Voice of the Whirlwind (3 page)

“No.”

“Not much help, huh?”

“
Écrasez l’infâme
,” Hikita said mildly. “I looked it up. What infamous thing do you wish to eradicate?”

“What infamous thing do you have?”

Hikita put down his cup of coffee. “You can go,” he said.

Steward eased himself out of the bunk, opened the soundproofed door, and stepped into a corridor. It was yellow and smelled of fresh paint.

Outside, the view of the mountains was cut into strips by glass towers. Steward chose one of the long reflective canyons that had a mountain view and walked along it, toward the green on the horizon.

He decided it was time to find out about Sheol.

*

At the hospital they told him it would be several days before he would be assigned his new doctor. They gave him a chit for the pharmacy in case he felt anxiety in the meantime. He cashed the chit, put the capsules in his pocket, and forgot about them. Then he went to the library and looked up the Artifact War.

There wasn’t much that filtered through the Outward Policorps’ security. There hadn’t been many survivors, and after the breakup of the policorps responsible, those remaining in authority preferred to discourage interest. A mistake, swept under the rug in an atmosphere of universal embarrassment.

Steward had the sense that things had been worse than anyone had ever imagined. The war had been triggered by the near simultaneous discovery of three planetary systems, each crammed with ruins and artifacts built by an unknown starfaring alien race that had vanished or been wiped out a thousand years before. The Powers, though no one knew it yet. The Outward Policorps, with their monopoly on star travel, had leaped madly into unregulated space in order to exploit the new technologies and techniques resulting from the investigation and understanding of the alien culture.

Out in the far reaches things had fallen apart very quickly, particularly on a planet called Sheol, which orbited around an obscure star called Wolf 294. There were sixteen separate armed forces, each maneuvering for sole domination, each months away from home in terms of communication time. What had begun as exploration and investigation degenerated into a mass plundering of the alien ruins. Commanders in the field made and broke temporary alliances independently of their superiors, who were creating their own temporary alliances and enmities back in the Sol system. Every latent, aberrant military technology in the ancient inventories was brought out and used: biologic weapons; extermination drones; tactical atomics; terraforming techniques stripped of their benign aspect and used to blacken tens of thousands of square kilometers of forest, plain, herbage; asteroids captured and used as weapons, creating craters on the surface of the planets where suspected enemy positions had been, and used as well to destroy the enemy’s alien loot so as to make one’s own more valuable. The ultimate aberration of a war out of control: the demolition of everything they had been sent to capture.

At the end, there were still a few survivors who fought on, isolated from the superiors in the Sol system who had proved unable to support such a war at such a distance. Amid an escalating round of Sol system bankruptcies and “retrenchment,” the Powers, having finished whatever mysterious business had drawn them away, returned to their devastated homes: The war was over.

The Icehawks had been brought back from Sheol by Power craft, delivered like a package at Earth’s door. Coherent Light had long before written them off, had sold them in a complicated deal with Far Jewel. Had assumed they were dead, or hadn’t cared if they were alive.

Steward thought for a moment about the faces he remembered. Colonel de Prey. Wright. Freeman. Little Sereng, solemnly drawing blood from his finger every time he sharpened his kukri. Dragut. A hundred others. How many had survived? A handful, the reports said, and no names were given.

Years ago. The other survivors would have had time to forget, build new lives, start again.

All except Steward, whose loyalties still drew him to a company that no longer existed, comrades that were dead or scattered, a child he had never seen born to a woman whom he had loved but from whom, in the fifteen years that he did not remember, he had been divorced.

Who was lost in time, adrift as in a glider under a featureless sky, nothing but blackness below, with nothing to guide him but the sight of distant fire.

*

The next day, after lunch in the hospital cafeteria, he went to his room. There was a package on his bed, a plain brown-paper envelope with his name written on it. No stamps, so it hadn’t come with the mail. He tore it open and found a black metal video cartridge, the size of a cigarette lighter. He looked in the envelope. Nothing else.

He turned on his vid and put the cartridge in the slot. The screen, gray, hissed at him for a moment, then the hissing stopped and a voice began. A coldness settled in Steward’s spine.

