"If she attempts to go elsewhere?" The silver eyes did not waver. "I will kill her, of course." Jalian hesitated. "Is there news of Georges?"
Michael's voice was barely audible. "Nothing. He is harder to find than you are. Last sighting remains Chinese border, mid-1993."
Jalian looked off-camera. "Thank you, Michael. Tell Henry Ellis that I will be in contact with him shortly ... I must leave. The lights just came on over the garage."
Michael Walks-Far went to the west window, and watched the small compact hovercar leave the garage on the south side of the complex. Out of the darkness, a kilometer or more away, a hushchopper descended like a bird of prey.
His eyesight was very good, nearly as good as Jalian's; but it was probably his imagination that gave him a flash of white from the inside of the hushchopper. When he closed his eyes, he could feel, as she had taught him all those years ago....
/hunting/
Sharla, he sent to her, go home. Go straight home.
Please.
It was 1996, and there were eleven years left until Armageddon.
The author wishes to note that the following is verifiable data, unlike the contextual data assembled from reports and memory tapes taken from human beings who are highly subjective, poor observers, and liars.
Program scrolling forward:
DataWeb News, Headlines, 1997-2000.
1997
PLAGUE IN CHINA: USSR DENIES IT GENEGINEERED.
"We're Here to Stay!" Announces Lunar Astronaut.
SOVIET UNION ANNOUNCES FURTHER HARDENING OF SILOS
...when asked about his decision to ban hovercars in city limits, the mayor declined to comment....
Senate Approves Appropriation For THOR!
DATAWEB SECURITY NABS "WEBSLINGER."
1998
DATAWEB NEWS BREAKS FIFTY PERCENT SERVICE MARK!
Armageddon Blues Band Begins Record-Breaking Tour.
... "I Don't Remember You" number one song on charts for fourteenth consecutive week....
PAN-AFRICA INCORPORATES; RACE RIOTS STILL FLARING
... experts say much of South Africa and most of the central regions will be included in the newly incorporated African Empire ....
CHINA SENDS TROOPS TO HONG KONG!
1999
SOVIET SUBS DISCOVERED OFF WEST COAST
World Population Passes Six And A Half Billion!
CHINA NUKES TAIWAN!! PRESIDENT BROWN DISAPPROVES
... Chinese, French and Brazilian reps announced today that they would boycott the proposed US-USSR Disarmament Conference....
2000
FRENCH SCIENTIST ANNOUNCES SUCCESSFUL HUMAN CLONE
... Doctor Demberrie said in response to questioning that the process was still highly experimental....
3 Supreme Soviet Members Executed! Treason Speculated.
MILLENIAL RIOTS KILL MILLIONS
...McCartney said, in the interview, that Lennon was consistently misinterpreting his work....
From DataWeb News, April 13, 2001.
Interview with Rhodai Kerreka, author of the cult classic A Theory of Rational Ethics.
Q. You were elected to the provisory Disarmament Council by a landslide. What are your plans for the next year?
Kerreka: Essentially, to keep channels of communications open between the Americans and the Soviets. The American delegate, Henry Ellis, is an old friend. I'd like to establish close relations with the Soviet delegate, Anatoly Dibrikov.
Q. It seems strange, Sen Kerreka--as strange as referring to you by a title that you invented--listening to your plans, to reflect on how little of what the Council plans to do directly concerns disarmament.
A. My views are on record. Disarmament talks have been going on for forty years, since the days of Kennedy the First. In that time there is no record of a single weapon being destroyed or withdrawn from deployment except for reasons of obsolescence. The UN has only the power given to it by its members; at this point that's not much. While the Disarmament Council enjoys high visibility at the moment, you must realize that none of what we decide is binding.
Q. You've stated on a number of occasions that unless some of the basic parameters of the current political situation are changed, you consider nuclear war inevitable.
A. There are too many people on this small planet, and more coming at a rate of half a million a day ... we are on a long downhill slide, and I am not optimistic.
Dateline 2001 Gregorian; August.
