Emerald Eyes

by Emerald Eyes (new ed) (mobi)

  The room was information sterile, intentionally. There should be nothing to distract him from his job.

  Paris, he thought for the hundredth time that week. I left Paris for this.

  Two hundred meters below the surface of New York City, Peaceforcer Emile Garon sighed and closed his eyes, and hoped desperately that the flicker would become a trace that would take him out into the Crystal Wind of data that was life.

  And returned to work.

  Their offices were on Third Avenue, a fifteen minute walk from Grand Central Station. The suite belonging to Kalharri Enterprises, Ltd., was not large: one subdivided private office where Malko, Carl and Jany McConnell had desks, a receptionist's area and a conference room. For almost a year now Malko had been paying for the offices out of his own pocket. That too would be changing, and none too soon.

  Spyeyes hovered above the street outside when Carl reached the Kaufmann Spacescraper at 550 Third Avenue. Their presence was not unusual; many of the news services floated spyeyes outside the spacescraper when a story involved one of the occupants. The sheer number of spyeyes, though, brought him to a halt--twenty, twenty-five; he stopped counting when the spyeyes spotted him. A dozen spyeyes identified him and swooped down toward him, shouting questions that blurred into a wall of sound. Carl ran the last forty meters through the early morning pedestrian traffic, to the spacescraper's revolving glass doors.

  Half again the usual number of guards stood duty today; they processed him through quickly. The lift tube took him up to the 408th floor; sunpaint lit as Carl unlocked his office. The receptionist's area and conference room were empty. Carl entered his own office and dropped his briefcase next to the desk.

  In the darkness of his office a cool blue cube appeared above Carl's desktop. The cube was invisible from the side opposite Carl, where the holocam pickup was located.

  Marilyn Monroe's image appeared within the cube.

  "Gerold McKann, please."

  "One moment, sir," breathed the image of a woman who'd been dead for nearly a hundred years. The solid, rock-steady receptionist's holograph was replaced on Carl's desktop by a wavering flat sheet of projected monovideo. Gerry was in his car; through the flat interface Carl could see part of the front seat of Gerry's Chandler 1300, and through the windows of the car, what Carl guessed was TransContinental Highway 4 out in Pennsylvania. In the poor light of early morning, as relayed by the hovercar's marginally overscanning camera, it was difficult for him to be certain.

  "Carl! Goddamn, man, congratulations." Gerry grinned into the camera. "I told you it would go through."

  Carl stood with his fists resting on the desktop. "I audited the Electronic Times already this morning, Gerry."

  The grin widened. "Yes? What did you think?"

  "How stupid are you?"

  Gerry laughed. "I'm one..." He broke off abruptly. Cautiously, he said, "You're angry."

  "Why did you write that story, Gerry?"

  Gerry's eyes flicked down toward the camera embedded in the Chandler's dash, and back up again to watch the road. "Excuse me a moment," he said mildly. Carl watched as Gerry set up radar and hooked the carcomp into TransCon Auto Control. Gerry McKann was in his late forties, though he looked younger; he kept in shape. He was a newsdancer with over thirty years experience in the field--it was the only job he'd ever held.

  The flickering, blue-tinged monovideo showed little of his expression as Gerry leaned back in the driver's seat and folded his arms across his chest. "Okay. I was under the impression I was doing you a favor."

  "How so?"

  "Well--correct me if I'm wrong--telepaths are people. I'm even willing to grant de Nostri that status; you and yours strike me as being a bit more human than that lot. I thought I'd spread the news." The newsdancer in him popped up with a quick grin. "Also, it was a hell of a story."

  From the outer office Carl heard the faint sound of the doors curling open. Voices, Jany and Malko. Without turning away from the image in the holofield, he touched a key on the control panel to his terminal. With a whisper the door between his office and the outer offices slid shut and locked itself. He sank into his seat slowly. He measured his words. "First of all, you correct me if I'm wrong, Gerry, isn't it contrary to newsdancer ethics to write a story on a subject to which you are connected in a personal fashion without explicitly identifying the fact?"

