Voice of the Whirlwind (6 page)

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.”