Georges was out for his morning walk across the roof of the world.
It was the only time of day that he left the small set of rooms that the lamas had given him. His control was still shaky; he could rarely hold down the talent for more than an hour at a time. He treasured that hour, spent it for the most part walking; usually just a short distance down the road from the lamasery. He nearly always stopped before he reached the village, unless he had risen very early indeed, and the sun was not yet up.
Despite the spring that was approaching in that half of the world, the morning air, high on the mountain, was still well below freezing; even during summer it rarely broke sixty degrees Fahrenheit. He had grown a beard, and frost settled in it as he walked blindly down the road. He wore only a brown robe, and with the suppression of the talent that he enforced upon himself, the cold struck him like a razor. He had not yet learned to ignore the cold.
He walked carefully down the dirt road, bare-footed, humming "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to himself; it was a new song one of the lamas had taught him, and he found to his surprise that he rather liked it.
It had been disconcerting at first, the way the edge of the road trailed off into an echo of nothingness, except in the two places where prayer wheels were set up for the use of travellers, but Georges had been taking this morning walk now for more than two years; he was used to it.
His walking stick tapped from side to side, as though his hearing were no better than that of a normally blind man. The villagers saw him only rarely, and the simple fact that he was a white man was enough to cause rumors that had brought the local Chinese constable, or equivalent thereof, up to the monastery twice already. Fortunately the man spoke no English, or French, and Georges pretended to speak neither Mandarin nor the local, Burmese-related dialect; the constable had gone away frustrated both times.
But let the villagers report to him that the blind white man walked like a sighted man, without a cane, and he would be back with other police--communist Chinese police who would not find the authority of the head lama particularly impressive. It would not matter to them, as it did to the local police, that the Mahayana Buddhists had been here since the early 1800's. If they were notified of a white man living among them in the safety of the monastery, well, the monastery would no longer be particularly safe.
So it was that he walked down the path with his walking stick swinging from side to side.
Nearly a kilometer and a half down the crude road, near the point where he usually turned back, he heard a sound.
A child, crying.
The sun was close to rising. Georges considered briefly, muttered to himself, "Ah, well," and continued down the slope toward the sound. The crying ceased as he approached the area where the road widened out into a clearing where the village boys often herded yaks. Georges stood silently, then moved toward the edge of the clearing, where it dropped off into a series of small ledges that were too steep to be of use even for pasturing. There was nobody there, but he could still hear
Sighing, Georges set down his staff, knelt, and inched his head out over the edge of the bluff. All sound ceased, except for quick, frightened breathing. Georges pulled his head back over the edge of the cutoff.
It was bad. The child below him was small, perhaps less than a meter tall, probably no more than eight or nine years old. He was wearing only the usual long-sleeve, high collar robe; sitting on the ledge over a meter beneath Georges, with the frozen-dead body of an animal, a dog most likely, clutched in his arms.
There was a wait before the child answered, uncertainly, in equally accented Chinese. "Who are you?"
It was, Georges thought, the voice of a boy, although at that age it was hard to be sure. "Can you stand up?"
"I don't think so ... who are you?"
"My name is Gorja," said Georges patiently. "I live at the monastery."
"You don't have any eyes."
"No," agreed Georges. "But I can hear you. Better than you think. Do you want to come back up?"
"Yes." The boy sounded ready to cry again. "My legs don't move any more."
"Oh." Frostbite, then. Worse and worse. "Can you move your arms at all?"
The boy did start crying then. "But I'll have to let go of Go'an."
Go'an? Ah, the dog. "Go'an is dead, child. The fall won't hurt him."
"He's not dead," the child screamed. "They all said he was, and father just ... just threw him over the edge." He started crying again, a child whose heart had been broken, with great shaking sobs that Georges feared would send him over the side of the thin ledge.
"Child, he's cold. I can hear the stiffness of him from here."
The boy stopped sobbing after a while. "He's cold," he agreed. He sounded surprised.