  "Only if you get caught. Damn it, Carl, if nothing else it was good publicity. Count the number of favorable stories there've been about you folks of late and--"

  "I--we--don't need the publicity. I don't want the publicity. The Peaceforcers don't want the publicity."

  "What do you care what the Peaceforcers want?" McKann looked bewildered. "Man, you're free! That's what all this was all--"

  "I am not free!" Carl screamed. He found himself on his feet, glaring down into the screen.

  Gerry McKann stared at him.

  "Damn damn damn," Carl swore in a monotone. "Gerry, I have two hundred and thirty-six children who depend on me to take care of them. The Secretary General doesn't like me and may hate Malko. Jerril Carson does hate me, he'd pay to see me dead. Half the Peaceforcers in the world are terrified of us and all of them think we're traitors." He slammed a fist down on the desktop and the desk shivered. "And you, you stupid fuck, had to rub their noses in it in front of an audience of one and a quarter billion Electronic Times subscribers. We got a piece of paper signed, today new copies of the Statement of Principles get transmitted around the world, saying the Peaceforcers can't use us without paying us anymore, can't tell us to do anything anymore. Do you think the Peaceforcers care what that piece of paper says?"

  Gerold McKann looked at him.

  Carl shouted, "Well? Do you?"

  McKann's voice was barely audible. "No."

  The word drained away Carl's anger, left him standing there, cold and empty. "I shouldn't have to say things like this, Gerry. You know better."

  McKann sighed. "I didn't think. I was trying to do you a favor." He shrugged and looked out the window at what was, to Carl, only a blurred image of countryside. "I was trying to help." McKann looked directly down into his camera. "Sorry. But Jerril Carson was your mistake."

  He hung up and left Carl looking at a blank sheet of dim laser light.

  Carl nodded after a moment. He spoke to the empty screen. "Yeah, well, we all make mistakes."

  After a long moment he turned away from the field, called the sunlights up, and went out to face what promised to be a long day.

  In a park at the south end of Manhattan island, a telepath named Johann MacArthur sat with his back to a tree and watched children play in the warm sunlight. He sat and enjoyed the warmth. The Weather Bureau said that the day would be pleasant, but Johnny had learned, like everyone else, not to trust anything the Bureau of Weather Control said.

  The park was not large. It was a rectangle less than a hundred meters on its long axis, and only forty meters wide. A five-meter-high fence enclosed it and there was no exit to the street. It would not have been safe. Instead a tunnel walkway led from the center of the park, under the street, and came back up across the street, inside the Chandler Complex where the telepaths had been living for over half a year. The shade trees scattered throughout the park obscured visibility enough to make the fence difficult to see unless you were near the perimeter.

  The children rarely approached the park's perimeter; it made it too easy to hear the chanting of the picket lines. Today was particularly noisy; given yesterday's vote, that was to be expected.

  Johann sat in full lotus, eyes open and unfocused, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. It was unseasonably warm for early morning in March, and promised genuine heat by noontime. He was a big blond man who looked too much like a young Malko Kalharri for coincidence. Carl had told Johann that in the earlier days of what the technicians had, only half sarcastically, named Project Superman, many of the men in the staff had donated sperm cells for the genetic content. Johann had never asked Malko
if he had been one of those men; he had never cared enough.

  At twenty-five he was the third oldest telepath on Earth, but he didn't feel very old, most of the time.

  The park was quiet this early in the morning. About sixty of the children were out playing. The rest of the kids would be in one class or another, except for the eight who were currently out on jobs for the Peaceforcers.

  He felt a certain grim satisfaction in the knowledge that those would be the last eight.

  A swift thought struck him; it came from Heather Castanaveras, the fourteen-year-old girl who was teaching unarmed combat that morning to a class composed largely of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. Johnny, have you seen Trent?

  Johann closed his eyes briefly, and with the Sight walked through the park quickly. Althea, his lieutenant that day, was leading her group in a game of hide-and-seek played by rules no normal human could have understood. I don't see him, Heather.

  Blue eyes isn't in class again. The thought held frustration that approached anger.

