Tintagel (18 page)

He was trembling somewhat and he didn't know why. He still held the Villa-Lobos in his mind. He rose quickly, nervously, and began pacing. She watched him.

"As soon as it gets dark, Charlie and I are going to have to leave," he said out of nowhere.

Ellie parted her legs and got up, walking over to him.

"I don't think you want to go so soon. Charlie can take care of himself. Please stay," she said to him. "I've never really known a Stalker before. At least not one like you."

Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5
—the soprano aria drifted through his mind like the wind across the autumn sky. Dark. Sorrowful.

Then he thought,
Estevan is Spanish
. Ellie came up to him and put her arms around his neck, surrounding him in a soft haze of perfume. Gently she pressed her lips to his.

Then she pulled back, but only slightly.

She said to him in a low, sweet voice, "Don't let any of this fool you." She spoke even as their lips were touching. He held her tight, very tight.

Like a stone in the shallows of a creek, there was nothing that he could do. The rest of the world passed around him on all sides.

Chapter Ten

Pohjola's Daughter, Symphonic Fantasia

Jean Sibelius

"Shouldn't, that be snow?" Lanier asked Christy as he entered the living room from the bathroom. He massaged his brown hair with a soft towel.

Beyond the picture window that faced the steep mountainside, rain thundered in thick curtains to the earth.

She laid down a report that she had just recently completed. "Yes, it should, or so it said on the radio this morning. It's unseasonably warm for this time of the year."

Lanier walked over to the couch. He glanced at the communiqué from the Pentagon that was already on the coffee table.

Eight days ago Lanier had gone under to Prokofiev's Suite
From The Love of Three Oranges
attempting to rescue a radio astronomer who was held in high regard in some military circles. The astronomer had, for quite valid reasons, chosen not to return to the real world, and, amazingly, had talked Lanier into leaving him alone. Lanier deferred to the man's judgment.

The Pentagon wasn't happy about it, and neither were the scientists at the Doty-Wright National Observatory outside Pine Island, Minnesota.

"There is some talk about suing you," Christy said to him as he read the communiqué.

"I don't think so," he said. "When they think it through they'll realize that Dr. Tyler is expendable. Besides, he wasn't in any sort of danger."

Lanier had never been talked out of returning a patient to the real world, and the incident still sat uneasy with him. But, in the end, it was Lanier's own choice what to do.

He folded his robe over his long legs, putting his feet on the stoneware coffee table.

"But Dr. Tyler did make a curious remark that I neglected to put into my report to the director of, the observatory. It was the primary reason I let him stay."

"What was that?"

"Well," he began, "Tyler suggested to me that his world might be better than this one." He had found Dr. Sidney Tyler, an astronomer, ironically dwelling in an incredible underground world, far from the sight of the sun and stars.

Christy silently observed him. "And?"

"I think he's right. Every time I've gone under, I've found that despite all their good intentions to escape, the patients take with them some bugaboo or other, almost in a twinge of guilty conscience."

Christy recalled the occasion she herself went under. "I don't think I did."

"No, that's not true. You were desperately unhappy in that Eden you'd created. You had been crying for hours and it wasn't because you were stuck there. The one chief symptom of the Syndrome is that people go under because they
want
to go under. You could have been eternally happy in that floating garden of yours, but something—perhaps your own guilt—kept you from being happy."

He paused, fingering his freshly shaved chin. "There is always a balancing force." He recalled Two Moons' cryptic remarks. "And the odd thing is that if the fantasy world is a nightmare, like Senator Randell's fabrication, there's usually an element of good backstage somewhere. It all balances out."

"Are you sure? Randell's not the most pleasant person I know."

Lanier smiled through the dark clouds of his mood. Well, it's either that or it's just my imagination. But Dr. Tyler could be right. His world was remarkably simple. I wish him luck."

They both fell silent for a brief time. Lanier faced the window, which drummed with the cascading rainfall. A fire in the fireplace busily crackled, throwing out a soft light.