"Reach for my hand." Georges reached out as far as he could; the boy was still ten or twenty centimeters away.
"Go'an would fall."
"Reach for my hand."
The boy sat silently for a moment. Then, moving as though it pained him, with a whimper that even Georges barely heard, he loosened his hold on the dog. The dog stuck, frozen to his skin, for just a moment; then it fell, forty meters to the ravine below. It shattered when it struck.
The boy did not seem to notice; he reached up, making small high-pitched keening sounds with the movement, and clasped the weak, numb fingers of one hand around Georges' wrist.
Georges clamped his crippled hand around the boy's wrist. He made no effort to pull the child up. In his current state he would drop the child. There was no question in his mind.
He let go of the controls; shed the chains he had fought to put in place.
Himself blasted into life, eightfold. He heaved, and the child came up off the ledge like a feather. Georges' grip failed almost immediately, but already the boy was halfway over the edge of the bluff. Georges threw his arms around the child, and worked his way back from the cutoff.
His back fetched up against one of the small trees that grew close to the edge; he leaned against it. The boy was still wrapped in his arms. He was not tired, he was not cold. Electric fire danced over his skin; his hearing grew sharper and clearer. The Enemy of Entropy burst into being within him like a solid white spike of glowing steel, and he was alive again, alive....
The boy stirred in his arms. Georges whistled in ultrasonic, and listened to the echoes from the boy's legs and hands. The frostbite was fading rapidly. Georges released the boy. The boy scrambled out of his lap, ran a few steps, and stopped. He looked back at Georges. Georges said nothing.
The boy took a step toward Georges. He said, sounding as if he were ready to bolt, "Thank you. My name is Kai. My father is going to be angry that I left to come look for Go'an. If he had to come look for me he would be even madder."
Georges nodded. "You should probably go home. It's still quite cold for you to be out without an overshirt."
Kai nodded. "Thank you," he whispered again. He bit his lip. "Did Go'an ... I thought he broke when he hit the ground."
Georges started to deny it, and changed his mind. "Yes, he did. Kai, Go'an was already dead when you let go of him."
Kai looked around the clearing. "The plants are growing," he said in amazement. He looked back to where Georges sat. "It's you," he said. "How are you doing this?"
Georges stood. He listened carefully for the echo of his staff, found it, and picked it up. The villagers would be up this way any time now. "Kai, listen to me. I want you to understand. Go'an died because he was sick, or else old. Your father didn't throw him over the edge because he hated Go'an, or because he hated you. Go'an was already gone."
"But I was holding Go'an," Kai protested. "How could he not be there?"
Georges Mordreaux, standing high on a mountain in Tibet, said slowly, uncertainly, "What causes the body to move, and be alive, is not a part of the body, and once it is gone, there is nothing that anyone in the world can do to make it come back."
Kai asked, shivering in the cold, "Gorja? Where does it go?"
"It happens," said Georges Mordreaux in French. "There comes a time when they ... grow old, perhaps ... and die ... and then they are gone."
He shook himself slightly, as though he had been daydreaming. He walked away from the boy without speaking again.
Kai called out, "Gorja?"
Georges ignored him. He walked back up the road to the temple, walking stick swaying carefully from side to side.
As he walked upward, leaf sprouted, and flowers bloomed, on the trees that were planted to the sides of the path.
2002
U.S. SHOOTS DOWN SOVIET RECON PLANE
"Soviet Jets Will Be Shot Down Over Alaska!" Says General
... ambassador expressed great sorrow that an unidentified submarine had accidentally torpedoed three U.S. Coast Guard Ships....
SANTA MONICA FREEWAY TO BE DEMOLISHED!
...the unidentified woman threatened the workers in an unspecified manner. At dateline no worker had returned to begin the scheduled demolition....
Dateline 2002 Gregorian: March.
Henry Ellis leaned forward over the SORCELIS terminal in his New York City Sunflower office. "Okay, SORCELIS, show me another projection. South Africa experiences a white extremist revolution; thermonuclear warheads are detonated in Johannesburg. The CCCP moves naval forces into the area...."
