In the Courts of the Sun (80 page)

₂
. All the air from the house would get sucked into a truck and pressurized for analysis. It would be replaced with argon. Finally, when the pressure of the gas systems was stable, the biowarfare team could start tearing apart the house. A forklift rolled up the driveway to the garage, ready to load the nitrogen blocks into gasket-sealed containment trucks. Like all the other suspects, human and inanimate, they’d be going to a Vancouver containment complex, where air flows in but no air flows out. Now there was a bit of gray daylight augmenting the electric light. It started drizzling. The cold front had come over. Just another day in the Great White North.
We sat around. As there got to be less and less to watch, people drifted out of the command center. Michael Weiner slapped me on the back as he left, like, “Good job, Columbo.” A few of the interns seemed to be going off to celebrate prematurely. The rest of us sat or stood there. We couldn’t believe it was over and kept waiting for someone to tell us it really was. Eventually I walked out, took a service elevator up to the east side of the Hyperbowl. It was gray and wet, but it felt like the morning rain was over. A driver on one of the shuttle coaches asked whether I wanted him to take me back to the dorm, but I said no. It was less than two miles, and walking it was about the only exercise I got lately.
“Hi,” A
₂
said. She touched me on the acromion. I said hi. I noticed there was another pair of workers walking about fifty yards behind her, probably another element of the contingent that had been tailing me around the compound. Even though I’d delivered on Madison, I was still in a bit of trouble because of my near-OD on the Steersman’s dust. Just ignore them, I thought. They’re for your own good. Right.
A
₂
wanted to come in, but I said I needed to just crash. She left. She was actually a really nice girl. I popped two blue Valia and oozed into the sack. Damn, I really am a bit wiped. I hadn’t really relaxed since . . . I don’t know. Since eighth grade or so. I rolled in and out of consciousness over the next twenty hours. Every once in a while I checked in with the team’s situation report. There was no new news. Tony Sic texted back that everybody was just hanging around the vending machines, sitting on pins and needles, or more like daggers and ice picks. At 2:08 A.M. on the twenty-second I took another two blues. I remember the time because four minutes later A
₂
banged on my door. There’d been a conference call from Ana. In Madison’s second interview he’d told the interrogators that, as of last week, he’d already distributed over a quart of the
Brucellis
, that his own tests on his family members and “a few friends” had shown that they already harbored contagious levels of the bacillus, and that, in his own corny phrase, it was all over but the dying.

[70]

T
he Wet Lizard used to be crowded all the time, but now it was still two-thirds empty at 1 p.M., and I got the feeling they’d let me sit here all day on two mai tais. I didn’t get why Marena’d wanted to meet me here, unless it was because it was close to the Belize City Airport. Maybe she wanted to coax me into her plane and get me back to the Stake. I sat at a too-small wobbly table on the sort of veranda on the second floor, looking out over Fort Street and trying to guess which of the parked cars belonged to the Executive Solutions people who were tailing me. My money’s on the circa-1980 Econoline, I thought. It was grungy on the outside, but the windows were new and emphatically tinted. There was probably another pair of dicks at the bar downstairs, in case I made a run for it on foot. I should really take photos and go over them, I thought. Learn who they all are. Except who cares, really? Lindsay’s put a lot of money into me. If he wants to feel like he’s protecting his investment, let him. I looked down at the big screen on my new phone. 1:39 P.M. The desktop background—well, it’s a little small to call it a desktop, but you know what I mean—was a new reconstruction of that crumbled mural that we’d seen back in the palace at Ix Ruinas, the one with all the bats and the Twin dude walking up to the Earthtoadess’s mul. Michael’d put his digital reimaginer to work on it and it looked almost new. It was still hard to see what was what, though. A cicada-killer wasp landed on the screen. I touched the button that made the thing vibrate and the critter flew off into the humid air. It had rained and now that the sun was out it was going to get steam-bathy. Good growth medium for new bacteria, I thought. Designer bacilli . . .
Except that wasn’t going to happen. By now—it was March 28—it was pretty clear that when Madison said he’d released the Goat, he’d just been blowing smoke at us. The stuff in the freezers had been the real deal, all right. But Madison kept changing his story. First he’d said it was already out there, and then he’d said he had confederates planning to release it, and then he’d said he’d sent some out in packages with timed heatless explosives that would go off sometime in November. But—so far as we could tell from the DHS’s terse reports—the more they’d sweated him, the less likely any of that sounded. The Goat couldn’t live long without care, anyway. And based on the amounts of colloids and other supplies he’d bought, on the day of the raid he still had everything he’d grown. Also the Game was backing up the DHS theory. That is, plays of the Sacrifice Game addressing the issue—two of mine, and a bunch of games by Tony and the others—suggested that the Goat had not gotten out into the world and probably never would.
And as far as the 4 Ahau date went—well, it was a little odd. So far, the only thing Madison had said about why he’d chosen the date was “People are into this 2012 thing. I’m just giving them what they want.” Otherwise, he hadn’t talked any Maya stuff. Or if he had, the spooks hadn’t told us about it.
