by David Hewson
If she blasted La Finca, she could be blasting herself. The helicopter cleared a low col, spiralled upward, and, with a sudden lurch that left his stomach in midair, they crested the mountain. He looked down on the dome, and beyond to the blackened hulk of the command centre. He nodded at Mo in the back, then hit the talk button. 'The dome's perfect. Not so much as a crack in the skin.'
'I guess we were stupid,' Schulz said. 'Look for someplace within range where they could site a dish, Michael. The angle on the receptor at the dome is fairly shallow. My guess is they must have the last antenna at three thousand feet or more. Which means they probably have a line of dishes running back to their control centre. No one's going to find a place to build a base at that altitude without us knowing.'
Lieberman scanned the horizon through a pair of binoculars and glanced at the chart. The seaward side of the range had to be out. There was no obvious place for a base, and the forest was too thick. But on the landward side, the terrain ran away into a complex formation of sharp, dramatic valleys and long, bare headlands, tumbling all the way down to a plateau at around a thousand feet.
'Think about it,' Davis said, holding the helicopter in hover. 'We know they're not on the seaward side. We know they can't be on the island plain — that would be too public and the distance would probably be too great.'
'So they're somewhere in that mess,' Lieberman said, looking at the rolling, tumbling landscape in front of them. The machine dropped suddenly, lurching to one side. Davis struggled with the controls, brought it back to straight and level.
'Sorry. Turbulence.'
'My.' Lieberman stifled a gastric burp. Then he put the glasses to his eyes once more and surveyed a rocky spur that stood a good eight hundred feet beneath the summit of Puig Roig. 'Close in on that.'
The helicopter moved forward, starting to descend. 'Got it,' Davis said, and Lieberman found himself envying the pilot's eyesight. Even with the glasses, it still looked like a grey blur to him.
The machine moved swiftly to close the gap, then Davis put it into hover thirty feet away from the rock face. The dish had been disguised, a little half-heartedly, with some brushwood. Lieberman pulled out the videophone, pointed the lens out of the front of the helicopter.
'This look right, Irwin?'
'Yeah,' the remote voice replied. 'Where is it?'
'About half a mile southwest of the dome.'
'Got to be more in the line, Michael. There's nowhere to run a base close to there. Look for the receptor antenna. It's like a smaller dish, with a rectangular box in it. Where that's fixed on the thing, that's lining up with the next link in the chain.'
'There,' Davis said instantly. It was to one side of the main antenna, pointing down, back into a narrow valley. The helicopter turned away from the mountain and began to descend through the huge cleft in the rock.
'You know where we're going?'
'Just like a treasure hunt, old man.' Davis grinned. 'One clue leads on to the next.'
They watched the dark, narrow valley come up to greet them. The shadows embraced the little metal machine as it fell. Abruptly, the interior of the aircraft felt cold. Lieberman turned round, watched Bevan mutely hugging the weapon, Mo holding Annie in her arms.
'You two okay?' he said. They nodded.
'Don't throw up, Michael,' Annie said.
'Hadn't even occurred to me.'
'There!' Davis was pointing to another dish, half-hidden in a small clump of scrubby pine.
'We're still nowhere near something that looks like a base,' Lieberman said. The helicopter bounced up to the rock face, stopped ten feet from the dish, Davis peering at the thing, looking for a pointer.
'Like I said.' Davis smiled. 'It's a treasure hunt.' And then the Squirrel dived again.
'Why not?' Joe Katayama wouldn't let this one go. He was annoying her, there was no escaping the fact.
'Because I said so.'
'Eve just left. Everyone else is gone now. It's just you and me. If something goes wrong, if they do find us, they could turn this around.'
'Joe, Joe.' The dope was in her head, she could feel it, but that didn't make her weak or crazy. If anything, it strengthened her, made her sense what was happening more effectively than ever. 'Have you forgotten why we're doing this? Not to harm people. Not to harm the world. For Gaia. And she's with us. You can't feel that, I know. But you have to believe me. It's so.'
'I believe we risk jeopardizing everything by leaving this system open. Give me the code, Charley. Let me set the program in stone, then destroy the dish link. That way no one can touch it.'
'And no one gets to see this through, correct any errors along the way.'
