CHAPTER FOUR
Griffith didn’t so much eat breakfast as tear it apart, nervously shredding eggs and ham, ripping up his toast, now and then eating a bite, otherwise just pushing the food around his plate. Steward understood how he’d grown so thin. While watching Griffith mutilate his breakfast, Steward explained that he was a clone, that he had his Alpha’s training but not his memories of Sheol or anything since.
Griffith looked at him. “He didn’t update the memories at all? Didn’t give you anything?” Steward shook his head. Griffith leaned back in his booth with surprise on his face. “Why?” Griffith asked.
“He didn’t say.”
“Shit.” He rubbed his mustache. Then his puzzlement turned to wary concern.
“He’s dead then, right? You wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“That’s right.”
Griffith was silent for a moment. His watery eyes seemed turned inward, watching a memory landscape printed inside his mind. “How’d it happen?” he asked. “Did they tell you?”
“He was killed on Ricot, or maybe Vesta. Hunting Colonel de Prey.”
Griffith was silent again for a long moment. “Yeah,” he said. The voice wasn’t disapproving, or approving either. “That sounds like the Captain.” And then he went back to ripping up his food, slowly, not even looking at what his hands were doing. Steward watched him, not wanting to break into Griffith’s reverie, his mourning for someone he hadn’t known he’d lost.
The Captain. That was the Alpha personality’s name, now. It symbolized a rank, an authority, that Steward did not remember possessing. He hadn’t even been an officer. The Captain had come into being on Sheol.
Griffith put down his knife and fork and took a breath. He seemed suddenly pale. He excused himself and went to the men’s room. When he returned, his color was back. He lit a cigarette and inhaled.
“I’ve got some kind of stomach thing,” he said. “It’s been following me for days.”
“What are you doing in Arizona?”
“I’m staying in a condo suite my company keeps here. I’m working as kind of a salesman,” he said. “For an outfit called Lightsource, Limited. We provide various kinds of communication services for businesses. Software aimed at solving particular problems, communication equipment built to specific configurations, that kind of thing. Are you working?”
“Not at the moment. I’ve got some things lined up. I’m going to try to get into Starbright.”
Griffith’s face grew wistful. “Getting back into space, huh?” he asked. “Wish I was.”
“I want to travel. I think I’d be restless if I stayed in one place.”
Griffith nodded, puffed smoke. “I’d like to see the Powers again. Live with them in a real Power environment. That’s what I miss most about space. The Powers turned out to be the only thing up there worth the trip.”
“You think so?”
Griffith gave him a glance. “The Captain was that way, too. Wasn’t impressed by them. Kind of a blindness in him.” He shook his head. “But when you meet them, you realize how centered they are. How real they are. And you see by comparison how humans are almost…transparent. As if we’re not really there. And you know how far we have to go.” He looked down at his plate, his mutilated food. Frowned. “I think I know someone in Starbright,” he said. “A drive jockey. Let me think a minute. Maybe she can help you get in on an apprentice program.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to make some calls.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Griffith waved a hand. “Don’t thank me yet. I don’t know if I can do anything.”
“Griffith.” Steward felt an adrenaline touch on his nerves. Griffith looked up at his tone.
“I want to know what happened on Sheol.”
Griffith looked down at his hands. He shook his head. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you, buck.” His voice was low, his voice absorbed by the table, his crossed arms. “It’s something you’d have had to live through. I’m sorry, but—”
“It’s important.”
Griffith wiped his forehead with the back of an arm. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not…possible.”
Steward felt his breath going out of him. “That’s all right, man,” he said. Knowing it wasn’t. “If you can’t, you can’t.”
Griffith shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a sales meeting coming up. It’s gonna run all day.”
“Want to get together tonight? Have some drinks?”
“Can’t. I’m going to have to dine with a client tonight. Probably have to get him laid, too, the asshole.” He looked up, took a drag from his cigarette, and stubbed it out. There was an uncertainty in his watery eyes, and Steward found it odd—it was as if Griffith was about to say something against his will. He wondered if Griffith, too, was a clone, if the Alpha Griffith had died on Sheol and the Beta refused to talk about the war because he hadn’t been there.
“Breakfast tomorrow?” Griffith asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Here? Nine o’clock?”
“Good.”
Griffith slid out of the booth and gave a wave that looked almost like a salute. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and walked away. Steward glanced after him, looking carefully at the back of Griffith’s receding head.
