Valentine's Resolve

by E. E. Knight

  A strange sort of scaffolding had been set up in front of the tower. Perhaps three stories high on its own, it consisted of two staircases leading up to a long, bridgelike platform, an isosceles triangle aimed at the center column. A television camera was perched halfway up the stairs.

  The spectators gathered for the audience consisted of well-dressed functionaries in the front, and a mass of shaggy student types farther back, each of whom received a little paper ticket like a theater admittance. The Seattle Police, in waxy black leather jackets, herded the entire crowd into one narrow mass in front of the scaffolding. Silas went up to the television platform and spoke to the cameraman, who turned his camera out on the crowd. Silas looked through it as well, and the police had the crowd spread out a little at the back, and passed out banners that could be unfurled to hide the lack of numbers.

  SEATTLE CITY OF DREAMS AND PROGRESS, read One. PACIFIC COAST BEST AND BRIGHTEST HONORS KUR. Then there was the eternal OUR FUTURE IS BRIGHT AGAIN in phony childish lettering, held up by uniformed Youth Vanguard troops, which Valentine had seen in every political rally he'd attended in the Kurian Zone. Duvalier always said that Youth Vanguard troop rallies were so filled with high-ranking Quisling pederasts and pedophiles that the banners should read Our cherry is plucked again.

  "Why not just round up more people for the audience?" Valentine asked one of the cops. "That's what we do back home."

  "That's what I tell 'em," the cop said. "Just give folks a day off so they can come into the plaza. Give 'em luxury coupons like they give those sweatin' kids. They wanna have their cake and eat it too is all. Can't lose ten lousy hours of work. What they do is give everyone a half day on Fridays so they can go home and watch the speeches rebroadcast."

  "That many televisions around? We sure don't have that at home."

  "Shit yeah. Back in the good times, before all the fighting with the insurgents, this was a sweet spot."

  "Sorry to hear that."

  He lowered his voice. "Getting so even a police badge ain't proof against a cull. Like I was—"

  A blast of music from the speakers mounted on the scaffolding interrupted him. Valentine wondered if Silas had selected Aaron Copland.

  Then a New Universal Church Archon began to speak. He led the audience in a hymn, "Onward Human Progress," and Valentine managed to drone through it; he'd heard it many times before in the Gulf.

  Silas' limo pulled up to the scaffolding and he and Troyd got out. Silas, wearing an elegant camel-hair coat that stood out against the dull aluminum of the metal, led Troyd up the stairs, where after a brief introduction as "the skilled xenologist who is doing so much to reverse our recent misfortunes" Troyd walked up a set of railless stairs that seemed impossibly narrow to Valentine. It was tipped with a sort of pulpit, and from there, by leaning on the rail and reaching his hand up, he could just reach a sort of blister on the side of the tower.

  Silas spoke, talking about battles recently won that Valentine had never heard of, except for a small skirmish that resulted in a raiding PeaBee company retreating from an old state trooper station. To hear Silas describe it, another Stalingrad had been won.

  Troyd passed his hand through a shimmering wall of light and pulled it out, still dripping with what looked like liquid fire. He shook it off and held up his undamaged hand, and the new brass ring on his finger glimmered like Venus on a dark night.

  Valentine half listened to the speeches, marking the placement of Reapers. Two stood at the bottom of each stairway.

  Troyd descended the stairs more surely, and stepped to the micro­phones. With the TV camera on him, he gave a brief, halting speech, thanking Seattle for his generosity and leadership, as a banner unfurled from the bottom of the scaffold.

  rings awarded in our sixth decade what's stopping you from getting yours?

  With Troyd's speech concluded, the Archon stepped to the microphones again. He clutched the railing and sagged for a moment, but Silas helped support him. With that, he raised his head, and with his eyes rolling and cheeks twitching he spoke.

  "My children," he said, giving Valentine an odd tingle over the difference in his voice. The Archon sounded a little like a stroke victim who hadn't quite regained the full use of his tongue. "Your Kurian friends and allies have this day placed one of your number among the eagles that soar over this lovely land of ours. He is an example to be followed, for he teaches us the virtue of cooperation and utility. The beings he directs to guard your homes may look fearsome to you, but consider how fearsome they must look to those who threaten our peace. Perhaps then you shall look on their strange faces and beauty. We, your Kurian friends and allies, know you have sacrificed to feed these beings, but who regrets a toe when a leg is saved?

