Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  Mira’s needles resumed their fitful clicking. “Isn’t that an oxymoron, sweetheart?”

  The Chevy floated in over the top of the Sears Tower, spiraling down toward the platform where a thirty-piece brass band blared earnestly for a throng of thousands. Leslie watched, grinning broadly, and then—

  Her face tautened, as if someone had run the cold flat steel of a knife blade across the back of her neck.

  “Something wrong?” Aubry asked.

  Leslie’s lips were flat and unmoving, but her eyes were locked on one of the buildings, Tyson’s All-Faiths. The half-finished web of steel and concrete was a multidenominational house of worship. Although unfinished, it was already in use, housing prayer services almost every day of the week.

  Leslie was perfectly still, her body locked in the rigidity of a marksman preparing to squeeze the trigger. “I don’t know, Father. There … when we passed a ninety-degree angle …”

  “What?”

  “I saw a distortion field.”

  Aubry chuckled. “A distortion field doesn’t leave anything to see. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

  “A popular misconception.” Leslie’s eyes never wavered. Her voice became unnaturally calm and precise. “While you cannot see the object concealed, the field itself has a visual presence much like heat distortion. We used them often during my period with Gorgon.” His voice trailed off, as if that memory was still painful.

  “Well,” Aubry said doubtfully. “Distortion fields aren’t illegal. It might just be a virtvid crew. It’s not like I’m the president or something.”

  Leslie’s pretty face creased with concentration. The skimmer had made a lazy loop around the inner city. If there was something hidden on a rooftop, a momentary trick of light and angle could have revealed it.

  Promise squeezed Leslie’s shoulder. “Let it go.”

  “But Mother … Mommy …” The words were a childish plaint, but Leslie’s eyes were huge and dark, as if he had dropped back into some other level of existence. Promise turned her child away from the window.

  “There’s nothing there, Leslie. If there is, then the security people will handle it.”

  “But—”

  “Leslie.”

  “Sometimes …”

  Her voice was as soft and strong as silk. “Sometimes you forget that you’re just my Leslie. Forget about the things you were trained to be, and do, and see. Just be Leslie. That’s enough. You don’t have to see threats behind every corner, below every bush.”

  Leslie responded, sitting back in his seat, but her mind was still entangled by steel struts, enmeshed in shadow.

  Aubry wagged his massive head. “Let it go. I’ve seen this before. There’s a bit of bird dog in Leslie. Give him a hint of a sniff of a whisper, and he’s off. I think life’s gotten a little dull for us.”

  As they laughed, Leslie’s mouth softened into a childish, slightly abashed smile. But behind those youthful eyes the intensity was undiminished. Her eyes were a killer’s eyes. Promise could never make herself forget it.

  You cannot develop and nurture an ability, hone yourself to razor-edge preparedness, expand every capacity to its ultimate, and not have a raging desire to express those talents, be they creative or destructive.

  There may have been few things natural or normal about Leslie Knight, but in this way, if no other, her offspring was typical. She could not remake Leslie. Could not give her a new childhood, could not make Leslie forget the terrible reality of her early years. All Promise could do was love her.

  It was sad, in a sense. She had hoped that after all this time, Leslie would begin to forget. And yet …

  Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  3

  The crowd was quiet as the Chevy spiraled down, momentarily eclipsing the sun and thereby haloed with its radiance. The platform doors dropped aside, revealing the landing bay beneath. Turbofan disturbance scattered papers and fluttered hats and cloaks at a hundred feet, and those very close to the stage experienced a brief but not unpleasant surge of heat. The skimmer sank down out of sight, into catacombs beneath the surface street. The platform slid shut above it.

  Steam and compressed air hissed. With a hum, the turbofans glided to a halt. Skimmer and elevator platform came to rest.

  They were underground now, in one of the subterranean catacombs the Scavengers had constructed over the last decade. Nearly a square mile of quake-ravaged downtown Los Angeles had been rebuilt by the Scavengers. Highly conservative estimates valued Scavenger holdings at six hundred and fifty million dollars. How much of that money belonged to Promise and Aubry was a closely guarded secret.

