Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  I hated that look of his, the gaze of a saint caught with his hand in the till. “I don’t want to pull rank, Justine. I know what’s needed. I promise not to get very sick on nicotine. I intend to get well with it.”

  “You’re ill? That doesn’t surprise me-”

  “We all are. Please don’t act the nanny; the role ill-suits you.” He didn’t have Hawke’s subtlety; he just pointed at the door.

  I went. I could already smell Alpine meadows.

  G G G

  The Swiss were an enterprising lot who understood money better than most. In a week I was back with a real tan and an itch to return. Meanwhile, Howie had collected a trunkful of manuscripts and custom-tailored old formal clothes. And yes, he was already dosing himself with nicotine and smoking strong tobacco as well.

  Handing him the packetful of travel vouchers, I tried to get him to endorse another trip for me. Lowering my voice for vibrancy: “There’s a nice room below yours at Clarens. Surely you’ll need me for, um, something.”

  “I’ll need all my concentration, thanks. I couldn’t do justice to the problem if I were constantly thinking of a lovely woman just downstairs.”

  I tried once more: “It could be so romantic, Howard.”

  “Too right,” he muttered, tasting me with his eyes, but sadly-like a man craving cheesecake who fears he’ll miss the last rowboat out of hell if he stops for a nibble.

  “You really must think you’ve got it this time,” I said.

  The little chin came up. “Yes, I do. Seems obvious now. Ah-where’re my tickets?”

  “In your hand, fool. What will you do without me? Well, give me a call when you’re through with your Swiss mystery,” I said quickly, and made a toujours gai exit.

  So Howie went alone to Clarens carrying his damned Mahorka tobacco and his double-damned, old-fashioned manuscripts and high-collared shirts, and I didn’t see him again for almost a month. But I know he went there because I spoke with him by vidphone several times. I even had to wire money to a doctor who visited Howie in his pension. The man confirmed that Howie’s neuralgia was probably from nicotine poisoning. I sent money to Howie’s concierge, too, as a bribe to keep her from taking the muted upright piano from Howie. It wasn’t loud, she admitted; merely calamitous. She might have been describing the nightmares I was having by then. In each of them, I was kept marking time while tacky little people passed me.

  While Howie was gone I backtracked him. His Delphium account showed he’d taken a taxi to the old library annex before deciding on his Swiss trip. I unearthed no hint of what he went there for. I got Howie’s passplates-Delphium’s personnel files are thorough-and wasted hours searching his grungy little apartment for a gap in his files, notations of his computer access codes, anything to build a scenario on. I found nothing of interest, beyond the poster-sized blowup of a candid holo that faced Howie’s desk. I wondered when Howie had taken it; nice, but it hadn’t captured the real me.

  I figured there was an even chance that Howie would wind up in a loony bin, in which case Cabot Hawke would seek some heavy explanations from me. And I hadn’t any, until it occurred to me that Howie might be ignoring his personal bills while in Switzerland. Paying his bills gave me slender reason to search his apartment. The rent bill would include the number of times his door passplate was used, so Howie would eventually know someone had been there.

  Utility companies can be so-o-o understanding when you offer to pay overdue bills. They weren’t angry at Howie. CompuCenter wasn’t, either; his bill for the past few weeks had been hardly more than the base rate. Hardly more? Well, his apartment terminal had been used for only thirty-nine minutes since his last payment. A trifling sum, which would be carried over since it had, after all, been spent within the past few days.

  Within the past few days?

  I kept the tremolo from my voice, thanked them, rang off. Somebody had been using Howie’s apartment, and very recently.

  I called his apartment manager and offered to pay his rent. Yes, Howard Prior was slightly delinquent. Gentle, sweet man, honest to a fault; not to worry.

  I simpered into the vidphone, “Howie wanted me to take care of things, but he’s an absent-minded dear. Did he sublet the place or let any of-our friends use it?”

  The manager consulted her terminal, then said, “No. His door passplate’s been used only once in the past few weeks.”

  “Would you know when that was?”

  “Uh-just today, about noon.” She cocked her head. “Something wrong?”

