Emerald Eyes

by Emerald Eyes (new ed) (mobi)

  Finally, in disgust, Malko punched in for the skystreets. They weren't the fastest way home--ground traffic was usually that--but today they looked the best bet for covering the four kilometers to the Complex before an hour was out. TransCon turned on the AUTO light on the dash, the steering grip went rigid, and Malko leaned back in his seat as TransCon took the Caddy out into the gossamer webs of skystreets above New York.

  Carl slept the sound sleep of exhaustion in the back seat of Malko's old '47 Cadillac. In the dark front seat, Jany sat with her gleaming blue leather coat drawn up about her throat, hands down in the deep pockets. Her eyes were fixed on something that did not exist, far out on the highway. Malko stretched, ligament and cartilage and bones creaking audibly. Shifting in his seat until his right shoulder was leaning against his seat's backrest, he studied Jany McConnell's profile.

  "He touched you, didn't he?"

  "Twice."

  The old man reached over to her and moved a stray hair away from her face. She shivered, but did not flinch. "I'm sorry. I am sorry." Knowing it was futile, he tried to make sense of it for her. "I told them not to touch either of you, but for some people it's hard not to. Sandoval--Latinos, they're raised that way."

  "He knew," she whispered.

  "What do you mean?"

  "He knows a lot about us," she said simply. One hand came up out of the pocket, to hold his tightly. "We fascinate him." Behind them, a Speedfreak came up out of nowhere, weaving through the TransCon controlled hovercars at high speed, its headlights throwing a bright, moving light into the interior of the Caddy. "He's been auditing everything that's been declassified about us for years now." The headlights peaked, and faded. The hovercar's interior sank back into gloom. "I wasn't trying to read him. He's ill, Malko, as bad as the Peaceforcer who tried to rape me that time. Pain and love and sex and death, all mixed up together. He touched me and it leapt out." She shivered again.

  "You didn't tell the boy," said Malko. It was almost a question.

  "God, no." Jany laughed shakily. Her eyes dropped shut, and she ran the caress of a thought across Carl's unconscious mind. She sounded near tears when she spoke again. "He ignores me half the time, Malko, but then he's so protective. He would have hurt Sandoval so badly, and he would have thought he was doing it for me." Tears began. "He spent last night with Doctor Montignet, did you know that? He was depressed and he was afraid he was going to hurt me, but, you know, I can handle the black moods, they don't bother me so much. What hurts is when he won't trust me."

  Malko said gently, "Carl doesn't trust himself. How can he trust you?"

  She sat holding his hand, watching the flow of traffic. She cried quietly, her shoulders shaking inside the coat. Malko knew better than to try to talk. Eventually the tears stopped and her breathing slowed. When she spoke, there was drowsiness in her voice. "I don't understand how he can be so angry with the world. There's this huge blind spot and he doesn't know it's there. All of the good things, he misses those. He doesn't see the children, he doesn't see what a wonder they are." She clutched Malko's hand harder. "He's such a mess."

  Malko squeezed back. "Yeah. He is that."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "It's a long story, little girl."

  Jany giggled. "You're the only person in the world who could call me that with a straight face."

  Malko smiled down at her. "Why don't you get some sleep? Prince Charming didn't waste any time. I'll wake you when we're...home."

  "That sounds like a good idea…." Her eyes closed almost instantly, and she curled up on the front seat, still holding Malko hand. "Home. That's such a nice word. I don't think any of the children have started using it yet. Maybe they don't know what it means."

  Malko stroked her hair with his free hand. "Maybe so."

  She was almost asleep when she murmured, "God, what did they do to him...." It was not a question, and her breathing gentled into sleep moments later.

  "Nothing you want to know about," said Malko.

  The car flew on through the night.

  They reached the Complex near eight o'clock.

