Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (2 page)

"More than a hundred! See," he said, and leaned over the counter, elbows on the glass, the book in his hands again. He touched the spine, once black, now split with white lines that nearly erased the title. "It's mostly worn off. Number 12. Early one." Bekka had approached without Jimmy hearing her.

"Look at you," she said. "You buying that?"

He pursed his lips. "Yeah."

"The things I'm learning about you," she said, and picked up the book. "That's a good thing. Little surprises."

"The cover's coming off," Jimmy said to them both.

"Let me put some tape on it," the clerk said. "By the way, I'm Darren." His tongue peeked from the corner of his mouth as he smoothed the tape down. "I tell you, I wish she were still alive to ask about this guy."

Bekka poked Jimmy's arm. "Who's 'she'?"

"His relative. She wrote this."

"She was my great-great aunt. Or probably cousin."

Bekka put her book atop Jimmy's; Jimmy had already produced a ten.

"I'll accept that," Bekka said, and nudged him.

"Computer's down," Darren said. He tapped straight down onto a fat calculator atop the counter, then recorded something on a legal pad. "Funny to think there was a time when someone like this, you know, did his thing. Saved the world." He bagged the books. "Of course, if he were around now, he'd be..." He looked upward, wiggling his fingers, calculating.

Jimmy slid the book from the bag. "He'd be like this."

"Ha. Well... yeah."

Brigadier General Weston refilled her glass from the water dispenser, which released gurgles of air into the enormous upended jug. The corner office windows ran the length of two walls, and Weston looked toward the road on which Jimmy had arrived. She quickly drained half her glass. Jimmy, having spent his entire morning seated, over the course of three flights and a drive, stood behind the proffered chair, his black beret joining the general's beige cap on her desk.

"Did you see the video?" she asked. "Of the capture?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Holy Jesus come again, that was something. It took a twenty-person team." She drank the rest of the glass and went to refill it. "Want some?"

"That'd be great, ma'am."

Though air-conditioned, the room felt stuffy, still warm from the morning sun. The general set down her own glass on her featureless metal desk and took another glass from a small table. "The doctor tells me I need to keep hydrated. I just wish I could take in all the water I'm supposed to and not have to hit the bathroom so much." She handed him his water. "Here's to not getting old too fast."

The icy water shocked his front teeth.

"Lieutenant, I've been given no details of your mission, except that you're to conduct an interrogation. You've got the look of an innocent soul, but let me say, I want none of that Abu Ghraib shit here. You didn't put in time there, did you?"

"No," Jimmy said, but he took too long to answer, and the general read it wrong.

"I'm going to require honesty and cooperation from you, Lieutenant, and if those qualities do not make themselves evident to me, I'm shipping you back to Intelligence post haste. In the last two weeks, they've taken both my XO and an entirely affable lieutenant colonel who did just about all the grunt work around here. This assignment may not end with commendations and effusive praise, but I will not have it end with courts martial."

"Honestly, General," Jimmy said. "I didn't. I wasn't there. I was in country. I saw some prisoners on their way there. That's it." He didn't say what a failure it all had been, pointless, both his interrogations and the entire military escapade.

Weston's scrutiny lingered; then her jaw shifted side to side, and she nodded. "All right. Last time MI came through here was before I arrived. I don't know what all they did, but I know it was ineffective. Every orifice has been examined, and there aren't any weapons of mass destruction up his ass. Whatever's in his brain, they couldn't get it. Truly, I don't know if this guy has any intel or not."

"So why keep holding him?"

"The same reason they'll be holding those poor sons of bitches in Guantanamo for another twenty years."

He nodded, recalling images of cage-like enclosures and kneeling men. "You've been here how long?"

"Nearly two years. The past six months, holding just one man." She swirled the glass as if it held ice, or two substances in need of mixing, and set to gazing on the landscape again.

Jimmy took in the nothing that lay beyond Perilous Base. Twice on the road from the airport, the high-riding car had passed ground-level signs that identified the Texas landscape on either side as a nature refuge, but from Jimmy's perspective, attempts at preserving anything living had failed. A few weeds, an uninviting blank stretch of charmless, lumpy tan: perhaps there was life there that couldn't be seen, below the surface. Or, as he remembered from some grade school lesson, maybe rains visited this dry country one week out of the year, causing flash floods, filling every culvert and ditch, causing the colorless vista to blossom in yellows and reds. What did he know of this part of the world?

