Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  By mutual unspoken agreement we had all given up the idea of immobilizing Tom with duct tape; the thought seemed grotesque. "Okay," I said. "You two are going to stay at least five hundred meters back. That should keep you completely out of Zudie's range, and he's got enough on his plate." They both nodded agreement, but Jesse said, "Let me hang a cellphone on your belt, Pop"

  "No," I said at the same time Tom shook his head. "We're going to keep this conversation as simple as we can."

  "Don't put it on speakerphone then. We'll only be able to listen."

  "Please do as he asks, Russell," Nika said stiffly.

  I gave in. Jesse fixed his cell to my belt, made sure I knew the buttons to start and stop a call. "Give her your number," I reminded him.

  "I have it," Nika said, and they both looked embarrassed.

  "Let's go," I said.

  Tom turned to Nika. "Wouldn't you like to pat me down first?"

  She hesitated.

  "I'd rather you would," he said.

  She nodded. She did a professional job, which is more thorough than they show in the movies, then stepped back and said, "Thank you, Tom."

  "We'll both feel easier now," he said. "I'm ready, Russell."

  "Let's do it."

  We crossed the beach without difficulty. The moon was just setting, which made it somewhere around 3:00 AM, but there was more than enough starlight to pick our way through the driftwood and mossy spots. The temperature was perfect, just warm enough for the gentle breeze to be welcome.

  "Why do you both feel easier now?" I asked as we walked.

  "Nika's more confident than she was that I'm unarmed, so she feels better. That makes her less likely to shoot me through the spine, so I feel better."

  I glanced over my shoulder, made out their silhouettes. "From that range?"

  "She took her car because she has a long gun in the trunk. I bet she's good with it. She's a very good cop."

  I felt an urge to walk farther away from him. Instead I moved closer and put my left arm around his shoulder. He made no comment. We walked that way all the way to the water's edge together. Then I stood closest to the surf, directly in front of him, where a through-and-through would get me too. He squeezed my left shoulder briefly and said, "Thank you. What now?"

  The phone buzzed at my belt, startling hell out of me. I brought it up where I could see it, hit start, put it to my ear and said, "I'm here, Jess."

  "What now?" he said.

  "Now we both wait here at the shore, for a long silent interval, both of trying to think as loud as we can, 'Come closer, Zudie, it's safe, I promise.'"

  "How long do you think that might take?"

  "I have absolutely no idea. Somewhere between ten minutes and eternity. He has forty years of paranoia to overcome. I'm going to put this back on my belt again. You'll hear us if he comes close enough to talk. Over and out."

  As I was pulling the phone away from my ear, I just made out his voice saying, "I love you, Pop." It startled me so badly I nearly dropped the phone. Then I just looked at it. Finally I brought it back near my mouth and said, "I'm very glad, son. I love you too," and hooked it to my belt.

  Fifteen minutes later I spotted Zudie, way out. A few minutes after that Tom did too. "I see him," he murmured.

  "I think he'll be in range, soon."

  He came forward and stood next to me on my left, making himself a viable target for Nika. I had my eyes shut for concentration, but I could hear him straighten to his full height, square his shoulders, rotate his head on his neck once, and stand facing the sea, taking long slow deep breaths I wished I could emulate. But I didn't need them to bellow in my head.

  —I BELIEVE HIM, ZUDIE—

  —I DON'T THINK YOU NEED TO BE AFRAID OF HIM—

  No result. I could practically feel Zudie's skepticism.

  —NIKA CAN DROP HIM WHERE HE STANDS IF SHE WANTS TO—

  —HE SURRENDERED HIS WEAPONS, PUT HIMSELF IN OUR HANDS, TO TALK TO YOU—

  Minutes went by. Tom waited in silence.

  —I BELIEVE HIM, ZUDIE—

  —I THINK YOU SHOULD GIVE HIM A CHANCE—

  Tom had taken Oxy from him. Tom had made him spend the rest of his life hiding as a hermit. This was never going to . . .

