“Goddamn,” said Oleary. “I still can’t believe he managed it, all alone like that.”
The Secret Committee had assembled to hear Yama’s final report on Stef’s mission to the past. Xian, Ugaitish, Hrka, Oleary—they were all there but Kathmann. Except for Xian — who already knew the story—the fromazbi were leaning breathlessly over the gilt Martian table, listening to the story of how their world had been saved.
“Well, here’s the evidence,” said Yama. “First, we recover Stef’s body, dead, obviously shot by a modern weapon, oké? His own gun has been fired once. The world we live in does not vanish, but on the contrary looks as solid as ever, at least to me. Just to eliminate any doubts about what happened, we use the wormholer one more time. We pull back from Moscow, 360th day of 2091, an air sample which is full of intensely radioactive dust and ice particles.
“Now I ask you, Honoured Grandees. What can we conclude, except that Stef and Dyeva killed each other, that with his last gasp, so to speak, he signalled us to recover him because his job was done, and that the Time of Troubles proceeded to happen on schedule?”
Xian turned to Yang, standing in the shadows, deference in every line of his big, weak body. “What do you think, Honoured Professor?”
“I agree. The evidence is absolutely irrefutable, and I have spent my whole life evaluating evidence.”
“Well, I guess we have to accept it,” fretted Oleary. He still hoped to take back Stef’s million, but he could see that it would be difficult now.
“I am obliged to add,” Yama continued, “that a sealed envelope was found on Steffen’s body containing a note to Solar System Controller Xian.”
He glanced at her and she nodded.
“It reads as follows,” said Yama, spreading a copy on the arm of the shozit.
Facing death, Dyeva states that Kathmann cooperated in the theft of the wormholer. He expected to win promotion by crushing the conspiracy afterwards, but Crux was too clever for him. Ever since, he has been desperately trying to wipe out those few who know of his treason.
—Steffens Aleksandr
The fromazbi drew a deep collective breath.
“Is it possible?” demanded Ugaitish. “The head of Earth Security? What could he hope to gain from assisting a conspiracy, then destroying it?”
“He told me once,” said Yama, who had been waiting for this moment for many years, “that he dreamed of being Solar System Controller.”
“Honoured grandees,” said Xian, “you must know that at first I, too, found this accusation hard to believe. But the evidence is great. The paper, ink and handwriting prove that Steffens wrote this note. In his own defence, Kathmann made the claim that Steffens was seeking revenge because he had been tortured. But Kathmann’s own record of Steffens’s interrogation certifies that the questioning was ‘exceptionally gentle’. This was a troubling contradiction.
“We all know that Kathmann, in spite of his many virtues, was too zealous, too ambitious. I ordered him to bring me the scientist who stole the wormholer for questioning. The man had been beheaded. That seemed an extremely suspicious circumstance to me. Was Kathmann trying to ensure his silence? All the builders of the wormholer were also dead. I questioned the only two Crux prisoners who were still alive, but they were mere children and knew nothing—which was probably why they had kept their heads.
“In the end, to resolve the matter I ordered Kathmann into the White Chamber. With the needles in his spine, he made a full confession. Every statement made by Steffens in this note is true. Kathmann knew too many state secrets to be permitted to live, and so I had him beheaded.”
She looked around at the others, as if waiting for a challenge. Yama smiled a little. Admiral Hrka remarked that he had never liked the fellow. Aside from that, Kathmann’s harsh fate produced no comment whatever.
“Is there any other business, then?” asked Xian, preparing to end the meeting.
Yang had been waiting for this moment to step forward from the shadows. “Now that Crux is finished, Honoured Grandees,” he said smoothly, “I would suggest going public with the story and making Steffens a hero.
“The heroes we honour all lived a long time ago; they are almost mythic figures—indeed, some of them, like the Yellow Emperor, are entirely myths. But here we have a hero of today, one that people can identify with, one who brings the glory and splendour of the present world order home to the common man. It’s true, of course,” he added, “that certain aspects of Steffens’s life will have to be edited for public consumption. But the same could be said of any other hero of history.”
