Time slowed. If they had been compromised, Renz thought, the girl could be wired—a walking bomb. There wasn’t enough room in the parking structure to avoid her. If she went off, they were all going to die. Fear flushed his mouth with the taste of metal.
He heard Thorn exhale sharply, and the van sped past the stairway. The dead girl failed to explode. A dud.
“Jesus,” Marquez said, relief in the sound of the word. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”
Paasikivi stopped for less than a second, and Pauel was in the passenger’s seat. Renz pulled the rear doors closed and latched them as they went up the ramp and out to the brightness of the street.
They were half a mile from the building when the trigger signal attenuated and the coil sparked out. With a shock like a headache, Renz’s link dropped for a half second, leaving the disorienting sensation of only being inside his own head again. It felt like waking from a dream. And then the display windows were back, each showing slightly different views out the front while he alone looked back at a plume of white smoke rising from the town behind them.
By the time they reached the base in Hamburg, the news was on all the major sites. CATC under the orders of the Global Security Council had launched simultaneous attacks on the al-Nakba network, including three opium processing plants, two armories, and a training camp. Also the al-Nakba communications grid and network had suffered heavy damage.
The opposition sites added that a preschool near one of the armories had also been firebombed and that the training camp was a humanitarian medical endeavor. Eighteen innocent bystanders had died, including ten children from the preschool and two teachers.
There was also a girl shot in a minor raid in the Persian Interest Zone. Her name was Samara Hamze. Renz looked at the picture of her on the newsnets—shoulder-length black hair that rounded in at her neck, dark, unseeing eyes, skin fair enough she could have passed in the most racist quarters of Europe if she’d been given the chance. If she’d wanted to.
By the time they’d dropped Pauel off in Paris and found seats in a transatlantic carrier, the news cycle had moved on, and the girl—the dud—was forgotten.
Renz had never expected to see her again.
“That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s probably something worse,” said the man on the stage. “Now, this is going to seem a little off-topic, but we may be in some strange territory before we’re done here, so I hope you’ll all indulge me. Ask yourselves this: Why aren’t we all brilliant neurochemists? I don’t mean why didn’t we choose to go to med school—there are lots of reasons for that. I mean doesn’t it seem like if you’re able to do something, you must know about it? Aaron Ka can play great football because he knows a lot about football.
“But here we are, all juggling incredibly complex neurochemical exchanges all the time, and we’re all absolutely unaware of it. I mean, no one says ‘Oops, better watch those calcium channels or I might start getting my amygdala all fired up.’ We just take ten deep breaths and try to calm down. The cellular layer just isn’t something we’re conscious of.
“And you can turn that around. Our neurons aren’t any more aware of us than we are of them. If you ask a neuron why it fired or muscle tissue why it flexed, it wouldn’t say ‘Because it was my turn to run’ or ‘The bitch had it coming.’ Those are the sorts of answers we’d give. If our cells could say anything, they’d say something about ion channels and charges across lipid membranes. And on that level—on the cellular level—that would be a fine explanation.
“The levels don’t talk to each other. Your neurons don’t know you, and you aren’t aware of them. And, to torture a phrase, as above, so presumably below.”
Renz felt Marquez shift in his seat. It wasn’t impatience. Marquez was frowning, his gaze intent on the stage. Renz touched his arm and nodded a question.
“I don’t like where this is going,” Marquez said.
When Renz got back from the mission, Anna was sitting at the kitchen table—cheap laminate on peeling-chrome legs—scrolling through another Web page on her disease. Outside the dirty windows, the streetlights of Franklin Base glowed bright enough to block out the stars. Renz closed the door behind him, went over, and kissed his wife on the crown of her head. She smelled of the same cheap shampoo that she’d used since he met her. The sudden memory of her body when it was young and powerful and not quite his yet sent a rush of lust through him. It was embarrassing. He turned away, to the refrigerator, for some soda.
