Slant (50 page)

Marcus stares at the large syringe in the woman's hand. His eyes widen.

"What did you put in me?" he asks, voice shrill.

"Medical monitors. Stabilizers. You'll be fine--they'll start setting and

knitting that leg and sealing off the wound in a few minutes."

"No!" Marcus screams, thrashing. "No goddamn crutches! Let me go--get

them out of me!"

Martin makes a face and takes a deep breath, but says nothing to the doctors.

He pulls Mary aside. "Let's go. I need to keep up with the others. I know what

to look for."

"What about him?" Mary asks, glancing at Marcus.

"I'd be more concerned about myself, if I were you."

Mary joins him and they walk through the library. "Shit," she says, then,

"Muh huh. Fuh ki kikh."

Martin gives her a quick sidewise look.

"It's happening already, isn't it?" Mary asks him.

"I'd say so," Martin answers. "Cipher Snow's disease."

Jonathan has not yet made up his mind. He is looking for Giffey. He might help him set the charges. It is the least he can do to exact some revenge for his wife, his family, his own lost self. Then he wonders if he will go back and get Marcus out of Omphalos. Nothing is fixed, nothing sure. From the numbness through the clarity, he now feels almost like a child again. The brightly

308 GREG BEAR

seem enchanting, dream-like, yet at the same time his adult portion wonders at the monumental waste and lack of planning. As if they couldn't possiblyplan to succeed, could not imagine succeeding. Sink the rest of humanity, but never follow through...

He has seen a lot of death recently and it is lighting off little depth-charges in his soul: intimations of mortality, accountability, of what he values most on this Earth, in this life: his family.

Giffey called him a family man. He is that.

He longs for a glimpse of Penelope or Hiram; specks them at various stages in their young lives, as infants in his arms, the smell of their fuzzy heads warm and spicy-sweet in his nose, then as adults, raising their own children. Continuity and mortality and immortality all confused.

He can't picture Chloe, can't see her face. After so many years of marriage, this puzzles him; but the woman he married seems to have vanished, to be replaced by an assortment of miseries and challenges and losses. For a moment, he wants to sit in an inset doorway (the door is locked) and simply try to recall pleasant things about this woman who is, after all, his wife, with all that suggests and entails. Is he whole if he can't picture, with some pleasure, the mother of Hiram and Penelope?

He turns within the inset and sees a short, narrow service corridor lined with piping and maintenance boxes. At the end of the corridor is an elevator. The doors stand half-open. He does not think it is one of the emergency elevators; it is small, barely large enough for two people.

A sign next to the elevator says, No SERVICE ADMITTANCE. AUTHORIZED MANAGEMENT ONLY. He reaches his arm between the doors and shoves one aside with the inside crook of his elbow. It might have been

4mmed; now shudder and open all the way, then begin to close

both

doors

again, resetting after the power failure.

Jonathan slips inside before the doors shut. The elevator does not go up; from here, it only goes down. There is one button. He pushes the button.

For a moment, in the small enclosure, there is silence and peace. He imagines himself away from all that has happened, isolated and senseless in a controlled and controlling space. The elevator does not move. He doesn't care; it is quiet. Nobody can see him or ask anything of him.

Then Jonathan completes the equation. The elevator muffles sound and cuts off air. It is peaceful and small, like a coffin. Like spending a hundred years in a cold box, awaiting resurrection; like spending a thousand years in continuous warm sleep with all inputs shut down because of a malfunction. A thousand years of Marcus Reilly's cost-saving, poorly planned immortality, catered to by the creations of a madwoman, Seefa Schnee.

He reaches up to touch the door. All the fear that has been kept in reserve begins to push over the gates. He sees Ken Jenner hit by the backspray of

/ SLANT 309

some undefined weapon, and GifJ3y, everybody, is wrong; the MGN does not recognize friend or foe, everybody is foe. "Please!" he screams, pounding on the door in earnest. "Please!" That is all he can say. His throat jams and he falls to the floor, to allow more space above his head, to decompress that closing dimension. He is convinced that this is Marcus's doing, to punish Jonathan for leaving him back by the library entrance. If he comes out of this needing therapy, then Marcus's unknown disease will turn him into a Ken Jenner, jabbering uncontrollable obscenities--For an instant he has to laugh, despite his terror, but the laughter turns to sobs. The lights go out. The slight breeze from the air vent stops. In the absolute absence of light and fresh air, of space, Jonathan feels the floor sink under him. He curls. His lungs flutter, as flat and frantic as the wings of a pinned butterfly.

