Worlds (18 page)

Sad monument to the east, though. A perfectly round
lake of black glass, still slightly radioactive. Over a hundred thousand dead.

Jeff took Violet skiing this afternoon. I might have gone along to give it a try, but they said there was no real provision for beginners here, and I don’t want to finish seeing the world bound up in a body cast. The Klonexine wouldn’t make it any safer, either.

So I wandered around town until the cold got to me, then set up camp in this coffeehouse to write letters. Daniel, John, Benny, and even a note to Mother.

I didn’t mention Jeff to either John or Daniel. It was easy to talk to Daniel about Benny, since I knew he wouldn’t feel threatened. Jeff might arouse some primal groundhog instinct in him. As if I could fall in love with a mudball cop.

6 January. Last day in France, good to be back in Paris. It was a slightly cold day but no wind and lots of sun; too nice to stay indoors. Violet and Manny spent all day in the Louvre, but Jeff and I walked until dark, from Montmartre to the heliport and back down the Seine to the pension. Then rubbed each other’s feet for a while. His are big and ugly and mine are getting there.

(Seriously, all of this walking is changing my shape. My slacks are getting looser around the middle and tighter around the thighs. Will have to take care that it doesn’t turn to fat when I get back to 0.8 gee. Maybe give up handball for track.) (Back to 50 kg. tonight)

Jeff and I split the cost of a European-language translator. It’s a four-language box that has a large vocabulary but no grammar other than the sequence of words spoken, which can lead to accidental humor on both sides. But they’re in common enough use that nobody has trouble understanding them. We got it for less than half price, from an English tourist at the heliport; presumably, we’ll pass it on when we leave Europe.

We saw so much today. Better go find the map before I try to write it all down …

Nothing in Madrid prepared us for Nerja. Madrid was cold and just had normal city bustle; not many tourists this time of year. Nerja was sunwarmed and paved with tourists. (And the tour took us here because it was far less crowded than Málaga or Torremolinos.)

Not too many Spaniards, it seemed. Most of the chatter sounded Scandinavian when it wasn’t English. Our language machine made interesting noises when we tried to eavesdrop.

I was impatient to get into the ocean, since it had been too cold for swimming at Nice. But first I had to rent a “bathing suit,” contradiction in terms. A couple of bright scraps of cloth that barely hide nipples and genitals. I never felt so naked bathing at home. But it is erotic, in an adolescent, peekaboo way.

The water was rather cold but it was all right once you got numb. Jeff gamely stayed out with me for a few minutes, but when his teeth started audibly clattering I sent him back to the beach.

Salt water tastes interesting and its density makes you feel buoyant. But it’s hard to swim well when you’re trussed up like something out of a Devonite fantasy. I tired pretty rapidly and joined Jeff on the beach. He toweled me dry and we lay down on the sand, wedged between two
parties of Germans. You could have walked from one horizon to the other without stepping off human flesh.

“You look good in that,” he said. “Especially wet.”

I’d noticed the difference. “Feel like an ad for a Broadway parlor. I’ll be scraping off eyetracks all night.”

“Wish I could help.” The hostel we were staying at was divided into male and female dormitories.

The wind shifted and we got a whiff of the Mediterranean, beyond the pollution boundary. That was some electromagnetic barrier a kilometer or so out. Our translator renders the Spanish term as “wall of shit,” which is sort of an awesome image. I buried my nose in the towel.

We fell asleep and got toasted pretty well. Jeff woke me and we took a quick splash. The damned bathing suit had sand in it; there was no way I could get it all out without taking it off, which I was tempted to do in spite of all the signs saying you would be arrested.

It was a longish walk back to where we’d rented the suits. By the time we got there, between the sun, salt, and sand, I was burned everywhere my skin had been exposed and rubbed raw everywhere else. People pay good money for this.

Madrid AmEx had been closed Sunday, the mail part, but the tour director had had our mail forwarded today. I had letters from John and Benny.

John’s letter was disturbing. Guarded language. He is not sure the Lobbies are acting in their own best interests. He is not sure of what the true sentiments of the American people are. (If they
have
any opinion one way or another. The Worlds can buy cube time to explain their problems, but the Lobbies can schedule dozens of sex and thrill shows in competition.) The situation is reasonably stable. He thinks. Our only useful threat is shutting down the power, and we’ve made the threat, and they’ve weighed it, and haven’t yet closed the Cape. Negotiations, if you can give that word to it, continue. But it’s hard to separate the information from the noise.

Benny sent another poem:

It was posted in Denver. So he’d started running.

This poem was more straightforward, if a little scary. But the words didn’t sound like Benny in either of them. Which could have been the form, of course. Every poem of his I’d found was traditionally minimalist; his using sonnets made me think there must be a code.

I hadn’t found it in the first one. I’d finally given up, deciding he’d used too subtle a code. I’m no poet, after all; I haven’t even studied that much poetry.

“Letter from Benny?” Jeff had come up behind me.

I jumped, and held the sheet against my chest. “He wouldn’t want anyone else to see it. Personal.”

He shook his head. “All I saw was that it’s a poem. Wish I could do that.” He sat down across from me. “Dinner?”

“If it’s late enough. I want to lie down for a while.” We agreed to meet here in the common room at eight.