At the base of Griffith’s skull Steward could see the implant socket under the short hair, and he felt satisfaction at the certainty that this was the original Griffith, not a clone. The implant socket was an Icehawk thing, enabling a soldier to interface with his weapons, transport, and environment suit. A lot of people carried them, but a salesman for a software company wouldn’t need one: He’d be able to demonstrate his wares with a headset, not needing the extra fraction of a second the socket would provide. So Griffith still had the interface socket, that and the implant threads that jacked his reflexes and programmed them with martial arts and small-unit tactics.
Steward watched Griffith as the man left. He could feel a high, his nerves stirring, connections being made in his head. Griffith was a pathway to something else, something he wanted.
Griffith was going to lead him to his Alpha.
However long he thought about it, things kept coming back to the Powers. They’d inhabited the planets where the Artifact War was fought; their return had ended the war. In the pictures Steward had seen, they hadn’t seemed at all attractive. Yet Griffith loved them; perhaps there was a reason for it. Steward accessed the library and read everything he could find. Though there was more than there had been in the hospital library, there still wasn’t much that wasn’t speculation. It was as if people who had met them preferred not to say anything concrete.
“Powers” was a translation of the aliens’ name for themselves. Their own language was a combination of clicks and singsong mutterings that often dipped into the subsonic range: No human had ever come close to translating it in anything approaching its full idiom.
The Powers had inhabited Sheol and a number of other planets that humanity had discovered, then abandoned them. After a thousand years the Powers came back and found humanity warring in their ruins. They had not yet explained why they had left, why they had come back. They’d merely announced that a vast area of the sky, an eighty-six-degree cone expanding from its entering point at Ross 986, was now off-limits to human exploration. Presumably that was where the Powers lived, or where they wished humanity to think they lived. Humanity, eager for trade and knowledge, fearful of the consequences of being thought unfriendly, was happy to oblige.
The Powers were vaguely centauroid, four-legged, two-armed. Their lower bodies were about the size of a small pony, their upper bodies slightly smaller than the human. The proportions of their bodies did not in any other way resemble ponies or humans: Their legs were too short, too powerful, with spreading, clawed ostrich toes, while their upper arms were too stalklike to be reminiscent of anything on Earth. Their heads were a flat, boneless muscular protrusion, with a large single nostril on top and a pair of eyes, armored like a lizard’s, that could be twisted so as to cover the entire horizon, or focused forward or back for binocular vision. Their brains were in their chests, with a secondary brain in the middle of the back. There was a combination mouth/voicebox/nostril between the forelegs and a complex organ for synthesizing aerosol hormones in the rear. Along the back, placed on either side of the spine, were light-colored spots, like a salamander’s third eye, that acted as primitive eyes, ears, scent detectors. Apparently much of their communication was by scent, from airborne hormones created in their hormone synthesizer and then communicated to special sensory organs in the upper nostril. By this means they could impart moods, emotions, perhaps other things peculiar to the Powers alone. They could communicate many things at once—emotional text via hormones, main text through the deep vocal cords in the lower voice box, and subtext through whining, singsong overtones made by forcing air through the upper nostril.
In color they were a deep violet, individuals ranging from a deep purple to an almost-black. Their skin was smooth except for the stiff hairs sprouting from the top of the head and along the spine. The hairs were packed with nerves—apparently the hairs had some sensory function as well.
The Powers were omnivorous and warm-blooded. Each individual was bisexual and oviparous and at least some were very long-lived—evidence suggested that some of the leaders were thousands of years old. They seemed to spend most of their time sexually inactive, and sexual contact seemed to be an act devoid of emotional context. Eggs were raised in collective crèches: Emotional allegiance belonged to the group, not to biological parents. Some sociologists saw this as a great advantage. Others found it troubling.
The Powers’ social organization was confusing and highly ritualized. It was autocratic in the extreme. Personal interaction was marked by a great deal of body and hormonal language that defined the status and role of each individual. So far as anyone could tell, loyalty was universal, responsibility and reward running from the few individuals humanity had met all the way to some big boss Power in the vast field of stars the Powers called home. If there were dissent and dissatisfaction among the Powers, none had ever been displayed before humans.
The following terms did not translate into the Powers’ language: government, dissent, individual, rights, justice, religion, progress, law, freedom. Sociologists were unanimous in asking humanity not to be judgmental about this. Other species, other mores.
