Solstice

by David Hewson

  'No,' she replied, and there was no easy way to explain. The past was still hazy to her sometimes. Fleeing a shattered marriage, finding refuge, when the money was about to run out, with the Children in San Diego. These events had a loose, filmy reality. What she remembered most was Daniel Sinclair, and the way his sweet, quiet face turned sour when Annie was born. And his fists. She still flinched when she thought of those. Even Bevan, Lieberman noticed, couldn't rouse the anger to turn on her. Every life had twists and turns. Mo had taken a wrong one, fallen into Charley's arms at some low ebb, when the Children just seemed to make sense. After that, it simply became hard to leave.

  The news let her off the hook. The link from NASA was screaming for attention. They had followed Schulz out to the control room, sat watching the giant monitor, and felt some huge wave of relief when Bill Ruffin's friendly face came up on the screen, grinned at them, and said, 'We're there. Apologies for the delay but this is one big place to hide. Where are our government friends?'

  'Off-line,' Schulz said. 'We've got some major failure in the system in Nevada for some reason. They'll be back when they can, but we can handle this now.'

  'Suits me,' Ruffin agreed, and cued up the external camera from Arcadia. Now they could see Sundog in all her terrible glory. The satellite sat above the earth like some giant insect. The sun and the light from below outlined the black, sleek form of the machine. Lieberman wondered at this collection of antennae and scanning devices just visible on its underside, tried to imagine how anyone could believe you could keep the world at peace by placing this deadly, unstable collection of toys in the sky above it. And then there was his personal contribution. For years he'd dreamed of seeing the solar wings in orbit. Now, when the moment finally arrived, it made him feel ashamed. They looked like the black, equidistant blades of a giant clover leaf, sucking the invisible energy from the cosmos and turning it into something dark and deadly.

  'How far have you got to run?' Schulz asked.

  'Thirty kilometres,' Ruffin replied. 'We need to cut the engines real soon and drift on in there. If we time it right, we'll be in EVA within ninety minutes or so, erecting your shade thirty minutes after that, and taking that thing down within another hour.'

  'That's a hell of a long time for an EVA,' Lieberman said. 'You sure you can keep the Shuttle in range during that time without using any power?'

  He remembered reading about how the EVA was the most dangerous part of any mission. There were so many things that could go wrong: meteorite storms, equipment failure, harness detachment. That was why you never, ever ventured out into that big empty space without a solid line between you and the ship. Once that was cut, you could float anywhere, be lost for good in a matter of minutes.

  'Yeah,' Ruffin said. 'No problem.'

  Schulz beamed at the monitors. 'Great news. What do you need?'

  'Nothing right now.' Ruffin had the look of a man who needed to get on with his work. 'When we get to the EVA stage we'll take a floatcam with us. You can be a second set of eyes. I'd be grateful for that.'

  'You got it,' Lieberman said.

  'In the meantime maybe you people should just go and pray a little. No time for that here.' Then he cut the call.

  Schulz punched some keys, to no avail. 'I wish we could get through to Helen. Damn network. Till then we just have to wait.'

  'We need to talk some more,' Bevan said, looking at Mo, and she didn't object. They went into Bennett's vacant office, sat awkwardly at the table, Lieberman next to her, wishing there was something he could do.

  'Ask away. I didn't betray you, Michael,' she said. 'I didn't betray anyone. Except myself. And Annie. Annie most of all.'

  She reached across the table, touched his hand. 'Michael, I'm sorry if I offended you. What happened wasn't what you thought. Not directly anyway. I was scared. When I saw that woman today it was like opening a grave, lifting the lid on a coffin I thought was long buried. I couldn't shake that from my head.'

  'Yeah,' he said, and squeezed her hand, then let it go. 'But you see the problem?'

  She stared at the table. Bevan had turned on a video recorder, taping all this for further analysis. Schulz looked miserable again; the news from the Shuttle had lost its potency. Outside, the night was alive with the buzz of insects, frantic in the close, humid air. And she was relieved, he thought. After the initial despair, the end of this deception gave her some kind of deliverance. Deceit and pretence didn't come naturally to her. Shedding this false skin was welcome, even if she knew that, in the end, it was bound to lead to some new kind of pain.