He made a sour face, sat down next to her wheelchair, and folded his arms. 'Charley, if this is about being scared…'
She closed her eyes and let out a long, pained sigh. 'Scared? Joe. I am the woman who's turning the world on its head. I don't know how much blood is on my hands. Do you think this is because I'm scared?'
'I need the code. Please. Give me the code.'
'It's time for you to leave,' she said icily. 'I don't need you any more, Joe. Go. With my love. With my respect. Don't push this any further. I wouldn't want those things put in jeopardy.'
And you don't know how to do it without me, Joe, do you? she added silently.
It was suddenly plain to her. For all his skill, for all the work he put into setting up the fake dome, getting hot-wired into the real one, Joe was lost on the network. Without her, he could only watch.
'No. You're not a god, Charley. You're not always right. There's something happened in your head that means you don't see straight any more, and I can't allow that. We have to go through with this, all the way, and we have to make sure no one stops us.'
'You have no faith. You have strength, Joe. You have a terrible strength, like men do. But you have no faith. And in the end you're as stupid as the rest of them. You should go now. You don't understand those figures coming in about the storm. It's erratic. It's changing. I can't just leave it alone.' His cold Asian eyes watched her. He was quiet, and in this silence Charley Pascal tried to remember: Where did Joe appear from? And failed. Her head was running down into oblivion, like a clock unwinding, like a child's toy with a failing battery.
'Yeah,' he said unpleasantly. 'Stupid.' Then got up and walked for the door.
'It's your time, Joe!' she yelled.
Katayama walked over to the corner of the room. 'What the hell are you doing?' Charley screamed. 'Something you can't, Charley.' Rage, red rage.
'Fuck you, fuck every last part of you!' He stopped, looked back at her over his shoulder, and for a brief moment she felt afraid. 'You crazy bitch,' he said quietly. 'Just stay there, dying. If you want a shit from now on, crawl to the can on your own. I don't carry you any more. Understand?'
'Joe?' The old Charley, good Charley, scared Charley, watching the last person she would ever see in this world walk out of the room, a fog of seething anger around his head. 'Touch that fucking system, Joe, and I'll see you in hell, I promise that. You leave those things alone.'
'Yeah,' he grunted, going out the door. 'You come make me.' And was gone.
Charley Pascal wanted to scream, wanted to curse this iron frame that trapped her. But her thoughts felt messed up, the world wouldn't stay upright. Her head began to spin.
Somewhere overhead, soft and repetitive, was the beating of rotor blades, getting louder, getting nearer, falling from the clear blue sky like ghostly rain.
It looked like a miniature version of La Finca. When they got to the end of the line of dishes, down in the heart of the valley, still a good fifteen hundred feet above sea level, they found Yasgur's Farm — the real one, Lieberman knew that immediately. It was accessible only through a single dirt track and stood in a meadow of parched yellow grass, the odd poppy waving blood-red out of the soil. Golden stone, a four-square barn of a house, with a few farm buildings at its periphery. And no sign of life. No sign it was anythi
ng but deserted.
Davis peered at him.
He stared at the pilot and said, 'It has to be.' Then turned to Schulz and Helen on the video screen. 'We think we've found the place. We're going down.'
'Michael,' she said, 'take care. We can't get in support for a good twenty minutes or so.'
'Yeah.' He tried to smile. Then the Squirrel bobbed and wheeled, descended to the ground in a cloud of dust, and, with a solidity Lieberman adored, found its feet on the dry grass in front of the house. He pulled the cans off his ears, turned to Mo. 'You and Annie stay behind us. We don't know what we'll find here. We don't want you in the way until we need you. And when we do need you, it has to happen fast. You have to establish a network link straight through to Irwin, and he can take it from there. Right, Bevan?'
'Right.' He looked younger now, less confident. Maybe he was scared, just like the rest of them. Lieberman popped open the door and jumped down into the dry, thin air, took a couple of deep breaths, praying for his head to clear. The light was too strong, the day too hot. It felt like they had landed in an oven. Davis and the others joined him, staring at the house.
