“I know this place,” he said in a tiny, brittle voice. “From my dreams.”
“Your dreams, my past,” she replied. “This is just a projection, Tom. Don’t be frightened.”
He looked up at her. “I’m not frightened.” He lied. “And this is a projection? A projection of what?”
“Of home.” She smiled, gentle and wistful. Walken understood. “This is where we came from, Tom. Is it not beautiful?”
“I don’t know,” he said softly. It was beautiful, he supposed, in the way hurricanes were when seen from orbit. He looked out again, and the strange, muted not-fear washed over him in waves. He couldn’t relate at all to the sight. He accepted it as a city, aware the twisted knife-shapes were buildings, but didn’t understand any of it. The scene put a knot in his guts, and he fought to seem casual as he turned his face away. “Why do you have to do this? Make me. Make people. Why do you have to take them at all?”
“I told you why, long ago.” She shrugged. Her arm tightened, kept him close to her. He was keenly aware of her body’s heat, so intense beneath her white skin, making him increasingly uncomfortable. “We could not come here ourselves. We had to take the vessels that we could. And here we are, such as it is. Without a place to go back to.”
Without a place to go back to. Had something happened since he was put in the tank, or was this manipulation? “I’m sorry about that.” He lied again. “But what you’re doing here, it’s wrong!”
“So you’ve said.” She shrugged. “Though I confess that I find that your grasp on morality to be a bit slippery, Tom. Let’s consider your career, after all.”
He made a dark sound. “Consider yours. Besides, you have me at your mercy. No point in not giving me a good, long, dramatic monologue.”
She smirked at him. “Far be it for me to fall down on the job while playing the villain from your point of view. I told you before, it’s the only way we really can live here. Our bodies don’t travel through space. We tried to clone them here, but to no avail. It’s the radiation, you see. Different here than from our neck of the proverbial woods. And as I told you before, Tom, we looked for alternatives. Different species on other worlds. Nothing else had the same…vulnerabilities, you could say. No other civilization proved so easily engineered into colonial vessels.” She shrugged. “We were desperate. I’m sure that given the chance between losing your race and harming another, you would have made the same choice.”
“We aren’t like that,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they came out of his mouth.
She laughed, her voice bright and musical. Thoroughly amused, as he knew she would be. “You don’t believe that any more than I do. You people are true pioneers in ethical calculus. We had to work very hard to get where we could do this, you know, but to you humans it’s as easy as breathing.” She shrugged again. “Our analysis suggested it’s because you’re so easily able to fool yourselves. Illusion and self-denial serve as the fulcrum upon which humans leverage their decisions. Similar to any other logical analysis, I suppose, risk and result weighed against one another. You people convince yourselves that anything is ethical, given the intended result. We know what we’re doing is wrong. The fact that you’re primitives certainly doesn’t change that. We simply don’t have any choice.”
“There is always a choice,” Walken fired back. “Always. There was something that you missed, or chose not to pursue. You sound like every hump I used to bust in Baltimore. ‘Officer, I couldn’t help it!’” A vein of disgust opened inside of him, and he was vaguely astonished to find himself sneering. “You decided to do this. You’ve decided to continue, even now. This is deliberate, what you’re doing to us. Saving your people or not, don’t try and tell me that you never had a choice.”
Silence fell between the three of them. Yek’n hk’ghal looked at Walken as though he had pissed on Buddha’s foot, while the Mother of Systems wore a placid mask as she regarded him. She did not seem to have expected this kind of outburst. The clouds moved overhead, glowing deep inside with the horrible greenish lightning. The air moved, stiff and hot, and it felt almost restrictive.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said, and Walken thought she looked haunted. “We had to do a great deal of observation of your people to make this thing come to pass. Perhaps you rubbed off on us when we weren’t looking, after all.” She turned to the parapet, her face hidden between onyx cubes as looked over it into the mysterious world beyond. “I’m going to put you back into the tank soon. Your systems will need tending, your power reserves replenished. New and improved cells, I think.”
“I’m going to get back out,” he said. “Best to kill me.”
“New cells,” she repeated. “Best ask whatever other questions you might have, Tom. Our time is drawing to an end.”
He frowned at her. “Fine. Tell me why I’m so important, then. Why you’re taking so much trouble to keep me together. Who’s in my head, anyway? The guy who’s going to secure your victory?”
“No.” Her voice had changed, gone soft and distant, as if he listened to her from very far away.
“Anyone important to your movement at all?”
“No.” She turned her head a bit. “Just a citizen. A person.”
“I don’t believe it,” he growled.
