A Separate War and Other Stories (20 page)

“What? I don't know. Made dinner.”

He put the binoculars down on the railing and pulled out a little sound recorder. “This is what you did.”

It was a recording of me phoning my landlord, saying I'd found a cheaper place and would be moving out before Christmas.

“That was at six twenty-five,” he said. “When you got home from the coffeehouse, you must have gone straight to the phone.”

I had, of course. “No. But I guess it was the same day. That Wednesday.”

He picked up the binoculars again and scanned the middle distance. “It's okay, Johnson.”

The big man slammed me against the guardrail, hard, then tipped me over and grabbed my ankles. I was gasping, coughing, trying not to vomit, dangling fifty feet over the icy water.

“Johnson is strong, but he can't hold on to you forever. I think it's time for you to talk.”

“You can't…you can't do this!”

“I guess you have about a minute,” he said, looking at his watch. “Can you hold on a minute?” I could see Johnson nod, his upside-down smile.

“Let me put it to you this way. If you can tell us where Hugh Oliver went, you live. If you can't, you have this little accident. It doesn't matter whether it's because you don't know, or because you refuse to tell. You'll just fall.”

My throat had snapped shut, paralyzed. “I—”

“You'll either drown or freeze. Neither one is particularly painful. That bothers me a little. But I can't tell you how little guilt I will feel.”

Not the truth!
“Mexico. Drove to Mexico.”

“No, we have cameras at every crossing, with face recognition.”

“He knew that!”

“Can you let go of one ankle?” He nodded and did, and I dropped a sickening foot. “Mexico returns terrorists to us. He must have known that, too.”

“He was going to Europe from there. Speaks French.”
Quebec.

He shrugged and made a motion with his head. The big man grabbed the other ankle and hauled me back. My chin snapped against the railing, and my shoulder and forehead hit hard on the gravel.

“Yeah, Europe. You're lying, but I think you do know where he is. I can send you to a place where they get answers.” He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Maybe I'll go along with you. It's warm down there.”

Cuba. Point of no return.

My stomach fell. Even if I knew nothing about Hugh, I knew too much about them.

They couldn't let me live now. They'll pull out their answers and bury me in Guantanamo.

Johnson picked me up roughly. I kicked him in the shin, tore loose, ran three steps, and tried to vault over the edge. My hurt shoulder collapsed, and I cartwheeled clumsily into space.

Civil disobedience. What would the water feel like?

Scalding. Then nothing.

(2005)

She sat on the examination table, trying to hold the open back of the hospital robe closed. Everything was cold chrome and eggshell white and smelled of air-conditioning and rubbing alcohol. And of her, slightly.

The man stepped in and quietly closed the door behind him. He had a stethoscope and a name tag but was wearing all black.

He spoke her name and took her cold hand. His hand was warm and dry.

He listened for a heart and then for breathing. He put the stethoscope away in a drawer and left it open.

“You have to trust me completely,” he said.

“Will it hurt?”

“Not really,” he said. He wasn't actually lying. The pain would not belong to her.

“But people have died from it.”

“People have died during it. Not many,” he said. “What would death be to you?”

“I don't know. John Donne said something about it.”

“‘Death, thou shalt die.'” He almost smiled. “Take off the robe.”

She took it off and tried to fold it, then just dropped it.

He didn't react to her strange nakedness. “Lie down here.” She did. “Hold still.”

With his finger he traced a line from her navel to her breastbone. Her skin was gray and tight, room temperature and parchment smooth. He kept his finger pressed there, marking a place midway between her small breasts.

He painted something cold there.

“You will just barely feel this,” he said. She looked away. He pressed a round fitting firmly into the bone, with a small snap.

He blotted for blood. There wasn't any. “That wasn't bad,” he said. “Was it?”

She nodded, eyes tightly closed.

“How did you die?” he asked.

“I don't really know. I woke up like this.”

He tapped the fitting a few times and wiggled it. “This must be your first time,” he said.

“Yes; I'm only 110.”

He bound her wrists and ankles to the table with metal clamps.

“Is that really necessary? I'm weak as a kitten.”

“You never know,” he said. “Sometimes there's a violent reaction, hysterical strength.”

He put on a chain necklace with a heavy silver cross, with rubies at the stigmata points. She heard the metallic rattle and opened her eyes. “I'm not a Christian. Will it work?”

“You don't have to be a believer,” he said. “And this is not an exorcism, except in some metaphorical way. Metaphorical, not metaphysical.”

“Okay.”

“Close your eyes again,” he said. He reached into the open drawer and withdrew a black metal rod that tapered to a point. He gently inserted the point of the long black tool into the fitting in her chest. Then he moistened his fingertips with his tongue and touched her ears and then her eyes, whispering in Latin,
“Exorcizo te, omnis spiritus immunde, in nomine Dei…”

“So why the Latin? If it's not an exorcism.”