  Not that it would be easy to translate it into liquid assets. Scavenger assets were immediately reinvested in human beings, one of the reasons for their overwhelming success.

  An enormous sun-bronzed man strode to the landing platform. He was decked out in military dress, the interlinked vipers of the Gorgon insignia emblazoned on his jacket. He wrenched the door open and saluted smartly. “Aubry.”

  “Bloodeagle,” Aubry responded. They clasped hands, expending enough pressure to crush Brazil nuts into meal.

  Miles Bloodeagle was almost as tall as Aubry, and even heavier. His broad, weathered face was strengthened by the Asian-Semitic planes and shadows of his Cherokee blood. He was one of the hormonally altered beings known as the NewMen. Even among that elite fraternity, he was legendary, one of the leaders of the paramilitary subgroup known as Gorgon. Bloodeagle owed both life and honor to Aubry.

  “How does the crowd look?” Aubry asked skeptically.

  “Does the term “feeding frenzy” strike a chord?” Bloodeagle helped Promise down from the vehicle. Although not physically attracted to her, he could and did appreciate a healthy animal. If Aubry has to be hetero, Miles thought, at least he has good taste.

  “Looks like the whole Maze is here,” Bloodeagle said proudly. “God, how it’s changed.”

  Aubry grinned. “I guess it has, at that.”

  “Seems a lifetime ago that you brought the Scavengers in after us, saved a houseful of NewMen. Could have cost you everything, Aubry.”

  “Everything worked out fine.”

  “But you didn’t know that at the time.”

  Aubry shrugged and mumbled something unintelligible, then turned to speak with the pilot.

  For the thousandth time, Bloodeagle envisioned Aubry in Gorgon uniform. Aubry would never join, but Miles knew his friend had been born to wear the colors.

  In Miles’s circle, abnormal levels of strength and fitness were commonplace, an automatic aspect of being a NewMan.

  Aubry was as great a freak as any of them. He had been tested, and his physical strength, stamina, flexibility, endurance, balance, and coordination were simply superior to ordinary human beings’. There was no evidence of chemical stimulation, or genetic tampering. And yet, the indisputable fact remained—Aubry Knight was the fittest human being the NewMan Nations had ever encountered.

  If it wasn’t genetic engineering, and it wasn’t hormonal tampering, then it might have been the morning exercises that Miles had twice seen Aubry perform. It looked like an odd combination of martial arts and yoga, and lasted over an hour. Aubry said he had learned the movements at the age of five, practicing them every day until his mid-teens. Fifteen years passed, and then a man named Kevin Warrick reawakened the old habit patterns. Rigorous daily practice had been resumed.

  He refused to let Miles holo the routine. But twice, Miles had watched Aubry’s magnificent body flex and twist and leap through the sequence, his breath hissing like a steam engine at full boil …

  Bloodeagle felt a touch of vertigo when he looked at Aubry, but had long since grown past any embarrassment about it.

  Leslie paused in the doorway, a coquettish smile on his beautiful face, and dimpled prettily. “Uncle Miles!” he yelled, and leaped from the doorway.

  It was a hell of a leap. An entirely
casual effort, it came close to the city record for the standing broad jump. Miles caught Leslie and spun him around, planting him on the ground behind the screen. “Come on, now—no theatrics. This is Daddy’s big day.”

  Leslie grinned. “Isn’t it like muy headthunk?”

  “Uh …”

  Leslie giggled and linked arms with Miles, and they waited for Mira to emerge. She appeared in the doorway, patting a stray hair into place and smiling wanly. She let Leslie and Miles escort her down the stairs.

  Aubry ran his fingers along the tunnel walls as they walked past. The walls sighed, and whispered steam, seemingly in response to his touch. Miles watched him, without covetousness.

  Are you happy, Aubry? You have all of the things that men say they want. Family. Love. Wealth. Health.

  And now, public acclaim.

  But why do you seem so coiled and brittle? Why the storm cloud hovering above your shoulders? Does the quiet life wear thin?

  Do you miss the nearness of death?