33

Giffey sees the woman walk around a bend. He emerges from an alcove designed to provide a perspective for a large nineteenth-century painting, not particularly distinguished (though how would he know?), but impressive with its dense packs of chestnut and dapple gray horses and Napoleonic soldiers. The woman is Seefa Schnee. That much he knows; he just can't remember why he knows that, or what it means. But he is no dummy. He's figuring out things for himself between the alternating engagements of his two personalities, two histories. He can even explain the fresh onset of twitches and muttering. Jack Giffey is not and never has been real. He stalks the woman quietly, hiding around corners and darting out to follow as she makes her way from the large garden to wherever she is going, probably down. That suits Giffey, real or not. Both Giffey and the Other have worked as soldiers most of their lives. Both Giffey and the Other have been trained to kill. Both Giffey and the Other found themselves displaced upon the death of Colonel Sir John Yardley, but at some point thereafter, one went away. The other was born. Colonel Sir is the crossroads of his two selves. He has a theory. (The woman stops at the end of a blind hallway. There is a door in the right hand wall at the end. She removes a key ring, quaintly mechanical, from her pocket, and fits a key into the door.)

by some government. Since it was the government of the United States of America that moved once again into Hispaniola to bring stability and take charge in a power vacuum, he presumes it was the U.S. of A., land of both Giffey's birth and the Other's, that split him down the middle.

Since Giffy is now coming down with the same malady as Jenner, ticks and expostulations of meaningless rage, it is an easy assumption that he was therapied, equipped with monitors, perhaps as the condition of some sort of judicial punishment. Or...

The Other was seen as useful. He was equipped with monitors that restructured his psyche, giving him the mask of Jack Giffey as a thorough, self-deluding cover, making the Other into a human smart bomb. An unaware warbeiter targeting Omphalos. Jenner was recruited elsewhere, a separate piece of the plan; and Park, who thought he had recruited Giffey, was led into the

scheme like a man picking a forced card from a magician's deck.

How else would Giffey and Jenner get access to MGN?

Somebody knows. Somebody has been suspicious of this place for some time. Or perhaps it is simply government paranoia, set to strike against some overweening aspect of the Republic of Green Idaho. Actually, he can sympathize with that, even cheer on his programmed, fictional self.

Jack Giffey's goals never did make much sense. But to confront Seefa Schnee,

and her personal bell-ringer...

He could do worse.

The neutral affect accompanying this hypothesis is striking. But now he has other fish to fry. He manages to catch the door before it swings shut.

The lights flicker out once more, and a disturbing shudder goes through the building, as if Omphalos is trying to wake up. He hears the woman's steps

the stairs falter. She stops. Then, in the darkness, she continues with

a

sure

gait. She is very familiar with this place, these heavy steel stairs.

He still has his flashlight. He waits to switch it on until he can no longer hear the woman's steps. There are at least three flights, perhaps four or five. It's a long way down.

In the darkness, the light's beam darting ahead, he begins his descent. The Giffey persona probably knows what to do under these circumstances; it seems

likely he has received special instructions or training.

He allows Jack Giffey to rule, for the time being.

But this also leads to his uttering little squeaking, jagged obscenities, and he claps his free hand over his lips to hide the noise.

$4

>Jill, I'm trying to reach you. Can you reJond?

She can't. She assumes the message is from Nathan; Roddy allows her this

much as he uses all her resources to leapfrog back into control of Omphalos.

But he will not allow her to answer Nathan.

>Jill, I'm in Green Idaho. I'm inside Omphalos and I'm looking for Roddy. I've left everything in La Jolla with the techs. They're working to shake you loose. Anything you can tell us would he useful.

