“You don’t mind rocking the boat. Did you miss me?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“You never called. Why is that? Were you trying to forget? And now you’re here because you couldn’t? You never even called. I mean you have an emosponder, right? They couldn’t have taken that away. Why didn’t you ever call? I thought you were dead.”
“Sometimes I wanted to be dead. But here I am. And you? I hear you’re entering your application for fine-tuning.”
“Not yet.”
She had a sudden need to see his face.
“Come with me. We’ll check out the balconies,” she said.
“That’s not allowed.”
“Just come. We’ll figure it out.”
“Do you know the way?”
“I’ll find it.”
Corrag led him past the stands to the far end of the hall. Gurgie and Mathew were dancing and looked over briefly in her direction. She pretended not to notice. She grabbed a Maxergy freshener shot, and Ben followed suit and they walked together out past the dancers and the presenters from the ArtSmile Corps lounging and stretching in a circle by an unused energy panel exit. Corrag waited until the music reached a moment of high intensity and then reached swiftly with her time wand and tripped the converter switch on the box like she’d observed Mr. Breen do. This turned the receptor back to the recently phased out digital signal. The panel bars began to throb in a slow rhythm, in line with the less powerful digital pulse. Then she looked at Ben and nodded, and he slipped through the bars of the panel. She waited a few seconds, held her breath and with a sudden movement jumped between the bars to the other side. She felt the hairs on her head and neck rise with the kinetic energy but not enough to set off any alarms.
The music and hubbub from the center sounded distant. The walls of the hall they were in were dusty. The unpainted cement had splotches of water staining down from the ceiling. Ben was looking into the dim distance in some inert way. Corrag reached up and touched his masked cheek, and he recoiled.
“Can you just take it off?”
“I ... you,” Ben spluttered. “You don’t have the right, Corrag.”
He reached up and pulled off the mask. His face looked old, tired. His eyes were dark, and he looked away when she stared. She tried hard to remember the way he had used to look, the memory she had of him the day he’d explained to her that he could wait with his avatar at a crossroad and that if he concentrated he could sense the virtual enemy before it appeared. He had been so alive, so focused and so quick to see a way. Underneath the mask of this face there was that other face, she was sure.
“Where have you been, Ben?"
“In the south quadrant with the Corps.”
“What do you want to do now?"
“Corrag, why do you think you can ask me that?”
“You’re Ben. My friend.”
“No. I’m Private Calder of the 175th Air Infantry Battalion, Mayagua Sector Six.”
“So, that doesn’t mean anything to me. You’re Ben. Why did you come back?”
“I don’t know.” He walked away down the hall. Corrag followed. She wanted to touch him, to turn him around. Where was he going? It scared her to see him this way. She didn’t want to lose him. He was the last link to her childhood, to the hopes, unformed and unspoken as they had been, of a happiness of her own. At the end of the hall, where it emptied into a larger stairwell, he stopped and craned his head around, looking up into the dark.
“What do you see?”
“Nothing. Come on.”
“No, Ben. I mean about us.”
“About us?” Ben took his foot off the step and turned towards her. He shifted his weight uneasily and looked into her face intently.
“There is no us. We don’t exist.”
“What about trusting your instincts, Ben? What about finding the way?” Corrag’s voice cracked with emotion. She heard the echo of it down the hall and had the sensation of falling, as if she’d been dropped into a time warp.
“Shut up, Corrag. That’s just stupid.”
“Stupid? Ben, that’s what we lived for. Don’t you remember? You taught me everything I knew. You were the best gamer ever before you dropped it. Left it all behind. Said you’d be back and we’d figure it out. I believed you, Ben. We can find a way to be happy. In a new way. Our own way. What about all that? Are you going to say you don’t remember? Private Calder or whatever you are?”
Ben turned around and walked back towards her.
