Suddenly he was struck dumb by a concept: I wonder if that’s how he charmed animals? If they somehow felt a special level of communication with him, even though it wasn’t exactly in their language?That’s how it was, wasn’t it? I got something back, something in return, on some level, when I was droning on and on to him . . . At the time I thought it was like talking to a blank slate, writing ideas on it, then collating them, arranging them, pushing them this way and that and then placing them just so, in the right order and the right time . . .
But what if it was Zoan who was doing the collating all the time?
“Nonsense,” he growled. Abruptly he noticed he was once again trying to argue with an empty room. Alia had left, and turning his mind away from the ephemeral, he licked his lips and hoped she hurried with the tea.
“So it’s your ohm-bug that’s giving you trouble, is it?” Alia asked lightly. They were on their third cup of tea, and Niklas was showing signs of uncoiling from piano-wire tensile level.
“That’s a dronehead phrase for it,” Niklas said lazily. “It’s not an ‘ohm’-bug. An ohm is the unit used to measure electrical resistance, and is not an accurate representation of what Thiobacillus chaco does.”
“But you’ve called it that yourself,” Alia said lightly. “You told that boy, what’s his name again? Zoan?—you told him that at least ‘ohm-bug’ was better than ‘ampere-bug’ or ‘kilowatt-bug.’ I heard you.”
“Yes,” Niklas admitted grudgingly. “Zoan gave Thiobacilllus chaco that silly nickname. For some reason, he recognized the symbol for ‘ohm’ in some of my documents and labeled chaco the ‘omega-bug.’ I explained that the Greek symbol he was seeing was actually for ‘ohm,’ and it sort of got shortened to the ohm-bug.”
“Where is he, by the way?” Alia asked carelessly. “He’s usually somewhere close around you, drooling and staring into space.”
Niklas almost retorted angrily, No, he’s just quiet and unobtrusive, virtues you wouldn’t understand, Alia. But he controlled himself at the last moment, and bit off the angry retort. He did feel a strong reluctance to tell Alia that Zoan had disappeared. The vision of her and her storm troopers, dressed in their all-black paramilitary garb, swooping down on Zoan in one of those ugly black Vindicators, repulsed him.
“He’s around here somewhere,” he answered. It wasn’t a lie; though Zoan had never disappeared before, Niklas was certain that he’d be all right out wandering in the desert on his own little quest, or whatever it was. And Niklas was sure he would come back to the lab. After all, it was the only home Zoan had ever known. And what could possibly be out there in the world for a being such as Zoan?
“About the ohm-bug,” Niklas said quickly. “You’re not going to believe what it’s doing to me.”
Alia jerked upright, a spasm of fear contorting her face. “Doing to you—you mean—”
“No, no, Alia,” he scoffed. “I keep telling you, it’s not the kind of bacteria that infects humans.”
She relaxed a little. “Well, I know you’ve got some nasties down here somewhere. I saw some brass monkeys leaving when I came in, and I just know that they were down here petting some of their doomsday bugs.”
Niklas shrugged. He never visited the biochem weapons labs, didn’t know anything about biological or chemical weapons, and he didn’t want to know. There was just no percentage in developing them, or any superweapons, since no one would be interested in buying them except maybe some crazies in the Mideast. Besides the American military crazies, that is. And they didn’t pay much.
“Well, my ohm-bug isn’t one of those, Alia. I’ve told you over and over again, it’s a life-form that could be one of the most important organisms ever to benefit mankind. At least, it could be. Except that it’s playing the old Cinderella game. Without my permission,”
he added dryly.
Alia sighed. “I don’t understand, Niklas. As usual. What game are you talking about?”
With exaggerated patience, he replied, “I call it the Cinderella game. It’s a type of point mutation of the coding sequence of DNA nucleotides. It’s called ‘slipped mispairing.’ Get it? Cinderella— slipped mispairing—slipper mispairing?”
Alia looked utterly mystified.
“Never mind. I would have thought you, of all women, would know the Cinderella story,” Niklas said with a touch of malice. “Forget all that. My nice little ohm-bug, my beautiful blue light of heaven, my multimillion-dollar electrical conductor, is now a mutant monster electricity-eater.”