Jill receives this in complete silence. Then, Roddy tosses her a quick cold

query: "What will he do?"

"They seem to have discovered where you are, and they already know what

you are doing."

Roddy considers this. "They will shut me down." His thinking is labored;

he has not yet completely reintegrated his basic memory.

"I think they will cut your I/Os and then study you," Jill says.

She catches a cubist glimpse of what Roddy is observing. There are more

than twenty people in Omphalos now; some have died, and some have entered recently. He is tracking all of them. The man named Marcus has not moved for some minutes, but is still alive. He is surrounded by recently arrived people, five of them, that Roddy has not yet labeled. Jill guesses that they are doctors.

There is another figure marked in steady green, alone. He is in an area

Roddy does not control, in an elevator created for the personal use of Seefa

Schnee.

Another three figures, each marked flashing red, are present, but Roddy is

not letting her see their exact locations. They may be below ground level.

Roddy tracks all of these people as intrusions. He clearly wants to eliminate

most of them; and for the first time, Jill sees, Roddy is not going all-out to protect Marcus Reilly. He is more concerned with Seefa Schnee. But to Jill's puzzlement, there are two Seefa Schnees in Roddy's maps of Omphalos.

One of them is being pursued by a flashing red intruder. The second sits

alone in a room not far from Roddy's central location, wherever that may be.

Roddy seems to sense Jill's interest in his mother. He switches her available

set of views suddenly, and in so doing, gives her some control over spaces in which he is no longer interested. For a few seconds, Jill studies miles of service corridors and unfinished floors within Omphalos, all empty, silent, boring.

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Roddy's method of seeing, she barely recognizes the man at first--it is a man.

But the figure is too familiar to escape recognition for long.

Nathan is inside Omphalos, just as he said!

Jill rushes her sensory awareness through the halls and chambers, tries unlocking a few doors, finds that she can, and makes a clear pathway toward the center and, she hopes, toward Roddy and Seefa Schnee.

The trail of dead and dying wasps and bees has thinned; Nathan sees a small, twitching body only every fexv yards now, and he's walked at least half a mile through twisting service corridors, down stairs, through doors that should have been locked but open at his touch. He is so deep in Omphalos--maybe even below ground level--that his pad can make only occasional contact with the outside through the satlink in his rented armored car--all that was available at the Moscow airport.

He stops for a moment to catch his breath. None of the corridors in this part of Omphalos look finished; the walls are bare metal and fiexfuller and concrete, unpainted, wiring and ribes and piping clearly visible. He can hear the rush of air and water through pipes and ducts overhead. The lighting is sparse, designed for arbeiters--deep red and intermittent at best.

ople are not supposed to be here.

is heart thumps even after he has rested and caught his breath. "Christ, I'm scared," he tells himself, and tries to focus on bringing his fear under control. The problem is, his fear is entirely rational. He is in danger. He saw the bodies in the waiting room, and followed the trail of insects from there to where he is now...

He has a crude map supplied by the FBI, glowing faintly on his pad's night display. He thinks he knows where he is. There's a couple of unmarked spaces, quite large, below ground. He's near the upper reaches of the larger of the two, at the center of Omphalos, if his reckoning is correct.

He wishes he had never met Seefa Schnee. He remembers the night, near the end of their brief relationship, when Seefa spent several long, agonizing hours arguing with him, trying to explain over his heated objections how to put insect colonies to directed neural use. He can't bring himself to believe she's succeeded; if he does, he'll have to swallow a lot of crow, amend his estimates of her ability, and he does not want to do that. Seefa Schnee has never been a gracious winner in any intellectual conflict.

/ SLANT 313

really here. Not to help the FBI, not even to serve his troubled country, but to find the snare into which Jill has fallen, and release her, any way he can.

Nathan has come to regard Roddy as the worst kind of blind date, a kidnapper who has stolen something very valuable to him.

Jill is perhaps the sweetest intellect he has ever met in his thirty-two years. Nathan is more than half in love with her, an angelic platonic love freed of