by James Axler
Lakesh didn't acknowledge Kane's observation. "If we had access to artificial-insemination techniques, if DeFore had the knowledge of how to perform them, if we had prenatal-manipulation technology here, I would have never conceived the plan."
Kane stretched out a leg, blocking Lakesh's pacing path. "You're going to have to unconceive it, at least as far as Beth-Li and I are concerned. Have you spoken to her since we got back?"
Lakesh shook his head. "No, nor do I know the details of where and how you found her and Auerbach." He tilted his head, eyeing the cut on Kane's cheek. "Would my assessment that bloodshed was involved be incorrect?"
"Not at all," Kane answered. "Nor would it be incorrect if you placed the responsibility for it on Beth-Li."
"Explain."
"That's why I'm here."
Crisply, Kane told him everything that had transpired at the Indian settlement, what Auerbach and Rouch had said and the details of Sky Dog's proposal to repair the war wag.
Lakesh's reaction was mixed; while he was angry, he seemed the most incensed about the agreement struck with Sky Dog, but he was intrigued about the war wag.
As Lakesh began to upbraid him for making the pact without consultation, Kane cut him off with a stern voice. "It's done. We have to abide by it now. Let's move on to Beth-Li. Her stunt put all of us at risk, and she threatened Baptiste. She can't be trusted, and you're going to have to do something about her."
"Like what?" challenged Lakesh. "Exile her from exile? Return her to Sharpeville so she can be executed? Lock her up in a holding cell, confine her permanently like Balam?"
"Don't ask me — she's your problem," Kane said flatly. "You brought her here, so you deal with her. How you have the balls to accuse me of making unilateral decisions after what you pulled is beyond me."
"And why you refuse to cooperate is beyond me. I'm not asking you to pull sewer maintenance."
"As corrupt as she is," replied Kane coldly, "you might as well be."
"Corrupt?" Lakesh rolled the word on his tongue contemptuously. "Since when did you decide to become a paragon of virtue? She's a splendidly healthy young woman, with remarkable genes, and with the very strong female drive to pass them on. How does that make her corrupt?"
"She's a little more than that. If you weren't blinded by your ego, unable to see your own errors, you'd acknowledge it. Beth-Li is underhanded, self-centered, manipulative and arrogant." Kane slitted his eyes. "Maybe that's why you're so fond of her… kindred spirits, that sort of thing."
Sudden rage glittered in Lakesh's rheumy blue eyes. Kane stared at him, stone-faced.
Then, bit by bit, the anger burning in Lakesh's eyes ebbed away. Kane knew the old man realized there was a good deal of truth in his charges, and being an essentially honest man, he wasted no time on sputtering denials.
Heavily, he admitted, "I don't suppose I'm really much of a manipulator, since you see through all my attempts so easily."
"I've been manipulated since the day I was born — even before I was born. I ought to be able to recognize it by now."
Lakesh winced as if he had been stung. He knew what Kane was alluding to. Some forty years before, when he first determined to build a covert resistance movement against the baronies, he riffled the genetic records to find the qualifications he deemed the most desirable. He used the Archon Directorate's own fixation with purity control against them. By his own confession, he was a physicist cast in the role of an archivist, pretending to be a geneticist, manipulating a political system that was still in a state of flux.
Kane was one such example of that political and genetic manipulation.
Lakesh said quietly, "I have already expressed my remorse about that — and offered my apologies."
"Yet you still want to improve the breed, by any means you think are necessary." Kane blew out a long, weary breath. "I've cooperated with the missions you've concocted because you convinced me of their importance. I'm not convinced of this one. The timing is all wrong, for one thing. Our situation here in Cerberus is too chancy. We could be under a full assault at any time. We don't need to complicate it with pregnancies or infants."
Lakesh sat down behind his tiny desk, propping his chin beneath a hand. "I can't debate you on that, but I maintain you are refusing to understand my point of view," he said, his voice petulant.