“Superb,” cried Xian at once, ending any argument before it began. Raising a tiny, thin hand that looked with its many rings like a jewelled spider, she declared: “Steffens will be buried with full honours. Someone with talent will write his biography and Yang will sign it. Scenes from his life will be enacted on every mashina. A great tomb will be built—”
“Honoured Solar System Controller,” muttered Yama, “we’ve already cremated the body and disposed of the ashes.”
“What difference does that make? Do you suppose Genghis Khan sleeps in what we call his grave? Now, bistra, bistra! — quick, quick! Get a move on. Remember that heroes are made, not born.”
Professor Yang, smiling over the adoption of his idea, left the cabinet room with Yama.
“In some ways,” he remarked, “the most intriguing supposition is that the world we live in has always been the consequence of the Crux conspiracy and its outcome. Wouldn’t it be interesting, Honoured Colonel, if time is, so to speak, absolutely relative—if this episode has been embedded in the past ever since 2091, and all our world is the longterm result of what, from our point of view, has only just happened?”
Yama, hurrying to carry out Xian’s order, paused long enough to stare at Yang.
“What complete nonsense,” he growled.
Pending appointment of a replacement for Kathmann, Yama was combining Earth Central duties with his own. Most of his day was taken up with Stef in one way or another. Yama launched the process of glorification, then carried out a more personal duty: as he’d once promised Stef, he ordered the release of Iris and Ananda from the White Chamber. He did not see the young people, and so never knew that their brief stay beneath the Palace of Justice had turned their hair the same colour as the tiled walls of their cells.
Weary and ready to go home, Yama was thinking of Hariko and his children when a piece of copy containing two lines of script was hand-delivered to his desk. Thus he learned that the woman Lata, last survivor of Crux on earth, had been tracked down at a village near Karakorum. She had committed suicide before the polizi and the Darksiders arrived and had left this note.
“It is all over,” she wrote, “and I know it. This world endures as if protected by a god. But what sort of god would protect this world?”
Yama slid the paper into a port of his mashina.
“Copy, file, destroy,” he said.
On the next Great Genghis Day, Government of the Universe Place was crowded with people. From every flagpole hung nine white faux yaktails in honour of the famous Unifier of Humankind. But the event of the day was not honouring Genghis—though President Mobutu burned incense on his grave—but the dedication of Stef’s memorial. As the veil over the statue fell, Dzhun and Selina stood together looking at an idealized Stef striding ever forward, holding an impact pistol in one hand and a globe symbolizing the world order in the other.
Since Dzhun was only semiliterate, Selina read the epitaph that Yang had composed: “Like the Great Khan in Courage and Like Jesus in Self-Sacrifice.”
“Yang’s been made a grandee, you know,” Dzhun said. “They needed somebody to purge subversives from the University, and he just dropped into the slot. We’re lucky to have him for a customer.”
She had used the million Stef had left her, not to buy a cottage or get an education, but to open her own brothel. She called it House of Timeless Love. With clever Selina to manag
e it—and to serve a few select customers, such as the now famous, rich and powerful Yang—it had rapidly become the most popular of the newer houses, with capacity crowds every night.
Selina smiled down at her friend and employer.
“Anyway, the statue’s nice. Of course he never walked stiff-legged like that. Stef just lounged around.”
“I think I preferred him as he was,” mused Dzhun. “Alive.”
“You loved him, didn’t you?”
“I guess so. I really don’t know much about love. I know that I love you.”
She and Selina had been sleeping together for years. Sometimes they made love, but sex wasn’t really the point. After the night’s work was done and all the customers were gone, they lay together for comfort, holding each other close.
“Can I ask you something, Dzhun?”
“Anything. Almost anything.”
“How’d you get Stef to leave you all that money? Was it just telling him that you had a senator on the string?”