I indulged in another sip of espresso. Hmm. I poured a half-shot of rum into the cup, took a minimarshmallow out of a baggie in my waist pocket, dropped that in, stirred everything around, and tried again. Better.
Fucking Madison. It wasn’t enough for him to be the biggest loser of all time. Since he’d fumbled the big score, now he had to give us all—“all” being the two or three hundred people, at most, who knew about the Goat—he still had to give us all a few days of agita just to milk whatever cred he had left. Weasel.
Well, at least they got him, I thought for the n
ⁿ
th time. Since I’m me, I was still amazed that government, or rather two governments—who, one naturally assumes, would always do almost everything wrong—had actually gotten their acts together. Not that they’d have found the guy without us. On the other hand, now they were saying that the Madison business had to stay classified—forever, one supposed—to avoid inspiring copycats. Uncharacteristically, I thought I might almost agree with them. Or at least I wanted to think about it before I blew the whistle. Of course, if they wanted us to keep it secret, that might also mean that they’d start bumping us all off. All of us who knew about Madison and whatever, that is. The old truism about how being paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you—well, the reason it’s called a truism is that it’s true. So naturally I wanted to get away from the Stake for a while. Maybe I’d use the Martin Cruz identity for a while and then switch to one of my Jed legends . . . hmm. I looked around again. Nobody.
Hmm.
Weirdly, the fact that the world would keep on going for a while almost felt like a bit of a letdown, after all the—
“Hi there,” Marena said.
She was wearing a Magic baseball cap, and a sort of bottom thing, and a sort of top. She looked a little less thin and a bit paler, but in a good way.
“Hi,” I said. My voice cracked Henry Aldrichly. So much for sounding all cool. I stood up. She kissed me but it was almost an air kiss.
“Please,
nehmen Sie Platz,
” she said. “Gentleman Jed.”
I sat. She sat. I had a box of those Cohiba Pyramides sitting on her side of the table—I hadn’t found a Maximón around here yet—and I pulled over another chair and put it on that.
“You look well,” I said. “Weller.”
“Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Pause. “Hey, how about a, a Kon-Tiki Zombie? I think they serve them in a hollow jackfruit with a parasol and dry ice smoke and a big Easter Island dude glowstick swizzle thing and everything.”
“You’re saying they can make me a zombie?” she asked.
“Or—oh. Heh.”
“Hi, welcome to the Wet Lizard,” a waitress interrupted. “Today we have a special on the Bikini Atoll Mai Tai, that’s made with the house coconut rum—”
Marena raised a hand and cut her off. “Could I get just a bottle of Fiji and a shot of Glen Moray?” she asked. “Thanks.”
Waitress girl bounced off.
“How’s Max doing?” I asked.
“He says his new school is too arty,” she said.
“Arty?”
“Yeah, they have the kids make all these leaf prints and, like, centerpieces out of pinecones and shit.”
“It sounds like hell.”
“Yeah. He’s good, though. He says hi.”
“Hi back, Maximum.”
“Hi.”
The waitress came back with the whiskey and water.
“Uh, how about a cloneburger?” I asked.
“Sorry, I’m not really hungry,” Marena said.
“Nor am I,” I said. “Sorry.”
The waitress left. Marena looked down at the street. There was a maroon BMW X1 SUV standing in the right lane, not far from the Econoline.
“Is that your ride?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She looked back at me and leaned back in her chair.
“No cigarette?” I asked.
“Not since Madison Day,” she said.
“Great.”
“I can give you a nicotine lollipop, though.”
“Oh, no, thanks. Want a marshmallow?”
“You know, I hate to break it to you, but most people don’t really like marshmallows. At least not to just eat them out of the bag.”
“They don’t? They sell a ton of them.”
“That’s just for—never mind.”
“You think—”
“So are you still on—sorry,” she said. “What were you saying?”
“What? Oh, sorry. Nothing.”
“No, go ahead.”
“No, I wasn’t saying anything. What were you going to ask?”
“Just, you’re still on retainer, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I just put in for some vacation time.”
“Well, I know it’s not exactly the Plaza Athénée out there, but if you could stand to come out to this thing, it’d be great.”
“At the Stake?”
“Yeah. At the Olympics complex. It’s nothing exciting, just, Lindsay’s having a sort of ribbon-cutting thing for the Hyperbowl.”
“Already? Is it done?”
“No, but they’re filming something there for the IOC, so I guess he wants to add some pomp.”
“Well, I’ll look in out there pretty soon,” I said. Hmm. Did she really want me at the Stake? That is, did she want me to come along so we could hang out together? Or just so they could keep an eye on me? Something wasn’t going right about this conversation. There was that sort of awkward distance happening. Maybe I should go along. Except if she really wanted me in, like,
that
way, she’d footsie me under the table or something. Wouldn’t she? Damn it, it’s like I’m still in grade school with this relationship shit. That’s why I hate interper—
“Also, you know, Lindsay’s working on getting those soldiers off the Ix site,” she said. “So they should open it up for us pretty soon. Legally, even.”
“Really?” I asked. “Even if the Belize war thing is still going on?” According to CNN, as of this morning they were still shelling each other across the Río Sarstún.