Anna turned off her screen and shifted. Her movements were awkward, disjointed. Her face was pinched and oddly expressionless. He smiled and lifted a bottle of soda. She shook her head—the movement took a second to get going, and it took a second to stop.
“Douglas Harper had Hulme’s Palsy too,” she said.
“The serial killer?”
“Yup,” she said. “Apparently it’s old news. Everyone in the support group knew about it. I’m still green compared to all of them. He wasn’t symptomatic. They didn’t diagnose it until after he’d been executed.”
Renz pulled out a chair and sat, his heels on the kitchen table. The air conditioner kicked on with a decrepit hum.
“Do they think what … I mean, was killing people related?”
Anna laughed. Her eyes wide, she made an overhand stabbing motion like something out of a murder flick. Renz laughed, surprised to find his amusement was genuine.
“They just think if it had progressed faster, some of those girls might have lived,” she said.
Renz took a sip of his soda. It was too sweet, and the fizz was already gone, but it was cold. There wasn’t more he could ask than cold. Anna dropped her hands to the table.
“I was going to make dinner for you,” she said. “But … well, I didn’t.”
“No trouble. I can make something,” he said. Then, “Bad week?”
She sighed. She was too thin. He could see her collarbone, the pale skin stretched tight over it.
“The new immunosuppressants gave me the shits,” she said, “and I think I’m getting another fucking cold. Other than that, just another thrilling week of broadcast entertainment and small town gossip.”
“Any good gossip, then?”
“Someone’s screwing someone else even though they’re both married. I didn’t really pay attention to the details. You? The news feeds made things look pretty good.”
Anna’s eyes were blue and so light that they made him think of icicles when they caught the light from the side. He’d fallen in love with her eyes as much as her tits and the taste of her mouth. He pushed the sorrow away before she could see it.
“We killed a kid. But things went pretty well otherwise.”
“Only one kid? That thing with the preschool …”
“Yeah, them too. I mean we killed a kid. My guys.”
Anna nodded, then reached awkwardly across the table. Her fingertips touched his wrist. He didn’t look up, but he let the tears come. He could pretend they were for the dud.
“So, not such a good week for you either, huh?”
“Had its rough parts,” he said.
“You’re too good for this,” she said. “You’ve got to stop it.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
He spoke before he thought. Truth came that way; sudden, unexpected. Like illness. “We’d lose the medical coverage.”
Her fingertips pulled back. Renz watched them retreat across the table, watched them fold into her flat, crippled fist. The air conditioner hummed, white noise as good as silence. Renz swung his legs down.
“I wouldn’t change anything,” he said.
“I fucking would.” There was pain in her voice, and it pressed down on him like a hand.
“You know, boss, I’m not really hungry,” he said. “Let’s go to bed. We can eat a big breakfast in the morning.”
Once she was asleep—her breath slow and deep and even—he got gently out of bed, pulled on his robe, and took himself out the fr
ont door to sit on the rotting concrete steps. The lawn was bare grass, the street empty. Renz ran his hands over his close-cropped hair and stared up at the moon, blue-white and pale in the sky. After a while, he turned up his link, seeing if there was anyone online.
Paasikivi and Thorn were both disconnected.
Pauel’s link was open with the video feed turned off, but it had been idle for three and a half hours—he was probably asleep. Only Marquez was awake and connected. Renz excluded the other three feeds, considering the world from Marquez’s point of view. It looked like he was in a bar. Renz turned up the volume and thin country-pop filled his ears.
“Hey, Marquez,” he said.
The video feed jumped and then settled.
“Ah! Renz. I thought you were actually here. Is that your street?”
He looked up and down the empty asphalt strip—block houses and thin, water-starved trees. Buffalo grass lawns that never needed mowing. His street.
“I guess so,” he said, then more slowly, “I guess so.”
“Looks like the same shit as last time.”
“It’s hotter. There’s more bugs.”