“That was part of it. But also I made up a sad story about myself and fed it to him. You know, in spite of everything he was sentimental. That’s why he was thrown out of the Security Forces. I was working for the polizi then, keeping them informed about my customers. When I reported that Stef was working on an important secret project, I got a bonus. Kathmann himself told me about Stef’s weakness,” said Dzhun proudly. “Even way back then I had powerful friends, Selina.”
“Tu nespravimy, Dzhun,” said her friend, smiling and shaking her head. “You’re incorrigible.”
“What’s that word mean?”
Selina told her. Dzhun smiled; she liked the sound of it.
“Well, honey, if you ask me, we live in an incorrigible world.”
THE CURE FOR EVERYTHING
Severna Park
Here’s a disturbing look at an all-too-likely future, where, as usual, we don’t know what we’ve got until we’ve lost it.
New writer Severna Park has sold short fiction to markets such as Event Horizon, Sci Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Black Heart, Ivory Bones. Her critically acclaimed novels include Speaking Dreams, Hand of Prophecy, and The Annunciate; Speaking Dreams and The Annunciate were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Coming up is a sequel to The Annunciate, called Harbingers. She lives in Frederick, Maryland, and maintains a web page at http://users.erols.com/feldsipe/index.htm.
1
Maria was smoking damp cigarettes with Horace, taking a break in the humid evening, when the truck full of wild jungle Indians arrived from Ipiranga. She heard the truck before she saw it, laboring through the Xingu Forest Preserve.
“Are we expecting someone?” she said to Horace.
Horace shook his head, scratched his thin beard, and squinted into the forest. Diesel fumes drifted with the scent of churned earth and cigarette smoke. The truck revved higher and lumbered through the Xingu Indian Assimilation Center’s main gates.
Except for the details of their face paint, the Indians behind the flatbed’s fenced sides looked the same as all the other new arrivals; tired and scared in their own stoic way, packed together on narrow benches, everyone holding something—a baby, a drum, a cooking pot. Horace waved the driver to the right, down the hill toward Intake. Maria stared at the Indians and they stared back like she was a three-armed sideshow freak.
“Now you’ve scared the crap out of them,” said Horace, who was the director of the Projeto Brasileiro Nacional de Assimilação do Índio. “They’ll think this place is haunted.”
“They should have called ahead,” said Maria. “I’d be out of sight, like a good little ghost.”
Horace ground his cigarette into the thin rainforest soil. “Go on down to the A/V trailer.” he said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of minutes.” He made an attempt to smooth his rough hair, and started after the truck.
Maria took a last drag on the cigarette and started in the opposite direction, toward the Audio/Visual trailer, where she could monitor what was going on in Intake without being seen. Horace was fluent in the major Amazonian dialects of Tupi-Guaraní, Arawak, and Ge, but Maria had a gut-level understanding that he didn’t. She was the distant voice in his ear, mumbling advice into a microphone as he interviewed tribe after refugee tribe. She was the one picking out the nuances in language, guiding him as he spoke, like a conscience.
Or like a ghost. She glanced over her shoulder, but the truck and the Indians were out of sight. No matter where they were from, the Indians had some idea of how white people and black people looked, but you’d think they’d never seen an albino in their lives. Her strange eyes, her pale, translucent skin over African features. To most of them, she was an unknown and sometimes terrifying magical entity. To her … well … most of them were no more or less polite than anyone she’d ever met stateside.
She stopped to grind her cigarette into the dirt, leaned over to pick up the butt, and listened. Another engine. Not the heavy grind of a truck this time.
She started back toward the gate. In the treetops beyond Xingu’s chain-link fence and scattered asphalt roofs, monkeys screamed and rushed through the branches like a visible wind. Headlights flickered between tree trunks and dense undergrowth and a Jeep lurched out of the forest. Bright red letters were stenciled over its hood: Hiller Project.
Maria waved the driver to a stop. He and his passenger were both wearing bright red jackets, with Hiller Project embroidered over the front pocket. The driver had a broad, almost Mexican face. The passenger was a black guy, deeply blue-black, like he was fresh off the boat from Nigeria. He gave Maria a funny look, but she knew what it was. He’d never seen an albino either.