“That’s what Larry tells me,” she said. “Yeah, now that we’re the heroes of the hour.”
“Well, of course I’ll definitely come out for that.”
“Excellent.”
I finished my coffee concoction. I shifted in my chair and looked around. She shifted in her chair and looked around. A familiar-sounding dog was barking somewhere. The day was starting to feel all sticky and carbon-monoxidy.
“So what are you planning on doing otherwise?” she asked. “Like, long term.”
“I don’t know. I moved around some more corn futures today. I still have to pass Go and collect two hundred billion dollars.”
“How about getting into the time travel business?”
“Well, I thought I’d wait a bit so I can get into it earlier.”
“Heh. Yeah.”
“Yeah. Except, you know, if that were going to happen we’d already know about it.”
“How does that go again?”
“If there were ever going to be any time travel on any sort of large scale, any time in the future, then there’d be visitors from the future here now. We’d already know about them.”
“Maybe it’ll just be too expensive,” she said.
“Well, but, you know, TVs used to be expensive. The wormhole projection might be expensive now, but twenty years from now it’ll be cheap, and everybody’ll want to try it. Technology gets around.”
“Huh. Well, maybe . . . maybe they are here, but they wouldn’t be supposed to tell anybody.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it be better if they could tell us what to watch out for?”
“Except Taro said, you know, didn’t he say something about how you can’t do stuff like that because of the, the uncle problem?”
“The grandfather paradox.”
“Right.”
“Well, yeah, he did,” I said. “But, you know, the farther you go back, the less that’s a problem. So people way, way in the future from us, they could come back here and they wouldn’t run into much trouble.”
“Maybe it’s going to be illegal to take over people’s heads. Because it is basically murder, right?”
“Sure, but I don’t think . . . I mean, even if there were a law against going back at all and erasing anybody’s mind, even if it was considered murder, that sort of thing never stopped everybody. Right? Especially when they’re going to be out of the law’s reach anyway. They’ll be back in the past.”
“I guess,” she said. She tossed back the first half of her Scotch. I was starting to notice all the car horns. I wondered whether, if they were some noise birds made, people would think they sounded pretty. Probably not.
“Or they could just take over people who’d otherwise be about to die, and then help out their families or whatever to make it even . . . no, I don’t think that’s a problem without a workaround.”
“So you still think the reason they’re not here is because there isn’t any future.”
“Well . . . I don’t know,” I said.
She had a slug of Fiji. There was a pause.
“Sorry,” I said. “Maybe you’re thinking about Max.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe there’s some other good explanation. In fact, there probably is. Sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being such a fucking mom.”
“That’s good. Mom does you credit.”
“You know, the deal is,” she said, “when you have a child it’s like there’s no value on it. Somebody . . . some alien or god or whatever could come up to you and say, ‘Listen, if you give up your child I’ll cure cancer, and I’ll make everyone else live forever, and I’ll even eliminate all the suffering in the universe, ’ and you’d be like, no thanks.”
“Right,” I said.
“It’s some kind of chemical change. You turn into a life-support system for this other being.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Anyway, I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“No, it’s fine,” she said. She finished off the Glen Moray.
“Maybe the old Game’ll give us a clue about it,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Speaking of which, there is still stuff to take care of with the Game. Right? Madison’s not going to be the last doom dude out there.”
“No.”
“You have to keep working it. You’re like in that Philip Dick story, with the Bureau of Precrime.”
“I have to?”
“Well, I know I’m not your boss right now. But I mean, you know, you’re James Bond. Except you don’t have to leave the office.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine, I just meant, that, you know, I’m not the only thing going anymore,” I said. “I mean, I think Tony and the gang, they’re getting pretty good, so, you know. They can take care of it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And LEON’s getting good,” I said. “The thing’ll be running itself in a few years. We won’t even know what it’s doing. I mean, it’ll be way too complicated for human beings to check.”
“We’ll just have to trust LEON, then, right?”
“Well, that’s another issue,” I said.
I looked around. The sun was really getting belligerent. Somewhere, out in one of the alleys, somebody was vomiting. Loudly.
“Isn’t this kind of a low-rent town for a classy dame like you?” I asked.
“Yeah, it does kind of get you down after a while, doesn’t it?”
“Like after ten seconds.”
“So why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m not classy.”
Pause. The vomiting diminuendoed out.
“Listen,” she said, “I wanted to see you in person because I found out something that’s not too great and you’re going to be really mad.”
“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”
“But you’ll have a right to be mad. You got really, really screwed.”
“How? I bet I’m about to get arrested.”
“No, it’s nothing like—okay, look, you know how the, the blood-lightning-making stuff, how there are two parts to it, and one of them’s like a sense-of-space-getting-rid-of or whatever part? The one that sounds like an aftershave?”
“Old Steersman.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, I did some digging around on that.”
“Yeah?”
“And, and the, those Lotos people weren’t being—I mean, somebody told you and me both something different from the reality.”
“Which is what?”
“It’s not just a chemical.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a parasite.”
Pause.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“It’s a critter, it produces some kind of psychoactive—it’s like those zombie snail things, with the worms in their eyes, you know, they make the snails climb up on things so that birds’ll eat them—”