Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “We’ve got to have a break.”

  In her other role as a loyal arm of the KGB, she had been filing progress reports through a tiny radio built into a cosmetic container. Computer chips inside it compressed her messages into momentary squeaks too brief to be traced and transmitted them to be picked up and forwarded to Moscow from the embassy in Washington.

  “My people are worried.” Feeling more and more at ease with him, she let anxiety sharpen her voice. “They demand more progress than I can report. They know just enough to terrify them, and they don’t trust anybody. Not me, for sure.”

  “Who else?”

  “Nobody.” He sat silent, and she went on. “I’m their only agent here inside, but I can be replaced. If such military biologicals do exist, my Moscow bosses have ordered me to get them. Or else erase the whole discovery. If they don’t get positive news—soon—they’ll recall me. Hunt me down if they have to.”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t sign up for anything easy.”

  She tried to carry on, searching for possible informers. A service club and bar now occupied what had been the student union building of the abandoned college. Spending her evenings there, appearing available and talking to anybody indiscreet or drunk enough to talk, she met a security man who liked gin and Coke a little too well for his own security.

  His name was Frankie Bard. An EnGene security staffer before the disaster, he had just come back to work on the post, driving a patrol car and drinking in the club on his nights off. She disliked him. Foul-mouthed and dim-witted, his black-haired belly often bulging from the bottom of his shirt, he always smelled of onions and tried too hard to get his hands on her.

  She tolerated him because of his gossip. His pet topic was the captive monster-critter, which held him in a frightened fascination. Sitting with him in the bar, she paid for most of the drinks and listened to his nasal monologues.

  “Just nigger luck I happened to be off duty on the night she fired the town, or she’d a burnt me to that queer dust.”

  Exchanging rumors with his friends in security, with drivers and lab technicians and the mess hall crew, Bard had gathered a store of terrifying tales. The critter shone in the dark. People that touched her came down with chills and fever. Could be the Enfield virus, now incubating in them. Deadlier than anything.

  “Me, I wouldn’t touch her. Pray to God she don’t get loose.”

  The creature was still chained in her cell in the old infirmary. Bard’s friend Mickey Harris had worked her over there. Said he thought he’d done her in, squashed the hellfire out of her like the devil’s imp she was. Somehow she’d come alive again. Upset about the injuries, the major had transferred Mickey to mess hall duty. Afraid he’d finish killing her before she confessed what sort of hell she’d brought to kill Enfield.

  Her hunger strike was over—Mickey knew the cook who had to fix up the special trays she ordered. The major was scared of her, as much as anybody. Maybe afraid she’d plant the death in him. He’d begun giving her all she wanted to eat and doing favors for her friends, that killer spic and the crazy doctor that found her in the ashes. She’d got the major to order the cuffs off the spic. Even got permission for him to walk outside, exercising the knee Mickey had shot from under him.

  To pay for those favors, the critter was talking. Anyhow, learning to talk. English now, instead of her smattering of spic. Learning faster than any human, the lab crew said. Nearly like she read people’s minds, though she kept asking a lot of questions. But still too stubborn to say anything about EnGene and the killer dust till Belcraft and the spic were set free.

  Which would be never.

  “Not a Chinaman’s chance.” Frankie belched. “The general swears he’ll be damned if he ever lets them go, or the critter either.” He belched again and lifted a wavering finger for another gin and Coke. “Time’s a-comin‘ when the little monster bitch will have to change her tune. That’ll be when they have to let Mickey Harris at her again.”

  When Anya said she had to leave, Frankie wanted to drive her home. She tried to remind him that he couldn’t take his patrol car out of the perimeter. He wanted to borrow her car. Escaping, she went to the “she room,” slipped out the back way, and left him to his gin and Coke.

  Driving out toward the gate, she saw Mickey Harris walking from the mess hall, late and hastening. She had met him in the bar. He was a dark stocky man with a flat, high-cheeked face and long black hair combed straight back; even at night he wore black-framed mirror sunglasses that glinted in her headlight.