'Company,' Davis said. And they watched the tall, lean figure of Joe Katayama walk toward them, then come to a halt six feet away, between them and the house. He stood still, arms folded, staring with cold, quizzical eyes. Lieberman looked at every inch of this big, powerful man and thought: He's unarmed. Davis stood, tensely playing with his weapon, and Bevan watched this small drama unravelling, nervous too.
'Joe,' Mo Sinclair said behind them, and Lieberman could hear Annie let out a low, quiet whimper of fear.
'Hey, listen to me. We're going in,' he said to the imposing, still figure. 'This thing has to end now.'
'No.' When his big head moved slowly from side to side like that he looked wooden, like a statue, not quite human. 'You're too late. The zenith's nearly here. And we burned the link after we set the program. It's all gone now. You've got no pathway up there. You've got no hope. Like the woman said: Prepare. Now, why don't you go tell your bosses that?'
'Right. Well, that sounds nice and sensible. But you don't mind if we check for ourselves, now, do you? And me and Charley, we go back some — it would be a shame to come all this way without saying hello.'
'No, you can —'
'Mummy!' Annie's shriek brought Lieberman's head back down to earth, back from this image of the sky, dancing, wheeling, aligning, that filled it right then. A shadow passed in front of him, something following it. Mo was walking toward Katayama, her back to them, her hands out from her sides, fingers stretching, saying, 'No, Joe, it's okay, Joe…'
And Annie, screaming, ran behind, catching up fast.
'Hey.' Lieberman touched Mo's hair briefly. 'Let's all stay cool. Okay?' And didn't feel cool at all (this is some form of redemption, the inner voice said, this is Mo paying herself back).
'Joe,' she said, so close to him, a hand reaching up touching his cheek (a cold cheek, Lieberman thought, seeing, in his head, the picture of the girl with the snapped neck on the Web, and registering these big strong hands). 'We were wrong. Wrong. Can't you understand that? All of us. And when you get out of this place you'll understand that, you'll see it was just our closeness that made us crazy like this. We lost perspective.'
'Perspective,' he said, and in one swift movement reached forward, pushed Mo aside, snatched Annie by the hair, twisted her around with a single violent blow, and from somewhere there was a gun at her throat, the barrel glinting silver in the dazzling sunlight.
'No…' Mo said, scrabbling on the ground, close to sobbing (tears of rage, Lieberman thought, tears of fury).
'Shut up,' Katayama said calmly. 'You fucking people. You get back in that machine. You get out of here. Leave us alone. You understand that? And when this is over, when we see what's done, then you come back for her. If you can.'
Annie was tight in his grip, not struggling, eyes wide open. Flesh on flesh, flesh on metal, and the sky bore down on them all, like a heavy golden weight on their shoulders.
Screaming (no words, nothing you could understand), Mo Sinclair rose from the ground, took hold of his giant, muscled hand, and then tore at it with her fingers, tore at the tendon (the shield goes down, Lieberman thought, this is the way this big, cold man is thinking just now), her body was pulling him away from Annie, the silver shape moving, Annie ducking, getting free from his grasp, and behind the animal gasp of Davis's laboured breathing.
Then Lieberman was pushed aside by the small, frantic figure, gun rising, these figures moving so slowly in the hot, meagre air, like puppets dancing on strings, limbs jerking, mouths agape, all fear and fury. A sound, like the cracking of a whip. Then a second, different in timbre, from another direction. He looked at Katayama, who was exposed now, his shield had escaped, and slowly, with the agonized motion of broken film running wild through the mechanism of some ancient projector, a small red dot appeared in his cheek, grew, became a livid, pumping rose, the colour of blood, the colour of flesh, then opened, like a window into his head.
Someone screaming, Annie, racing back, not caring, not minding. And Mo Sinclair, slumped to the ground (two shots, he thought, two different sounds), a dark, intense stain spreading across her cheap white T-shirt, bubbles of blood appearing at her mouth.
Look.
You look, Charley. This is your doing. Not mine.
Look.
He ran over, was by her side, not knowing what to say. Annie was weeping, shaking uncontrollably. The red stain covered most of Mo's chest now, and it was alive, something pumped strength into it from inside her, stealing away her vitality by the second.
Her eyes rolled, so white, so open. 'Annie…' Her mouth was filled with blood, dark and pulsing. Hands trembling, Lieberman shook the videophone free, flipped it open, yelled for backup, yelled for a doctor, and didn't even wait to hear the answer. Bob Davis knelt by him, touched Mo lightly, touched her wrist, tried to hold the girl off.