“It’s—mutated? Into an electricity eater?” Alia repeated with difficulty.
“Yes. Thiobacillus chaco has spontaneously decided to change its DNA coding, and now, instead of possibly making the world a better place, all it does is eat electricity and make billions of other little chacos.”
Alia grew very intent. “Explain it to me. What do you mean, it eats electricity? Do you mean it—it—”
“I mean that it absorbs the unstable electrons in an ionized atmosphere, just as it always did. Only now, instead of conducting them like a circuit, it chemically throws off negatively charged ions to offset the positrons. It negates electricity. Nullifies it. Makes it go away.”
“I get it, Niklas,” she said with a touch of impatience that took him aback. Alia never responded to him so sharply, and it upset his equilibrium. Before he could regain it, she jumped up and started pacing the laboratory, her eyes, unseeing, on her laced-up black paratrooper’s boots, her hands clasped tightly and neatly behind her back. “Can you control it?”
“In what way?” he muttered.
“In any way. Its rate of reproduction, the span of its effective life, its dispersal, its rate of intake—”
“No,” he said a little sulkily. “I’ve just been trying to get it to either voluntarily cancel the mutation or add the same conductivity capability the earlier generation has.”
Still she paced, deep in thought, obviously listening closely to him but not looking at him. Finally he asked, “Alia? What are you thinking about? I’m the one that should do the thinking in this partnership, you know.”
The weakly cajoling joke didn’t work, and the offhand reference to a “partnership” didn’t either. Niklas hadn’t been aware until now exactly how intense Alia could be. “Listen to me, Niklas,” she said in her commissar’s order tone that Niklas despised. “Don’t destroy all of the ohm-bugs that have this electricity nullification property yet. It has possibilities. It definitely has possibilities.”
He eyed her warily. “I guess you can have all the little mutant beasts. I’ve still got plenty of the original strain to work with.”
“Where are they?” she demanded. “I’ll take them now.”
“No, you won’t,” he snapped, finally getting impatient with this Alia, this imperious, take-charge Alia. He wanted his old Alia back, the pliable, lusciously weak Alia. “This is my lab, Madam Third Commissar, and no one takes anything out of my lab without my permission.”
She stopped, whirled, and her strong features were set in granite. But then she softened and said, “Of course, Niklas. I just meant that there’s someone I know who might be interested in such an organism, for a variety of reasons. Of course, if any recognition is ever due for any kind of use of Thiobacillus chaco, I’ll make certain that you receive it.”
“Forget recognition,” he grumbled. “But if there’s any money in it I’d better get a hefty cut.”
“I promise,” Alia said, then walked slowly to him and slithered into his lap. “Well, since you won’t allow yourself to be kidnapped, I suppose I’ll have to make do with just staying here tonight. But I promise I’ll do my best to be more interesting than your old bugs.”
He pulled her close, and she kissed him long and with much promise. “I believe,” he said heavily, “that it’s time to take a long break. I’ve been working much, much too hard.”
At about two o’clock in the morning, the door in Niklas’s laboratory leading to his private quarters open
ed and a shadowy figure silently slipped into the darkened lab. The halogen light above Niklas’s cluttered worktable was switched on, and Alia Silverthorne hurriedly starting thumbing through the crumpled papers piled helter-skelter on the desk. She looked surprisingly young and soft and small; she was wearing a powder-blue satin night shirt with a matching robe carelessly pulled on over it, and she was barefoot. The small queue at the nape of her neck had a tiny blue ribbon tied in it.
Impatiently she stared at this paper, then that one. It was incomprehensible to her that Niklas still did much of his work with expensive wooden pencils on rare yellow notepads; it was another ostentatious quirk of his that he would only use imported notepads of virgin paper, not recycled. He said that recycled U.S. paper had the finish of a piece of particleboard (Alia didn’t even know what that was) and it smelled like cheap glue.
He certainly uses it without worrying about the cost, she reflected as she tried to arrange the papers in some sort of order. Of course, he can afford it . . . I know that the directorates would never buy real pencils and paper for anyone, not even the great Dr. Niklas Kesteven .. . She realized that Niklas’s notes were nonsense to her, she wasn’t even really seeing them, much less comprehending them. With an impatient movement she went to Niklas’s Cyclops II, switched off the audio-vox response module, arranged the SATphone earpiece and microphone, and called her shift lead bodyguard, Kev Jamison.
