Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  “I can see how that might be a problem,” Gagnon said dryly.

  Koskotas ignored her. “Swarna’s security forces detained a suspected rebel yesterday. He was released after nine hours—possibly long enough to compromise him, and his brother does have knowledge of one of our routes. So the Mozambique scenario is declined. But it isn’t all bad news. DEA uncovered a load of baby brains coming in from Ethiopia. Captain will make a deal.” He clicked a button on his lapel, and a holographic world map appeared, swelled, and became a revolving sphere. The Atlantic Ocean expanded, continents contracted. A red line began to dance across the expanse of blue. “Captain’s next assignment is a tanker heading to the port of Ma’habre in the Sudan. From there, Aubry can be smuggled to the south, through the Central African Republic, to PanAfrica.”

  Gagnon’s gaze remained level, on the figures and graphics sprouting before her. “I notice that you have never mentioned Knight’s escape routes being compromised. I assume that is because they are exceptionally secure?”

  Koskotas was silent. The machine hummed.

  She waited for a long beat, and then realized that Koskotas’s silence was all the answer she needed. She changed the subject. “Physiologically, all signs are perfect. Surgical invasion begins tomorrow.” A red lozenge-shaped light shone on Aubry Knight’s upper thigh. “Tracer implantation.” A light near the base of his skull. “Translator. In connection with the posthyp work, the languages will be a snap. Is our top scenario still on?”

  “If he completes training, yes. Otherwise, we have backup plans,” Koskotas said.

  “All right—we can compromise most PanAfrican files, but the standard X rays are unavoidable. We’re implanting shadows. On the most recent tests, we’ve beaten better than ninety percent of the machines. Plastic surgery is commencing now—”

  As she spoke, a robotic arm snaked down from the ceiling. With obscene grace, a needle extruded from the tip of the arm, and inserted itself into the flesh under Aubry’s eyes. A small amount of silicone gel was injected. Then the arm traveled farther down, and inserted its tip here … and then there.

  “Whether or not the spaceport scenario is effective, the physical transformation will be useful. Reduce the chance of accidental identification. After all—he did save the life of the president. His face was broadcast around the world.”

  “So we’re destroying his face, and rewiring his mind. What do you expect to remain?”

  Koskotas laughed. “His soul, of course.” He laughed, and then frowned when Gagnon didn’t join in with him. He straightened. “Is the subliminal channel open?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Patch me in.”

  In Aubry’s dream state, the image in his mirror shifted, and Guerrero was there once again. Aubry was startled: something was wrong with this. Was he still entranced?

  “Aubry Knight,” Guerrero said flatly. “Colonel Kim said that you could never stand in front of a classical karate man. He said that he would kill you in five seconds.”

  Aubry was shocked. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Don’t you think a man should do something about that? He says you’re a pussy.”

  Then Guerrero faded away. Blooms of pain, rage, fear blossomed in Aubry’s head. He bent his face, clasped it in his hands, dug his fingers into it moaning until the headache subsided.

  He looked up. He saw his own face, strained. And all he heard in his mind, over and over again, was a single syllable:

  Kim.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Koskotas laughed, rubbing his palms together briskly. “We’ll keep Kim and Knight apart for a while. Build up the potential. And then we’ll put them together. We need to be sure that all this programming won’t affect those wonderful reflexes.”

  Gagnon stared at him. “Jesus, you’re a bas …” She dropped her eyes, stopping herself just in time.

  “And you,” Koskotas replied coldly, “are dangerously insubordinate.”

  Gagnon studied the sleeping man in front of her, her eyes cold with fury. She blinked twice rapidly, triggering the computer, and spoke a few words. The couch beneath Aubry shifted and hissed, and transformed into an upright chair. Gagnon fitted a hood over Aubry’s head, a black construct of soft plastic that fit snugly at ears and jawline. A clear visor lowered itself into place. The hood sighed and wrapped itself closer to his head like a living thing. The visor darkened, and Aubry was enshrouded by night. Then dots of light began to dance in that darkness, focusing and defocusing, racing, blending, and spiraling in apparently random patterns.