  —DO YOU REMEMBER THE DAY WE MET? THE FIRST THING I NOTICED ABOUT YOUR EYES? WHAT THEY TOLD ME YOU WERE VERY GOOD AT?

  The voice came from so far away I could barely hear it.

  "Forgiving. I remember, Slim,"

  Tom filled his lungs to shout a reply.

  "Don't!" I said urgently. "Unless you want to meet the RCMP. A lot of those boats moored out there are full of sleeping rich guys. You don't need to speak out loud with Zudie either."

  He emptied his lungs reluctantly. "I want to."

  "Don't worry. He'll be here soon."

  He subsided.

  About five minutes later we could hear Zudie's paddle. I opened my eyes and saw him. In another few minutes he braked to a stop about a hundred to a hundred and fifty meters out, and waited. So did I.

  "Zandor Zudenigo," Tom said aloud, but probably too softly for Zudie to hear him with his ears, "I humbly apologize to you. Your Oksana's death was my responsibilty: I chose the security system that killed her. It is my fault you've spent the past four decades running for your life, hiding from me. I took your love and I took your life and I have no excuse.

  "The man I was the first time you touched my mind was gravely damaged. I was better than Allen Campbell only in that I wasn't enjoying my work, but I'm sure we both used some of the same techniques. I think I only started to get better when I learned that you existed. I had begun to believe that the hijacking and corruption of the United States I already saw going on behind the scenes was inevitable, unstoppable, that they were just too smart, strong and well dug-in . . . and you were the first hint I'd ever gotten that it might be possible to fight the sons of bitches. I'd have sold my mother to get my hands on you. It was only after I lost you that I began to realize I didn't deserve you, that I wasn't a whole lot better than the people I was fighting. I'd been thinking of myself all along as a Good Guy, who'd been placed in a position where he had to do bad things."

  "You kept screaming that after me with your mind, as I ran through the forest that night," Zudie called back. "'Stop! I'm a Good Guy!' I remember."

  "And you didn't buy it for a second," Tom agreed. "After you were gone, I had to resolve that. There were only two possibilities. Either you were a lousy telepath, and no help to me—or I was someone who didn't deserve your help." He was silent for maybe half a minute, and then said, a bit louder than anything before, "I've been working on that ever since."

  Zudie let the waves take him in a little closer to shore before sculling to hold position again. He stayed there in silence for a minute.

  His first words were, "God, you look like hell, Billy," followed by, "You too, Russell."

  He was right. I know what I must look like, and Tom/Billy looked for the first time typical of his calendar age or maybe a little worse. But Zudie made us both look good. I saw a painting in a comparative religions book once that was supposed to be the Buddha in Hell Realm. Zudie looked like that.

  Billy made a noise in his throat. "Nobody's called me that in over fifty years," he called back.

  "You're still him, though."

  Zudie's voice sounded strained. All that time drifting near yachts had taken a lot out of him. "I'm going to back off a ways," I said. Neither objected. I took the cellphone from my belt, handed it to Billy. He nodded and hung it from his open shirt collar, and I backed away about thirty meters, at an angle, so I ended up the same distance from them both. I sat down on a driftwood log. I could still hear them speak, and I took a second to confirm that Nika and Jesse could too.

  "Here's what I need to do, Zandor," Billy said then. "Here's what I want from you." And then there was silence for two minutes, maybe three.

  Zudie let the current take him even closer in, until he was no mo
re than fifty meters away. I could just make out his face now, and I was shaken by the awesome total overwhelming sadness on it. I'd seen it only once before. In Susan's eyes, as she was telling me the doctor's prognosis. Wishing she didn't have to, even more than I was wishing I wasn't hearing it.

  "This is a good news, bad news thing," he said.

  Billy seemed to turn to stone. "Bad first."

  "I cannot help you. Not 'will not.' I can not. What you want is not doable."

  Billy gasped as if he'd been knifed, and rocked slightly. He took a long slow breath so deep it hurt me just to watch it, filled his chest, held it until he must have been seeing spots, and then released it as slowly as he had taken it in. "Why not? What did I get wrong?"