Jimmy had imagined the Hummer as if from above, animated, a red line reaching forward toward a set of small cubes set on the desert floor. And then exactly that appeared ahead of him, two-story buildings the color of the earth, surrounded by tiers of wire, and he sucked his upper lip, wondering if the confirmation of his mental picture was another manifestation of his abilities. He'd have to record it in his journal, himself an experiment on which he kept a close watch.

Jimmy said, "Can you tell me anything that isn't in the files?"

"The files," scoffed Weston. "I've never seen records like that. All the standard papers are missing. He might be a foreign national, for all we know. Rumors and adventure stories going back to the 1920s. Supposedly, the man has operatives and contacts everywhere. Either someone is withholding what's known about him, or he has friends who've covered his tracks. Or both." Her gaze wandered. "What's not in the files," she mused. "Well, he's scared of dogs."

"You've got dogs here?"

"The BrightLine people train them here. They've got their own yard for it. That deal was done before I arrived. There used to be MPs with dogs. One day—so the story goes—he was being taken to the yard when the dogs were in the corridor and the dogs spooked him. Shook him up." She paused, waving a finger as she thought of what she might have left out. "Ah. Covey is head of the security people, and for the time being, he reports directly to me." She raised and lowered her head, overemphasizing her visual evaluation of Jimmy. "I assume you're some kind of last-ditch effort."

"That's how I think of it, too, ma'am."

"Let me tell you how this is going to work. No materials of any kind are allowed in there, except what goes in with his meals, and we get that back. We keep every possible tool or weapon away from him; about the only reliable intel is that he's an expert in everything—if you believe some of the anecdotes, the guy can make a black hole in a lab or turn a piece of lint into a concussion grenade. If I could send you in there naked, I would. You'll have two guards with you until he's secured. Then we'll keep an eye on you from next door."

"There's a separate viewing room, is that right?"

"That's right."

"Well, I won't be in the room with him for this... procedure. I'll be in the next room. I won't interact with him."

Jimmy watched her turn this over—squinting with one eye, then sitting on the corner of her desk. "Aw, nuts," she said. "Spooky stuff?"

"Ah..."

"You gonna tell me what I'm thinking, Lieutenant?"

"No, ma'am. It's not like that. I won't read his mind." As convincingly as possible, he said, "I'm going to realign his will."

He could tell she thought of asking what that phrase might mean, but elected to move on. "And you've had success with this approach?"

"I can't really discuss—" he began, but Weston waved away his words and moved toward the door.

"Unless you've been sent to rescue him, I'll just leave you to do your thing."

Jimmy hefted his duffel from the floor. "I did want to ask: The birth year... that can't be right. Not with the fight he put up."

"Over a hundred?" He waited for her to shrug, but instead she said, "With no birth certificate, it's obviously an estimate. He's definitely
old".
She opened the door for Jimmy. "We've been calling him Methusaleh."

Jimmy pushed his sunglasses closer to his eyes and frowned at the palm-tree print on his trunks—pickings had been slim at Target the day before the trip—while Bekka and her friends, Max and Megan, graduate mathematics students at Cornell, continued to reminisce about Wesleyan. When Jimmy picked up his book, Bekka noticed.

We might work a little harder to include Jimmy in our conversation," she said.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'll go back in the water in a bit." Three small children rushed past, heels flinging up sand; Bekka sat forward to brush off the towel.

"Ithaca seems like a nice little city," she said. "Was it founded by Greeks?"

"Actually, a lot of towns around here have classical names, the ones without Iroquois names, that is," Max said, and Jimmy watched him tuck in his lips and shut his eyes, preparing to elaborate. He had left his T-shirt off after swimming, and Jimmy figured that he would, in a few hours, be red and in pain. "Roman and Greek cities and personalities. Here's an interesting thing: Seneca was both a Roman senator and an Iroquois nation. There's even a Homer. And an Ovid."