“It's a message to both our bodies,” he said. “An incantation that initializes us as patient and healer.”

“That sounds as bad as exorcism.”

“It's science,” he said. “The nanozooans that keep you immortal have gone into an emergency mode. Some imbalance has to be addressed. They can stay alive themselves, in aggregate, but they can't keep you alive, beyond oxygenating your brain.

“Together, they have the intelligence of a small child. But it's not easy to get them to do anything out of their routine. Like organic cells, most of them have a single function in terms of keeping your body going. But instead of dying when things go wrong, they go into shutdown mode and await instruction.

“We chose the old Latin rite as an instruction code because no one will run into it accidentally. If it were some common phrase, you might overhear it accidentally, and your body would start deconstructing itself. That would be frightening.”

“I don't think I understand. I'm not a technical person. What is that black thing?”

“It's like medicine in the old days,” he said. “Helping your body help itself. Try to let the Latin put you to sleep.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes again.

“…in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi eradicare, et effugare ab hoc plasmate Dei. Ipse tibi imperat, qui te de supernis caelorum in inferiora terrae demergi praecepit. Ipse tibi imperat, qui mari, ventis, et tempestatibus imperavit…”

Her eyes snapped open, bright red, and she bucked against the restraints, howling. Lunging, she was almost able to bite him, with teeth suddenly long and sharp as fangs. He leaned into the short sword and pushed her back to the table. The door behind him banged open, and two big attendants in green started in and hesitated.

“It's okay,” he said. “Get the cleaning 'bot.”

Her mouth overflowed with black foam, and she shook her head violently, spraying the room. Yellow and gray worms came crawling out of her mouth and nose. Noxious gases rose out of her body and billowed into orange flame. Something like electricity crackled along her arms. Finally, she fell limp.

He had studied her carefully through the whole seizure. Now he rotated the black tool patiently between his palms, like a man trying to start a fire, but more slowly. Green vapors rose out of her chest for a minute, and then stopped, and there was a little bright blood there. He put down the tool and found a cap in the open drawer, and closed off the fitting with it.

He undid the restraints. “Okay, guys,” he said. “She's ready for cleanup.” The two big men came in and carried her away, while the cleaning robot scuttled around after wriggling worms and various excreta.

She came slowly back to consciousness seated in a lukewarm shower. There was a kindly looking matron in a candy-stripe uniform watching her. “Are you coming around?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.” The dead gray skin sloughed off, and the skin underneath glowed bright healthy pink. “That didn't hurt at all.”

The man in black appeared in the door. “Good thing. There'd be hell to pay.”

(2004)

I think the universe would have been a much finer place if space travel had stayed expensive. Then it would never have involved me. So now I get to spend two years of my life doing “social observation” on a planet where, stepping out without a space suit, you wouldn't live long enough to take a second breath.

Social observation by a draftee with a gun. You couldn't call it war, since these woogies were still killing each other with sticks when we arrived—and besides, nobody really wants to hurt them. We just want to find out whether they have anything worth taking.

I do the reals and read books about the old days, my great-grandparents' time, when they spent more to put two men on the Moon than we spend to keep ten battalions on ten worlds. I try to feel what they felt, but I can't get there. It's not very glorious: step into the machine, step out on a woogie planet, try not to get into too much trouble, come back one month a year to spend your pay.

We call this one La-la Land, or just Lalande, because its star's real name was Lalande followed by some number. A sun with another sun pretty far away. Not much night, or none at all, for about half the year, which bothers some people. I grew up in Alaska, sun all night in the summer, and also lived there while getting my highly useful degree in art history. For some reason that seems to have qualified me to become a heavy equipment operator. With a gun, one must add, and a big gun, on the heavy equipment, which I would call a tank if I didn't know it was a GPV(E), General Purpose Vehicle (Exploration). Which spends half its time in the motor pool with mysterious ailments.

My partner in this dubious enterprise is Whoopie Marchand, whose name may affect her demeanor, with another appropriate degree: library science. We both wish the other was a mechanic. Whoopie comes from Jamaica, and likes to keep the machine about ten degrees hotter than I would choose, and in our tiny space cooks food so spicy it makes my eyes water. So except for the fact that I prefer the company of men and can hardly understand a word she says, we were just made for one another.

The Lalandians are a little more like humans, or at least other Earth creatures, than most woogies. (I have an older cousin who served on Outback, where the natives are like big spiders with metal shells.) They have the right number of eyes and ears and nostrils and a tiny mouth-thing, but six arm/legs. Their body chemistry is so different from ours that they breathe chlorine along with their oxygen. The water that comes out of their wells would kill you in a second.