“We’re following the truck from Ipiranga,” the black man said in Portuguese. His name was stenciled over his heart. N’Lykli.
She pointed down the dirt road where the overhead floodlights cut the descending dusk. “Intake’s over there,” she said in the same language. “You should have called ahead. You’re lucky we’ve got space for them.”
“Thanks,” said N’Lykli, and the driver put the Jeep in gear.
“Hey,” said Maria as they started to pull away. “What’s a Hiller Project?”
Another cultural rescue group, she figured, but the black guy gave her a different funny look. She didn’t recognize it and he didn’t answer. The Jeep pulled away, jouncing down the rutted access road.
Maria groped in her pocket for another cigarette, took one out of the pack, then stuck it back in. Instead of heading for the A/V trailer, she followed them down the hill to Intake.
She found N’Lykli and the driver inside with Horace, arguing in Portuguese while four of Xingu’s tribal staffers stood around listening, impassive in their various face paint, Xingu T-shirts, and khaki shorts.
“These people have to be isolated,” the driver was saying. “They have to be isolated or we’ll lose half of them to measles and the other half to the flu.”
He seemed overly focused on this issue, even though Horace was nodding. Horace turned to one of the staffers and started to give instructions in the man’s native Arawak. “Drive them down to Area C. Take the long way so you don’t go past the Waura camp.”
“No,” said N’Lykli. “We’ll drive them. You just show us where they can stay for the night.”
Horace raised an eyebrow. “For the night?”
“We’ll be gone in the morning,” said N’Lykli. “We have permanent quarters set up for them south of here, in Xavantina.”
Horace drew himself up. “Once they’re on Xingu property, they’re our responsibility. You can’t just drop in and then take them somewhere else. This isn’t a fucking motel.”
The driver pulled a sheaf of papers out of his jacket and spread them on the table. Everything was stamped with official-looking seals and Hiller Project in red letters over the top of every page. “I have authorization.”
“So do I,” said Horace. “And mine’s part of a big fat grant from Plano de Desenvolvimento Econômico e S
ocial in Brazillia.”
The driver glanced at his Hiller companion.
“Let me make a phone call,” said N’Lykli. “We’ll get this straightened out.”
Horace snorted and waved him toward Maria. “She’ll show you where it is.”
“This way,” said Maria.
It wasn’t that Horace would kick the Indians out if they didn’t have authorization. He’d kick out the Hiller whatever-the-fuck-that-was Project first, and hold on to the Indians until he knew where they were from and what they were doing on the back of a truck. Indians were shipped out of settlements all over Brazil as an act of mercy before the last of the tribe was gunned down by cattle ranchers, rubber tappers, or gold miners. Xingu’s big fat grant was a sugar pill that the Plano de Desenvolvimento gave out with one hand while stripping away thousands of years of culture with the other. Horace knew it. Everyone knew it.
N’Lykli followed her across the compound, between swirls of floodlit mosquitoes, through the evening din of cicadas. The phone was on the other side of the reserve, and Maria slowed down to make him walk beside her.
“So what’s a Hiller Project?” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “we’re part of a preservation coalition.”
“Which one?” asked Maria. “Rainforest Agencies?”
“Something like that.”
“You should be a little more specific.” Maria jerked a thumb in Horace’s direction. “Horace thinks Rainforest Agencies is a front for the World Bank, and they’re not interested in preserving anything. If he finds out that’s who you work for, you’ll never get your little Indian friends out of here.”
N’Lykli hesitated. “Okay. You’ve heard of International Pharmaceuticals?”
“They send biologists out with the shamans to collect medicinal plants.”
“Right,” he said. “IP underwrites part of our mission.”
“You mean rainforest as medical resource?” Maria stopped. “So why’re you taking Indians from Ipiranga to Xavantina? They won’t know anything about the medicinal plants down there. Ipiranga’s in an entirely different ecological zone.”
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