Some humans had been bold enough to suggest that the Powers were in their racial decadence, that their ritualized and autocratic social structure was indicative of a race that had lost the adaptability necessary to a starfaring, expanding culture. Others offered the possibility that humanity, following the evolution of the policorps, was headed in the same direction. Still others, by way of rebuttal, simply pointed to that great off-limits cone of space. If the Powers were in a decadence, you couldn’t prove it from that.
Coterminous with the arrival of the Powers was the collapse of the Outward Policorps following the military and economic disasters of the Artifact War. The remaining policorps, picking up the pieces, had ended the Outward Policorps’ monopoly on faster-than-light travel and had created two new trading policorps from scratch, Consolidated Systems, operating from the manmade planetoid called the Ricot Habitat, a Coherent Light project that had survived its builder; and Brighter Suns, headquartered on Vesta. These two systems were partly owned by the policorps that had created them and existed for the sole purpose of trading with the Powers. Apparently the Powers also had a financial interest in their existence, since they refused any other offers of trade, even those made at favorable terms by Earth governments.
There were no longer any Powers on Earth. They had lived on Earth for some months, then left abruptly. There was a rumor, which Consolidated Systems and Brighter Suns did not deny, that they had proven susceptible to Earth bacteria. They now lived in hermetic isolation in the two space colonies, behind seals that guaranteed sterile isolation. They communicated almost entirely by electronic means, rarely face-to-face. They sold pharmaceuticals, bacteria, terraforming techniques, and knowledge, cutting deals with intelligent rapacity in order to purchase electronics, pharmaceuticals, bacteria, terraforming techniques, knowledge. They remained enigmatic.
Steward watched vids taken of the Powers after their first appearance on Earth. They were faster than they looked. Movement was accompanied by fast shuffles, bobbing, and arm waving that defined status and zones of influence. The muscular head changed shape like a balloon caught between cold fronts. It was repulsive and fascinating.
Griffith loved them. Steward couldn’t see why. But he felt it was important, and he watched the vids over and over. He found no answer.
*
The next morning he saw Griffith waiting for him outside the coffee shop, smoking a cigarette. He seemed energetic, nervous almost. He was dressed in boots, an open-collared, short-sleeved shirt, and black jeans.
A robot car went by silently, wreathed in a hologram halo announcing Darwin Days.
“Hi,” Griffith said. “I couldn’t get a hold of my friend. She’s not on the planet.”
“That’s okay. Thanks for trying.”
“I’ll keep after her. She’s coming back next week.”
Griffith jerked his head up the street. “Want to go for a walk? I have an idea.”
“Sure.”
They walked up the street, ignoring the lottery sellers. It was too early for the hustlers to be out of bed. Griffith turned and led them to one of the town’s rugged parks. He looked Steward up and down as they walked.
“You look in good shape. Been working out?”
“Yeah. Every day.”
“I’ve let it slide.” Griffith reached in his pocket for a handkerchief and mopped his brow. A compressed-gas inhaler fell out of his pocket and clattered on the sidewalk. It was the sort used by asthma sufferers and people who shot drugs up their noses. Griffith picked it up without comment and put it in his pocket. He looked at Steward again and narrowed his eyes. “You don’t have the hyped nerves anymore, right?”
“No. If I wanted threads, I’d have to pay.”
“Well”—Griffith was silent for a moment—“you probably won’t need them.”
Steward looked at him, but Griffith turned and began to climb a steep grassy slope. Steward fought down his annoyance and followed. Griffith was breathing hard by the time they got to the top. From the ridge they could see bright banners on a sward, temporary tents, models of ships and tooled DNA. Distant amplified voices muddied one another in the air. The NeoImagists were having their Darwin Days celebrations.
Steward decided he was tired of the game Griffith was playing. “What is it I won’t need the nerves for, Griffith?”
Griffith held up a hand for patience and lit a new cigarette from the old. “Okay,” he said. “Salesman isn’t all I do. I have a…another kind of job on the side.” He looked at Steward and smiled a jittery smile. “Maybe I can help you earn some money toward getting into Starbright.”