  Johann sighed. Try not to get upset with him, Heather.

  Why not?

  He's not having an easy time with the Change. And besides, today's his birthday.

  It's always somebody's birthday, snapped Heather, and cut the connection abruptly.

  Johann thought a moment. Trent had only turned eleven today; Heather had moved him into class with the thirteen and fourteen year olds some months ago. She thought he held promise in unarmed combat, and certainly he was large enough. But he seemed to have little interest in the subject.

  Not my problem, he decided with a cheerful lack of interest, and returned to dozing under the sun.

  Emile Garon's hands trembled slightly. He was close to datastarve; and if he showed symptoms, the PKF DataWatch would yank him from his job--

  He could not afford, as a private citizen, the processor power necessary to take him into the Crystal Wind with the bandwidth that PKF equipment afforded. But there had been no traces, nothing to justify going in.

  It hurt. He had spent far too much time in the information-sterile world of reality. He had not gone live into the Net in nearly two weeks.

  Though he would not admit it even to himself, he was addicted to the Crystal Wind.

  "There," said Peaceforcer Emile Garon aloud. He wanted desperately to believe that he was not fooling himself. His eyes did not open. Finally he spoke with conviction.

  "There it is again."

  Trent danced through the InfoNet, seeking.

  Garon keyed open his throat mike. "I have a live one. Tracer request submitted."

  The watch commander's voice boomed in his skull. "Describe the sign."

  "Intelligent, sir. Starting in the public Boards, at 9:08:11. Redirected output through ComSat 0188 and multiplexed back down in several different channels at 9:19:35. I filtered out the ghost channels and sent web angels into the net to chase it down."

  "Replicant AI or live sign?"

  "No AI signature. Live sign probability in the high nines; it doesn't know how to scramble deep memory, and hasn't booby-trapped pursuit. But it generated its ghosts in a burst of elegant superlisp."

  "Opinion?"

  "A talented amateur. Trace, sir?"

  There was no reply. Garon chewed at his lower lip. He knew it was foolish, but he could not restrain himself. "Sir?"

  He wondered if he imagined the coolness in the watch commander's voice. "Trace enable on three. Access at point five. Stay out of Ministry and Space Force Boards." A pause. "Trace enabled."

  Emile Garon activated the trace nodes at his temples, and descended into the light of data.

  Francis Xavier Chandler, in an autobiography written only a few years before his death in 2094, wrote of Jany McConnell:

  "I have never met another woman who was more alive. I thought when I first met her that she was a great beauty, but in later years, looking at the images that are all that is left of her, I saw this was not so. She was an attractive woman. She and Carl Castanaveras were of a type; good looking, dark-haired young adults in excellent physical condition, with those brilliant green eyes. Neither of them looked like their names, but that was not uncommon even then, with interbreeding.

  "I am indifferently affected by male beauty, but those who are not, who knew Castanaveras, have told me that their reaction to him was the same as my reaction to 'Selle McConnell. When I was still a relatively young man, practicing my first profession, I wrote a song called Desert Eyes. It was a 'Top Ten' hit; unless you know what that means, it is an irrelevancy I won't describe here.

  "Over seven decades after I wrote that song, I met Jany McConnell and knew at last whom I had written the song about. She had desert eyes; they burned.

  "One gains perspective with the passage of time. The telepaths, in that time, were a fact. Only a fool would ignore them; but only a greater fool would allow himself to be aligned with them publicly. There was too much resentment against them. The Jews were discriminated against for thousands of years because they made the claim to superiority, to being a Chosen People.

  "The telepaths, Castanaveras and all those children named after him, were better than us. Quantitatively and qualitatively, in nearly every way that could be measured and some that could not, they were a superior people.

  "Except in numbers. Of course they were doomed."

  "Baby?" Jany McConnell looked up from her work as Carl entered the conference room. Seated at the head of the table, she was downloading the InfoNet profiles of their five guests into the two waitbots. She looked enough like him to be his sister; a handsome green-eyed woman with long, dark hair, wearing an oversized blue leather coat, short skirt, and a pair of emerald studs. Genetically they were closer than most twins. "How do you feel?"