  Something goosefleshcrawlingly wrong. “No,” I smiled past my chill, then thanked her and rang off again. That single entry at noon had been mine. No one else had passed through that door in weeks.

  Yet his apartment terminal had been used very recently. And CompuCenter long ago stopped permitting remote processing through private terminals.

  I stood gazing down at Howie’s desk terminal, then at my picture on Howie’s wall, until my neck began to prickle. I sensed a presence. Maybe not exactly human. What if someone had been in his apartment all this time? In fact, what if someone were still there with me, watching me, silently waiting in the shadow-haunted bedroom? The sensation of an unseen presence became a hobgoblin that forced me out of Howie’s apartment at a dead run.

  By the time I reached Delphium, my panic had transmuted to rage and I knew just the pickaninny to take it out on. I passplated myself into Howie’s office, intending to call him from his own office for a little therapeutic Swiss sturm und drang.

  I didn’t need to make that call. Howie Prior, in the flesh, sat on his desk, swinging his legs and grinning like an imp with a forefinger across his lips. He didn’t need the gesture. I tried to speak but couldn’t find the breath for it.

  “Don’t you ever tell anyone I started hyperventilating,” I said, still leaning against his door, willing my hands to stop shaking as I found my compact. “I don’t know what industrial espionage you’re up to, but I could blow your whole show. You’re going to tell me about it right now, Howard Prior. Right now,” I repeated.

  “You again called me ‘Howard,’ ” he said smiling. His face, ugly as it was, bore a frightful beauty, his dark eyes shining deep under his brow ridge, teeth bright between pale lips. I mean, he looked-haunted, but unafraid. Exalted. All right then: beatified.

  I keyed Cabot Hawke’s emergency priority code on the vidphone, leaving it on hold so that I needed only to press the execute bar. “You look like hell frozen solid, Howie. And you’ve got me suspicious, and you don’t want to do that unless you’re after big trouble. Set me at ease.”

  “That’s why here am I.”

  “You can start by telling me who’s been using your apartment terminal this week.”

  “I did. A few things there to verify were, and easiest it seemed-”

  “A lie. You haven’t been through that door in weeks. Anyhow, you can’t afford to shuttle back and forth from Europe and Delphium sure as hell hasn’t bought you more tickets, and your concierge has orders to call me if you disappear or start acting crazy. And stop talking funny, you’re beginning to scare me.”

  “Sorry. I hadn’t thought how to you it might look. But I assure you, I several times my terminal used. Maybe a half-hour.”

  Again that unspeakable sunburst smile of a madman or a bright angel: “However, yes I can afford anywhere to go I bloody please. And so can you, Justine.”

  My suspicions made a quick test-connection. “You broke the Cetian code and sold it!”

  Softly, lovingly, so quietly I almost missed it: “Broke I the human code.” He caught himself garbling the phrase and slapped his knee. “Human communication breakdown: it’s wonderful. Don’t you want to know where was hiding our message?”

  “I want to know what it said,” I hedged.

  “Life lastingever,” he said, obviously amused now by his own speech patterns that suggested an unhinged mind. He opened his arms, palms up, and continued: “Freedom to discover, to anywhere go. To pain
an end. That is part of what it said. Forgive my troubled syntax,” he chuckled. “I must sound a bit queer but-but you see, once you, um, internalize the translation, you needn’t obey any of the nasty little hierarchies that hag-ride us until we can’t see Godhood staring us in the face.

  “We even make languages into stumbling blocks; help it we cannot! This word must go here, there another, yonder that phrase. Change the sequence, the pecking order, and you may impair the meaning. Precedence. Status The stuff of our shell protective.”

  “What’s wrong with protection?”

  “Nothing-if you’re an embryo. The translation is our egg tooth.” Seeing my headshake, he added, “We can use it to peck our way out of the egg of the hereandnow.”

  He had all the earmarks of a loser who had hit on some nutcake rationale for giving up the good fight. By now he’d probably drained his savings, telling himself it didn’t matter. If and when he came to his senses again, Howie was going to be damned sorry. “Howie, do you suppose neuralgia from a self-poisoning could just possibly have a teeny weeny something to do with your outlook?”