“You’ve never been on patrol in the Nicanor. You’ve never done three weeks on the hunt. You don’t know what it’s like to be holding a Nicanor prisoner and looking into eyes that just mirror back the hatred. There is no you or me. Just the next day. And the next camp. And the next. You disappears. Me is just a hole to put food into. The Nicanor kills you.”
“Don’t go back. Stay with me. We’ll find work on the cooperativa farm. I'll do the VocAg.”
“No, Corrag. Finish your fine-tuning. Be what you need to be.”
“And smile all the while?”
“Yes.”
“Why, Ben? Why?”
“Because otherwise it hurts too much. We never knew pain, Corrag.”
Ben took her hands in his.
“I know it now.”
“There is no you. There is no me. Listen to me.”
“No. I won’t. I listened to you before and you lied.” Corrag pulled her hands away. She wanted to run back to the dance floor. Forget she’d ever seen him or ever wished to see him again.
“What’s a lie?" asked Ben, his voice small, tinny, just a remnant of the fire and humor that had once filled him.
“What have they done to you Ben? It’s like you’ve been augmented, only worse.”
Ben stared at her, unable to say a thing.
“What is it?”
Instead of answering, he turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two or three at a time, his legs churning and arms flailing. He’d disappeared from sight in a matter of seconds, just the sound of the boot strikes on the concrete echoing more and more distantly as he ascended. Corrag followed. She climbed at a slower pace, hands on the cold metal rail, listening for the sound of Ben up ahead. But there was just silence. When she reached the top flight, there was a metal door propped open.
Outside, the cold night air rushed by in a breeze from the north. The San Fermin Mountains ranged in a dark silhouette. Ben was standing on the edge of the roof overlooking the Convention Center plaza. The red lights of Federation weather and surveillance drones filled the night sky. Corrag came up next to him and looked out over the city.
“That’s where we grew up, Ben. We existed in it. That was real. You and me, we were real, right?”
“Yes.”
"But you think I should fine tune?”
“I do.”
"But look out there. We can discover it for ourselves. We can be free.”
"There’s no such thing. All the desires will be reprogrammed and rebooted to the higher order.”
“Well, then. Why try?”
“Because otherwise we die.”
"But you’re going to die, Ben."
"Not if I kill first. In three months, with confirmed kills in the seven hundred or higher range, I can be a candidate for Officer Training School.”
“Is that what you want?”
"What I want. It’s what is, Corrag. That’s all. There is no other way. Some day we can live in the heavens on the planets of Betelgeuse or Andromeda. Our offspring will rule the galaxies, fill the universe with their thought forms and productions. Don’t you want that?”
“That’s not alive with me. I want to live here and now. With you. Have children, not offspring. Raise them to run and breathe and drink and dream in the mountains and valleys of Earth. That’s why I knew you’d come back. I knew you would, just not tonight. I expected you in the summer. That’s why I was holding out on sending off the fine-tuning application. I wanted to be here
when you got back.”
“There’s a break in the fighting now,” said Ben distantly. “The Naguani have retreated. It’s strange. I expect they’re gathering strength for a major counteroffensive. We’ve tried to burn them out. Dry up the water cycle with localized cloud inhibition and carpet napalm bomb the rivers. But they keep coming. They never stop. No matter how many you kill there’s always more of them. Especially at night. They can shape-shift and come at you. The jaguars can get by the lasers. In your sleep. That’s the worst sound.
“What is?”
“The guys in their bunks being mauled, Corrag. All the guys in the Corp, we just want to survive long enough to get the kill range target and get out. It’s as if the war is bigger than we are.”
“What about the girls?”
“Well, it’s Democravia, right? The girls in the Corps can work their way up to augmentation with a kill rate, too.”
“That’s wrong.”
“Yes, it is. Kind of.”
She couldn't see his face in the dark, but wanted to. At that instant she sensed he needed her. The distance between them was threatening to blow up and obliterate whatever they had left between them, any memory of a friendship, any hope Corrag had for the future. So she took his hand and pulled him away from the edge of the roof.