  He turned to wave and grin at her. She looked quickly away. She had come to hate him for his persistent stupid passes and all the ways he repelled her. His foul talk and something ugly in his voice when he was drunk and something else she couldn’t name. The cold flash of those blank mirror glasses and something in his grin sent a shudder through her now.

  Eyes ahead, she drove faster.

  Late one night soon after, while she was still awake, trying to compose a radio report good enough to hold the Center off a little longer, her telephone startled her.

  “Miss Grant?” A flat, raspy whisper that seemed almost familiar. “Want to stay alive?”

  “What—”

  “No time for gab. Do what I say, and you won’t get hurt. I want a ride. Get down to your car and pick me up at the phone booth outside the Exxon truck stop on the Enfield road. You’ve got ten minutes.”

  “Why—”

  “Move! Unless you want holes in your hide. Try to stall me, and Belcraft will know you ain’t Miss Grant. Nine minutes now. Counting down!”

  The phone clicked off.

  Nine minutes later, breathless and trembling, she stopped the Toyota at the truck stop. The phone booth was empty, but a dark shadow slid out of the darker shadows behind a parked furniture van. She heard the rear door open.

  “Don’t look back.” The same voiceless rasp. “All you gotta do is run me out to the post. On through the gate and the campus to the old Enfield airport. You know the way.”

  “I know the way. But—”

  “No more gab! Keep your cool and drive me there. Not too fast. Watch the traffic. No funny business— unless you want a bullet in the brain.”

  The cold muzzle of a gun jabbed hard into the nape of her neck.

  “If things go wrong, you die first.”

  “Ok—okay!”

  The gun was gone. She pulled away, toward the post. Glancing into the rearview mirror when the lights of a speeding car came up behind, she made out a dim form crouched down into the dark.

  The corporal at the gate raised his hand to stop her.

  “Trouble, Miss Grant?” He leaned to peer into the car. “Can I call somebody?”

  “Thanks, Jake.” Eyes on her, he wasn’t looking into the back. “Nothing wrong. Captain Holliday just called me in to type a late report.”

  He waved her through. She could breathe again.

  She started on through the old campus toward the airport. Two couples were strolling slowly toward the dorms from the canteen bar. Another, in mess-hall fatigues, had stopped in the doorway, swaying in an alcoholic embrace. A block farther on, the late movie was just over. She had to slow for people scattering out of the theater.

  The streetlights went out. All the lights everywhere.

  Trembling, she braked the car.

  “Drive on.” The whisper again, close to her ear. “Slow.”

  For a few seconds, she saw nothing except the startled pedestrians caught in her headlamps. Then she heard emergency generators roaring. Here and there, windows shone again. Something jolted the car. She heard the muffled thump of a far explosion.

  “Steady!” The gun jabbed her neck. “On toward the airport.”

  She obeyed. A siren screeched somewhere in the dark, and she saw red lights flashing closer.

  “No help for you.” She felt hot breath against her hair. “That’s our escort to the terminal. All you do is follow. The freight gate will be open. Drive inside. D
own the taxi strip. We’re taking the general’s jet.”

  The patrol car lurched around a corner on squealing tires, red lights flashing. She followed it on toward the airport, through an open gate in the new chain link fence, down the taxi strip. Her headlamps picked out the white star that was painted on the side of the jet, and a name, Spirit of ‘76. The door was open, the stair down. She parked beside it.

  “Lights out! Gimme your keys.”

  She snapped off the headlamps and gave him the keys. They jingled somewhere. The patrol car went dark. Two men ran for the jet. The one ahead—Frankie Bard? She thought the other had something in his arms. Her captor darted after them.

  Lights came on in the jet. The stair retracted. The door swung shut. Engines whined and roared. Their hot blast washed her. The plane swung, rolled away, thundered down the runway. Still shaking, she sat watching the twin tongues of pale fire climbing into the night.

  32

  The Color of

  Hope

  For far too long, there had been no hope.