“Hi,” it said. “There are some things you should know.”

The video portion was nothing but interference pattern. Steward tried to adjust it but couldn’t find a picture.

“If you get this,” the voice said, “it means I’ve been killed. I’ve given this to a friend of mine who can be trusted so far as to give this to you. Don’t try to find him. He won’t be able to help in any other way.”

Steward looked up at the screen, seeing his own pale reflection in the glass, a ghost of himself: bushy dark brows, hair cut short, eyes like darting shadows.

“I’m on Ricot right now. I’m working for Consolidated Systems, and I’m involved in something very complicated…” The voice seemed to fade away for a second, as if the man had taken his mouth from the mic. Maybe he was just trying to make up his mind how much to tell, or how to tell it. Then the voice was back, louder than before. Steward almost took a step back.

“The thing is”—gratingly—“that when you become important in certain ways, there’s no one you can trust. That’s the lesson the Icehawks learned, that everything on Sheol taught us. Because we were trained and set up and then sold by our own side.

“So when you can’t trust anyone else, you learn to trust yourself. That’s what I’ve had to do. And when the official rules that they give you, all their morality, all turns out to be a fabric of, of . . .” The voice faded again. When it came back, it was almost a scream, each word forced out with such intensity that Steward’s throat ached to hear it. He was glad he couldn’t see the man’s face, the taut throat muscles, the way the eyes must be glaring into the blank face of another video set. “When it’s
all lies
,
when you can’t
turn around for the lies…
well, you have to find the truth yourself. Find morality in your own mind. Do what you have to do. Like I’m going to try and do.”

Steward heard a clatter very close to the mic, the sound of glass on glass. The man was pouring himself a drink, none too steadily. Steward looked down at his own hands. They were perfectly calm.

“I’m doing a job for a guy named Curzon. He’s my chief here. I’m going to get into the Brighter Suns complex on Vesta, and do something…that doesn’t entirely feel right. It looks as if I’ll get in and out okay. Listen up now.”

At the sound of the command, Steward’s eyes snapped to the screen again. He laughed at his nervous reflex.

“The reason I’m going is that Colonel de Prey is there. He’s the one who’s responsible for what happened on Sheol. It was all his idea. Now he’s back in business for Brighter Suns.”

No, Steward thought. The Colonel wouldn’t…He felt his fists clenching by his sides, the nails digging into the palms.

The Colonel
had.
He’d trained the Icehawks and then sold them. The…other…wouldn’t lie about something like that.

Steward’s eyes were burning. He felt a pain in his throat. The betrayal had a name.

“But to get to the Colonel I’m going to have to do some things…that I’m not comfortable with…that I’m not going to talk about in a recording. I may end up dead because of that, but I don’t think so. It looks as if Curzon has things planned pretty well.

“But remember what I said. What I’m going to do is important to Curzon, and that means I can’t trust what he’s telling me. And there are people higher up the ladder who might be lying to him.” There was a pause. Steward heard a glass being put down on a table, close to the mic. The warming vid smelled faintly of hot plastic.

“What I’m trying to say is that I want de Prey, and Curzon wants something else, and we both know it. So after I get de Prey, Curzon won’t have a hold on me anymore, and that might mean I won’t be of any more use to him. He may decide to put the ice on me. So if I end up dead, it’s most likely my own side that did it.”

The glass made a metallic slipping noise near the microphone, as if he’d tried to pick it up but only pushed it farther away. Then there was a space of silence just long enough for him to pick up the glass more carefully and take one long swallow. When the voice came back, it was tired, the pauses between each word long.

“I don’t know why I’m sending you this. Except to say I’m sorry. For the years gone. It’s just…for the record, I guess.”

Another silence. Another drink. “One last thing.”

Three beats of Steward’s racing heart.

“Sorry I took so long.”

A silence, a click that echoed a distant, months-old termination. Then nothing but a long, endless hiss.

*

He played the video several more times that afternoon. The rest of the time he lay on his bed, watching the reflections of sunlight from mirrored windows stretch slow-moving fingers across the precise pale white of the ceiling.

Several times the telephone rang. He let it ring.