Their heads are long and squashed-looking, with batwing ears and chins like axe blades. Bright red slanted eyes with nictitating membranes, set in deep sockets. Not easy to love.

They look sort of like nightmare centaurs, but their front, with the chest and “arms” and head, isn't always pointed forward. When they want to, those arms become the hind legs, and their butts rise up into the air, and they can use their former hind legs as arms. It's a defense thing, since from a distance the butt looks like the head, with dark spots for eyes and ears and mouth, but it's just a fat-and-water storage organ. If something bites it off, they can regenerate it.

It's an evolutionary anachronism now; their ancestors killed off all the large predators when they became tool-users. The old guys were pretty fierce, too, evidently. Sabretooth centaurs with big claws. They're more or less settled down now, though.

Whoopie and I are part of X Group, engineers, and normally stay in the compound that overlooks the town Nula. It's the biggest town on the continent, with maybe ten thousand natives. Hard to get a count, though; they're nomadic, and most of them are just in town temporarily, buying and selling and anxious to get back on the road. They ride six-legged things that aren't mammals but look like big soft camels, going from one oasis to another on this dry dustball of a world.

They couldn't send me someplace where the natives had art, like Kelsey or Pakkra; that would be too sensible. They probably send mechanics there. The Lalandians seem kind of plain and pragmatic; they have crafts like weaving and pottery, but everything's utilitarian. There are subtle and beautiful color variations in some of their fired pots, but they seem to be incidental, perhaps accidental. They're close to color-blind anyhow, with those huge red eyes.

So I was surprised and pleased to get what looked like an art assignment; the coordinator said an orbital survey showed what looked like statuary in the Badlands north of here, and Whoopie and I were to go out and take its measure. They didn't choose Whoopie on the off chance that there might be a library out there; it's just that we had trained together on the GPV in South Dakota and Antarctica. And we did get along all right except for gender, culture, language, diet, and all. Did I mention that she smokes? I don't. For the past month or so, she and I had been out for a couple of hours a day, gathering geological specimens to send back to Earth. This was going to be a really long one, so I made sure she had lots of weeds and chili powder.

We went into town first, to take on water, which is always a bit of a driving challenge, since the Lalandians are fascinated by the GPV, which bears a superficial resemblance to their camel things, since it's bulbous and has six wheels. Their culture lacks the concept of being squashed like a bug, though, lacking heavy machinery, and it takes a delicate touch on the joystick to keep from running over the juvenile natives.

I'm glad to let Whoopie drive in town, since she's better at it and enjoys it. I sort of enjoy riding along hanging on to the side. The kids wave like human kids would. I'd throw them candy except carbohydrates would kill them.

When we left the city limits, defined by a huge dirt wall, I swung inside through the double door, took off the breather helmet, and seat-belted myself into the command seat. “Hey, mon,” Whoopie said.

“It's John,” I said, not for the first time.

“Hey, John. You smell like the chlorine dust.”

“Go ahead.” She lit up a clove-smelling weed. The airco cranked max on her side and sucked up most of it.

“You don' want one.”

“Thanks, no.” I thought about my own opie but couldn't slap that until I was off duty. She could smoke the clove thing because regulations lag behind reality.

The inside of the GPV was bigger than a civilian van, but full enough of stuff that it felt crowded. Two bunks and a galley in front of us, and a little head with a privacy curtain that only pulled halfway. Weapons station at the very rear. Chatterguns and a big pulse cannon in case you were bothered by something far enough away to use it. We'd trained on both back earthside, but nobody had ever fired a shot on Lala. Probably a good thing. The chatterguns were almost as hard on the user as on the target, and the cannon could blow the front off the tank if you depressed it too far.

Whoopie put the thing on dumb auto, and we studied the chart on the screen. There weren't any roads headed for the artifact.

“How the hell they build this thing?” Whoopie said. “Gotta be twice the size of Mount Rushmore. They had roads and like explosives and jackhammers for Rushmore.”

I didn't know what Mount Rushmore was, but then I was never actually an American, not since Alaska seceded when I was six. Neither was Whoopie, of course, but Jamaica was an American protectorate and just a hop away. She went there all the time.

She saw my expression and explained. “Mount Rushmore's in one of those states like Idaho? The big square ones, I always get mixed up. They got four and a half presidents' heads carved in the side of a mountain.” She closed her eyes, trying to remember. “Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln. One of the Roosevelts. Then they try to add someone from the twenty-first, Reagan or Bush, and it collapses. Just a triangle of hair and part of one eye left. It looks kinda like a cunt.”