  "There are dark forces at the gates of our city, so long a symbol of the heights mankind can reach, with just the tiniest touch of a friendly hand. With these fresh allies beside us, we can look to better days ahead. Belief in victory will lead to work for victory. Work for victory will lead to an affirmation of that belief.

  "Too many homes have been darkened by death in the last year. New medicines are even now on their way to church dispensaries to help you dispel whatever fears and doubts you may have. But these have not come cheaply. We must bring the new B-6 into production to meet orders already placed, and certain luxuries will, for a time, become unavailable. Your conferences will provide you with details of our plans to increase output. If we all push together, a very short period of sacrifice will put us back on the road to prosperity and peace. Meet these hardships, not as a burden among burdens, but as a challenge above self! Will you, my family, accept this challenge?"

  "Yes," Silas shouted into the microphone. "Yes, yes, yes," he chanted, and the crowd took it up, perhaps eager for exercise to keep warm in the chill November air. The Youth Vanguard jumped up and down with each "yes."

  After a few close-ups of people cheering, and a rowdy student or two lifting her sweater and T-shirt, the TV cameraman left.

  Silas came down the stairs, chatting with Troyd.

  "Wait for Valentine a moment, won't you, Troyd?" Silas asked. "I believe he's going to accompany you back to your wet little camp. Unless you want to come up and pay your respects in person."

  Troyd looked at the ring on his hand, rubbed the skin. "No. I was touched once. That's enough for me."

  "Then it's you and me, Valentine," Silas said.

  "What, up there?"

  "Of course."

  "I thought I could just speak to one of the, the ..."

  "We call them avatars."

  "One of the avatars," Valentine finished.

  "He wants to look at you with his own eyes. All eight of them. Are you coming?"

  Valentine nodded, and stepped up onto the scaffold stairs.

  The four Reapers came up the stairs with them, boots loud on the metal steps. Valentine saw the TV man blanch as he placed his camera in a padded bag and frantically wound cables as the Reapers passed.

  Silas hit a button by the microphones—another worker with a little silver television pin on her collar dismantled the microphones— and the stairs Troyd had used to climb up to the blister lowered and flattened into a narrow walkway, bridging a gap between the tower and the scaffold bridge. Valentine saw a slit open up in the tower wall, saw lips peel back as it widened.

  He looked up at the blister in the tower. Some trick of light put six Reaper faces in various oddly shaped shards and panels of glass.

  Two Reapers led them inside, ducking to go through the slit. Silas followed, hands held out a little for balance. Valentine walked the beam uneasily, more thanks to the Reaper following behind than from fear of a misstep.

  They lost two of the Reapers at the portal. Valentine couldn't resist turning around and looking. Sure enough, there were lines of triangles like shark teeth, yet off bias like the blades of a ripsaw, deadly yet deco­rative bumps on the inner side of those lips.

  Valentine was relieved to see the inside conforming to
human ideas of architecture and design.

  "The center tower is separate from the others?"

  "At the level humans go to, yeah. People work full-time in here, you know. They use our technology to light the place, keep the air moving. Seattle used to be a popular piece of real estate for them. I learned they evolved in tidal zones when I was out East in Cambridge."

  They passed through an inner, curving shaft. Valentine looked up, saw small spiky projections on both sides of the wheel within wheels. There more threadlike projections connected the two layers of structure. It reminded him of a cross section of a bone with the marrow cleaned out. Climbing it would be possible, he imagined, but a long and demanding ascent.

  All the corridors curved and wound, so it was difficult to see more than ten meters or so ahead. The Reapers led them to another elevator, in what Valentine guessed to be the center core of the pillar. Silas put his key into the slot and Valentine heard a beep.

  "You have to do it too."

  Valentine got the same beep and a green light came on over the elevator. The doors opened and they got in, accompanied by the Reapers.

  "Two for audience, Seattle level," a Reaper said to a speaker grid.