“Your belief isn’t required, Thomas,” she said briskly, and turned back to the two men. “Take him to the laboratories and have him secured in stasis. Ensure that he doesn’t wake up for a while. I want him to…think about what he’s done.”
“Of course,” Yek’n hk’ghal said. “Shall we resume with external stimulus?”
“I think not. No media streams, nothing. Just himself. As I said, I want him to think about what he’s done. Nothing does that like silence.”
He was again the child, undeserving of direct address. The beautiful monster beside Walken nodded, and looked at him. “Come. If you do not, I will disable you.”
Walken’s long limbs moved, driven by spite, fueled by a burning, animal need to deny the Mother what she had in him, what she desired for the future. He turned toward the parapet, intent on throwing himself off into oblivion. As his body began to perform the first millimeter’s worth of the initial turn, something hard and electric struck the back of his neck, a shuddering cascade of power. He found the black stone of the floor, and before consciousness left him, remembered what she had said: just a projection. It wasn’t stone, and it wasn’t their homeworld. Just some holographic tank.
As his dream self passed out and his real self awoke, Walken felt like king of the idiots, or at least some major prince of that benighted people. Fooled by holograms. It was a wonder he ever made it out of anywhere alive.
So many dreams.
Walken chuckled.
Walken made an affirmative sound.
Jacinto snorted. Outside, clouds danced with moonlight glimmering on their chemical lace through a blackened sky.
The diagnosis did nothing to cheer Walken. This was all his fault, after all.
That only got another snort.
d that alarm,> Walken said.
Walken squinted at Jacinto from over his station.
The understatement of the evening, that.
Walken nodded and slid out of the station. Walking back toward the jump bay, he wondered if Kim would be awake – or, more the point, if he’d want to talk to him. At the very least, Walken had good news about his family. The doors to the Agincourt’s bay slid open. In the center stood the gurney they had put him on during the extraction, sheathed in an inflatable immobilization sleeve. The man lay face up, wreathed in shadows like laurels, his eyes closed. Walken approached him curiously. He tried to fix focus on him through the lens of his personality rig, reading the slack face like tea leaves. Muscle tension in his jaw, faint but clear. Awake.
“Your family is safe.” Walken decided to start with the best news, first. To his surprise, however, Kim opened his eyes and fixed him with an expression of dim resignation.
“I’m glad,” he said. “But as I lie here, I wonder if it even matters.”
Even with the injuries, such navel-gazing was hardly what Walken wanted to hear out of the scientist’s mouth. Impatience flooded through him. “Your family is safe. Unless there is some side effect to your medication that I am not aware of, that should be a good thing.”
Kim managed a chuckle. “No. No, it is. I mean that I’m wondering if this is going to do any good, I suppose. Begging your pardon—and perhaps it’s just the muscle relaxers talking—but you weren’t exactly the most skillful hand at all this.”
Walken certainly couldn’t argue with that. “It’s something of a mystery, that, but it has more to do with a lack of competence on my part, I think, than a lack of competence on the part of the powers that be. I wasn’t ready for prime time, so to speak. We had to make do with what we had.”
That seemed to soften him. “Then I suppose I should thank you, again. For my family. And at least not killing me in the process.”
“Not for lack of trying, I’m afraid.” Walken stood at the side of the gurney with his hands behind his back, doing his best not to loom over the man. “I’m terribly sorry about that. My body is…I’m still adapting to it.”
Kim grimaced faintly and looked around the bay.” I can’t imagine what you’ll be like when you finally come into your own. But on the other hand, this isn’t going to be won with a punching cyborg, however powerful.”
“Which is where you come in.”
“Which is where I come in.” Kim smiled faintly. “Did Cagliostro tell you exactly what it was that they wanted me for?”
Walken nodded. “As far as he ever does. You’re going to unlock the rest of what’s in my head, or so I’m told.”
Kim shook his head weakly. “There’s a great deal more to it than that. You’re just the gateway, you know.”
“I imagined it would be something like that.” No feelings of betrayal, just a buried expectation returned. “I take it that unlocking the buried capacities of my body would give new insights into the Yathi?”
“That’s about it, yes. I can only do so much, however.”
“What do you mean?”
Kim licked his lips. “My sphere is as narrow as it is deep. I’m a neurological specialist focusing on implant technology. I know a great deal about the way their systems interact with human nerves, especially the way they interact with the brain. I don’t know specifically what your friends want me to look for, but once I see your scan data, I imagine I’ll know what’s needed.”