“Where are you?” she whispered. “No, everything is fine, Commissar, I just don’t have my intracomm unit with me.”
Then: “Which one of you is most Cyclops-literate? All right, then come to Dr. Niklas Kesteven’s lab immediately. Be quiet.”
She gathered up the papers, then remembered that neither of her bodyguards had been vox-scanned for universal entrance. “Not a very smart move, if they had to get to me quick,” she muttered darkly.
It was really her fault; they couldn’t, alone, initiate the security process that gave them the same access she had. She had to make their security and access arrangements. Alia thought now that maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stop treating her guards like her personal show drones and maybe show them a little respect, give them a reason to have pride in their position.
“Access,” she whispered to the steel door leading out into the hallway, and was surprised to find Kev Jamison already standing there, dressed in his uniform, waiting. He didn’t even look sleep-stupefied . . . surely they didn’t actually stay awake to take shifts to guard her, did they? The realization that evidently they did—and that she hadn’t been aware of it—galled her. A coppery blush flared on her pronounced cheekbones, and Commissar Jamison stared at her with surprise, and something else—appreciation?
Suddenly flustered and self-conscious in her nightwear, she whirled and spoke much more sharply than she intended, though she kept her voice low. “Commissar, I want all the information you can find in this laboratory about a bacteria called Thiobacillus chaco. Or it might be denoted as the ohm-bug. That’s o-h-m. Download all pertinent files to the Cyclops II at my residence. Here’s the access code. Also, take these papers, and any others you can find lying around, and scan them in. Don’t try to organize anything, just create a dump file called—called—”
“Blue Satin?” he suggested, deadpan.
He was really devilishly handsome, and did his dark eyes glint with appreciation? Alia swallowed, then managed to say, “Fine. Just encrypt it using RS/SAT.”
“I can’t access that without your code, My Commissar,” he said.
“No, no, of course you can’t,” she stammered. Her fingers moved over the Cyclops II keypad . . . she stumbled, made an error, and was glad she’d turned off the audio. Did he notice? She cast a quick glance up at his face, but he was pointedly looking away from the keyboard as she entered her code. No low commissar was supposed to have access to the Radio Static Satellite encryption program. At least he had sense enough to show he knew that. “Done,” she muttered, stepping back.
“This will take me a while,” he said, already cyber-thumbing through Niklas’s database, which was named simply “Chaco.” “Maybe an hour or so, with the scanning.”
“That’s all right. When you finish, go back to base mode.” She hesitated, then said thoughtfully, “There’s something else . . .”
“What?” he asked alertly. “I’m sure either I or Evans can take care of it for you.”
“Some samples. Bio samples. I’ll bet they’re here.” Moving to the wall just past Niklas’s desk, by the two easy chairs and black acrylic table that still held their litter of afternoon tea, she felt along the concrete wall, then pushed a button that was unnoticeable unless one were looking for it. A panel slid open, a soft overhead light in the hidden cubicle came on. In the small square partition were several bell jars and sealed flasks. With relief she saw that none of the samples were connected to biofeeds; they must be absorbing the growth medium inside the containers, and the atmosphere must be sustaining them. For the samples in the bell jars were alive, no doubt about it; soft blue ribbons of light danced in them. Kev Jamison, forgetting he was just a dronehead, whistled softly. “We named them right, didn’t we? Looks like blue satin. Living blue satin lights . . .”
“Perhaps,” she agreed dully. “But I think we want the samples that aren’t so pretty.” The Erlenmeyer flasks had no visible organism in them, only the growth medium as dirty puddles at the bottom. “Check the files for the codes of the mutations. These are all labeled. We don’t want the original strain, the ones that look like blue lights.”
“Yes, My Commissar.” Kev disappeared into the robotic face again.
Alia stood for a moment, watching the hypnotic blue lights as they whirled and swirled. Abruptly she jabbed the button to close the partition and turned to Kev. “Find out which samples we need, and how to safely transport them. Then go ahead and take them to the helo. Get Evans to help you if you need it.”
