“We’ll meet out here,” Rahma replied, noting that the Director’s left hand was in a cast, which he explained was from slamming his fist on the edge of a casket when Artie was with him.
The Chairman gestured for the patrician man and Artie to accompany him, and they set off across the grass, toward a nature trail that ran beside an electronic pasture fence, invisible except for blinking red lights on top.
Keeping up with the fast pace, Ondex said, “I need to tell you more about the vanishing tunnel project. I’ve already told you it was a top-secret research program, an offshoot of splitting and greenforming technology, and it failed, with the entire team of inventors committing suicide.”
“And the bodies of the suicide victims?” Rahma asked. He paused to stare out at a herd of antelope on the other side of the fence.
“One is missing, that of Dylan Bane, the brilliant scientist who was in charge of the program. He probably murdered the rest of his team.”
The Chairman shook his head, shot a hard gaze at Ondex. “He took the vanishing tunnel technology with him, didn’t he?”
“Right, seventeen years ago, and the traitor tried not to leave any records behind, though we found some clues. Without knowing he was still alive, we’ve had a crack team working on the technology ever since, and we’ve made some progress toward developing it ourselves. Our best people are working on it.”
“But you’re not there yet?”
“No, there’s an ongoing problem with scaling the technology up to the proportions we need for military purposes. The tunneling system uses splitting and greenforming machinery at the same time, and there have been a number of promising clues as to how they work in tandem to bore through the earth. We are catching up.”
Rahma glowered at him. “But you’re not there yet.”
“No, but we’re confident that we will solve it.” He trembled noticeably, almost stumbled into the electronic pasture fence, which would have given him a moderate shock.
“I want results, blast you! Where is that son of a Corporate whore hiding?”
“We don’t know. Not yet.” Director Ondex looked like a scolded dog. He hung his head, fearful of meeting the Chairman’s gaze.
“Our military forces are already on full alert,” Rahma said, “so there’s not any more we can do. And what are we defending against? A phantom? Your rogue SciO inventor is either leading his own forces against us or he’s turned the technology over to the Corporates, the Eurikans, or the Panasians—or some combination of them.” He heaved a deep sigh. “Maybe there’s yet another foe we don’t know about yet. In any event, we have powerful enemies, potentially aligned against us in an unknown form.”
“I’ve put our best scientists on it and our labs are working around the clock,” Ondex said, scratching under the cast on his hand. “We’ll either solve this or die trying.”
“The effort may be too late,” Rahma muttered.
Ondex didn’t respond. He looked dismal, but the Chairman felt no compassion for him, only anger for his part in letting dangerous technology escape. Before this revelation, SciO security had seemed impregnable, but Rahma knew now that was not the case.
“Why hasn’t Bane made another attack like he did at Bostoner?” the Chairman asked. “Why the delay?”
“I have no answer for that, sir.”
As Rahma gazed out on the pristine beauty of the game reserve, he thought of all he had tried to do in forming the Green States of America, and of the ideals and efforts that were likely to go to waste if his country went to war. He felt what a deep and extraordinary loss that would be.
He also felt very much alone, because no one on Earth cared as much as he did about the welfare of the planet.
35
Many anarchists are unaccounted for. Following the Corporate War in which their violent methods proved useful to our cause, some of them discovered that they could no longer fit in, and vanished. Presumably a number of them are living in the wilderness, having gone there to avoid being arrested and recycled. Others perished there, and became food for predator animals.
—a GSA statistical analysis of population decline
THE LONG TRUCK bumped slowly over a rough desert pan, following satellite coordinates that had been laid out by the local dispatch office. It was midday and unseasonably cool for autumn, with the sun hiding behind a layer of clouds. Joss and Kupi sat in the passenger dome behind the driver’s cab of Janus Machine No. 129, wearing crisp, clean uniforms with peace symbols on the lapels. A holo-map projection floated in the air in front of them, over an instrument console.
This was Joss’s first greenforming gig since returning to duty, and he felt trepidation as he looked through the dusty clearplex, not knowing what awaited him. He wanted to return to his normal activities, and this job was a step in that direction. But he felt trapped by circumstances, needing to work to get his mind off his concerns, while knowing that he was only delaying the inevitable. Whatever he was becoming physically, he would become, whether he wanted to admit it or not. Despite his hopes, he had a sinking sensation that the powers would not wane.
“We’re like Shiva in this machine,” Kupi said, “the Hindu god of the universe’s creative and destructive powers. The destroyer side wears a necklace of skulls—that’s me, the Black Shirt—while the creative side is a phallic symbol. That’s you, in case you’re having trouble keeping up.” She ran a finger over a vinelike green scar on his arm.
“An interesting line of reasoning, the way your logic invariably leads to sex. I’ve been wondering. Is that all we have between us, the physical relationship?”
“Of course not. I like to think we’re good friends, too.” She looked hurt.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. Of course we’re good friends. Thank you for caring about me after my accident, for visiting my hospital room when you could. And for keeping the crew together in my absence.”
“You’re a better crew chief than I am, Joss.”
The truck rolled over an especially bumpy area, jostling them around. “Maybe they should have brought in the heavy-lift copters and flown us to the site,” Joss said.