  Zudie sighed. "Several things, but chiefly a flawed premise. You've been assuming I'm the only telepath in the world, and that you are the only player in this game who knows there are any."

  That hit Billy even harder. "No!" he gasped.

  "How the hell did you think they became so strong—so fast—so surreptitiously? Enough to take us from the America of the sixties to the America of today, from Flower Power to Guantanamo, in a lousy few decades?

  Holy shit! I felt my stomach lurch. I had been making the same assumption for years, ever since I'd first learned Zudie's secret: that he was unique, a one-of-a-kind mutation. Most mutations that radical just die, before or shortly after birth. I'd always thought of him as being sort of like a two-headed baby that had miraculously survived, a once-a-generation freak. Now I felt stupid. Did anything ever happen once?

  "It can't be," Billy insisted. "If they have telepaths, why am I still alive?"

  "I hate to say it, but they must not have thought of you as a significant threat. There are too few of us, and we're all too fragile, for them to have everyone vetted. You just never scared any of them enough for them to run you past their telepath."

  If it shook me, it shattered Billy. He seemed to age before my eyes, like Dorian Grey, to shrink five percent. He sat down heavily on the sand, and it seemed surprising not to hear an accompanying crack of forearms or hip breaking.

  Zudie shocked me, then. He paddled to shore, beached the kayak, got out of it, tugged it farther up on the sand, and sat down equidistant from Billy and me. No more than ten or fifteen meters from either of us. I could see that it hurt him terribly, and that he didn't give a shit. Billy sat too.

  "Your ace in the hole is worthless, Billy," he said softly. "They know how to protect themselves from people like me; I'd never get near them. And they know how to use people like me. You and I together would be easier for them to hunt than you alone."

  "How many?" Billy asked hoarsely. "Worldwide."

  "I can't tell you for certain. I'm sure of three, pretty sure about another, and there must be others. But I have almost no facts."

  "How many are working for or with the Vandals?"

  "At least three."

  "What are they like? Can they be reached?"

  Zudie shook his head. "I can't really say. Everything I know about them is based on inference. I spend two hours a day monitoring news, worldwide from multiple sources. I'm a mathematician by trade, and when I look at the planetary news flow and think of it as an enormous equation, I can intuitively spot anomalies, apparent errors that resist analysis. Until I include the assumption that people like me exist in the world, and then the anomalies make perfect sense."

  "Haven't you tried to investi—"

  Zudie cut him off. "No. I have not directly touched another mind like my own since I was fourteen years old. I hope I never will again. It was . . . horrible in a way I can't explain. I'm sorry, Billy: I will not be your telepath-detector. Not at gunpoint. Not even if you threaten to send my friends to jail for being heroes. And even if you could drug or con me into it, the second I detected one, he'd know everything I knew. You'd be dead within the hour, and I'd be waiting for you in Hell. The secret weapon you've had your hopes pinned on is a dud. That's the truth."

  Billy sat up straight, folded his hands in his lap, raised his eyes to take in the murmuring surf nearby, the far horizon, and the unthinkably distant stars overhead. He started some sort of measured breathing exercise, yoga for all I know. We all left him alone with it, doing our own processing in our own ways.

  "You said there was good news," he said finally.

  "You've been overestimating the power of the Vandals to manipulate the country. There aren't as many as you think there are, and they aren't nearly as smart as you think they are, their influence isn't half as strong as you think it is."

  "Then why are they so fucking effective at fucking up my country?"

  Zudie flinched and winced, but stayed where he was. He shook his head. The sadness was back in his eyes. "I'm sorry, but that's on the country."

  "What?"

  "Face it. No secret cabal can corrupt a country that doesn't want to be corrupted, no matter how slick they are. If American does self destruct, it will be because in the end it chose to. It is possible to sit in front of a widescreen surround-sound HDTV and listen to a professional liar try his best to terrify you out of your wits with transparent nonsense and CGI effects . . . and to reject him, decline to take the exhilarating adrenalin high he's offering. Americans don't have to eat bullshit, and they're learning more about how to spot the taste every day. Vandals or their minions can manipulate news and entertainment on paper, on radio and on TV, but as your son said, there's not a lot they can do about the internet yet. America can still wise up and turn itself around. But only if it wants to enough. If it doesn't, no secret weapon will help."