  If the major concentrated hard enough, she could pretend that Koskotas wasn’t in the room with her.

  “Now,” Gagnon purred. “Place your hands in these stirrups, and attempt to follow your eye movements with your hands, go ahead and match them—”

  The apparatus massaged and invaded him, rolled his mind in its silver fingers, and let his consciousness surface just enough to follow the directions. In his dream, her words became Guerrero, coaching and leading him, as he had almost two decades before.

  At first, the entranced Aubry could follow the movements by bringing his attention to bear. It felt like trying to read a book in a dream—if he wasn’t careful, the words on the page would fuzz away into meaningless squiggles. The same was true with the light patterns, only here they simply accelerated into a glowing fog. He had an eerie sensation, as if one part of him were stepping back out of the way, and something else, something different from the waking Aubry, stepped in to take its place.

  At that moment Gagnon, watching the readouts, inhaled sharply.

  The images flew and split, bobbed and dashed. Aubry slipped into a slightly defocused, dispassionate state, surrendering to a mode of thought ordinarily available only during combat. Despite the speed of the images, subjectively they slowed down. Or did he speed up? He felt enmeshed in a cocoon, lost in a warm hypnotic reverie.

  The testing, programming, and small insults to his flesh went on and on. And as part of Aubry worked, and learned, and suffered, another part of him dreamed. Of Leslie, and Promise, and Ephesus. A dream within a dream, encased within a nightmare.

  14

  JULY 28, 2033

  Sweat slicked Aubry’s bare chest. For the past twenty minutes he had been strapped into a padded chair caged in gleaming chrome: a hydraulic strength training/testing system. It was similar to a piece of equipment in the Scavenger rehab center, except built for heavier duty. He had been performing various push-curl combinations on demand, warming his body up for the real work to come.

  Gagnon passed a plastic card through a light beam, and the chair reclined. “We are going to build you to a maximal contraction,” she said mildly. “And map your strength curve.”

  The chrome apparatus flexed, a giant spider attempting to mate with Aubry’s chest. He grasped padded handles, and did a bench-press-type movement. “All right,” she said. “Do a few more. The resistance is set at approximately fifty pounds.”

  With no apparent effort, Aubry pumped it a dozen times.

  “All right. Let’s take that up to a hundred.” Aubry pumped it another dozen times, also without apparent effort.

  “All right—”

  They went through 150, and 200, which he also pressed a dozen times, although he hissed with effort and his concentration had become more intense.

  Now the room lights dropped. Aubry was alone with his efforts. Gagnon’s voice drifted to him disguised as Guerrero’s.

  “All right. Maximal contraction please. Three repetitions—” At 250 Aubry paused, adjusted his grip, hissed, and pushed the weight three times. At 300 the veins in his arms rippled like snakes, miming a relief map of Rivers of the World. He was concentrating now, completely focused in. At 350 he exhaled and got it halfway up, but then let it drop again.

  “Are you all right?” Guerrero’s disembodied voice asked.

  “Why am I doing this?” Aubry panted.

  “We’re try
ing to understand you physically. Once we do, it will be much easier to build our plans.”

  “What do I get if I push this?” His breathing was beginning to regularize.

  “What?”

  “What do I get?” Aubry searched for the right words. “It’s hard for me to motivate myself, unless I get something out of it.”

  “I told you—”

  Aubry shrugged. “I’m not arguing with you, I’m telling you that if I’m doing something for a reward, I perform better. It’s just the way I am.”

  Guerrero was silent, leaving Aubry alone in the darkness. There was a pause, and then a humming sound, and the patter of feet crossing the floor.

  Aubry heard Guerrero’s whisper without being able to make out the words. Then much more distinctly: “Just rest there for a moment. I think we can arrange something for you.”