A feeling of nervous familiarity settled on Steward. He remembered sitting on his fuel-cell scooter back in Marseilles, hiding behind his shades and his big white jacket, talking to a boy and a girl who were dealing in suspect wetware, the sort that a lot of the Marseilles factions felt was ideologically incorrect. They were offering him a deal on it, but Steward wasn’t sure whether it was anything he wanted to handle.
Steward remembered the way the girl’s jewelry flashed in the sun, the boy’s stance, hands in pockets, feet in cowboy boots covered with silver wire and microcircuitry, and most of all Steward remembered the strange taste on his tongue. A taste of something he wanted, and something he was afraid of. The taste of a proposition that he wasn’t sure he was able to handle.
He looked at Griffith now and wondered what had really happened on Sheol. Whether anything he knew about the young Griffith had any relevance now. If Griffith had a grudge that went back to the war, and had planned to set Steward up for some long fall.
“NeoImagery,” an amplified voice said. “More than stepped-up evolution. More than a vision of life outside human parameters. More than anything you’ve ever dreamed.”
“What sort of moonlighting have you been up to?” Steward asked.
Griffith looked at him with a nervous smile. “I had a lot of medical bills,” he said. “Sheol wasn’t good to healthy young bodies.”
“You come back with a habit?”
Griffith seemed surprised. He shook his head. “Nothing like that. I breathed in some nerve toxins, some nasty bugs. Liver damage, kidney damage, pancreatitis. A scarred lung. That’s what the inhaler’s for.” He laughed. “A habit. Jesus. I can see where you might get that impression.” He puffed tobacco smoke. “No, I play thirdman. It’s a small operation, just between friends.”
“What sorts of things do you move?”
“Depends.” Griffith shrugged. “It’s pretty irregular. My friends and I ask around and see what’s wanted, what’s available. Take a cut. It’s all amateur league.” He squinted up at the sun and began moving across the park. Steward followed.
“What I have now,” he said, “is a package that I’ve got to deliver to LA. I was going to call someone else to deliver it, but since you’re here, I thought I’d throw the job your way if you want it.”
“What does this involve?”
“Flying to Los Angeles. Looking up some guy. Giving him the package, collecting the fee. Your cut is two percent, which should come to about two thousand dollars in Starbright scrip. That should help you to get into Starbright, if that’s what you want.”
Steward laughed. This situation was striking him as more familiar every minute. He could feel Canard reflexes coming back, fitting him like an old jacket. “Two percent is two thousand Starbright?” he asked. “That doesn’t strike me as amateur league.”
Griffith seemed annoyed. “Give me some credit, man. I run this operation, and my fee’s five percent. There’s a lot of competition here. For hell’s sake, it’s even legal. There’s no law against possessing what’s in the package, or trading in it. The cops might want to know where you got it, but you’d be within your rights to tell them to fuck off. I’d deliver the damn stuff myself if I weren’t tied up here all week.”
“Yeah. Okay. I see your point.” Steward looked up into the sky, narrowing his eyes against the brightness. A contrail from a suborbital shuttle was scarring the blue, marking a path between fixed orbital stars. “Why are you working as a traveling salesman if you can pick up this kind of money just flying to LA?”
Griffith scowled. “Because of who I’d have to fucking deal with, that’s why. If I keep it small, no one’s interested in taking over my action. But the big leagues play by different rules. If I did this full-time, I’d have every hotshot juvecrime scumbag in the world after my ass. And, shit, they’re faster than I am. These days.”
“I want to know what’s in the package.”
Griffith looked at him sidelong, then nodded. “You have the right. It’s Thunder.”
Steward shook his head. “I remember reading something about it. But I’ve been out of touch for a while.”
Griffith began to walk across the grass. He flipped cigarette ash onto the deep green. “Okay,” he said. “It’s a neurohormone developed by Pink Blossom a couple years ago. The trademark name is Genesios Three, and it’s also called vitamin B-44. On the streets it’s called Thunder, or Black Thunder. It stimulates the nerves to repair damage—it can grow a severed spine together, man. The cripples are skipping in the streets.”
“So why’s there an underground trade in it?”
“Because it gets you high. A nice buzz. Also raises your IQ by twenty points if you take it long enough. But after that, Thunder begins to repress vasopressin and oxytocin levels in the brain, which suppresses brain function, so you need more of the vitamin to restore it, which suppresses brain function even more, so . . .”
“Negative feedback loop. Addiction.”
“Join the great adventure.” An amplified voice, from the carnival.