  They reached the elevator disk and stood in the middle, enveloped in a brilliant cone of light from overhead.

  Leslie stood between his extraordinary parents, and linked hands with them, smiling so brightly he nearly glowed. At that moment, he seemed the proudest and happiest, most normal child that Miles could imagine. How different from the feral animal that the scientists of Gorgon had created from Promise and Aubry’s seed. How different from the bloodthirsty creature that had been unleashed upon the president of the United States.

  The elevator disk began to rise.

  4

  Promise Cotonou-Knight held her breath. The crowd’s roar numbed the ear, rocked the ground, meshed with the swell of the brass band’s Sousa marches, embraced them with its tidal thunder as they rose up into the staging area. Pershing Square was a rectangle of park in the very heart of Los Angeles. Ordinarily it held the Free Market, the last remnant of the bad old days, when Mazetown had been America’s largest and most shameful ghetto.

  Now, after years of backbreaking work, it was a showpiece. She had manipulated, finessed, and otherwise hypnotized industrial concerns ranging from Canada to PanAfrica into investing time and money and skill to make it so, and this was a gorgeous day to show it off.

  The crowd surged against the police barricades like a joyous, volatile fluid. Many of them were still Mazies, the street people who earned their bread by selling physical services—anything from manual labor to quasilegal sex. But even today, the label “Mazie” seemed less an insult than a celebration of an individual choice. The world had changed. Skins tinted every color of the rainbow were cloaked in the raiment of a dozen lands. Painted and sculpted faces shone with love and appreciation.

  Mazetown was an official suburb of the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, something that had always been a crazy quilt of neighborhoods: “a thousand suburbs in search of a city,” as one wag had described it But as the most culturally diverse area in the world, it had naturally split into uncounted overlapping zones.

  Aubry stood quietly, flanked by Promise, Leslie, Mira, and Bloodeagle. He was conscious of Promise’s steady, warm pressure on his hand, and he returned it. She seemed remote. Wherever she was, he wished that he could have been there with her, preferably the two of them alone. This, he decided, was a pain.

  “This belongs to you,” he whispered to her. She squeezed his hand and gave him a gift: her plastiskin, the light-conductive plastic on the left side of her body, crackled and arced in time with the music. After all this time, it still fascinated him. The artificial flesh was warm, soft, and resilient, porous enough to carry her sweat to the air, or to his tongue. But it was also pure visual magic, controlled by a processor implanted in her jaw.

  A holofield above Aubry’s head captured his attention as it transformed him into a giant. President Roland Harris’s prerecorded voice echoed through the streets. “Born in the streets of this, one of the greatest cities of the world, with only his mind and his body to help him in his journey, orphaned at a tender age …”

  A skimmer floated by above, carrying a banner of some kind. Go Aubry. A cheer? A request?

  “—and so it is our very great honor to present to you, on this most solemn of days, this plaque, bestowing upon you officially what has already long existed in the hearts and minds of your people—”

  5

  San shut her mind away from cold, or fear, or excitement. There was, however, interest. She studied the target carefully. Knight seemed uncomfortable. And why not? He was playing a role, wearing a mask. And no human being can be happy wearing a mask. One must be who and what one most truly is.

  And so, whither the charade? Shall it end today?

  Certainly, for one of us.

  The pulse rifle steadied itself, and San’s finger caressed the trigger. Soon, now.

  6

  Leslie’s head canted to the side, nostrils flaring, as if catching a whiff of skunk. His fingers closed on Aubry’s hand tightly enough to crush ordinary fingers into paste. Leslie’s small face was flushed, his gaze unsteady, as if struggling to keep raw emotion under control.

  Suddenly Aubry regretted bringing Leslie with them. The child still hadn’t accustomed himself to the notion of life above ground, out of the shadows.

  Harris was a good man, as politicians went, but would this long-winded mouse-faced bastard get his fucking speech over with?

  “—I give you now—Aubry Knight!”

  Aubry stepped forward to the sound circle, and looked out. Promise, Bloodeagle, Mira, and Leslie. The closest thing to a family he had ever known. And beyond them, before him, a cheering throng of thousands.