  The Complex was a large, elegantly pale building built of supertwisted monocrystal, on half an acre of land. It had been built by F.X. Chandler not quite a decade ago, in an open Italian architectural style that was prevalent back in the twenties. The land upon which it stood had once been the heart of the New York City financial district; tactical thermonuclear weapons, during the War, had ended that. Where Wall Street and City Hall and the Brooklyn Bridge had once stood was now one of the most exclusive and expensive residential areas in the world. One of four homes owned by Chandler in and around Capital City, the Complex extended two stories into the air, and three below the ground and was capable of housing twice the telepaths' numbers with ease.

  Thea and Mandy, two of the fourteen-year-olds, stood guard duty at the front gate. The floodlights cast harsh dark shadows where they struck, down the length of the driveway that led into the guarded Complex. The shadows shifted as the picketers walked back and forth before the Complex. The crowd outside was larger and louder and uglier than usual. There were a thousand to twelve hundred of them by Malko's eyeball estimate, many of them wearing dramasuits that made them appear three meters tall and amplified their voices to the point of pain. One image, of actor Adam Selstrom, was right out of storage; the copyright notice Images Inc., C. 2055, 2062, blinked on and off, ten centimeters high, for five seconds out of every thirty. They carried placards that ranged from the merely offensive to the scatalogical. Of the dozen neon holofields casting red and blue and green light across the front lawn and the slidewalk, only one showed the slightest trace of originality. The holofield glowed twenty meters across, five meters in the air:

  PUT THE GENIES BACK IN THE BOTTLE.

  Carl came awake with a suddenness that startled Malko when Malko turned onto the residential avenue that led to the Complex. He spoke without a trace of sleep in his voice. "Bad?"

  Malko looked over the crowd with a practiced eye. "I don't think so. And if it gets bad, there's not enough of them."

  Carl nodded, accepting the judgment. "Ten of the children could put them to sleep without even straining."

  Malko said dryly, "Or you could use the sonics at the gates."

  "That would be another way to do it." Carl ran his fingers through the mess sleep had made of his hair. For the first time he noticed the lack of PKF guards at the gates. "They didn't waste any time pulling out, did they?"

  "Did you expect them to?"

  "No. Did you talk with Security Services?"

  "Double-S and Brinks as well. We'll have something by Friday."

  The gates swung out, and the crowd's roar intensified as they recognized the Cadillac. Malko braked to 10 kph and drove the hovercar straight through them. Several of the demonstrators spat on the Cadillac, but nobody threw anything, and nobody attempted to touch the car.

  Upstairs, in the two-room suite that he and Jany shared, Carl slowly undressed. Almost nobody was left awake; only a dozen or so of the elder telepaths echoed their thoughts through the Complex, and apparently none of those dozen had anything urgent to say to Carl. Savoring the privacy, he gave the cloak and vest to the housebot, kicking off the high soft boots, and went to the bar to fix himself a drink. The nap in the back of Malko's car had not been a good idea; he still felt exhausted, and his eyes were grainy. He hadn't slept much in the preceding weeks, and not at all in the last three days. Four fingers of smoke whiskey went into the tumbler, and he placed the glass under the SloMo. He waited with an irrational displeasure with the universe while the heat was sucked from the tumbler.

  The liquor came out of the SloMo bitingly cold, so cold there was no taste to it. Carl left his shirt and pants at the side of the bed for the housebot to pick up, and laid down atop the covers. The bed was notably large; it could sleep six in comfort, and sometimes did. The one time Suzanne Montignet had visited them, to give the telepaths their semiannual physicals, she'd
seemed particularly amused by the bed; the sort of thing, she said, that she'd have expected to find in the place where Malko Kalharri lived.

  His exhaustion took him quickly. He finished the first whiskey and had the housebot bring him another. The whiskey was five years old, laid down in 2057; for smoke whiskey that was old. There was only one distillery, in orbit, with the facilities to selectively flip the isomers that produced the subtle, distinctive taste. The distillery was a wholly owned subsidiary of Tytan Manufacturing, and the drink had only been available for the last decade or so. Which was as well; if the drink had been available when Carl was in his teens, he thought he might have become a drunk.