'Be careful, Annie,' Davis said. 'She's hurt. You mustn't make it worse.'
'Where the hell did he get the gun?' Lieberman yelled, his mind racing. Ellis Bevan stood behind them, ashen-faced, looking scared. Lieberman joined Annie, kneeling by her side. 'Hey,' he said, holding her hand. 'You just keep calm, now. We can get help in here. We can call someone on the radio.' 'No time,' Mo said (the blood bubbling, boiling over her tongue, her teeth, her voice thick with the viscous blackness there). 'Michael, go…'
'We can carry you,' he mumbled, astonished at the flatness of his own voice.
'No,' Davis said, looking gingerly at the wound. 'We can't move her. It's too dangerous. She has to wait here for the doctor. It's the only way.'
'Michael, I'm cold…' Her eyes were losing their light, her skin seemed paler, thinner, and Annie howled, screamed and howled (in this place, Lieberman knew, you go mad, everything disappears, gets stripped from your soul). Mo's thin arm, the walnut tan already looking lifeless, came up slowly; a hand, a single finger, went to Annie's face.
Michael Lieberman closed his eyes, wished himself out of this nightmare, wished himself anywhere else in the world. Then felt her fingers close on his.
'Annie,' Mo said (voice so thick, Lieberman had to work to follow her now). 'You have to help Michael now. You have to leave me, go with him.'
'Mom,' Annie whispered, her face long and ashen, and they could feel her grip weakening, the life draining out of her.
He watched all this from some distanced, remote part of himself, and knew then that your mind goes crazy watching someone die. You go to some space, some part of the world where nothing is real, where a voice inside you screams: Take me, take me. But there was no way to change places, one life for another, even if he thought it the cheapest deal in the world to make. He watched Annie in her agony, watched Mo slipping away into the dark, his consciousness dwindling into this single, searing focal point of suffering. It was like kneeling in a golden, roaring ocean of heat and light screaming silently around them a
ll.
'Michael,' Davis said (his voice coming from outside this world they had entered). 'Michael?'
He opened his eyes, looked at Mo Sinclair's prone frame, her colourless face, eyes closed, chest scarcely moving.
'I can't handle this on my own,' Davis said. 'The medics are on their way. There's nothing we can do here.'
'Annie,' he mumbled. She held her mother's hand, eyes closed, softly weeping. 'Annie. She's right.' He scarcely recognized his own voice. 'We've got to do this. You've got to help me try.'
The girl said nothing. He felt like a jerk. Ellis Bevan was over by Joe Katayama's body, searching through the pockets.
'Did you find anything?' Bob Davis asked him.
'No,' Bevan replied, scanning the horizon. 'There could be more of them. We should bear that in mind.'
'I don't think so,' Lieberman said. You could feel, from Katayama's presence, what kind of role he had in this place: one of strength, one of enforcement. 'They're gone. If we're going to do this now, we've just one more person to see.'
Annie watched Davis place his jacket over her mother, watched the small movement of her chest, wiped the tears from her eyes with her arm, not sobbing any more, not trying to avoid this sight. She looked at Michael Lieberman and took his hand.
'I can do it,' she said.
Charley Pascal sat in the wheelchair, eyes unfocused, drugged maybe, Lieberman thought, and said, 'I'm sorry about your mother, Annie. We're creatures of the dark. We all live in agony. You get to know that as you grow older, you get to understand its taste in your mouth.'
Annie tapped away at the keyboard, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes.
'Spare us this, Charley,' Lieberman said. 'You've done enough.'
Davis stood by the door, not letting go of his gun. Bevan was beside Charley, watching her like a hawk. And how much damage can a crippled woman do? Lieberman wondered. Ask someone in Kyoto. Ask those people struggling for life as this wall of heat and poison sweeps across the world with the sun. Ask Annie and Mo.
He propped the videophone on the desk by the side of the monitor, watched Annie typing away, and prayed for the thing to work. Slowly, hesitantly, the system made some contact with the outside. Schulz appeared, a little indistinct, Helen, even more shaky, in an adjoining window.