  His smile was melancholy. "Well. How about yourself?"

  She shrugged in a single fluid movement that took most of her upper body into account. "Well." Her makeup was turned off, except for a faint blue-silver sheen on her lips and over her eyes. "You didn't come home last night."

  "I stayed at Doctor Montignet's house. Where's Malko?" Carl had not seen him in the waiting area or the lobby.

  "He went down to the security station on the first floor to review security for the meeting." Her hands roved slowly over the huge pointboard at the head of the table. There were seven chairs lined up against the room's north wall; Jany sat in the eighth. "You didn't call, Carl. I was worried about you. It's only been about two months since that maniac shot at you while you were testifying before the Unification Council. We had this incredible party last night and you didn't even call to say you weren't coming home."

  I'm sorry, Jany. I wasn't good company last night. She did not respond, and he continued aloud, "I knew we were going to win by noon yesterday. So did Malko. We had two hundred and twenty votes firmly accounted for, and...it was just a step. It was depressing."

  "Just a step?" She looked at him quizzically. "And Suzanne was better company than we would have been? Suzanne's one of the least empathetic people I've ever met."

  "And the toughest."

  Jany nodded thoughtfully. "She lives in her own world."

  Carl flashed a bright, hard grin at her. "It makes her hard to hurt."

  Jany made no immediate reply. She did not respond to the grin, and slowly it faded. "Maybe you're right. But you should still have called. I worried."

  "Do I need to apologize again?"

  "No. Just don't do it again."

  He cocked his head to one side. "Okay--Okay?"

  "Okay, then." She smiled at him for the first time, and for the first time in several days he felt the bright, flickering warmth that made everything else in his life worthwhile. "Do you want to give me a hug? The last time I saw you we were still slaves."

  With a roar of frustration, Emile Garon threw his traceset down to the desktop. Even the glorious Crystal Wind, the sharp bright surge of data that was life, left him with only the smallest, fading glow.

  "How did he do
that?" Garon asked of no one, aware of the trace of hysteria in his voice. He sank back into his chair, eyes focused on a great distance. "I can't even do that."

  The watch commander's voice cut through the layers of unbelief with shocking clarity. "Officer Garon, you are relieved of duty. You are instructed to report to Elite Commander Breilleune's office at 13:00 hours."

  Suddenly, Emile Garon's holofield appeared over his desk, a silvered flat plane that sank away from him to present depth.

  Two letters appeared, black against a blue background, in an eighteen-point Helvetica typeface that contrasted sharply with the plain, ten-point terminal typeface PKF displays normally used.

  Ox, the letters said.

  Garon stared at the letters without comprehension. Suddenly the holofield reset, flattened into a silver plane, and vanished. Frantically Garon scrambled for his pointboard. The dictionary instantly displayed eight different possible meanings; number one on the list, with a probability of 87%, was an English word, that the dictionary translated for him as boeuf; as an adjective, meaning of great strength, but slow and clumsy.

  The watch commander's voice brought him back. "Emile? Officer Garon, do you acknowledge the order? You are instructed to report to Elite Commander Breilleune's office at 13:00 hours."

  "Yes. I will be there."

  Their fourth guest arrived at 9:45; Malko Kalharri took the elevator up to the downlot to greet her personally. Belinda Singer was, in her own right, one of the twenty wealthiest human beings on Earth, and one of the twenty-five wealthiest anywhere in the Solar System. She was old enough to make Malko feel young. While her age was not public knowledge, it was a fair guess she would never see the sunny side of one hundred again. Despite that, her wealth was the most recently obtained of their five guests. Thirty-seven years ago, the United Nations had nationalized both the orbital construction facilities at Halfway and the SpaceFarer Colony at LaGrange Five. The SpaceFarers' Collective declared independence by way of retaliation, and waged a brief and ineffective war with the Unification. The war did not regain their former holdings, but the United Nations, still weak from the strains of the Unification War, had not been able to prevent them from declaring, and maintaining, their freedom.