From Christy's office, the sound of the readout from HomeCom began rattling impatiently.

"Uh, Ok," she said, rising from her chair. "I'd better see who that one is about. I'll be right back."

Lanier watched it rain. The clacking from Christy's office would be another "rush" rescue coming in over the computer, followed by all the details of the patient's disappearance. Lately, he had to resort to encoding the information, since someone had effectively plugged into the satellite relay systems and sabotaged many of the Stalkers.

He had been doing nearly seven retrievals a day, and the list was getting longer. Dr. Tyler wasn't even the most important person he had done recently, but he was trying to get in as many different kinds of retrievals as possible. The strain was beginning to show.

He had been receiving reports daily, through a special linkup with DataCom in Christy's office that was tied in to the Bureau of Statistics and the Pentagon. The information that came in over the screens was worse than the news programs on television and radio reported. It was worse because the information through DataCom was classified and highly accurate.

Most of the major industries in both the United States and Europe were down, yet the ranks of the unemployed were diminishing. The Syndrome took care of that. If it wasn't a new outbreak of typhoid in Southeast Asia, it was the Greenland melt. There had been a horrible nuclear spill in Kuwait that no one could control, and the United Kingdom was torn in a war of secession with Scotland. While there were dozens of skirmishes and revolutions around the world, there were no massive armies in existence. The Syndrome was universal.

There were even rumors circulating that the Russians were helping the Japanese move one of the orbiting mine factories above the moon into a wider orbit so that it could be converted into an interplanetary vehicle. There was talk of moving to Mars, or even farther out, to Titan, because it was known that the lunar colonists also had the Syndrome bacterium.

And now with the warmer weather, the aeroplankton had become more of a threat than it had ever been at any one time. Aircraft had to keep to the higher altitudes. Aeroplankton choked Brazil. Central Africa had become a stagnant wasteland. The floating organisms completely blocked out any sunlight along the equator. The heat and moisture generated over the smoldering jungles had actually begun to raise the world's, overall temperature by one degree. Enough to alter the climate everywhere.

Perhaps that's why it's raining instead of snowing here in Montana
, Lanier thought. There was even an item in DataCom that suggested a new ice age in two hundred years if it all kept up.

What concerned Lanier more was the fact that a number of Stalkers were turning up dead, particularly the men and women—like himself—doing high-level work for the government. Two Stalkers, both personal friends of his, had been killed in the Chicago area. One disappeared into Ravel's
Le Tombeau de Couperin
going after the wife of a foreign attaché. The other, a woman, vanished while stalking a corporate head of ITT in Ned Rorem's
Third Symphony
. Neither came out.

Plus, someone had apparently cracked the DataCom channels out of the Pentagon itself, and had begun leaking information about the Stalkers. To Lanier, this was the greatest danger. Experts in the Pentagon had stopped the leaking, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before someone else broke into the channels.

Christy came through the door, holding a long printout. He couldn't read the expression on her face, but it was a cross between confusion and concern.

What is it?" he asked.

"You'll never guess. In a million years, you'll never guess. But here it is. Verified this time." She walked over and handed him the scroll of computer paper.

He looked at the name, skipping the introductory remarks by the policy investigatory team.

"I don't believe it," he said. He jumped back up to the head of the report and read swiftly. Burton Shaughnessy had made the request.

"Ellie Estevan," Christy murmured, watching Lanier.

Christy had gotten most of the story from Lanier about Burton Shaughnessy's party in the middle of the Colorado woods, and the consequences of Ellie Estevan's stellar presence there. Lanier had been quite open with Christy in relating the tale of his vanishing, and the effect she had on him. Charlie had filled in the rest.

Now this.

Christy stood waiting.

"I can't believe it," Lanier repeated.

He tossed the report onto the coffee table and ran one hand through his hair. "If she went under, that could imply a number of things. One of which is that I could have been completely mistaken about her all this time."