  “Indirectly-but the translation the crucial thing is. To share it with you first I chose. Than yours, no one’s need could be greater.”

  “Enough of your ding-y bullshit! You should’ve said nobody’s single-minded determination could be greater,” I said proudly.

  “Wrong-headed determination amounts to the same thing,” he sighed.

  “I know my priorities,” I said in anger, “and I’ll tell you yours. First let me see the damned translation.”

  “Lor’ love you, Justine, you don’t see it, you-empath it. The code was based on cardiac rhythms our. I think was Stravinsky too much the cold intellectual to realize what with the Sacre he had done. Didn’t have crypt-analysis to guide, poor man; and suffering he was from his tobacco habit in Clarens.” A sense of sorrow and wonder suffused Howie’s face. “Imagine how he might have exulted once the Sacre-the Rite-translated was into his own human rhythms.”

  “Talk sense! Once the right what was translated?”

  “The Rite of Spring; Le Sacre du Printemps! Stravinsky said it was really a coronation of spring. Proximans had their Coronation lyric to free them; Cetians had their Rebirth mosaic. And since primitive times, societies human have to something like this tuned into. Frazer, in The New Golden Bough, said the celebration of spring is to the expulsion of death a sequel. Frazer just let notions of sequence bugger him up. Stravinsky didn’t-until later rewrote the music he.” Animated, pleased as a kid, Howie rushed on. “If the Rite of Spring you’ve ever heard, you know it’s from metric patterns liberated.”

  “I wish you knew how you sound to me,” I warned him.

  “Only at first,” he said chortling. “Monteux the conductor thought raving mad Stravinsky when the piano score first he heard. Himself Stravinsky complained that badly overbalanced were some parts. So rewrote it he. Harmonies were more than dense; impenetrable they were. Until now,” he said, as if in prayer, and looked at me shyly. “Gibberish to you this is, suppose I.”

  I had to rearrange Howie’s chatter in my head, and the thought that he might be teasing me tempered my confusion with fury. “So you’ve been playing Stravinsky; that much I understand. And it sent you around the bend.”

  “Listened-truly listened-to the translation, I once only.” He turned to his keyboard. “Fed it I into memory with a recording old of the composer’s recollections. Listen.” He punched an instruction.

  The voice from the speaker was aged, unemotional, precise. Old Stravinsky’s accent sounded more German than Russian. And with it, beneath it, was a soft thudding asymmetry that I took to be an abnormal heartbeat.

  Except that it was informing me, its message as clear as speech.

  Howie had run two audio tracks together. On one track, Igor Stravinsky was saying, “Very little immediate tradition lies behind the Sacre du Printemps, however-and no theory. I had only my ear to help me. I heard; and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which the Sacre passed . . .”

  Then only the second audio track, the drumbeat whisper of some thunderous concept I hadn’t been listening to, emerged into the silence beyond the old man’s words. I thought, And Howie listened had to it once only, and then I screamed.

  It couldn’t have been more than a few moments later when I felt Howie’s skinny hands stroking my shoulder. I lay in a fetal crouch on his floor hands over my ears, and there was a dampness between my legs that had nothing to do with sex. I could hear my torturer murmuring, “Let it free you, Justine.” At least he had stopped that subversive mindbending throb of-knowledge? Heresy? I didn’t have a label for it, but I loathed it.

  I swiped at his arm as I struggled up, waiting for my strength to return. “Free me from what, you stupid abo? My sanity?”

  “Your shell of needs,” he said, still kneeling uncaring that I towered above him. “Needs that into a cage we made. Restrictions terrible of imprisonment in hierarchies, and time, and space.”

  I reached for my compact; checked to see that its gas cell had nearly a full charge, and took a nice long hit to quell my tremors. “All my life I’ve trained and fought to be somebody, Howie. Now I’m halfway up the ladder and you want to do me the favor, the FAVOR, of mindwashing me into-what? Some kind of born-again Buddhist?”

  “Anything timeplace you choose,” he said. “Forever,” he said. “It offers such freedom that honest to be, I’m growing restless with you. You heard some of it. You know, too.”