"Wrong again, Lakesh," replied Kane. "I understand you're trying to atone for the sins you committed when you were part of the Totality Concept and worked unknowingly for the Archons. I admit I've blamed you for your part in all of it, in the nukecaust, in the formation of the baronies. Maybe that blame is misplaced, maybe it isn't.
"Maybe your own guilt is misplaced. I haven't made up my mind yet. But one thing I'm certain about — you can't buy back all the people who died in the nukecaust and after by turning this redoubt into a breeding farm."
Lakesh grunted softly. "Whether you're right or wrong, I will accept your decision not to participate. Which still leaves us with the question of what to do about Beth-Li."
Kane smiled wryly. "Another place where you're mistaken. It leaves you — not 'us' — with the question of what to do."
The intercom on Lakesh's desk buzzed, then Bry's strident voice blared out of it. "Sir, are you there?"
Lakesh poked at the key. "I am. What is it?"
"Activity on the mat-trans network. An anomalous signature — again." Bry's voice held more annoyance than agitation.
"I'll be right there." Lakesh rose from the desk, murmuring, "This is getting to be a rather tedious routine, isn't it?"
Kane didn't answer as he followed him out into the corridor. He presumed the question to be rhetorical. Over the past few months, the sensor link of the Cerberus network had registered an unprecedented volume of mattrans traffic. Most of it was due to the concerted search for the renegades from Cobaltville, who had, in the space of a few short months, kidnapped a senior archivist, seriously injured one baron and assassinated another.
Lately there had appeared anomalous activities, or signatures of jump lines that couldn't be traced back to their points of origin.
The madly ambitious Sindri had been the first, making an excursion on Earth from his base on the Parallax Red space station. After the threat he presented had been neutralized, the ingenious dwarf had sent them, via the Cerberus mat-trans unit, a taunting message that he was still alive and could overcome their security locks. Sindri's theatrical gesture had consequences. Although the Cerberus mat-trans computers analyzed and committed to their memory matrixes the modulation frequency of Sindri's carrier wave, and set up a digital block, if he could overcome one measure, it stood to reason he could overcome another.
Certainly there were any number of unindexed, mass-produced, modular gateway units. After the initial success of the quantum-interphase matter-transfer inducers, the Cerberus redoubt had become something of a factory, turning them out like an assembly line.
Years ago, when Lakesh had used Baron Cobalt's trust in him to covertly reactivate the Cerberus redoubt, he had seen to it that the facility was listed as irretrievably unsalvageable on all ville records. He also had altered the modulations of the mat-trans gateway so the transmissions were untraceable, at least by conventional means. Sindri had proved there were ways of circumventing those precautions, although Lakesh still had no idea of how he managed to do it.
After he entered the control complex, Kane's gaze went automatically to the Mercator-relief map spanning the wall. A yellow pinpoint of light glowed steadily in the northeast region of the United States. Bry, from his station at the main ops console, said, "Manhattan Island, in case you're wondering."
A thin man with rounded shoulders, a headful of coppery curls and a perpetual expression of wide-eyed consternation, Bry acted more or less as Lakesh's scientific apprentice in the intricacies of the mat-trans gateways. "It's not the one in Redoubt Victor, in the South Bronx."
From a computer terminal, Brigid stirred. Kane hadn't seen her when he first
entered. "Then it's got to be the one beneath the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center. The only other redoubt in New York State is up in the Adirondacks."
She should know, inasmuch as she had memorized the locations of all the Totality Concept-connected redoubts.
Kane set his teeth against a groan of dismay. The best known hellzone in the continental United States was the long corridor between D.C., New Jersey and Newyork, a vast stretch of rad-rich ruins. Not too long before he had visited the vicinity of Washington Hole, and although miles away from ground zero, he had still undergone a prolonged and unpleasant decam process upon his return to Cerberus.
"No registered origin point?" Lakesh asked briskly.
"No, sir," answered Bry laconically. "Just like the last time."
Bry's drawled reference to the last time made both Kane and Brigid nervous. Lakesh, too, but he hid it well.
"Could it be Sindri again?" Brigid asked, adjusting her wire-framed, rectangular-lensed eyeglasses. Though primarily a means of correcting a minor vision impairment, the spectacles also served as a badge of her former archivist's office.