"I don't understand."

"And, it also means," he continued, ignoring her, "that the disease is getting much worse."

Christy picked up the printout. Lanier looked up at her.

"Christy, Ellie Estevan was so centered, so calm. You know what I'm talking about." He rose excitedly. "Her eyes alone revealed it. If she went under, either the disease has gotten out of any possible control, or—" He submerged himself into his thoughts.

"Or?"

"Or something very traumatic struck her, made her vulnerable. And suddenly, too."

"But the Syndrome does that to anyone upset. Why is she so special?"

She realized immediately that it was a stupid question, but Lanier went on. "It happened to me at the party. It just seems impossible that it could happen to her. She seemed so adjusted, immune to practically everything."

Christy watched the moods run across Lanier's face. His expressions shifted as he thought about Ellie Estevan. Christy had never known him to be like this.

He looked to the report that Christy still held.

Christy paced the room nervously, watching Lanier read the report. Lanier looked up, noticing her behavior. It took his mind off Ellie for an instant. He lowered the printout.

"Is there something here I missed?"

She looked at him.

"I don't know if I should tell you this or not. It won't be on the report."

"What won't?"

"I picked up a scandal sheet when I was in town yesterday."

"And?"

"Well, at a Washington rally, Ellie was seen with Senator Randell."

"Again?"

"Yes, but there's more to it than that. There are rumors that he and Mrs. Randell are getting a divorce." She paused. "That Randell and Ellie might get married. In fact, it seems more like fact than rumor, from what I can tell."

Christy sat heavily in one of the chairs.

"It was only a scandal sheet. Perhaps just another rumor, but, Fran, you shouldn't be too surprised."

He stared at her, unbelievingly.

She continued, "It's been in the air for weeks now. You know the kind of lives those people live."

"I didn't know anything about it."

"It's been talked about for some time. It started around the time you went to Shaughnessy's first party. I didn't think of it to tell you. Didn't think it was important. The scandal sheets were full of it."

"But Randell?" The shocks were coming to him one right after the other. Entering a person's Syndrome fantasy was tantamount to entering the patient's unchained libido. Both Randell and Estevan were world-famous. He, an active, influential senator, and she, a talented, beautiful actress, were both powerful individuals in their own ways.

Randell
! Thoughts of Albertson Randell's blood-filled world rushed into his mind. Randell was like a dog turned loose in a butcher shop.
And those women
…

Lanier could still see them fleeing before Randell in that world. That awful world.

Then he recalled Ellie's eyes in the torchlight at Shaughnessy's party. Or her face in the upstairs window of the Nacimiento estate when he and Charlie climbed into the ScatterCat later that night.

Randell was twice her age. The thought of Randell with Ellie Estevan revolted him. Randell's posturing was so apparent that he couldn't see how Ellie could be attracted to such a man. Like most senators, Lanier thought, Randell was a cutthroat, pure and simple.

But perhaps it wasn't so pure and simple as that. "I just can't believe this," he repeated.

He walked around, perplexed, and partly angry. He scooped up the day's list of projected rescues. It seemed now that people were going under whistling tunes from Bach's cantatas, or singing the Doxology in church. And now there was a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that purely synthesized music, despite its infinite tonal range, was not accomplishing what it was supposed to.

Christy followed him. "What do you think? Do you want to wait to see if she returns on her own, or …"

Lanier thought. "There's a connection here. But some key element is missing. I can see that the disease is getting out of control, that it affects everyone. But Randell…" He tightened the straps of his robe. "I wonder if this has anything to do with his bid for the presidency?"

Christy's eyebrows went up with a surge of surprise.

"Wouldn't hurt his image to have a movie star for a wife. But the election is two years away. And besides that, Babcock and Randell are cronies." Then she smiled cattily and remarked, "And lovers, no doubt."

Damn those scandal sheets
! he thought.
What I need are facts, not fictions
.