  His eyes did not close immediately. He was not, on the surface of his mind, truly looking at the painting on the wall facing the foot of the bed. Nonetheless, his gaze came to rest there, to rove over the features of a woman half human, half feline. Her face was essentially human, and exotically, painfully lovely; high cheekbones, and slitted blue cat's eyes. Her eyes had been sensitive to sunlight; when Carl had painted her she had kept her eyes half lidded to help shield them from the harsh light. Fine brown fur covered her face except for the very thin lips. Her ears were feline, pointed and mobile, capable of tracking sounds.

  After a while Carl stopped looking at the painting of Shana de Nostri, took a deep sip of the whiskey, and let himself sink down into the dimness of approaching sleep. It was quite pleasant, to lie there and let the alcohol take the edge off the Gift, to reduce the fine-tuned sensitivity to the rough intruding outer world. He was halfway through his second drink, and pleasantly buzzed, when Jany came into the room.

  It was too much effort to open his eyes. In a floating darkness, he forced his lips to move, his throat to generate sound. "How are they?"

  The bed shifted under her weight. "Allie's fine. You knocked her straight out. She's not sure what happened. Johnny's in bad shape."

  "How bad?"

  "He'll have nightmares for a while. Depression, probably. He's got a headache, but I think that'll be gone by morning."

  "Did you tell him I'm sorry?"

  "Why don't you tell him yourself?"

  Carl considered the question as an abstract problem. "In the morning, I guess. I could do it in the morning."

  "Sure." Flesh touched his hand, and he felt the tumbler being lifted out of his grasp. "I don't think you need any more of this."

  It wasn't worth arguing about. "Okay."

  "Johnny asked me to sleep with him tonight."

  "Oh." He exhaled slowly, and with a supreme effort forced his eyes open. He had trouble focusing. "This is a big bed for only one person."

  Carl thought she was smiling. "I could send Malko up. He said much the same thing."

  "Not my type."

  "Heather's still awake, and Marie."

  "That's okay."

  Jany nodded. "Command, lights down." In the darkness, Carl let his eyes close again. "Go to sleep, baby. I'll be here when you wake up."

  "Good enough."

  "Good night."

  When she was gone, Carl let himself drift. Alcohol shut down the telepathic ability with remarkable effectiveness, as though it had been designed for that task. None of the children drank, and none of the elder telepaths drank as much as Carl.

  He was glad, on the occasions he bothered to think about it, that the one thing that shut out the world enough to make the world a tolerable place was also something that he enjoyed for itself.

  He was still trying to decide whether to have the housebot make him another when the exhaustion caught him and dragged him down into the darkness.

  * * *

  5.

  At the palace of the Ministre Gènèral of the United Nations, at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, an old man paced restlessly across a thick carpet. Look at him with me for a moment; the years have been kind to Darryl Amnier. He has looked elderly since his thirtieth birthday; now at 75 he is elderly, by the standards of twenty-first-century Earth's medicine. The wrinkles have given character to a face that was once too bland, and the quick smile and bright, animated expression that he has cultivated have made him into an idealized image of an unthreatening patriarch.

  Beneath it he has not changed, except to mellow slightly. The things that he once loved he now loves less, and that which he hated he now despises with less passion; but they are the same loves, and the same hates, and the minor passions of the most powerful man in the world are more significant than the greatest passions of one whom the world has not made mighty.

  Across the room from him, seated at opposite ends of the huge, curved leather couch, were two members of his immediate staff, Jerril Carson and Charles Eddore, and two senior members of the Ministry of Population Control. One of the two, Gabrielle Laronde, was the senior non-elected official in the Ministry. Others came and went; she alone was always there.

  Darryl Amnier enjoyed her company. She was one of the few members of his administration about whom he could say that. A terrible thing, he thought with brief distraction, when the company of your enemies is generally more pleasant than that of your allies. He did not let Gabrielle eat in his presence; for the first decade he'd known her she had been a pleasantly plump young woman. She was better looking now than she had been when he met her; empty food, made of left-handed sugars, had helped her lose the weight she would not have lost otherwise. Gabrielle had given up attempting to control her diet; nearly every time Darryl saw her she was munching on something. He felt it an obscenity, so much time and effort spent on empty food in a world where so many people were dying of starvation.