Kupi pointed ahead of them, down a slight hill. “We’re almost there,” she said.
Through the dusty dome, Joss saw a sprawling complex of low-lying buildings, surrounded by a broken-down wall of adobe bricks. He checked the holo-map, said, “Villa Cabrón. Cabrón—that’s a bad word in Spanish, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. This was a fortified company town, run by a drug lord known as El Cabrón—‘The Son of a Bitch.’ He controlled every village in a hundred-mile radius—a reign of terror, from what I hear.”
“Why wasn’t it greenformed earlier?” Joss saw vehicles parked outside the compound wall, and people walking around, the privileged who were able to get permits to leave their reservations.
Kupi shrugged. “Just another bureaucratic detail to mop up for all I know, from someone’s list. Not too much grows naturally around here, does it? Maybe that has something to do with the delay, because a few more straggly plants instead of buildings aren’t going to do jack for worldwide air quality.”
Out on the flatlands, Joss identified small cacti, succulents, mesquite, and varieties of scrub brush that grew in arid climates, and he thought of how hardy such plants were. In a sense, they seemed admirable to him—and considering this for a moment, he thought these plants were more admirable than flora that grew in less-demanding climates. People were that way too, it seemed to him; they were shaped by their environments.
As they neared the compound and parked just outside the front gate, people gathered around the big machine and watched while the crew set up the outriggers and inspected the various components. Kupi went out to the turret platform and stood by the railing, but Joss remained inside, having decided to wait until the last minute before going to his station at the Seed Cannon. Some of the people were looking at him in the dome and pointing.
More vehi
cles showed up, and more people. The crew set up a clearplex blast shield, and directed the onlookers to step behind it, then cleared stray animals with sonics. Joss saw a desert hare scurry off, and a flurry of rodents. He thought there must be five hundred observers out there with off-reservation permits, which was unheard of at remote jobsites. They had come to see Greenman, with vines on his skin; there could be no other explanation. They wanted to see a carnival sideshow.
As soon as the observers were in a safe place, Kupi tapped keys on the instrument panel to generate splitting power. Joss heard the gathering roar, and saw her fire Black Thunder in an unusual manner, a slow-arcing, wide-spraying shot that disintegrated all of the buildings, fencing, and other structures with just one blast. It was something that most other Splitter operators could not do, a crowd-pleasing demonstration of her skills.
Most of the time she didn’t bother with this technique and just blasted away repeatedly, until everything was turned into goo. She never announced in advance what she intended, which Joss found interesting. At times, she had a tendency to be creative in her work, even artistic.
When Kupi was finished, Joss adjusted his helmet’s headset so that he could hear a past-century John Lennon song, “Imagine,” and then climbed into the bucket seat behind the Seed Cannon. He tapped the opening sequence, causing the turret to spin around slowly, so that the glowing green barrel pointed at the work area. He fired twice, spraying seeds over every square meter of the destroyed villa.
When Joss completed his portion of the work, he climbed down onto the turret platform and removed his helmet, to talk with Kupi.
“Hey, Stuart!” a man shouted. “What do you need the Janus Machine for? Show us some of your tricks!”
Joss shook his head, turned away.
“Come on! We drove all the way out here to see you!”
“Well, drive all the way back!” Sabe McCarthy shouted. “Who invited you? We’re on duty, doing the Chairman’s good work.”
Some people booed, while others called out, demanding to see Joss’s special talents.
“This isn’t a sideshow!” Kupi shouted.
“I’m sick of my ‘talents,’” Joss said to Kupi as the two of them turned and went inside the passenger dome. “I want my life back to normal.”
They closed the door, shutting out the crowd noises. “I don’t think you’ll ever be completely normal again,” she said. The two of them hadn’t made love since his return, and he didn’t know when—or if—they would again. He felt very tense.
* * *
THAT NIGHT, JOSS went to bed thinking about the seeds he had generated two days ago, without the use of equipment or SciO seed cartridges. Green light had lanced from the vinelike skin of one hand, bathing a flawed area on the ground, a place that Tom Ellerby had missed.
He wanted to know what had happened to him, enabling him to generate new life like that. Joss seemed to be evolving or mutating toward something, learning new powers as he changed constantly. Though curious at times, he was not really eager to discover more about his abilities, and wished they would be gone in the morning when he woke up.
Yes, that would be perfect. He tried to visualize it all gone, and even more, that it had never occurred at all. None of it, and that he’d dreamed the whole thing, an incredibly realistic dream.
Joss went over this idea in his mind, savoring possibilities, considering ramifications, looking for bits of evidence that none of it had ever really occurred. He tried to remember details that would prove this premise, evidence to remove a mountain of doubt. There must be something obvious.
As he went over events repeatedly, his mind circling, he began to drift off to sleep. But sleep within a dream? It seemed impossible, and yet it might very well be occurring anyway.…
In the dream (within a dream?) he again saw the Sonora jobsite where the J-Mac crew had been cleaning up the landscape after digging trenches to repair an underground water supply. A patch of moist, ungreenformed earth had remained after Ellerby fired the Seed Cannon; the man had skill limitations, was not up to Joss’s standards.