  His impatience melted. Some of that was merely butterflies, after all. This should have been Promise’s moment, and they would speak about that later. When it came to Scavenger business, she insisted upon thrusting him into the spotlight. And what Promise insisted upon, she usually got.

  “I don’t really know what to say, except thank you very much.”

  He accepted the plaque from the hand of one of the assistants, and—

  Mira’s head exploded.

  7

  In the last moment before the horror began, Aubry’s peripheral vision flashed an image of Mira: standing to Leslie’s right, hands clasped before her. Her face was sweetly serene, relaxed, somehow younger than the Mira sitting in the front seat of the Chevy. In the next instant she was a hideous scarecrow, her head a papier-mâché doll stuffed with tomatoes and cherry bombs, detonated as a schoolboy trick.

  A sound wave slapped Aubry’s ears as he dove to the ground, hurling Promise down with him, his left arm sheltering her, his right—

  Where was Leslie?

  Everything, including his thoughts, moved as if suspended in syrup. For the next few seconds his vision and hearing were painfully sharp. Smoke and the stench of charred flesh choked his nostrils. His eyes focused on something near him—too near him. Glistening. Shapeless. White, speckled red and brown, and black, with three strands of hair curling away from its base. As he watched, they curled and withered in the flames consuming Mira’s emerald dress.

  Christ. She was burning.

  Pulse rifle. Plasma burst. One-hundred-percent kill rate, anywhere above the knees. Zero penetration: bystanders rarely more than singed. An assassin’s weapon. A professional’s weapon.

  The killer hadn’t missed.

  Aubry realized he was screaming, and forced his mouth shut.

  More sounds: running feet. A loudspeaker. His own breathing, rolling like lava.

  Where was Leslie?

  The air around the speaking platform churned in a varicolored whirl, seethed with the chaos of a Gorgon distortion field: automatic defense against a sniper attack. It screwed up the visual coordinates—an assassin would need the optical codes to pinpoint him in this mess.

  The entire platform sank shuddering into the ground. On hands and knees, Promise scuttled over to the shattered, flaming remnants of Mira Warrick. She stared at her
friend, stripped off her coat and flung it over the remains. Stinking smoke gushed from beneath the fabric. She stretched out her hands without daring to touch. Then she turned to Aubry, her eyes huge and luminous. The carefully conditioned autonomic locks that kept her plastiskin dormant slipped away. Sparks and whirls of color disrupted the warm brown skin on the left side of her face, transforming her into a creature of myth. She snatched her hand back.

  “Where is my child?” Her voice was a terrible ragged whisper. Aubry crawled next to her and gripped her elbow.

  Then the animal in the back of his brain, a thing ordinarily submerged, a thing that had once been the only Aubry Knight he knew, laughed sourly and stepped out of the shadows.

  You knew you’d need me again.

  Images flashed, lightning strikes against an arctic night. Again, he saw the platform in its fully raised position. Mira’s head splashed into a cloud of flame and pink vapor as the fluids in her skull reached an explosive boiling point.

  He visualized the platform continuing to sink into the skimmer dock, without his child. Their child. Ten-year-old prodigy Leslie acted without hesitation.

  “Damn,” he whispered, lunging to his feet. “Did anyone see where that came from?”

  “Nothing.” Miles Bloodeagle had risen shakily to one knee. His ruddy face was almost ashen.

  “Leslie saw something at the southeast corner of Tyson All-Faiths.”

  “Put your money down.”

  An alarm wailed distantly, melding with the more immediate confusion. Six-legged emergency ’bots clambered up on the platform, hoisting legs to squirt white foam over the smoking remnants of Mira Warrick. Part of Aubry watched in horrid fascination, an emotional shield sliding down over the rest of him, taking him into a dark and ugly place within his heart.

  Miles jumped down from the platform and sprinted to his personal skimmer, a Lear airbike with triple hover fans. Twin Mitsubishi pulse rifles were mounted on the side. He opened the leather gear bag on the side and threw a pair of goggles at Aubry, who was already stripping off his coat and vest.