  He stopped pacing in mid-stride and turned to face them. Carson was sipping at his coffee, and dapper young Eddore was politely covering a yawn. Jerril looked ill, gray and shaky, and Amnier found that of concern also. Jerril's obsession with Castanaveras was never far beneath the surface; but in the last few weeks it had been virulent. "Charles?"

  Eddore lifted his fingers from the InfoNet terminal in his lap. The flickering video field above the keyboard vanished. "Yes?"

  "Have you got anything on Malko?"

  "No."

  Amnier waited, and presently Eddore said mildly, "Were you expecting something?" Still Amnier waited, and Eddore said with a sigh of irritation, "He's clean, of course. There are Johnny Rebs out there, and Erisian Claw as well. We catch the odd ideolog every now and again and braindrain them. Most of them don't know anything outside of their immediate cell, and the ones who do never know anything about Kalharri. Either the undergrounds have been smart enough not to contact him, or he's been smart enough to turn away the ones who have come calling."

  "Can we trump something?"

  Eddore raised one eyebrow in slight surprise. "Of course." His pronunciation betrayed the years at Harvard, and the years of professional public speaking since that time. He was the most likable, trustworthy-seeming person Darryl Amnier knew, and Amnier moved in circles where there were thousands like Eddore. "As you know, my offices have no objection to handling the Castanaveras matter in any fashion you find pleasing."

  "As I know," Amnier agreed humorlessly. "Gabrielle, what is the legal status of those children?"

  Gabrielle's assistant glanced at her superior, received a nod of confirmation, and fielded the question. She spoke French fluently, with a strong British accent. "That's a good question. Given that the Unification Council has voted that they are humans, with all of the rights of any normally birthed citizen of the United Nations, we are essentially starting over again at the beginning. There are a thousand questions that will need to be decided under both Occupied American and United Nations law, but they basically boil down to the following:

  "One, are the children subject to the Ministry of Population Control? Under normal circumstances I'd be tempted to argue that position, and especially so in an American civil court. Elsewhere in the world, over two hundred children being raised by so few adults might not raise as much comment, but in the U.S. the situation is not common, and the telepath
s are not popular. I think many civil judges would tend to listen favorably to an argument that Castanaveras and the other half dozen or so adults out there do not constitute a desirable environment for those children to grow up in.

  "Second, do the telepaths owe either the United Nations Peace Keeping Forces or the Bureau of Biotechnology any moneys relating to their creation, care, and upbringing? Granted that they were raised by Peaceforcers, and their upbringing researched and paid for by the Bureau of Biotech, there exists a rather firm precedent, in the case of the MPC's Bureau of Public Labor. Children raised under Public Labor are liable for the cost of raising them. Often that's offset in a variety of ways, so that the Public Labor client need not pay the entire amount, but the principle is in place. If it can be established that the telepaths are liable for those services, how much can they be charged?

  "Lastly, can they be allowed to work for anyone but the PKF? The Official Secrets Acts of 2048 and 2054 make it possible for us--conceding the Eighth Amendment to the Statement of Principles to be valid--to stop Castanaveras from peddling his people's skills, on the grounds that they are detrimental to the security of the Unification."

  Charles Eddore said dryly, "Wonderful Acts, those. Prosecuted any number of ideologs on them, and the occasional politician as well." He tapped away at the quiet keyboard for a moment and then added without looking at them, "Too many ideologs, not enough politicians."

  Amnier smiled politely at the comment. "Jerril?"

  Jerril Carson did not even look up from his coffee. "This afternoon Castanaveras met at the offices of Kalharri Enterprises with Francis Xavier Chandler, Belinda Singer, Marc Packard, Randall Getty Cristofer, and Tio Sandoval. I've been unable to ascertain the details of the conversation so far. Tio Sandoval seems approachable; he offered to discuss the subject of Castanaveras with me, but he was not in a hurry, and right now we are in no position to push a man with his sort of power. He--I mean Castanaveras," said Carson with grim precision, "he was there, as were Jane McConnell and Malko Kalharri."