Going over that day again, Joss saw the vinelike scars on his skin bulge and glow, and he saw in a detailed, breakaway view that this was from the sun generating photosynthesis in his body. It was a frightening realization.
His dreaming gaze wandered over the dry landscape, away from the area that Kupi had hit with the Splitter cannon, and which Ellerby had greenformed so imperfectly. Joss found himself staring close-up at undisturbed soil with all of its organic, cellular, and genetic components. Moments later he realized it was raw material, because he drew upon those ingredients and greenformed without equipment, rearranging the soil and coalescing it into the varying shapes of seeds for plants that were suitable for the Sonora region—seeds that he scattered over the jobsite in a rain of sparkling green.
Joss’s mind seemed to be controlling this, telepathically generating the seeds of life from waste dirt, as if he were God.
Stunned by the dream, he awoke and sat straight up in bed. His heart was racing, and perspiration drenched his clothing. He’d had odd dreams before, including the one in which he imagined powers he did not actually possess. But this one seemed different. It was as if he had been given a window into the secret workings of his own drastically altered body.
36
With all the talk of extraterrestrials in the past century, the UFOs and purported alien autopsies, it seems that we have finally found a “green man,” but he’s homegrown. He’s an Earthling, not from Mars at all.
—underground newsletter
BACK IN SEATTLE, Andruw Twitty had begun to give up on getting another audience with the Chairman. After being turned away from the guard station of the Montana Valley Game Reserve, he had made a series of additional attempts in the past week, sending daily messages to Rahma by sat-call, courier, and holo-net, each time saying he had important, damaging information to discuss about Joss Stuart. But to no avail. He had received no response whatsoever. Just silence.
All of his former roommate’s belongings had been inventoried by SciO security officers and taken to a storage facility at the Berkeley Reservation, where the SciOs had been investigating his strange and disturbing powers—powers that seemed to increase each time Twitty heard about them.
A few days ago, upon learning that Stuart was on a J-Mac crew in northwest Mexico, Twitty had applied for a permit to go there. The request had been granted by his Greenpol captain, the woman who had earlier ordered him to take time off his duties as an eco-cop and use his unique relationship with Stuart to see what he could find out about him. Twitty had gone surreptitiously to observe Stuart and had reported his findings to his superior. But then, without explanation, she’d ordered him to return to his normal duties.
After a day of routine police work, he was in the health club on the seventy-eighth floor of the government-run apartment building. Later in the week he was scheduled to receive a new roommate, but he wasn’t looking forward to that, or to continuing the old routine at work. He still had not obtained everything he wanted from the Stuart connection. Maybe some angle would occur to him while he was exercising, some way of getting back on the assignment he really wanted—the one he hoped would promote his own career through his past relationship with the famous Mr. Stuart. He did some of his best thinking at the gym.
This facility had a number of features that he could only categorize as novelty items, because they didn’t really need to be that way. The unique vertical swimming pool was a case in point, and always seemed to him like a waste of time and energy—something designed by techno-geeks just to show it was possible.
Throughout the reservation for humans, horizontal space was at a premium, but they could have done this in a more traditional way, instead of causing a swimming pool to run up the side of a long, three-level interior wall! Looking in at it through the viewing windows, it seemed to be an optical illusion, with the water remaining in the pool and people walking beside it l
ike flies on a wall. But it was no illusion.
In his tight-fitting swimsuit, Twitty passed through an airlock into a small chamber, and lay down on a wooden bench in the corner, with his feet against one wall. It was humid in there. He heard clicking and sliding noises, and presently he identified the fwwmph! of a gravity shifter. A moment later he found himself standing on the “wall,” with the bench against his back. Then, stepping through a second airlock, he entered the swimming pool chamber and dived into the water. So unnecessary, all of this technology and expense to set it up, but it did work, and was visually exciting.
He swam fifteen laps and was going to do more, but felt a twinge in one shoulder blade and paddled toward a ladder on the side. Twitty was just about to climb out when the implanted chrono in his wrist buzzed. The digital dial shifted, revealing a message there. The Chairman wanted to see him after all. Elated, he dressed and prepared to depart.
* * *
CHAIRMAN RAHMA POPAL usually had other people do things like this for him. But now, under the circumstances, he felt he needed to do it himself.
Jade Ridell stood in front of his desk, waiting for him to speak. At first she had been smiling, but now, as she saw his somber expression, she began to look worried.
“What is it, my beloved Chairman?” she finally asked. She wore a long dress with images of exotic animals on it. Her red hair was formed into a ponytail, held in place by a silver clasp he had given to her.
He looked away for a moment, at the wall sign that read ALL FOR GREEN AND GREEN FOR ALL hoping it would give him the courage for what he needed to do next.
“I really don’t like having to tell you this,” he said, looking across his desk at the young woman. He took a deep breath, because he had grown to care for Jade, more than most of the women he had known in his life.
She looked frightened now.
“Here it is,” he said. “Your family has been arrested for a serious eco-crime, and placed on a relocation train.”
The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma Page 25