In the end, everything turned out more or less as he had expected. This was how conspiracies moved, after all, and Walken hadn’t nearly been so arrogant about his place in the grand scheme of things to imagine he’d be anything more than a very interesting pawn. “All right. Well. I suppose I should let you rest.”
“Wait,” Kim said. “Before you go, I suspect this is the last time we’re going to have any privacy, so let me just say this.”
Walken turned to look at him. “Yes?”
“I grew up in a nation of tyrants. Communism was never a problem in and of itself, it was the people executing the policy. Those who suffer under that policy, those who decide to do something about it, have had kindled inside of them a fire that burns like nothing other.” Kim tried to lift his head a little. “Needless to say, I know the type. This Cagliostro, whatever he is, whatever he was, carries hate for his former masters like the greatest of revolutionaries. I don’t know that the fate of humanity is his goal, so much as the death of the Yathi race. Please be careful with that, Mr. Walken. I expect that you’ll be burnt on that pyre without thought if it means you take the rest of the Yathi with you. I know he wouldn’t have a second thought about me. In fact, I would count on it in the end.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Just take it easy from here on out. I’ll be up front if you need me.” As he left Kim, Walken thought of the pair of straightjackets that he had gotten himself fitted for. One for the devil he knew, one for the devil he did not. The trick would be, of course, figuring out which one was which.
At the moment, they changed places with alarming regularity.
Strikeboy waited for them at Cuidad del Carmen with a fast hovercraft that served as a black-market ambulance, one that took Kim to an equally black-market hospital in the bowels of Mexico City. Turned out, he needed to get his shoulder reconstructed and have a serious date with a tendon stapler, but that didn’t take long to make happen. They had him back in a laboratory somewhere inside of a month, reading Walken’s scans and doing the whole dark cybernetic magic routine.
Months passed. The fallout from the Korean job proved minimal. Whatever the Communists thought had gone down, they certainly weren’t sharing it with the world. Some videos of Kim’s incredible “flight” somehow managed to get onto the Network, probably from some mischievous soldiers, but these were quickly discounted. Diplomatic channels remained mum on the subject, which made a certain sense to Walken in the end. It made no sense, after all, to admit to potential enemies –and the Korean Communists saw everyone else as an enemy –that one of your secure military installations had been cracked by unknown parties and one of their captured experts murdered. The lack of an actual radiological emergency probably helped make it possible to keep it all under wraps.
Without an assignment or information from Kim forthcoming, Walken had time on his hands. He went back to the industrial tangle around Jacinto’s place, further honing his physical abilities and practicing the skills loaded into his brain. The wired skills didn’t really interest him, he found. They had the inherent problem of being entirely situational, genies summoned when he needed something done. Very little allowed for flexibility or creativity, something he felt could be to his future detriment if he relied on them too much. They certainly didn’t help him in Korea.
Moving through the tangles of pipes and conduits, however, Walken did the Superman job very well. He was every action hero ever made when in motion, pulling gymnast moves and punching holes through steel plate. Or, when physical force did not suffice, burning through it with plasma. He practiced extensively with this system especially, learning how to will the superheated gas into a variety of carefully-sculpted forms: torches, gauntlets, even ribbon-thin claws that let him execute careful surgery on machines and metal alike. Constant, nearly sleepless practice gave him much greater mastery over himself and his systems than he had before going to get Kim. Had he that much time before heading overseas, he might have done a more serviceable job.
The biggest question for Walken remained the status of his power supply. New power cells, the Mother of Systems had told him the he would need new power cells, but what did that mean? His body had to require enormous amounts of power to operate, but whatever digestive system he still had certainly didn’t clamor for him to eat. So where did it all come from? He imagined only Knightley and his team could say for sure, when they got there. In the meantime, he could do nothing more than continue to watch.
And of course, dream. Nothing on the order of the tank dreams he had experienced up to then, but something else. Flashes of violence played out upon the canvas of his mind, his old life in Baltimore, in the Bureau. Smells of chemicals and wet stones from a world long dead. Jacinto told him that Yathkalgn, the homeworld of the Yathi, had been destroyed already. He explained to Walken at length about what Bobbi had done in the last four years, how she had raised, armed, and helped operate an active resistance against the Yathi and killed off enough of them to slow the colonial effort by no small degree. Even though he already knew Bobbi had not been idle, he had more than a little trouble resolving this new image of the woman with whom he had taken the journey to the Mother’s door. But then again, he always knew he was hardly himself, or at least had been far less than he should have been. Such as it was for men like him, he found. Constantly underestimating those different than themselves.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 30