"Let’s go. I know where we can go.”
“Where, Corrag?”
“Anywhere, I don’t really know where. It doesn’t matter where.”
They went down and out through the dance hall with their masks on again. Corrag tapped the emosponder on her left wrist and picked up Gurgie’s avatar on the display.
“I’m going out.”
“Where?”
“Don’t know. I’m with Ben.”
“Please be careful, Corrag. Think about your steps before you take any. Be sure.”
“If I did that I’d never get anywhere, Gurgie. I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry.”
Corrag tapped three times on the emosponder, putting it to sleep. Together, she and Ben walked briskly, wordlessly, until they found a zipbike out on the street about five blocks from the Civic Center. After punching in the emergency code for civilian first responders on the meter, Ben mounted it and motioned for her to jump on the back. Corrag smiled. Now they were getting somewhere.
“How long do we have?"
“Three hours showing.”
“That should get us to Ysidro.”
“Do you remember how to get there?”
“I think so. Go out north on the old causeway.”
Ben twisted the throttle, and the zipbike responded instantly, silently accelerating to eighty miles an hour on the quiet streets. Ben braked on the corners and leaned as if he’d just gotten off the speed circuit training ground. Under the Spring Fest curfew, he didn’t have to worry about other traffic, and by keeping his headlights off he avoided alerting any police radars.
Ysidro had been Ricky and Alana's favorite camping ground in her childhood. They’d often pitched a tent in the shadow of the canyon land. She felt herself looking for a way back towards those days, the sense of security, satisfaction and rightness of those summers, drinking in the sun on the slippery stones of the riverbed. In her mind the golden glow of the memory was a currency worth guarding. In those years, the wars of the New Canaanite alliance against the secessionist states had still been fresh in Ricky and Alana’s memory, and Ricky had always kept a firearm loaded inside the tent in case of surviving secessionist marauders, but they never saw any. Alana had always played up the possibility in order to keep Corrag close by, warning her to not go too far along the riverbed by herself. But one of them had always been there with their old sheepdog Haj, hovering, as she had built her fantasy castles with river stones worn soft in the wettish mud in early June from the melted snowpack, an afterglow of the past. She imagined that somehow Ben sensed her giving directions by shifting her weight on the back of the zipbike, and they did end up somewhere very close to Ysidro, on an old logging road. Ben pulled up on the shoulder and parked. They got off and removed their helmets. Around the corner of the mountain was just a hint of the dawn to come. In a few hours the alarms would be going off and the search drones would be activated. She couldn’t see his face very clearly.
“What are you thinking?” Corrag asked.
“I’m thinking you’re brave to be out here with someone you hardly know. What would your father and mother think?”
“They already think I’m a lost cause. It doesn’t matter to me. Besides, what do you mean hardly know?”
“Do you think you know me, Corrag?”
“Of course. You haven’t changed for me. I know you’ve been through hell, Ben. Don’t get me wrong.”
“Then help me out here. Shine your light for me.”
Corrag knelt beside him with her open emosponder. Ben used his utility tool to unclip the casing on the zipbike’s fuse and carefully pull two hair-thin filaments that powered the geopositioning transponder. Then he turned the bike on again and rolled it over to a stand of aspen and behind some rocks where it couldn’t be seen from the road.
They hiked up a trail that paralleled the creek in the canyon below and then crossed an old footbridge. The sign for the trailhead was lying on the ground, rusted and overgrown with weeds. Ben said he knew an old hunting cabin that had been used by his uncles before the war. Somewhat hesitantly at first, Corrag agreed on it as a destination. She really wanted to stay on the bridge and watch the water rushing underneath their feet, the way it sparkled and crystallized into the colors of the rainbow. The sun had come out and warmed up the air. Flies buzzed around the body of a dead bird. They marched ahead, Ben pushing the pace, perhaps concerned about getting far enough up the trail to evade the police.