  Valentine found it interesting that even Reapers had to report in to some central authority. Bureaucracy or security? Weren't these Reapers animated by Seattle himself?

  The elevator rose fast enough for Valentine to feel the change in perceived gravity for a moment. Then he concentrated on swallowing to relieve the changes in air pressure.

  The elevator opened out on a wide bay. A Reaper in a purple robe, his face hidden by hood and fabric mask, nodded, and Silas led Valentine out of the elevator into the plain, well-lit lobby. Valentine noted that the walls had a metallic sheen, and there were what he supposed were two-way mirrors on each wall.

  "Silvers used to wait for me in this room. But he kept getting nervous around the avatars and soiling the corner."

  "You feel like you need a bodyguard up here?" Valentine asked.

  "You never know. A Grog's like a big, comforting dog sometimes. A dog that can shoot."

  The Reaper pointed to a door on the right wall.

  "Crap. I hate the tunnel. I was hoping he'd talk to us in the gardens. You're on your own, Valentine."

  Silas hurried over to the door, waved at a camera lens—Valentine noted the door had no ID card slot—and it opened. Dim light, such as one might find under fifty or sixty feet of murky water, showed a room beyond.

  "Go on. It's safe, until he decides it shouldn't be safe."

  "See you," Valentine said.

  Valentine passed in, ducking slightly to clear the door, wondering if another elaborate death awaited inside. Funny how even involuntarily one developed a fatalism about that sort of thing. Did they put some psychotropic in the food?

  While touring a classroom once in Biloxi as a Coastal Marine, Valentine had to do "community service" in a classroom. The class had a small family of hamsters, and the hamsters had a little plastic warren of connecting tunnels and shafts and rooms. The room he stepped into reminded him of those shafts, save that it was in the shape of a slightly pregnant triangle and surrounded by some kind of liquid.

  He thought he could see other shafts and rooms through the liquid, but they might have been decor, or models; the rather cloudy water—if it was indeed water—made it difficult to tell.

  Valentine saw dozens of bodies floating in the liquid. Most were in the shape of the octopus-bat creature that Valentine knew to be a Kurian/Lifeweaver form. Wires or lines projected from their extremities and "necks" to a football-sized orb that glowed mysteriously now and then as the forms floated. Something about the slowness of the movements inside made Valentine decide the liquid wasn't, in fact, water.

  Others shared the space with the aliens, gentle and predatory. Valentine saw a Grog or two, and humans. An encephalitic fetus, tethered both to mother by umbilical and to its own football, yawned and stretched.

  "Do you admire my menagerie?" a voice in his head asked. It was slightly mechanical, and Valentine realized it was from an old battery-operated Ready Reader toy he'd heard Amalee playing with the last time he'd seen her. He'd given it to her when he arrived on Jamaica, and she proudly showed "Uncle David" how good she was with it already, dog and cat and hat and ball prancing, stalking, bouncing, or spinning across the faded screen.

  Valentine decided to respond aloud. If he started having conversations with himself, or the Kurian, or maybe that floating fetus, he didn't like his chances of making it out of the tunnel a complete personality again. "Which one are you?"

  "All of them. In a way. You have a well-rounded mind for your kind, Vaal-eyen-tine-Dee. Strong extremes of love and hate. I hope you know the narrowness of the balance point on which the scale rests. Oh, here she is. How are you, sweet boy?"

  The last was said with his mother's voice. Valentine felt a piece of him fall off. "Don't do that!"

  "Do what, you little pail of piss water?" an old drill instructor from the Labor Regiment asked. "Oh, I like him."

  What am I here to do again?

  "Bargain, I think," LeHavre's voice said. Suddenly he was eleven again, standing in the kitchen above his pantsless mother, blood all over the floor, tomatoes stewing on the stove.

  "Oh, that was delicious, thank you," Father Max's voice said. "But my time is limited."

  Valentine found himself on his knees in the tunnel, gasping like a fish, his heart pounding. "Stop it! Please!"

  "Very well. Why are you wondering if some of these are Dau'weem?"

  "I have old friends in Southern Command who have vanished."