Lakesh shook his head. "I hope not. We don't need to contend with him again."
"If it is him," Kane said, "and he's still looking for a place to transplant the Cydonia colony, he'll find Newyork less appealing than Washington Hole. He and his trolls won't stay long. We can leave them be."
Lakesh's mouth turned down at the corners in a moue Kane couldn't read. Though he was consumed with guilt by his long association with the Totality Concept, his ego was still tied up with his history-making breakthroughs on Project Cerberus. The notion of someone else tinkering with the gateways was an affront to his vanity.
Turning to Brigid, he asked, "What results has the database yielded about Balam's black stone?"
"Too damned many," she replied dryly. "I've compiled the most detailed, most substantiated and least contradictory of the reports into a briefing jacket."
Slightly surprised, Kane asked, "There was a lot about the black stone in the historical records?"
"Not exactly the historical banks. Esoteric may be a more accurate description. Another word might be…" She trailed off, groping for the right word.
"Crazy?" Kane inquired helpfully.
"That," she agreed. "And scary."
"I presumed it would be," Lakesh stated tersely, "judging by Balam's attitude. Let's round up Banks and Grant and whoever else wants to be in on this and convene in the cafeteria."
"I don't want to be in on this," muttered Kane. "But I don't think that'll matter much."
14
The Cerberus redoubt had an officially designated briefing room on the third level. It was big and blue-walled, with ten rows of theater-type chairs facing a raised speaking dais and also had a rear-projection screen.
The briefing room was never used except to watch old movies on laser disks in storage. Most of the movies were instructional aids, addressing questions about hygiene, routine maintenance of the nuclear generators and what to do in case of an enemy incursion. The latter was intercut with footage from a film made in the 1980s entitled Red Dawn, wherein a group of high-school students waged a guerrilla war against Russian invaders.
Kane found the films The Day the Earth Stood Still and Independence Day silly, too, but a bit more relevant. He especially enjoyed the scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still where a dignified English actor playing an alien reamed out the military for acting foolishly with atomic weapons. He laughed out loud when the alien threatened to turn his invincible sec droid loose on them if they didn't change their ways. He couldn't help but take a bitter pleasure in the irony.
At any rate, since the briefings rarely involved more than a handful of people, they were always convened in the more intimate dining hall. Lakesh, Brigid, Banks, Grant and Kane, sat around a table, sharing a pot of coffee. Access to genuine coffee was one of the inarguable benefits of living as an exile in the redoubt. Real coffee had virtually vanished after the skydark, since all of the plantations in South and Central America had been destroyed.
An unsatisfactory synthetic gruel known as "sub" replaced it. Cerberus literally had tons of freeze-dried packages of the authentic article in storage, as well as sugar and powdered milk.
Brigid passed out illustrations, downloaded and printed from the historical database. Most of them depicted uninteresting chunks of dark stone, some of them balanced atop obelisks or resting on altars.
Without preamble, she stated, "Many cultures, separated by time and distance, held certain black stones in a kind of respect, fear or veneration for a number of reasons. Apocryphal religious texts tell of Lucifer coming from the sky bearing a black stone that was then split into fragments and scattered among humanity.
"One ancient South American legend relates that the god Tvira built a temple on an island in Lake Titicaca to hold three holy stones, called the kala.
"Similarly, three black stones were venerated by Moslems in the Ka'aba at the great mosque of Mecca. There are several traditions associated with these stones, but all agree they are of celestial origin. Moslems say the stones were white at first, but had the property of absorbing black or sinful thoughts."
Brigid pointed to a black-and-white line-scan photograph depicting a dark octagonal shaft of stone with indecipherable characters spiraling around it, leading up to a small black polyhedron.
"In Hungary," she said, "near the village of Stregoicavar, there was a black monolith that nineteenth-century occultists spoke of as one of the keys."
Banks picked up the illustration, studying it intently. "Keys. The same phrase used by Balam."
"What does it mean?" Grant asked.