  Schulz stared at the table, not wanting to look her in the face. 'You of all people, Mo. I trusted you. I thought we could make something permanent for you here.'

  'Me "of all people",' she said, smiling. 'What sort of people do you think should get involved in things Uke Gaia? Crazy ones? Criminals?'

  'Inadequate people,' Bevan said quickly.

  'Jeez, that sure opens things up a little. What do you think the waiting list is for that particular club?' Lieberman wondered aloud. 'One million? Two? Get real.'

  She touched his hand. 'Don't, Michael. It's okay. I don't mind. I don't expect you to understand. I don't want your condolences. I don't expect your forgiveness.'

  He poured himself a glass of water. Until Ruffin called them back into the game, there was nothing to do but wait. 'Lots of marriages get broken, Mo. It's a long way from there to Charley.'

  'You need the context. Ask Irwin.'

  'Me?' Schulz answered, offended. 'I don't know.'

  She shook her head. 'But you do. You just didn't take that route. Back in the early nineties, Daniel started to live inside that damn computer. The Web was real to him, more real to him than me and Annie. I thought that I could rekindle something if I joined him there. And it's so… enveloping.'

  'Yeah,' he admitted. 'Okay. I know.'

  'Is this some dweeb secret that gets to be shared among the rest of us?' Lieberman asked.

  'Hey,' Schulz said, 'just take my — our — words on this, will you? If you grew up in the California geek community during the nineties you knew someone who lost it. This job we do, the way we do it, you can get eaten up by these things. It can swallow you.'

  Lieberman listened, eyes closed, feeling dog-tired, only half taking in the words. He was thinking about the day and this tangled jumble of images in his head: fire on the mountain, the sky ablaze. And Mo, naked, her limbs entwined with his, the hot, fevered focus between them, the way that kind of ecstasy could steal your very thoughts. He wanted to stop up his ears, he wanted to sleep. All the time he couldn't stop thinking about what was happening elsewhere. Sara leaving the hospital, going out into a world that was on the brink of chaos. This strange silence out of Vegas. Bill Ruffin and his crew floating in the emptiness of space, praying some jerry-built concoction of fabric and foam would save the day.

  And somewhere, behind everything, Charley, no longer naive Charley, the genius with the appearance of some airhead bimbo. Charley with the crew cut, some cancer eating away inside her head, and this tragic, gnawing conviction that her own personal dissolution was somehow coupled, irrevocably, irretrievably, with that of the world.

  'You spent two years with these people,' he said. 'Two years in which they went from being just a bunch of ecofreaks out onto the fringe to this… black place they are now. Why didn't you leave earlier?'

  'Dumb question, Michael. I didn't leave Daniel. And he gave me nothing. No love. No affection. No respect. If I didn't leave him, why would I leave the Children, who gave me all those things? And more.'

  'But you must have known…'

  'Known what? I left there a year ago. They knew I was restless. They didn't like having Annie around after a while. She was the only kid in the place. And they told me to come here. Get a job in the project. Just stay below the parapet, talk to them when I wanted to. It was our chance to escape.'

  Schulz nodded. 'And that's what you did. You did it, Mo.'

 
'I came here. Yes. But I didn't know they had this in mind.'

  Lieberman looked at her and hoped for an honest answer. 'And if you had known?'

  She laughed. 'I would have come anyway. Of course I would. Don't you understand what the power is in these things? Where the strength lies? It's in the closeness you have. That's all, and that's everything.'

  'Like a family,' Lieberman said.

  'Yes.' She smiled, and she did look serene, she was beautiful that night. 'Exactly like a family. But a real family. One that doesn't abandon you because it's too busy or finds something else to do. One that doesn't judge you because of who you are. One that gives you love and support and understanding whatever the circumstances. How could you betray that? How could you even think of it?'

  'Yeah,' Bevan grunted. 'And so, when you found out we had someone inside, you called them, E-mailed, or something, and look what happened. That nice, kind family killed the one person we had inside who could have led us to them.'