  Lying always chained in that red-hazed room, the hateful gringos always watching, she had seen no way to freedom. Though she could touch los pobres amigos, her two poor friends, that was only with her mind. The gringos would never let her body go, and they would keep on hurting it until she could never heal it.

  Los pobres!

  She had reached to help when her friends were hurt, but she couldn’t break the irons or open doors or stop the cruel gringo guns waiting to kill them if they ever tried to get away. Reaching their minds, she could feel what they felt, share their fleeting dreams of freedom, try to ease their despair and pain. Yet she had no way to shield them if the gringos wanted to hurt them again.

  Nor to help herself. If the cruel gringos let their bullets smash her head and spatter her brain, if they let the laughing man named Mickey come again to squeeze and tear her too much with his savage hands, if they darkened too much of the quick-dancing fire that made her alive, she could never teach the hurt cells how to make her ashes burn again.

  Dead forever, she could never again comfort her friends. She could never hope to find why the dear Vic had lit the life in her, never even know the great mission he had planned and hoped for her to carry out. Only empty darkness would be left for her, and for Sax and Panchito, and for all the others Vic had shaped her to help.

  In Panchito’s dreams, he was always carrying her home to that small mud house in San Rosario, the small mud town where he had lived when he was young. She was to be la hermanita chiquita. Roberto and Estrella, fat little Jose and la madre, the mother herself, they always laughed and cried and touched her with tender hands and took her to be one of them, far and safe from all the ugly gringos.

  Poor Panchito! He always woke again, to the blazing lights and the new iron bars and cruel truth that the gringos were going to kill him before they ever let him go.

  And Sax—que lástima!

  Sax was never happy, even in the dreams she reached. Once he was back where he used to live, wandering through the empty house on the river, feeling lonely for Midge. She had been his mujér, the dark-eyed woman who named the house Tara Two and went away because he had never let her know how much he loved her.

  In another dream, he was running through the woods with Vic, back when they both were very young, the dear Vic no taller then than Panchito’s tiny hermanito José. The limping dog named Canis had gone ahead of them, chasing a rabbit. They tried to follow the dog, but Vic had been too small to run fast enough. He stumbled because his eyes were bad, and cried because he couldn’t keep up.

  Sax had run on in the dream and left Vic behind him, lust and bawling in the woods. He woke up very sad, because he had never been nicer to Vic. Now he could never be nicer, because Vic was dead.

  More often when she reached for Sax, she caught him dreaming of her, finding her again in the ashes of the lab when she was still a small pink sausage. He was smiling again at her thirsty eagerness when she sucked up the first beer she ever tasted. He was watching her crawl away from him when she was afraid of the soldiers, sad to see her go. He was afraid for her, searching again, pulling her out of the cruel cold blackness of the hoyo where she had fallen when she tried to hide. Always he was wondering.

  Wondering why he loved her, not the way he used to love Midge, but yearning to comfort and help her. Wondering what she was and what she might come to be, if los enemigos let her live to be anything at all.

  Always, at the end of the dream, he woke to the heavy blackness of no hope for her. No hope for himself or anybody.

  When she did find hope, it was only a tiny spark of brightness, dim in the red fog always around her, so faint and far that it had no color at all. Probing for it, she had to leave herself and reach out of the red badness around her, out far beyond the cruel-spiked perimeter fence.

  Reaching, she found the man who had lit that far spark with his own thoughts of her. He had never seen her. She felt no cloak of warning redness around him. He planned help for her instead of harm, yet in spite of the spark of hope, he troubled her. Sometimes his image came when he thought of her. A heavy dark man with sharp dark eyes. His name had been Ranko Barac, but now he called himself Escorpión. At first she found no love for her or anybody that would let her touch his mind.

  Not until once when he slept.

  In his dreams, she discovered a long-forgotten love for his grandfather, a lame old man who had been as lean and hard as he was. Awakening that love,, she touched his sleeping mind and uncovered old recollections he had put away. Later, when she had learned the way, she could sometimes reach his mind when it shone with that strange hope for her, even when he was awake.