  He was right. It had taken only a minute of that telepathic thudding seduction to push me to the brink of an internal precipice. Another few moments and I knew, positively, I wouldn’t have given a damn for my job, or getting Hawke’s job, for as long as the madness lasted.

  Well, I’d been strong enough to resist. But what if I could get Hawke to listen! Ah, yes; just as Howie wanted me to listen. “Howard, is your translation stored in your private access code?”

  “No,” he said with a smile, and showed me. “It is for access free. It no longer to me belongs, Justine. Returned I to arrange its broadcast, and to first with you share it.”

  He turned away to his terminal. I triggered my compact, holding it under his nose while gripping his head with all my strength. For only an instant he struggled, then relaxed against my breast, head back, smiling up into my face. “More proof, my love?” He inhaled deeply, deliberately.

  He kept on breathing the stuff until I felt the thumping in his little body diminish, falter, quit. Even before that, though, something abandoned his gaze.

  As long as his lungs were pumping, I held on. He’d gone berserk, I rehearsed, but I’d been too strong for him. Kept my compact hissing too long out of pure terror. It would be self-defense, and I was sure Hawke would back me. I was sure because I would soon have Hawke working for me.

  Howie’s heart was still. That had a message for me, too; it told me I’d go on winning, no matter what.

  I checked Howie’s terminal again, momentarily horrified that I might not be able to retrieve that demonic message. It was there, all right. I changed its address so that only I could locate it again-or so I thought. I stretched the body out on the floor, then remembered to rip my blouse and to use the dead fingernails to drag welts along my throat. When I left Howie’s little office I staggered convincingly.

  Hawke left a conference in midsentence when he saw me on his vidphone. In his study, he fussed over me in real concern. Gradually I let him understand what I’d rehearsed. I’ve always been able to evoke tears on demand.

  At the crucial point, Hawke showed no suspicion. “Dead? And you didn’t get a copy of his translation? Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered, then patted me distractedly. “I’m not angry with you, Jus’. You can’t be blamed.”

  I made it tentative: “I-might be able to find it. In his office. Uh-hadn’t we better get rid of . . . ?” I waved my hand instead of saying it. Hawke knew very well there are some things I’d prefer not to say a
loud.

  “You sure you’re up to it?”

  I took a deep breath, smiled my bravest smile, nodded. I said, “We wouldn’t want the police stumbling onto Howie’s translation before we do.”

  A few minutes later I had something more to worry about. Howie Prior’s body was gone. “Look,” I said to Hawke, balling my fists, “I did not imagine it. I-may have been wrong about his heart stopping.” I hadn’t been.

  “Or else someone removed his body. I’m trying to figure out how and why,” Hawke said.

  I moved to Howie’s terminal, readied my fingers at the keys. “I’m feeling barfish,” I said as preamble in a vulnerable little-girl voice that seldom failed. “I may have to . . .” I had intended to “find” Howie’s translation and then leave quickly while Cabot Hawke absorbed it. But I swear, I never touched a key.

  “We pause for a special bulletin,” said a familiar voice; Howie’s, of course. If he wanted people to listen, he had to ease them into it in a familiar way. “If carefully you listen, this is the very last bulletin special you will ever need.”

  The next voice was Stravinsky’s. I heard the ravishing velvet hammer of propaganda beneath it, thrust my thumbs into my ears, and hummed while I tried not to feel the message vibrating through me.

  Hawke didn’t notice me. After a moment he sat down, his face transformed in something beyond sexual rapture. I could almost understand, dimly, the message throbbing through my shoe soles. When I eased out of the room, Cabot Hawke was lost in Howie’s translation.

  En route to Hawke’s office, I kept hearing stray bits of that voiceless communiqué from every open doorway, and hummed louder. By some power I couldn’t yet guess, Howard Prior had plugged his translation into every channel of every terminal and holovision set in existence. I had to put my heel through Hawke’s speakers but finally, insulated by his plush pile carpet and my loudest soprano, I could feel free of that hellish persuasion.

  Two hours later I left Delphium. There wasn’t anybody there anyway. Then I left Baltimore. There wasn’t anybody there, either.