  'No!'

  Bevan raised his eyebrows. 'You expect me to believe that?'

  'Believe what you like. All I can do is tell you what happened. I left San Diego a year ago. We travelled through Europe first — they gave me some money and said there was no hurry — and I got here in January. It didn't take long to persuade Irwin to give me a job.'

  'No,' Schulz confirmed. 'Good Unix people aren't easy to find here. I guess I should have latched on to the coincidence.'

  'And when you got here,' Bevan continued, 'you contacted them when? How?'

  'Once. Just after I arrived.'

  'You're kidding me.'

  'Once. By phone. To the house in San Diego, reverse charge. Check it with the phone company. They wanted to know who was working here. And if the project got into problems, that was when I was supposed to get in touch on a regular basis. I was meant to E-mail them, then they'd get back to me with a phone number. Charley said she wanted me to be their eyes and ears. She never said why. I never asked. I called once and then forgot about them. Until this began.'

  'And we're supposed to believe that?' Bevan asked sourly.

  She shook her head. 'You still don't get it. Like I said, proximity was everything. When I was there, I was a part of the Children. When Annie and I were here, all that started to fade. It seemed less important. There were other things in my life. Annie. This idea of building something for us both, leaving all that dreadful time behind. I thought…'

  Lieberman wanted to be somewhere else, not watching this performance. We all reach crossroads, he told himself. We all take the wrong turning sometimes.

  'I thought I'd never hear of Gaia again. I didn't want to. Just one call and they had no way of contacting me. They didn't want one; they said it would be unsafe. I forgot about them. I started to think about us. About how we moved on from all this.'

  Schulz's eyes lit up. 'Hey! We got company.' The lights were winking on the terminal. Out of nowhere the screen came alive. Helen Wagner gazed back at them. Lieberman thought she looked exhausted, a little battle-weary and crabby too.

  'You had a rough time over there?' he asked. 'We couldn't pick up anything through the network. You heard about the Shuttle?'

  'It's bad here,' she replied. 'I'll tell you about that later, but I think we now know what Charley can throw at us. And yeah… I spoke to Bill Ruffin. That's the best news I've heard all day. It doesn't mean we let up anywhere else, though. The important thing right now is to close the net on these people. You're Mrs Sinclair?'

  Mo nodded.

  'I'm Helen Wagner from the CIA. I know you think we're the enemy or something but you have to forget that right now. These people have just blitzed Las Vegas. We have a lot of casualties here and I want to make sure the Children don't have the chance to do this all over again. We need your help. We need your cooperation. Frankly, I'm beyond threats. I don't care what's happened in the past. If you throw your lot in with us now, I'll see if I can help you out. You just have to take my word on that.'

  'I'll do what I can.'

  'That's excellent. We require names.'

  'I can give you names. Joe Katayama. Anthony Tatton. Billy Jo Surtees — '

  'Good. Bevan can get a list of those later. Most of all we need some clue of where they are now. Can you help us there?'

  Mo shook her head. 'I wish I could. They were in San Diego when I left.'

  'How were you supposed to get in touch with them?'

  'Just on the standard E-mail address for their public Web site. Nothing secret. You must know what that is.'

  'We do,' Helen sighed.

  Mo Sinclair shook her head. 'I'm sorry. Like I said, I thought I'd left all this behind, and once they stopped hearing from me I guessed — I hoped — they wouldn't contact me again.'

  'Mo,' Lieberman said, reaching out, touching her hand. 'Try. Didn't they even talk about moving somewhere else?'

  She paused. 'Sometimes. I don't really recall.'

  'Work on it. Did they talk about Nevada?'

  She tried to remember. It was like opening the doors on a cabinet she'd forgotten: Everything inside was dusty and distant. 'Perhaps.'

  One memory. 'They said something about a farm. I remember that. Joe and Charley were talking about a farm that interested them and they thought about giving it a new name. They really wanted a farm. Isolation, I guess. And it was an odd name.'

  He held her hand. 'Like what?'

  Mo shook her head. 'It was strange. Something like — I know this sounds stupid — Yogurt Farm.'