Marquez chuckled, and Renz wasn’t really on the step outside his shitty base housing, Anna dying by inches behind him. Marquez wasn’t entirely in the cheap bar. They were on the link together, in the unreal, private space it made, and it removed the distance between them.
“How’s Anna?” Marquez asked.
“She’s all right. I mean her immune system’s still eating her nerves, but apart from that.”
“You sound bitter. You’re not cutting out on her, are you?”
“No. I said I’d stay, and this time I will. It just sucks. It all just sucks.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s hard when your woman’s down.”
“Not just that. It all sucks. That girl we killed. We call her a dud like she wasn’t a kid. What’s that about?”
“It’s about how a lot of those kids have mommies who strap them up with cheap dynamite. You know that.”
“Are we soldiers, Marquez? Are we cops? What the fuck are we doing out there?”
“We’re doing whatever needs to get done. That’s not what’s chewing you, and you know it.”
It was true, so he ignored it.
“I’ve been doing this for too many years,” Renz said. “I’m getting burned out. When I started, every operation was like an adventure from start to stop. Half the time I didn’t even know how what I was doing fit in, you know? I just knew it did. Now I wonder why we do it.”
“We do it because they do it.”
“So why do they do it?”
“Because of us,” Marquez said, and Renz could hear the smile. “This is the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. You put people out in the world, and they kill each other. It’s the nature of the game. Your problem, man, you never read Hobbes.”
“The pissing cartoon kid?”
“Five hundred years ago, this guy named Hobbes wrote a book about how the only way to get peace was to give up all your rights to the state—do what the king said, whether it was crazy or not. Fuck justice. Fuck whether it made sense. Just do what you’re told.”
“And you read this thing.”
“Shit no. There was this lecture I saw on a philosophy site. The guy said you build a government so motherfucking huge, it can make peace. Grind peace into people with a fucking hammer. Crush everyone, all the time. He called it Leviathan. He thought it was the only way to stop war.”
“Sounds like hell.”
“Maybe. But you got a better idea?”
“So we’re making them be part of our government. And when we get them all in on it, this’ll stop.”
Marquez’s window panned slowly back and forth—the man shaking his head.
“This shit isn’t going to stop until Jesus comes back.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Come on, man. You know all this. I said it before; it’s not what’s really on your mind.”
“And what do you know about my mind?”
“I spend a lot of time there is all.”
Renz sighed and scratched at the welt on his arm growing where a mosquito had drunk from him. The moon sailed slowly above him, the same as it always had, seen or unseen. He swallowed until his throat wasn’t so tight.
“She still turns me on,” he said at last. “It makes me feel like I’m … she’s crippled. She’s dying and I can’t fix it, and all I want to do when I see her is fuck.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Don’t be gross.”
“She might want to, you know. It’s not like she stopped being a woman. Knowing you still want her like that … might be the kind of thing she needs.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“There is no sorrow so great it cannot be conquered by physical pleasure,” Marquez said.
“That Hobbes?”
“Nah. French girl named Colette. Just the one name. Wrote some stuff was supposed to be pretty racy at the time. It was a long time ago, though. Doesn’t do much compared to net porn.”
“You read the weirdest shit.”
“I don’t have anyone to come home to. Makes for a lot of spare time,” Marquez said, his voice serious. Then, “Go inside, Renz. Sleep next to your wife. In the morning, make her a good breakfast and screw her eyes blue.”
“Her eyes are blue,” he said.
“Then keep up the good work.”
“Fuck off,” Renz said, but he was smiling.
“Good night, man.”
“Yeah,” Renz said. “Hey, Marquez. Thanks.”
“De nada.”
Renz dropped the link but sat still in the night for a while, trailing his fingers over flakes of concrete and listening to the crickets. Before he went to bed again, he ate a bowl of cereal standing up in the kitchen and then used her toothbrush to scrape the milk taste off his tongue. Anna had shifted in her sleep, taking up the whole bed. He kissed her shoulder as he rolled her back to her side. To his surprise, he slept.