“Yeah,” Griffith replied. “What I said. Not physically addicting, not in the classical sense, but bad enough. Anyway, Pink Blossom’s being cagey about making the stuff and distributing it. And Thunder is so complicated and expensive to make that the underground hasn’t been able to produce it in quantity at a price people can afford. But I have a friend who works on the Orlando shuttle. And he’s got a system.”
“And you get a packet every so often.”
Griffith nodded. “That’s the idea. You want the job?”
“It sounds inviting. Who am I supposed to give this to?”
Griffith wiped his forehead with his handkerchief again. “A faceback named Spassky. Little guy, about fifteen. Runs an unaffiliated mob and wears Urban Surgery.” He looked at Steward. “You seen those?”
“On vid.” The new style, bizarre facial surgery mixed with elaborate, abstract tattooing. A cool style. Deliberately repulsive.
“You can’t tell those little pricks apart,” Griffith said. “That’s why they do it to themselves. It’s city camouflage.”
“Whatever works.’’
“Shit. I can’t look at it. On Sheol I saw what real mutilation was like.”
Steward hesitated for a moment, feeling a wave of coolness moving through his nerves. He looked at the carnival, the flags. The colors and the sky seemed different, as if a cloud had passed across the sun. There was a sense of motion inside himself, a movement like a thrown switch, that suddenly he was on a different side of things, as if he’d crossed a bridge without knowing it.
“I’ll carry your package,” he said.
Griffith dropped his cigarette, stepped on it. “Good,” he said.
“I want something else, Griffith.”
The other man didn’t look at him. Just stood with his hands in his jeans, watching the glass urban horizon, the mirrors that reflected the scarred sky. He was making Steward say it.
“Sheol. I want Sheol.”
A shudder moved through Griffith at Steward’s words. As if they hurt him, somehow.
“Yeah,” Griffith said. “I knew you’d say that.”
Steward’s mouth was suddenly dry. He tried to summon saliva, failed, spoke thickly. “What’s your answer?”
Griffith was still looking away. “Tomorrow,” he said. “When I give you the package.”
Relief flooded Steward’s limbs. He could feel himself getting closer.
“I need to know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Griffith looked down at the grass beneath his feet. “No you’re not,” he said.
Steward reached in his shirt pocket for a Xanadu. He wanted this high to last awhile.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m not sorry in the least.”
*
Steward was on the roof of Ardala’s condeco. It was late at night. Grass-colored carpet, stretched over concrete, scraped against his feet. The open deck was lit by the fluttering blue-and-gold radiance of the swimming pool and by colored spots planted behind metal tubs that held scentless bushes.
Sweat dripped on the carpet. Steward punched forward, repeating the movements over and over, trying to achieve a perfection in his balance, the slick flow of his muscles, the rhythm of heart and breath, his concentration perfect on the invisible target before him, the phantom objective toward which he directed his controlled violence.
He came here often, usually at night, for the long solitary workouts. In the daytime there were too many people, too many distractions, too many disturbed looks. At night there was just the darkness, the nuclear blue glow of the pool, the cold distant hum of the city.
Steward began alternating his punches with kicks. He was full of adrenaline, but he’d been drinking earlier with Ardala and was on the edge of a sugar crash. The result was a strange, disturbing high in which he felt perpetually on the edge of losing control, adrenaline battling insulin for command of his body. The feeling was unsettling but exhilarating, a perpetual fight for possession of his own actions, something like he’d felt when he’d been peddling wetware from his moped and didn’t know whether his customer would pay him with a hot credit spike or a knife, when his arms and legs were trembling with the urge to run but he’d just given the boy a smile from behind the comfort of his shades and asked him if he’d had any money down on the jai alai….
Colors began to flicker at the edge of his vision. The sugar crash was coming in like the shock wave off the ablative nose of a commercial shuttle. Steward decided to face it, ride the shock wave to a last attempt at Zen, at perfection. He set himself, balanced forward, leaning toward the target. His knee cocked up, his foot thrust out, his balance going forward as the kick delivered, as one arm punched forward, withdrew as the other arm drove his power through the target, the target that seemed, for a fractional hallucinatory moment, to bleed like a torn artery at the dark edges of the swaying earth, and then the crash moved through him and the glider swung out of control, spiraling down into the darkness of the dream. As it spun, Steward laughed.
He was there. At the center.