  'In America, Mo, that is yogurt.'

  'I know. That's why it sounded odd.'

  'Yeah.' Lieberman grinned. 'Charley hated yogurt. But she had good taste in music. How about Yasgur's Farm?'

  She smiled. 'That sounds about right. But what is it?'

  'Stop making me feel old. Woodstock, 1969.'

  Helen quoted on the screen, '"We are Stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."'

  'My, a lady from the CIA who knows Joni Mitchell too. Some week this is.'

  'It fits,' Helen said. 'So somewhere around here they have a place they've called Yasgur's Farm. And unless Bill Ruffin does his job, we've got under twelve hours to find it. You people think some more. I have to brief the President. He's on his way.'

  The screen went blank. No one wanted to speak.

  'The President in Vegas…' Lieberman said finally. 'It must be bad.'

  Schulz fiddled with the news channels now coming back onto the monitor. 'It is.' Pictures of wrecked buildings, people in pain being rushed away on gurneys, panic, chaos.

  'Is that what Charley really wanted, Mo?' Schulz asked. 'Can you believe that?'

  She looked at the pictures on the screen and shook her head. 'Not the Charley I met. But I don't think that Charley is there any more. This is a different person, and like I said, once you have that closeness, people just follow. All the way.'

  CHAPTER 43

  The Cambridge Mandate

  Las Vegas, 2051 UTC

  Tim Clarke insisted the Air Force provide him with supersonic transport to Vegas as soon as the severity of the attack became apparent. When he bawled enough, and looked as if he wouldn't stop bawling, they put him in the number two seat of an F15 and did as they were told. He was talking to people in the steaming heat of the emergency shelters set up on the city edge before Helen even knew he'd arrived. By the time she caught up with him, after an urgent, disturbing drive from Nellis through the deserted and wrecked Vegas streets, he'd left the camps of shocked, distressed people and gone to see the damage for himself.

  Clarke was walking down the Strip, by the Flamingo and Caesar's, a bunch of Secret Service people following mutely in his wake, soaked in sweat, Graeme Burnley among them. Helen told the driver to stop and wait for her, then caught up with the gaggle walking behind Clarke.

  Burnley stared at her when she arrived. He looked lost. 'This is one hell of a bad idea. The guy insisted on it but I'm telling you now we shou
ldn't be here. God knows what the radiation level is. Whether we've still got crazies in these buildings. Or what good this is doing at all when we've got bigger decisions to make. Also' — his face was red and soaked in perspiration — 'I wish to hell he'd remember that the rest of us don't fit the superman tag. You wouldn't catch me dead walking out here at this time of year, even when the weather was halfway normal. This is like marching through a furnace and it's as if he hardly notices.'

  She watched Clarke tread down the middle of the deserted road, taking in the devastation on both sides. Half the Mirage was burned out, some smoke still rising from the smouldering shell. Fire crews stood back, watching the giant building from a safe distance. It looked bad. All you could hope to do in this kind of situation, she guessed, was evacuate as many people as possible. And right along the Strip, stretching away into the distance, the story seemed the same: rising smoke, damaged buildings that stood like rotten teeth against the clear blue sky, and emergency services idling away in the deserted road.

  'I wouldn't worry about radiation,' she said. 'We did some tests immediately. It's flash energy. If you get it, you know about it, but five minutes later it's pretty much gone, down to a near-acceptable level. At least with this attack it is.'

  'Great. That still doesn't explain why we're here. Jesus, we don't even have any film crew to get some mileage out of it.'

  She just looked at him.

  'Okay, okay, I'm sorry. That was an awful thing to say. And pointless too. I think the idea we can news-manage this one into some nice, comfortable place is disappearing fast.'

  'I guess so,' she said, and watched Clarke ambling slowly along, taking everything in. This was the second day of his presidency. She guessed someone in that position could only move in one of two ways: get bigger or get smaller. And she didn't have any doubts about which direction Clarke intended to take.

  'Helen?' the President said, turning round to look at the little group behind him.

  'Sir?'

  'You're okay,' he said, smiling. 'That's good. Come and walk with me. And don't worry about the traffic'