Without waiting for his reply, she moved close, accessed a SATphone code again (noticeably jerking when her hip brushed against his shoulder), then hurried to the farthest corner of the lab.
“Alia Silverthorne, Third Commissar, Shortgrass Steppe Biome,” she said in a soft but clear voice, then waited. After a long hesitation, she spoke in a deferent whisper. “Minden? Minden, I’m sorry to have awakened you, but I think it’s important. Yes, important for you and important for me . . . and important for America. Can I come to Washington tomorrow and meet with you? Good. No, I’d like to come to your residence, if possible. Good. I’ll be there at 0800 hours. All right, 0900. Thank you, Minden, and good night.”
Without another word, Alia went to the interior door and slipped through it into Niklas’s personal quarters.
Behind her, dronehead Kev Jamison, low commissar lead bodyguard, was wondering what in the world was going on, but he knew he’d find out as he transferred this data to Alia’s residence Cyclops II. He’d get some idea, anyway. As he performed clerical setup duties, he idly wondered, Could that have been Minden Lauer, the Lady of Light, that she was talking to? The vice president’s consort?Is that possible, that Alia Silverthorne is personally acquainted with the most famous . . . and maybe the most beautiful . . . for certain the most powerful . . . woman in America?
Kev realized that his personal guard stint wasn’t up for another seventy-two hours, and he also realized that meant he’d find out for sure if it was Minden Lauer by ten o’clock in the morning, eastern standard time.
Suddenly this job didn’t seem half bad. And Kev was really, really glad that he’d drawn this particular, and peculiar, shift guarding Alia Silverthorne in the dead of this night.
SIX
IN PUBLIC, IT SEEMED THAT Minden Lauer, the “Lady of Light,” and the vice president of the United States, Aristide Luca Therion, were the immaculately perfect couple in an imperfect world. Aside from their youth and vitality, and the pleasing antithesis in their looks and demeanor, they seemed to epitomize pure and true love. When together, they were
always arm in arm, and gave each other small signals of affection through half-smiles, eye-twinkles, and light touches that were magnified a hundred times by the unblinking eye of Cyclops.
In private, however, they were very different.
The vice president was sitting hunched over a stack of papers that he shuffled and reshuffled, picking one up and poring over it, placing it here just so, filing another beneath it, and so on. He sat on one of two antique Venetian sofas, covered in brocade with real gold thread. Between the facing sofas was a long mahogany coffee table, polished so highly it looked as if the top were glassed. The furnishings were carefully centered on an enormous and priceless Persian carpet. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of potted plants and small trees hovering around gave “Luca’s half ” of the vast studio room the atmosphere of a secluded arbor.
By contrast, “Minden’s half ” of the room was severe, though graceful. The long expanse of oak flooring was polished to a rich patina, and was bare. A spidery-sleek architect’s table and a high stool, centered in front of the eastern glass wall, were the only furnishings. The entire western wall, except for an inset six-foot by six-foot Cyclops II unit, was a mirror. Minden Lauer was standing, watching a recording of her last live comm broadcast, pausing it, and turning to practice gestures and facial expressions in the mirror. Often she would stop the tape after a particular phrase or sentence, and repeat it over and over again in her throaty, hypnotic voice, trying different ascensions and descensions and timbre and emphasis.
The two might have been on different planets.
A heavy black lock of hair fell over onto Luca’s forehead, and impatiently he brushed it back. He had a finely shaped brow crowning a thin face, intense brown eyes, a long nose, and a woman’s full mouth. Slender and graceful, he moved like a male ballet dancer. He seemed the most aristocratic of men, even though his father had been a farmer in what had once been Nebraska, and his mother was a nobody from Atlanta, Georgia. He hadn’t cultivated his aristocratic demeanor, not consciously, anyway. Even as a child he’d been thin and sensitive, passionate and eloquent. Studying his innocuous-looking papers of columns and tables and graphs, he was as focused as if he were seeing his future in a diviner’s enchanted mirror. As, perhaps, he was. At least he believed so.
The Beginning of Sorrows Page 9