I found the code in a few minutes this time. The repeated line, “Crafting second letter after dawn,” was the key. Reading the second letter of each word didn’t work, beyond “reef.” But reading down, taking the second letter of each line, gave
RENDER ALL TO FBI
. I went upstairs and got the first poem, which translated to
THEY DID KILL HER
.

So we had been right. But what did he mean by “render all”? Had he gone to the FBI, or was he asking me to do it?

And what about the content of the poems? The first one didn’t make much sense, beyond the coded message, but the second had some real information. “I’m gone: I’d rather not be buried in a plot” was clear, but the rest wasn’t, other than a general sense of danger, foreboding. I suppose “I be
afraid” meant “FBI raid.” God knows what else was hidden in metaphor and rebus, though I should probably be careful on the ides of May. The fifteenth?

I took my pill early, and tried to get some sleep. Dreams kept waking me up, and the sunburn made it hard to find a comfortable position. I finally went down to the common room with a book.

Jeff was on time. We worked our way toward the beach in approved Spanish barhopping style. They have
tapa
bars, where small snacks are served with beer and wine. You have a drink and a snack and then move on to another bar. Some of the snacks were seafood; I tried not to think of what they’d been swimming in.

Most of the bars were crowded and noisy, standing-room-only places. It wasn’t until we got to a relatively quiet one that he noticed I hadn’t been very talkative.

“Is something bothering you?”

“Can’t figure out which parts of this thing are edible.” I’d gotten something that might have been a pickled fig.

“Is it Benny?”

I guess that was when I made the decision. I nodded.

“You know he doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Jeff said. “I’m quite—”

“That’s not what I mean. Benny’s the same kind of friend as you are.” I bit through the rind. It was fibrous and sour. How to say it? “Benny’s in serious trouble. His life’s in danger.”

He set the wineglass down without drinking. “Is he sick?”

“No… or if he is, it’s the least of his worries.” I drank the rest of my wine all at once and signaled the bartender. He looked at his feet; men order here. “Why don’t you drink that up and get us another?”

He did. “Who’s he in trouble with?”

“We don’t know a name.” The bartender brought over a tray of food. Jeff, brave soul, took a shrimp; I stuck to the vegetable kingdom and selected a wedge of avocado. “A few months ago, Benny and I joined a… well, a political action group. Slightly underground, but as far as we could tell not mixed up in anything really illegal.”

“Communists?”

“Nothing so formal. Sort of radical antiestablishment, was all the people seemed to have in common. Some were communists, some plain anarchists, some even sounded like
right-wing libertarians. Just people dissatisfied with your form of government” Jeff concentrated on peeling the shrimp. “No name?”

“No, they used various ‘front’ names, but they were emphatic about not having a permanent name. Benny said that probably meant they
did
have a name, but we weren’t deep enough to be told.”

“Sounds possible.”

“You know something about them?”

“No. Nothing from Washington. But you hear rumors.” He squeezed some lime over the shrimp. “A lot of politicians have died young lately. Conservative Lobbies, all of them.” He looked at me. “Why the hell did
you
get mixed up with them? I can see Benny.”

“Research… I was curious.”

“Dangerous kind of research.”

“It didn’t seem so at first—more like a debating society with delusions of grandeur. But then there was a really suspicious coincidence.” I told him about Benny meeting Katherine on the way back from Washington, and her “suicide.” Then I showed him Benny’s coded messages.

“You think Benny was more deeply involved than you were?”

“I know he was. At least, he was doing something he couldn’t tell me about.”

“Yet he went to the FBI. Or wants you to.”

I nodded. “Can you check?”

“I’m not sure you really want me to… did you ever do anything illegal for them, yourself?”

“No, just some statistical analysis.”

“Still, there might be trouble.” He looked thoughtful. “I think I can get around it; there’s no need to implicate you directly. Better wait till we get to Geneva, though. I can use the Interpol scrambler there.”

“Scrambler?”

“Safe telephone system.” He studied the two poems. “Speaking of that, have you called New New York lately?”

“No. It’s terribly expensive.”

“He might be telling you to. Why else would he capitalize ‘world’ here? Try calling on the World for peace of mind.’”

“Worth doing.”

“You don’t know this Katherine’s line name or last name?”

“Nobody’s. We went by first names only.”

“What about the day she died? Can you remember the date?”

“I can get it from my diary.” It was the day after we’d seen
Chloe
.

“The city might have done an autopsy. There will be a death certificate in any case, which could be useful. Is there anything else that might help identify one of them?”

I told him about James’s bugeye prosthesis, and the address of the place we usually met. He made some notes while I tried to remember everything I could. It felt good to tell him. Benny had relieved me of a large burden. Maybe I
would
get into trouble with the FBI. I doubted that they would hold me down and poison me.

When I’d. finished, he zipped the notebook shut and didn’t say anything.

“You think I’ve been foolish.”

“Not really. Naive, yes… you and Benny, too. What this sounds like is a handful of penny-ante thugs, fanatics with, as you say, delusions of grandeur. That doesn’t make them less dangerous than a large organization, not to you and Benny. It makes them
more
dangerous. They don’t have to answer to anybody.”

He took a sip of wine and continued, quietly. “That Benny found the bug in his room is interesting. It could be that they were simply amateurish and low on resources. But you can get an invisible bug for less than a thousand bucks. It could be that they wanted him to find it.”