  The world where she first touched his memories was strange and hard for her to understand. The grandfather had lived in a high rock house on a high rocky hill in a country of strange pits and caves called the Kras. That was in a far land called Montenegro. Himself a war-scarred fighting man, the grandfather had sent seven hard sons to the endless wars of his war-hardened people. Six of them had died in battle to defend their rock-ribbed nation. That was the way men should die, and they had made the old man fiercely proud.

  The other son had shamed him. He was the Scorpion’s father, who had become something called a spy. Spies perhaps were sometimes useful. Sometimes they had even given up their lives for a cause or a country, but the old man hated them for the way they killed by stealth and deception, with no fairness toward their foes. It had been a woman spy in something called the partisan wars who betrayed the last of the fighting brothers. When the old man learned the truth, he never let the Scorpion eat or sleep in his house again.

  The Scorpion’s mother had once been a partisan for a warrior named Tito. Following him, she had sworn her loyalty to a hateful ruler called Stalin. The grandfather blamed her for seducing his son to join her ugly cause. They married in a place called Moscow and took their training there.

  While the Scorpion was young, they had lived in places that were names in her mind without pictures, Istanbul and Rome and London and Lima and Havana. Using different names and passports, the Scorpion’s father always said he was attached to the Soviet embassy is a journalist for Tass or a staff officer for some ministry.

  The Scorpion had learned many languages and the ways of many people, and his spy father trained him to be what he called a good soldier of the party, skilled in the art called tradecraft, adept at killing, expert in all he needed to become a master of spies. But neither his father nor his mother had ever taught him any love. They took no time for love, because love for anything except the cause was poison for a spy.

  Perhaps his father died as a spy for Russia, but the young Scorpion was never told about it. That gray winter they had been back in Moscow for something called retraining and reassignment. His father was ordered very suddenly to Santiago, with hardly time to pack. He waited with his mother for their permission to follow, but that never came.

  If his mother knew why, she n
ever spoke about it. The year he was twelve, she got a divorce to marry a factory manager who had a dacha and a private limousine because he was making imitation Levi jeans for the black market.

  He disliked the factory manager, a loud fat man who hated him. They quarreled. He broke the man’s arm with a fighting trick his father had taught him. He tried to make his mother understand, but they sent him away to live with his grandfather in Montenegro.

  At first he hated Montenegro. The narrow rock house had no comforts. There was nothing to do in the village. He had to herd the sheep and goats. They lived on goat’s milk and black bread and goat’s-milk cheese. He had no friends, and even the language was strange. He stole a pistol and hid food and made maps, planning to run away, but then he learned to love his grandfather.

  That surprised him, because the old man hated spies. He smoked strong Turkish tobacco and smelled of goats and talked to him as if he were a warm new friend, seeming interested in all he said about the cities where he had lived and the different peoples he had known.

  Perhaps there had been too much tobacco, because the old man coughed in the night and sometimes gasped for air. He had to ride the donkey when they went down to the village. Drinking strong slivovitz in the cafe, he talked with his white-haired cronies about the many wars they had known.

  His voice was rich and mellow when he didn’t have to wheeze, and the boy loved listening. He talked of his six warrior sons and how they died, fighting in the wars of Tito and the partisans. He never wanted to speak of the other son, the spy. Hurt at first, the boy came to understand. Holding him in his arms while he tried to breathe, trembling and gasping and turning blue, he shed hot tears when the old man died.

  Sixteen by then, he went back to Moscow. He learned then that the factory manager had been caught and shot for gangsterism. His mother, they said, had shot herself. Love had been poison to one more spy.

  Men who had known his father saw ability in him. At first he disliked them and their loveless world. He sometimes even felt wistful for the barren hills of the Kras and his grandfather’s wheezy voice, but at last he followed the way of his father, training for the KGB. He plied the craft now just as he played chess, with conscious skill and total concentration, but moved neither by devotion to the USSR nor hatred for the Glavni Vrag. To a spy, hatred could be as deadly as love.