Late in the afternoon he changed into sweats and went down into the therapy room. Before he left, he taped the cartridge to the back of a sliding door in his bathroom cabinet, then tore the envelope across twice and put it in a wastebasket in the hospital lobby.

The therapists had gone home for the day. The place smelled of chlorine from the whirlpool and echoed to the slap of his sandals. Steward did his warm-ups and stretches, then stepped to the treadmill and turned it on. He pushed up the speed till he was sprinting, the sound of his breath louder than the whine of the machine, the thunder of his footsteps. It seemed to him, in some unclear fashion, as if he were running toward something. His breath became a pain in his lungs. He stumbled against the cool chrome railing, caught himself, ran on until the machine’s automatic counter turned it off. His hand hovered over the switch for a moment, then he stepped to the floor.

He stood still for a moment, catching his breath, waiting for the room to tell him what to do. He walked to the mats. He began running martial-arts exercises, first kata to find a rhythm, then short, violent patterns, imagining there were hands behind him that wanted to touch him, seize him, hold him back. He spun, parried, drove elbows into bone, fingers into eye sockets. The patterns grew longer, stronger. He felt a furnace of anger burning somewhere in his belly, driving each punch, each thrusting kick. He spun, his leg cocking, then lashing out. He tottered for a moment on the edge of balance, recovered…his vision was blurring, the dark empty room fading. Air poured like liquid down his throat. The patterns were driving him now, holding him up, moving him like a purposeful tide. He kicked out again, seeing a face, or something like a face, on the distant edge of his blackening vision, bushy brows, intense eyes, a background of stars…. He felt he could brush the face with his fingertips, break it with the torque of his instep, but he lost it, the face or whatever it was, and fell, the mat slamming hard against his shoulder, the side of his head.

Galaxies created themselves in vast blooms of light, all in the small universe behind his eyes. He rolled onto his back and sucked in air. His eyes blinked at the sweat flooding his vision. He put out a hand to touch whatever had been there, but it was gone.
Soon
,
he thought.

Sight came back slowly, the room leaching into him like a slow dawn. He sat up, stood, bounced on the balls of his feet while he cooled down, until his breath was no longer a shriek in his throat.

He went to his room, threw off the soaked sweats, showered. As the warm mists rose around him, he felt the tingle of anticipation. He’d look behind the medicine cabinet door after drying off, not before. As if he didn’t care.

When he looked, the cartridge was still there. Satisfaction danced from his fingertips as he peeled the tape away. He drew on slacks and a T-shirt and put the cartridge in his back pocket. As he stepped out of the room and locked the door, he heard the telephone begin to ring.

Outside he chose a mirrored canyon and began walking, heading toward the dim shadow of the mountains beyond. It was early evening. Cars slid dimly through gridded streets. People were pouring out of apartments and restaurants, moving along the concrete. The interface between the condecos was lively, full of people looking for fun, for something new, hustling each other. At a fast-food store Steward bought a plastic bottle of beer, and vatshrimp in a red chili sauce. He ate dinner as he walked.

The buildings diminished in size. This was the old part of town now, winding streets cut by bits of rugged terrain left in its natural state, like parks. The people were different, livelier, probably without as much money. They played instruments, passed bottles. Steward went into a liquor store and bought a bottle of old genever wrapped in foam insulation that would keep it cold for days. He drank as he walked, rekindling the fire inside him, feeling it spread warmly to his toes, his fingertips. The mountains were fully visible now, three peaks clothed in twilight gray. He kept walking.

Cars hissed by on the dark street, trailing wisps of music. His leg muscles were driving him steadily uphill. The moon rose, a narrow sickle cutting through the fixed stars of satellites, power stations, orbital habitats. Shining on the metal cylinder where Natalie lived, alone with her postwar child. Cool breezes touched Steward’s face, his arms. The air smelled of pine.

In another hour he was in the foothills, still moving. He sipped the genever whenever he felt his fires threatening to burn low. He was surrounded by a darkness that seemed tangible, friendly, like the inside of a tented blanket. Through the pines he glimpsed occasional glimmers, distant houses stuck to the rising slope like limpets. He walked toward the moon.