"I'm getting to that," replied Brigid. "There were a lot of superstitions regarding the stone and the monolith, especially the assertion that if anyone slept in its vicinity they would be haunted by monstrous nightmares of another world forever after. There are legends of people who died raving mad because of the visions the stone evoked."
Kane looked at the stone balanced atop the shaft. "The shape I saw was a trapezoid."
"A trapezohedron," Lakesh corrected him. "Evidently, that was the original shape of Lucifer's stone."
"And referred to in many ancient documents as 'the shining trapezohedron,'" Brigid interjected. "Which makes sense, since Lucifer's name is derived from lux and few… 'bringer or carrier of light.'"
"I thought Lucifer was just another name for the devil," commented Grant.
Lakesh smiled impishly. "In revised mythology, his name became synonymous with Satan. He was actually an angel of Heaven, but a fallen one. Like Prometheus, he was punished because he brought mankind the light of knowledge. Something to which I can relate."
"I'll bet," Kane drawled blandly.
Brigid glanced at him in irritation before declaring, "A number of esoteric and suppressed volumes dating back to the Gnostic tradition mention the original form of the stone as a trapezohedron. An Arab scholar who went by the name of Abdul al-Hazred wrote of it in his eighth century manuscript, Kitab al-Azij. Von Junzt alluded to it in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, as did the Ponape Scripture and Prinn's De Vermiis Mysteriis."
The difficult pronunciations rolled easily off Brigid's tongue, which Kane found more annoying than impressive. Due to her eidetic memory, she could memorize almost anything instantly, even words in foreign languages.
"The most recent mention of the stone," she continued, "is from the 1920s and directly reference the reason why the fragments of the black stone were called keys.
"In Buddhist and Taoist legends, there is the tradition of the Eight Immortals, eight masters who reside in a secret city beneath a mountain range on the Chinese-Tibet border. The city, known as Agartha in some legends and Hsi Wang Mu in others, is possibly underground and has been said by many to be near Lhasa. There have been numerous and dubious reports of explorations of tunnels leading to the city, but the most convincing came from Nicholas Roerich, a Russian artist and mystic.
"During his travels through Asia in the first decade of the twentieth century, Roerich heard of the Eight Immortals and their abode in the mountains. He was told, 'Behind that mountain live holy men who are saving humanity' A native guide told him of huge vaults inside the Kun Lun Mountain Range where treasures had been stored from the beginning of history, and of strange 'gray people' who had emerged from those rock galleries throughout history."
Brigid paused to take a sip of coffee, then went on. "In the 1920s, a high abbot from the Trasilunpo lamasery entrusted Roerich with a fragment of a 'magical stone from another world,' called in Sanskrit the Chintamani Stone. Alleged to have come from the star system of Sirius, ancient Asian chronicles claim that 'when the Son of the Sun descended upon earth to teach mankind, there fell from heaven a shield which bore the power of the world.' Perhaps it was a meteorite, or possibly an artifact brought by visitors from another solar system.
"Roerich's wife wrote that the stone possessed a dark luster, like a dried heart, with four unknown letters. Its radiation was stronger than radium but on a different frequency.
"Asian legends state the radiation covers a vast area and influences world events. The main mass of the stone is kept in 'a tower in the City of the Starborn.'"
Kane murmured, "I'm starting not to like the sound of this."
Brigid paid his comment no attention. "According to ancient chronicles, the stone was sent from Tibet to King Solomon in Jerusalem, who split the stone and made a ring out of one piece. Centuries later, Muhammad took three other fragments to Mecca. A smaller fragment of the stone was sent with Roerich to Europe to help aid the establishment of the League of Nations. With the failure of the league, Roerich returned the fragment to a Trasilunpo lamasery in Tibet. Supposedly, the thirteenth Dalai Lama decreed the fragments were to be kept in separate places for safekeeping. During Roerich's journey to Tibet, he reported that he saw a flying disk, over two decades before the term 'flying saucer' was coined. He was told by his guide that it was an airship from Agartha, leading them to the hidden city."