  "I assure you, they are not here," Ready Reader said.

  "What is this thing?"

  "Are you familiar with your concept of a phased array?"

  "No."

  "A team of horses, perhaps?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "It's the same principle. Joined minds able to do what one cannot. It helps me keep tabs on my enemies—and my allies. Which reminds me, which are you?"

  "An enemy."

  "I admire your candor. Are you here to kill me, Vaal-eyen-tine-Dee?"

  "No. I can't imagine how I'd do that."

  "You've proven yourself inventive in the past. But you must know your limitations. Watch out for Blake. He'll forget himself someday and kill you, I expect. These constructs have very poor impulse control. Speaking of impulses, you've got strong ones toward my old friend Adler. What kind of a man do you think he is?"

  "A madman," Valentine said.

  "You're wrong. In any case, he's set me back years. Not that years mean much to me, of course. I shall rebuild, better and more carefully, once he's gone. Sooner or later."

  "I want to make it sooner."

  "You do, of that I'm certain. Your wobbly little scale is quite tipped where he's concerned. I'd like to do it in Silas-Em's life span; he is a talented sort and I shall hate to lose him to age. This new generation thinks the most piddling acts of conformity merit a brass ring. Where is the desire for greatness?"

  "Maybe you're breeding it out of them. Herd talk and all that. We've still got it in the Free Territories."

  "Dream on, Vaal-eyen-tine-Dee," Duvalier's voice said. "Are you sure you're not mistaking free range for free land?" The voice shifted back to Ready Reader's. "Oh, and now we're tipping back for love again. You're more fun than a good treetop swoop on a breezy day, Vaal-eyen-tine-Dee."

  "And my ring?"

  "You do want it, after all. And food and a warm wet mouth and poke after poke into delicious juicy pussy and then a steaming hot bath. Are you toying with me, man, channeling the baser urges?"

  Valentine kept fantasizing.

  "Maybe you're not as interesting as I thought. In any case, I've no doubt you intend to go through with your plan. Your wish is granted. Adler's destruction would be worth eight-count of rings to me. Cross me and you will end up in the tank until your body rots. You can barely comprehend how long tha
t will take."

  "Don't forget my island."

  "You'll find them cold and rocky after your Caribbean, but something can be arranged." Light poured into the tunnel. "You may leave now. Good-bye."

  One of the human forms jerked as its tether balloon changed color. His eyes opened behind his mass of drifting hair and he waved. Valentine saw the eyes widen, and he tore his gaze away and fled back into the receiving room. The man floating in there was the Bear Rafferty.

  * * * *

  "You don't look so good, Valentine," Silas said. "Did you see that little girl? Some comedian stuck a—"

  "No," Valentine said. "I saw someone I knew, briefly."

  "You need some air." He turned to the Reaper. "Can we go into the greenhouse?"

  For a moment it seemed as useless as talking to a statue; then their escort Reapers moved to flank the other door. Silas waved Valentine over and it opened.

  Valentine smelled fresh, humid air and open space. Above, a crystalline dome diffused and admitted light, whitening the sun a little. A red path covered with a no-slide coating led them up to a little prominence, with a couple of comfortable human lounge chairs before a pool, which flowed over into a waterfall somewhere below.

  Staggered was the only word for what Valentine felt. The space was bigger than any stadium he'd ever seen, and filled with a winding archipelago that was half-bayou and half-beachfront.

  Red and purple trees topped with bristles of tresslike leaves dropped green vines into the water. Spongy-looking yellow growths clung to the bare trunks of the trees, sending out vast, delicate webs to catch deadfalls from above. Wind swirled around the interior of the dome.

  "This is a piece of Ehro, home planet of the Dau'ar."

  Valentine felt invigorated. "I thought they came from Kur. Someone told me it was a dry, almost lifeless place."

  "A castle under siege runs out of even rats eventually. But Ehro is where they evolved, I'm told. That oxygen's nice, isn't it?"

  "I wish they'd go back to it."

  "They can't, but then you know that, I expect. We're just a part of a bigger, older war. I worry sometimes that the Dau'weem will apply the same strategy to our planet that Adler does to the suburbs."