“Gurgie will tell them I’m with you. Mom and Dad won’t mind,” she said, thinking out loud.
“Colonel Bohjalian won’t be so easy-going. I’m supposed to be back on base as of twenty three hundred.”
“What will they do?”
“I’ll be assigned to care-taker duty for a month once we deploy back to the Basin.”
“Is that the worst they can do?”
“The worst is the CDC labor camp in the Ozarks for deserters. I don’t think they’ll send me there for going AWOL with my girlfriend.”
Corrag liked the sound of being called Ben’s girlfriend. She thought of her father’s rants against girls who relied on their boyfriends for their own sense of acceptance. He wanted her to be more independent and self-reliant, but it was another area where she differed with his thoughts for her. Corrag liked the idea of being important in a boy’s life, of being necessary to someone, and didn’t think it made her any less of a human being to enjoy or desire it. Alana didn’t like Ben for other reasons. She thought he was too smart to be completely trustworthy. People like Ben, she would say, often needed re-education components before being assigned to an augmentation track. This escapade would be further proof of the rightness of her judgment. But Corrag didn’t want them, her parents or the school or the Council, to blame Ben for leading her astray. She wanted to be the author of her own demise, if there was going to be such a thing. Let it be by her own hand at least. But for Ben, let it be a mild reprimand, whatever caretaker duty was. It didn’t sound so harsh. She didn’t want him suffering on her behalf.
After about a mile, the trail took a turn up a steep, rocky face. There was a cabin at the top of a ridge, sheltered from the prevailing wind by the mountain behind it. The siding was faded, and gaps showed between the boards. Scraps remained of the tarpaper that had once protected the wood from the elements. When they looked back, Corrag and Ben could see the desert, the suburbs of Edmundstown and then the city on the eastern edge and Mono Lake far in the distance -- just a dot of iridescence in the foothills. And far off behind those hills was the ocean.
The momentary sense of peace was broken by the barks of a dog and the sound of a door clapping shut. They turned round. An old man, faded into the dirt, h
ad appeared beside the shack. He neither waved nor moved. Nor did his attitude suggest fear. The dog barked again and the old man leaned down and scratched its ears.
“Hi there,” shouted Ben, but the old man made no sign of hearing.
“Let me handle this,” said Corrag, putting her hand on Ben’s arm. “We don’t want to scare him.” She was thinking of Ben in his uniform, and there was something frail and covert about the old man’s quietness. She walked over, and the dog growled as she approached.
“Nice dog,” she said as she got close to the old man.
He looked up and squinted. The dog was a mix, with blue husky eyes -- an old mutt. The old man straightened. The top of his head was at a height with her shoulders, and his hair, greasy and long, hid his face. He wiped his hair away with one hand and looked at her with grey, lidded eyes.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you,” he finally said.
“Who are you?” she asked with exaggerated wonderment, placating his delusions.
“Abel. Abel Marin. You and your friend are just fine. What are your names again?”
“Corrag and Ben. What’s your dog’s name?”
“Sandy.”
“Perfect. Hi Sandy.” She petted the dog and the old man began to cry. She noticed he wiped his tears away and let the hair fall in front of his eyes again. Ben came over.
"Ben, this is Abel and Sandy. Why are you crying, Abel? There’s no need for that,” said Corrag, horrified that he might think they meant to harm him.
“Crying,” said Abel. “Is how a man keeps a heart strong. I’ve been waiting a long time. I thought the world was done with me. And now you're here at last.”
Ben looked at her. She gave him a stern look back and shook her head.
“You’ve come back at last,” continued Abel. “Let me give you something.”
“No, you don’t have to give us anything,” said Corrag.
“Water would be nice,” said Ben.
Sandy began to bark as the old man moved back to the shack.
“Come in,” he called, holding the door open. The rusty springs squeaked as it shut behind them.
“This used to be my uncles’ hunting cabin,” announced Ben.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 3