I traced a possible route with my finger. “Maybe we should stay on this mesa? Just follow along the curve of the canyon lip.”

She nodded. “Twice as long, but God knows what we get in the valley.” Probably rubble, like leftover president chins. “You want to set it up, drive for a while?”

“Yeah, take a break.” The weed usually made her sleepy. She went forward and scrunched into the sack.

I might have joined her if I was that way. She's kind of pretty. And we do like each other more than we let on.

I took the stylus and drew us a route that stayed along a level path, according to the elevation lines, an arc that went west and then north. That would be the default, in case I smoked a joint and fell asleep myself. But dumb auto won't go over five or six kays per hour. We'd run out of curry before we got there.

I shifted over and belted in and gave the dashboard a thumbprint and eyescan. Cranked it up to about fifty, sixty kays, bumpety bump.

“Don't you go too fast, mon,” Whoopie mumbled.

“Sleep, my darling. I made Expert on this thing.”

“Yah, that's what I mean. Be expert.” I actually got ranked Expert on vehicles and weapons I'd never seen, let alone driven or shot. If you're not Expert all-around, they can't send you off planet. So there you go.

The trough we were in was kind of like a broad dry creek bed, pebbles and rocks. Sometimes boulders you had to maneuver around. At that speed it didn't even take half a brain.

I used the other half to paint mental pictures. I'm not a bad artist—just not an especially good one—and the paintings I do in my head work out better than the ones on paper or canvas. I did Whoopie's face, half in darkness, mysterious. The African goddess of Annoying Normal People.

The main sun set after about an hour and a half, but there was enough light from the little one, I didn't have to pop an eyepill. They always make me sweat, go figure. After about three hours, though, the light was getting green and weak. Whoopie got up and suggested we take it easy for a while, let the little bastard rise up out of the mists near the horizon.

It was good to stop. The shock absorbers on the tank were marvels of engineering, I'm sure, but I still felt like a pair of dice finally come to rest.

She'd soaked some dehydrated goat for a curry. Why did we take goat to the stars? It would never have occurred to me to eat one in the first place. She'd eat worms if they had curry and hot sauce on them, though in fact goat was big comfort food for her.

I did my usual escape, putting on a real and delaying my own dinner so I wouldn't have to share the smell of hers. I'd been on this one before, soaring like a condor over the Norwegian fjords in total winter, really like a bird, finding the weak thermals on the sun side and sliding along them, thinking of nothing but flight. Enjoying the deadly cold. At least there was plenty of oxygen and no exotic spices.

When I came out of it the air was cold and curry-free. “I turned up the airco,” Whoopie said. “Where'd you go?”

I told her. “I could try that.”

“Thought you didn't like cold.” I handed her the headset.

She nodded. “Like the birds, though.” She settled into the pilot seat and turned it on.

I zapped some chicken stew and read while she soared. A survey of Spanish architecture, post-Gaudi. I had a monograph linked to it, distilled from my Ph.D. thesis, and there were two latent hits I'd have to check when I went back earthside. Maybe a job offer, dream on.

It used to be that when you were drafted, the goddamned Confederación would make them keep your job for when you got back. That ended the year before I was offered the opportunity of service. I'll spend next month earthside trying to line something up, but there seem to be about five art historians for every nonteaching job. I'll wind up in some cow college trying to keep a roomful of Eskimos and myself awake while I drone on about Doric and Corinthian columns.

The phone chimed and I thumbed it. The lovely face of our immediate superior, Yobie Mercer. I sort of hated his tattoos, which looked amateur and self-inflicted. “Coordinator. What can I do for you?”

“You could start by telling me why your vehicle's not moving.”

“It's dark. We took a break for chow and to wait for Junior to come up out of the mist.”

“You have lights.”

“With all respect, sir, the terrain is pretty uneven.”

“It's not that bad. How far are you?”

I looked at the chart and measured out about two inches. “It looks like about seventy klicks, sir. Three hours in the dark.”

“Well, do it. I want you there by main dawn.”

“Yes, sir.” If they're in such a goddamned hurry, why don't they fly someone out? “We'll certainly try.”

“You'll more than try, Denham. You'll be there. We have civilian press coming at 0800.”

“Press, sir? From Earth?”

“Just do it.” He clicked off.

“What was that all about?” Whoopie had the helmet off.

“Fearless Leader wants us there at dawn, big dawn. Something about press.”

“Press this.” She grabbed her crotch. “You wanta drive?”

“I'd as soon you did. If you're rested enough.”

“Sure, no prob.” We shifted around and belted in. She dimmed the inside lights and snapped on the outside floods. The vague landscape jumped into sharp relief, mostly jumbled grey rocks. The bright light brought out subtle shadings, ochre and gamboge and rust.