He leaned back while the projection was set up in the three-meter wide holo tank that covered the west wall of his office. It was a strange office by most standards; no desk, just groups of small tables with assorted gadgets--function boards, light pens, and one partially disassembled module that only another AI specialist would have known for an electronically erasable, programmable array logic Symbols Recognition circuit--arrayed on them in no particular order. Over the door there was a sign that said, Shoot low; they might be crawling. He sipped from the black coffee in the holder on the arm of his chair, and noticed that it was getting cold. He ran a thumb down the edge of the mug handle, switching on the heating coil. "How long on this one, SORCELIS?"
The cool voice that answered him held much in common with the voices of ENCELIS and PRAXCELIS, but Henry couldn't help but feel that the system was far too smooth in its replies even with him. "This unit projects a closing run time of 4:35, +/- 4 minutes."
Henry glanced at his ring. It was only two o'clock; that gave him time to call ENCELIS and run the particles comparison program Nigao had asked him to write. (In theory, ENCELIS was shut down, and had been for the better part of a decade; in practice, Nigao and Henry had managed to keep a significant fraction of their research going despite their distance from each other and the demands of the Sunflower intelligence operation.)
There wasn't actually any reason that he couldn't run the program on SORCELIS, although it might have been a bit slower with the World War III projections programs already up; but he was disinclined to mix up his work. Privately, Henry thought of ENCELIS as the philosopher, and SORCELIS as the spy, and PRAXCELIS as the soldier. They weren't truly practical divisions; SORCELIS was in most ways a more advanced system than ENCELIS, and PRAXCELIS, Henry's most recent Integrated System, was a more advanced machine than either of them--advanced enough that there were times when Henry wondered whether or not PRAXCELIS might not be truly self-aware. PRAXCELIS would have made a far better insertion tool for hunting expeditions into the Soviet DataWeb than SORCELIS; but PRAXCELIS was necessary where
it was.
Theresa, his secretary of more than twenty years, entered his office without knocking while he was setting up Nigao's particle comparison program to boot into ENCELIS. She was no longer the stunner she had once been; the years had softened her features, and sometimes Henry was struck by the growing difference between Theresa's looks and Jalian's; and when that happened he avoided looking in the mirror for a few days thereafter, and tried not to think of Nigao. "Henry?"
There was a note of tension in her voice. Henry broke off as he was about to input the transmit command. "Yes, Theresa?"
"There's a man out here to see you, Henry." She gestured at the outer office. "I told him you weren't in, and he told me that it wasn't polite to lie to people." She hesitated. "I think he's blind; he has a cane, and he's wearing sunglasses."
"What's his name?"
"He won't say."
Henry grinned. "Send him in. He sounds interesting."
Theresa looked at him dubiously, but did not argue. A moment later she ushered a tall, well built man into her office. Henry stood politely, and said, "Good afternoon, sir. Who are you, and what can I do for you?"
The man turned his head around the room, as though he were examining his surroundings, and back to Henry. "You should be more careful," he said. He closed the door behind him. "I might be a Soviet assassin, might I not?"
The walls exploded. Half a dozen lasers whipped out of hiding places, and light traces cut through the air to the tall man. Six closely grouped red spots wavered on his business jacket.
Henry said deadpan, "It's not something I worry much about. Who are you?"
Georges Mordreaux said clearly, "Georges Mordreaux."
Henry took a step forward. "Well, I'll be damned. You do look like what Nigao described ... prove it."
Georges Mordreaux said, "In good time. I wish to meet Rhodai Kerreka. The three of us have many things to discuss. There is a thing that I wish to do that Jalian d'Arsennette would not allow; you will help me with it."
Henry Ellis folded his arms over his chest, and leaned back against the counter behind him. "What makes you so sure?" he asked with interest.
Georges shrugged. "You are a reasonable man. I am a reasonable man. Jalian d'Arsennette," he said, and then paused. "Jalian ... is a woman of passion."
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