  Aubry let his arms hang back, felt the sweat rolling down his arms and off his fingertips, listened to the droplets puddle on the floor. Dots of soft red light flitted in the darkness. He relaxed more deeply, and his breathing slowed. His eyes eased shut, but the red lights continued to dance. Then images resolved in the gloom: images of brick walls and trees and mountains, of death and prisons. And of Promise, her beautiful face aglow with love and light and passion.

  When his attention returned to the room, three technicians were adjusting cuff devices to the outlets from the ergometer. A connection was made to Aubry’s leg, high on the thigh.

  “All right,” Guerrero said. “I can see the logic in what you say, and as long as you’re willing to play the game, I’ll work with you. Would you rather be motivated by pain or pleasure?”

  Aubry chose his words carefully. “I’m not sure that ‘rather’ is the right word here. What we really want is to force me to perform at my best. If that’s what we want, then forget pleasure. I’ve always done more to avoid pain than to get pleasure.”

  “You and the rest of the world,” Guerrero said, and there was an undercurrent of regret in the admission. “All right. If you agree to cooperate with the experiment, we are going to give you a mild jolt of electricity into the iliopsoas muscle of the thigh. It will be decidedly unpleasant, and because of the proximity to the genitals, you are likely to feel quite a kick. Do you agree?”

  Aubry’s hands twisted in the grips. “Let’s do it.”

  “All right, we stopped at three hundred and fifty pounds, one repetition—”

  They started again. This time, Aubry’s strength seemed to have decreased, as if a part of him resented the mode of motivation.

  His struggles against the implacable bar took on a new dimension. He had ten seconds to break the connection, to lift it, and something had simply slipped within him. He watched the clock count down and—

  “Damn!” He shrieked as the pain slammed into him. His thigh biceps contracted as if someone had whacked him with a bat.

  The weight clattered down, and he heard voices in his head—along with something else. Lightning split his head, a flash of energy more visceral than visual—

  He set his arms against the bar again, and pushed.

  15

  It was three o’clock in the morning. Gagnon sat in her lab, surrounded by equipment. The air around her was alive with green, red, and blue dynamic hologram charts. They twisted like technicolor tapeworms. The door behind her opened. Gagnon didn’t turn around, but knew that Koskotas was there.

  “Strength curve estimates almost complete.” Gagnon spoke so quietly that she could have been speaking to herself.

  Koskotas closed the door behind him. The air-conditioning system pulsed in a hush against his back, drying the sweat. Koskotas waited without speaking.

  Finally, Gagnon began to speak. “He’s not strength-trained, not formally, in the sense of a power lifter.”

  “But?”

  “Let me preface my comments. In addition to my work with the military, I was head performance kinesiologist for the AAU, and worked in the same capacity for the last two Olympiads. I’ve worked with world-class athletes for sixteen years, professional, amateur, and military. Some are ‘natural,’ some hormonally altered, and some are genetic or prosthetic modifications. I’ve seen class-three pain override, accelerated impulse, oxygen hyperload, tungsten bone implants, and hypnotic states so deep that the athlete literally couldn’t remember the meaning of the word failure.”

  “And?” Koskotas said impatiently.

  “And I’ve never seen anything like Aubry Knight. In the last contractions he was no longer able to extend his arm completely. We shortened the arc of movement so that he was exerting pressure through a shorter range. The apparatus was set for three inches.”

  “And?”

  “We stopped the tests at five thousand, eight hundred pounds. That is almost eighteen thousand inch-pounds of pressure.”

  “What?”

  Gagnon nodded. “Not a record. In … 1988, I think, a yogi named Sri Chinmoy set an AAU record at seven thousand sixty-three pounds. And Chinmoy weighed almost ninety pounds less than Knight. Whatever we’re dealing with isn’t ‘sports performance.’”

  “What the hell is it?”

  “Hysterical strength? Maybe … oh, never mind.”

  “I don’t want to hear any mystic crap. Just stick with physiology.”

  “All right. He eats pain. He has no brakes. He should destroy his own body when he exerts himself.”

  “What prevents him from doing just that?”

