learned where I had lived before my capture and sentencing, he groaned and said, “Glen Echo. Jeez, that’s almost back where we started. We’ll have to go all the way upriver. An’ we’ll never make it the same way we came. How are you feelin’?”

  “With some effort, I can probably stand.”

  “I was afraid of that. We can forget walkin’ the roads anytime soon. So it’s gotta be the river.” He stood up. “I’ll be quick as I can, but I might be a while. I could say, stay here, but I guess you’re not plannin’ on goin’ anyplace.”

  He left me sitting on the block behind the syncope facility. I do not mind admitting that at that moment I had my doubts. My sustaining thought was that he needed me even more than I needed him. Even so, I was at a low ebb when he finally returned. He must have been away at least six hours, and though the night air was mild I could not lie down and rest in snow. I sat with my head in my hands, close to exhaustion.

  “All set,” he said. His trousers were soaked halfway up the thighs. “Got us a boat, didn’t even have to kill anybody.”

  Was he joking? I had seen the gun and knife hooked into his belt. I suspected that he meant me to notice them. With his assistance I stood up, held his arm for support, and shambled down a dirt trail leading to the wide Potomac.