At 6:30 in the morning, central time, a school bus packed with diesel-soaked fertilizer exploded in California, killing eighteen people and taking out civilian network access for half of the state. At 6:32, a fifteen-year-old girl detonated herself twenty feet away from the CEO of the EU’s biggest bank while he was finishing his breakfast at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan. At 6:35, simultaneous brushfires started outside ten major power transmission stations along the Eastern Seaboard. At 7:30, Renz was on a plane to New York. At ten minutes before ten, a ground car met him at the airport, and by noon, he was at the site of the attack.
The street should have been beautiful. The buildings soared up around them; nothing in Manhattan was built on less than a cathedral scale—it was the personality of the city. From the corner, he could just catch sight of the Chrysler Building. The café had been elegant once, not very long before. Two blackened, melted cars squatted at the curbside. The bodies had been taken away long before Renz and the others arrived, but the outlines were there, not in chalk but bright pink duct tape.
“Hey, Renz,” Paasikivi said as they took in the carnage. “Sorry about this. I know you wanted to see Anna.”
“Don’t let it eat you,” he said. “This is what they pay me for, right?”
Inside, the window of the café had blown in. Chunks of bulletproof glass three fingers thick lay on the starched linen, the wooden floors polished to a glow. The air still smelled like match heads.
The briefing had been short. OG 47 had done this kind of duty before. Renz pulled up an off-cell window on the right margin of his visual field so the forensics experts could demonstrate what they wanted. The feeds from his cell were stacked on the left. OGs 34 and 102 were security, keeping the area clear while they worked, but he didn’t open links to them; things were cluttered enough as it was.
Renz and his cell were the eyes and hands of the deep forensics team—men and women too valuable to risk in
the field. A second attack designed to take out agents at the scene was a common tactic. Pauel, still in Paris, joined in not because he was useful, but because he was a part of the cell and so part of the operation. He was good to talk with during the quiet times.
The next few hours were painfully dull. Paasikivi and Thorn, Marquez and himself—the expendables—all took simple instructions from the experts, measuring what they were told to, collecting samples of scorched metal and stained linen, glass and shrapnel in self-sealing bags, and waiting for the chatter of off-cell voices to agree on the next task to be done.
Renz and his cell were the eyes and hands, not the brain. He found he could follow the directions he was given without paying much attention. They drove his body; he waited.
They finished just after 8 P.M. local. There were flights out that night, but Paasikivi argued for a night in the city. Renz could feel Marquez’s attention on him like the sensation of being watched as Paasikivi and Thorn changed reservations for the whole cell. Renz almost stopped them, almost said he needed to go home and be with his wife. When he didn’t, Marquez didn’t mention it. With the forensics team gone, Renz arranged the other in-cell windows at the four corners of his visual field. An hour later, they were scattered over the island.
Marquez was on the edge of Central Park, his window showing Renz vistas of thick trees, their leaves black in the gloom of night. Paasikivi was sitting in a coffee shop at the top of a five-story bookstore, watching the lights of the city as much as the people in the café. Thorn sat in a sidewalk restaurant. Renz himself was walking through a subway station, heading south to SoHo because Pauel told him he’d like it. And Pauel, in the small hours of Paris morning, had taken himself out to an all-night café just to be in the spirit of things.
“I’ve always wanted to walk through Central Park,” Marquez said. “It’s probably safe enough, don’t you think?”
“Wait until morning,” Pauel said. “It’s too dangerous at night.”
Renz could hear the longing in Marquez’s sigh, imagined the way he would stuff his hands into his pockets to hide the disappointment, and found to his amusement that he’d done the same. Marquez’s gesture seemed to fit nicely on his own evening. The first breeze of the incoming train started to wash the subway platform, fluttering the fabric of his pants.
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 64