  "So what am I supposed to do?"

  Again Zudie flinched, but took it. "What people of good will have been doing for millennia. Wait, watch for chances to nudge things the other way, and hope. Take the long view, and be content with small victories."

  "That's not good enough any more."

  "Why not?"

  "If the Vandals get their way, all the ethical progress of the last two hundred years will reverse itself. It could take centuries for the pendulum to swing back. My guess is they'll end up establishing a religious tyranny that will take an ocean of blood to bring down, because those offer the maximum control."

  "That's happened before in history," Zudie called. "It can be recovered from. The wheel keeps turning."

  "Not forever," Billy said sharply.

  "What do you mean?" I said.

  "Time's running out—for the whole human race. We have to start acting globally; there's no choice anymore. We have a century or so, tops, to get this stupid planet organized, to build the kind of wise benign compassionate Terran Federation you see in so many science fiction movies, to start making the world fair, and get it self-sustaining. If we haven't gotten at least that far by then, the resources necessary to develop and build and maintain the necessary space-based technology will be gone, pissed away in pointless squabbles. Then everything falls to shit, and the future holds only tribal anarchy and progressive decay."

  "You're losing me," I said.

  "On the evening of September 10, 2001, the United States was closer than any other nation in history has ever come to being widely trusted. That's not very close, granted. Many people despised us. Quite a few just disliked us. But deep down, most people trusted us, on that day, at least a little. No other nation ever had a better shot at persuading and cajoling all the nations of the world to come together and work together to save ourselves before it's too late.

  "And ever since the next morning, we've been blowing it. Setting fire to a century of built-up good will, frightening half the planet and offending the rest. We needed to be telling the world that had just seen us win the Cold War, you can trust us; we are just and fair . . . and instead we told them, murder two thousand of us, and we'll murder six hundred thousand people who had nothing to do with it, even if we have to kill another three thousand of our own and wound twenty-five thousand more in the process.

  "We need to get our heads stra
ight, and we don't have forever to do it. Not anymore. This is our very last chance to get it together."

  Zudie rose to his feet, brushed sand from his legs, walked right up to Billy and gave him his hand, helped him to his own feet. I couldn't recall the last time Zudie had physically touched me.

  "Then let's hope we do," Zudie told him, so softly I barely heard.

  "That's not good enough."

  "I know. It's just all we have. I promise you, in the end it isn't about you and me, or the Vandals, or which political party hired the best PR firm this term. It's about the American people. They've been freer than any humans before them for centuries now. If they do decide they'd rather be sheep, it'll be their choice. If they really are determined to turn off their brains and entertain themselves to death, we can't stop them.

  "But I'm much less sure that will happen than you are. Again and again in its history, America has gone through love affairs with ignorance and superstition and meanness and conformity, like recurring attacks of a bad fever. But so far, it has always recovered, rediscovered that knowledge and reason and kindness and personal liberty really are worth all the dreadful effort they cost.

  "We tend to start out each new century by going crazy for awhile, usually with fear, and behaving like idiots for the first thirty or forty years. But each time we seem to start returning to sanity around the fifties or sixties, and by the close of the century we've reached a new plateau of ethical awareness, higher than any before it. There's no reason to think it can't happen again."

  "And no reason to think it has to, just because it always has," Billy cried. "What if it doesn't happen this time?"

  "Then it won't, and America will join the British Empire and Rome and a whole bunch of other pinnacles of ethical achievement. And perhaps in time, it will be replaced by an improved version of them all, that will learn from past mistakes better. It is never safe to say that new technologies won't be discovered before all the oil and metals run out. If that doesn't happen, then you're right: the human race will die before long. On the bright side, you'll never live long enough to know the answer for sure either way."