  “As far as we can figure it, either a natural understanding of the arcs of movement and the rotation of joints, or …” She paused. “Somebody got to him early. Taught him something, I’m not sure what. Maybe a sense of rhythm which has evolved into perfect coordination. A sense of relaxation in movement which gives him … well, total speed. A reaction time of point-zero-three seconds. I mean, he seems to be reacting at the maximum physical speed the human body is capable of, given optimal nerve conduction, and absolute strength.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Gagnon turned and stared at him. “I am suggesting that at some period in Aubry Knight’s past, a period which he may not even be aware of, he was given a set of exercises. Technologies which have developed him physically beyond anything we can duplicate. He is, without a doubt, the finest physical specimen it has ever been my horror to examine.”

  “Horror?” There was genuine puzzlement in Koskotas’s voice.

  “Yes, dammit. Horror.” Gagnon rubbed the bridge of her nose. She should have felt tired. Instead, she felt some variety of awful exhilaration. “For centuries, we have debated the relative contributions of nature and nurture in the creation of human potential. The horror of the ‘nature’ argument: What if Einstein had been born in a gutter in Calcutta? The horror of the ‘nurture’ argument: For lack of the proper environment and training, our jails and ghettos are filled with Mozarts, Jim Thorpes, Sun-tzus, Joans of Arc. We have squandered the greatest resource we have—the minds and bodies of our children.”

  “Why horror?”

  “Because Aubry Knight’s body and mind are, as far as I can determine, in absolute alignment. What I mean is that whatever the tolerance for error is, I cannot detect it. The average human being is probably in about twelve-percent alignment. A superb athlete might operate at forty-five percent. Aubry is something … else. Only his emotions are lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “What would you say about someone who can only motivate himself through pain? If one considers the classic Greek triad of body, mind, and spirit, Aubry Knight is a spiritual cripple and an emotional child with a perfectly developed body.”

  Gagnon wiped a hand across her brow. “Coordination is a form of intelligence. Call it kinesthetic intellect. Sports performance is problem solving on a kinetic level, and only the Western schism between mind and body could possibly conclude otherwise. Plato would have given his left nut to teach Aubry rhetoric or logic or poetry. He might have been a great man—instead of that, he is one of the most
damaged human beings I have ever seen.”

  “And one of the healthiest.”

  Gagnon’s laughter mocked her own weariness. “Yes. Isn’t that the bitch of it? And now we have him. For the next few weeks he is ours. Because of the situation, he has relaxed into trust. He needs to trust. The part of him who functioned without a father created his own father. His physicality, his deadly skills, are a paternal shell around a child. Striking at Aubry’s family was the most suicidal thing anyone could do.”

  The lights in the room shifted, the environmental processor cycling intensities and directions to minimize the risk of eyestrain. “You know,” Gagnon said, “I could help him.”

  The general, just beyond the cone of light, coughed. “We don’t want you to help him.”

  “No,” Gagnon said. “You don’t.”

  “We just want you to prove he can’t do it.”

  He waited. The smoke curled in the air between them.

  “And if he can?”

  “Then he goes in. But he won’t.”

  Gagnon looked at the general, and one dark eyebrow arched in question. “If he goes in—he will, of course, have backups?”

  “Of course. Our entire network is at his disposal.”

  “Odd,” Gagnon said, her voice low and controlled. “I would have sworn that this was a suicide mission.”

  The general coughed and drew on his cigar. The smoke curled in the air, wreathed his face. Under his cap, his eyes glowed dully. “Confine your opinions, Doctor, to your area of expertise.” General Koskotas coughed. He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at the glowing tip. “I’ve got to quit these things. I really do.”

  “Some would say,” Gagnon ventured, “that such self-destructive acts are indicative of deep self-loathing.”

  “Some,” the general replied blandly, “should mind their own fucking business.”

  16

  AUGUST 1, 2033

  Aubry brought the fighter wing in low and upside down over the artificial lake, barely skimming the surface. He braked, and it hovered. He leaned back and looked “up” into the boiling water, grinning.