Megan said, "Who's Ovid again?" The meager breeze from off the water swirled across the beach and kept tossing her corn silk hair into her face. "Blah," she said, pulling hair from her mouth.

"Latin poet. He wrote the
Metamorphoses,
a collection of stories about changes, changes of form, people changing into trees or changing into other creatures. Did I tell you? Lipkiss, my classics prof, e-mailed me a poem called 'Ithaka' the other day."

"She was in love with you," Megan said.

"That poem. You mean 'Ulysses'?" Bekka asked.

"No, not the 'To strive, to find...' Not that. What's that, Tennyson?"

"Tennyson," agreed Bekka. "I had to memorize that for a recitation in high school." She made a fist and brought her arm across her chest, regal and sonorous. "'To strive, to seek, to find, and
not
to
yield!'"

"Not that. No, the poem is called 'Ithaka.' There's something with 'Hope the voyage is long...' The poet's Cavafy."

"Our voyage to Ithaca wasn't terribly long," Bekka said. "Not of
epic
length, right?" She put her fist against Jimmy's shoulder and shoved, and he turned that into a face-first topple into the blanket. She giggled, tickling him till he sat and grabbed her lively hands.

Max got up on one knee as if to rise, then reseated himself and cleared his throat. "Bekka says you were in the military."

Jimmy grinned. "She speaks the truth," he said, echoing Bekka's stentorian tone, winking at her.

"Did you... were you..."

Megan's face suggested caution. "Max..."

"I'm just... I'm not..."

"You want to know if I was stationed in Afghanistan or Iraq." Jimmy swung his sunglasses up to rest atop his head. Both men squinted against the brilliance. "I was in Iraq."

"Well." Max gave something like a short nod that might just have been him gauging his tone before he spoke. "Thank you for your service."

Jimmy gave the only adequate answer. "You're welcome." That he had spent time in Iraq was all he had told Bekka, all he could tell her. The other man's face expressed understanding of this stranger on the beach, but Jimmy knew Max didn't know a thing. Looking at the stretch of sand beyond Max, pitted where people had stepped, he thought of the desert floor surrounding the Texas prison, though the texture wasn't the same and the color wasn't the same. Sand came in infinite varieties.

Max asked Jimmy, "Have
you
read
The Odyssey?
Or
The Iliad?"

"Odyssey.
In high school." He felt a twinge of sorrow for that lost self.

"I was going to say that when you tie it to
The Iliad,
it's this story about what happens in war and what it's like to be a returning soldier."

"Mm-hm." Jimmy did not want to have this conversation, but he recalled now flattening the book open on his desk. His thumb involuntarily moved, and he recalled the book in his hand. "What was," he began, and thought harder. "There are those phrases like 'wine-dark sea' and 'dawn's something.'"

"Rosy-fingered dawn. That's the Fitzgerald version."

"Didn't Odysseus have some phrase connected with him?"

"It varies," Max said, in his element, not really talking to Jimmy, expounding. "The man of woe. Skilled in ways of contending. Wily. The cunning man. The man of twists and turns. That's Fagles, one of the latest translations. Odysseus is the smartest guy in any Mediterranean room. He can see his way out of any situation, probably because he's been through so much, had so many adventures. His only failing, if it's a failing, is it takes him forever to get back to Ithaka after the war. They're not just a strategy. The twists and turns are his life story."

"He has to get back... to his wife?"

"Penelope. Remember, there are all these 'suitors'? The suitors make the mistake of thinking that just because he's old now, or older, he's helpless. He can't possibly fight this crowd of younger men. But everything he's gone through has made him stronger. You can't beat Odysseus." He squinted into this idea, then opened his eyes at Jimmy. "Does that strike you as ridiculous? I mean, personally. You've been in a war, or conflict. And I'm talking about the journeys of this
make-believe
fighter. Wouldn't a real person be... traumatized by these things?"

Aware of Bekka sitting stiff beside him, Jimmy pushed his pale soles into the sand, digging with them, making a track. He found himself wondering how far down the sand extended. When did it become dirt, stone, whatever lay deeper? What were the layers? Mantle, crust...