Brother Termite (21 page)

The ship, round and cool and silent, waited on a grassy hummock. He stumbled, tripped, sprawled facedown in the smell of loam, fallen leaves, and the quiet natural death of autumn.

Boots stopped near him. “Brother?” Oomal whispered.

Reen didn’t answer. And Oomal waited as blue shadows barred the lawn, as daylight faded to gray, as the first stars began to peer from the violet sky.

Finally Oomal said, “You trusted her too much.”

Reen somehow managed to get back on his feet. He dusted his hands. “Don’t you think I know?” he said.

“WE HAVE TO
find her,” Oomal said as they walked to the ship. “And we’ll use the Loving Helpers this time. It looks as though the CIA perfected that toxin they were working on but didn’t have the time to put it into production. Still, we have to make sure.”

Reen kept pace with him, his eyes on the grass at his feet. “There’s a farm in Virginia,” he said. “Fly up Chain Bridge Road to Wolf Trap. I think I might be able to find it again.”

In the smoky dusk, lights were going on in houses, and each looked as warm and friendly as home. Marian could have been hiding in any one of them.

The ship flew on in the cold, dim evening.

“Now where?” Oomal asked when they reached Wolf Trap.

“North, I think.”

They circled the area for a long time, over dozens of dilapidated barns, hundreds of solitary farmhouses, but nothing looked familiar. They went to Camp Peary, but the CIA farm was deserted.

Oomal gave up around midnight and flew back to the White House. When they landed, he motioned Zoor and the Loving Helpers out, to sit alone in the ship with Reen.

“From the notes I found,” Oomal said into the dark silence between them, “the wild animals were a dead end. That’s when they started experimenting directly on Cousins. I don’t know how this toxin works, Reen, but you saw that it’s effective and fast. Tali wants to find Marian, and he’s bound to search Langley. When he discovers what the CIA was working on, the Community will panic. They’ll order the viruses used.”

Ahead, the portico lights bathed a solitary marine guard.

After a moment, Reen reached into his pocket and took out the tape recorder. When Oomal saw the recorder, he cocked his head in mute question.

“Oomal?” Reen asked. “How much is Tali’s life worth? Ten humans? A thousand? Thirty billion?”

“I don’t understand.”

Reen hit the
REWIND
button, then
PLAY
. He heard Oomal’s gasp at Tali’s voice, Oomal’s low moan when he realized what Hopkins was saying.

“God, Reen,” Oomal said when the tape was finished. “Poor Tali. Murder. Blackmail. I thought
I’d
become too human. I thought you had. But Tali ... Christ. None of us is really a Cousin anymore.”

“You’ll be First.”

“Tomorrow.” Oomal, in his anger, sounded so much like Tali that it startled Reen. “Tomorrow I’ll go to Andrews and present this to the Sleep Master.”

The White House lawn was dark, with only the fountain lit. Reen could imagine the Old Ones walking there, searching, trying to find where Reen and his Brothers had so carelessly misplaced the Cousin legacy.

“If you know where Marian is, Reen, tell me.”

“If I knew, I would.”

Oomal climbed out of the ship, Reen following. At the top of the grand staircase, Reen paused.

“Aren’t you coming to sleep?” Oomal asked.

“In a moment.”

“About what we saw at Langley ... you’re not going to do anything stupid?”

Reen gave his Brother a lopsided smile. “Haven’t I always?”

Oomal gazed longingly down the hall toward the promise of sleep. “Look, what happened wasn’t your fault. You may have trusted Marian too much, but Tali also trusted Hopkins. It’s hard for us to understand human deception. I see it all the time, and even I don’t understand it. Suppliers and their lies about the freshness of their produce. Salesmen making overblown claims. They look you right in the eye and lie. It’s not–”

“Go ahead and sleep, Oomal. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Reen watched his Brother turn and make his reluctant way to Jeff Womack’s old bedroom. When Oomal was safely inside, Reen went downstairs.

In the pantry one of the staff was sleeping in a chair, his head on the table. At the entrance to the colonnade a dull-eyed Secret Serviceman sat at his desk, watching a bank of monitors.

The White House was as dead as Langley had been.

Reen paused at the entrance to the Green Room. In that plush, silent chamber someone was sitting in a chair by the fireplace, his back to Reen.

Reen entered. It was Jeremy Holt, staring into the cold hearth. The medium looked up. “Oh, hello.”

“Who are you tonight?” Reen asked. “Kennedy? Van Cliburn? Rachmaninoff?”

“No,” Jeremy said with a shy shrug, as if ducking a blow. “It’s just me this time.”

“Then why are you sitting in here?” It wasn’t a place for the medium. It was Jeff’s room. Jeff’s chair.

“I got lost,” the man said miserably. Reen sighed and sat down.

“It’s a big place, isn’t it? The White House, I mean.” Jeremy’s glasses magnified his pond-brown eyes. “When President Kennedy’s here, he knows his way around, but he never bothers to tell me. Do you know where I’m supposed to sleep?”

“The Lincoln bedroom.”

“Yes, I know that,” he said, regarding a Remington oil without interest. “I know I’m supposed to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. But I’m not in myself much anymore, and I forget where it is. I went to where I thought it was, but that was a big room with a piano in it.”

“The East Room. You needed to go up a floor.”

“Oh.”

Jeremy was a small man, Reen realized with a stab of pity. A little soul who was easily misplaced. “I’m going upstairs. I’ll show you where it is.”

The man’s face brightened. “Thanks. I’m very tired.”

“Just don’t come in this room again.”

“Is it the laughter?” Jeremy asked.

Halfway to his feet, Reen froze.

“I hear laughter in here sometimes.”

“Yes,” Reen said. “It’s because of the laughter.”

They trudged up the steps in silence. At the door to the Lincoln bedroom, Reen said good night.

Jeff Womack’s old bedroom smelled of sleep, and in the blue glow from the lamp Reen could see the pea-podded lumps of the Cousins. On the bed he found a sheet laid out for him, and he wrapped himself in it tightly. He fell asleep more easily than he thought possible.

He awoke before dawn and inched himself out of the sheet. Quietly, in order not to wake the others, he crept from the room and into the study next door.

The air was moist and cold on the Truman balcony. Across the Potomac the lights of Arlington shimmered. The sun, just below the eastern terminator, had turned the sky a bruised purple.

“Reen,” a voice said.

He turned. The speaker was hidden in shadow, but he knew the voice.

“I was hoping you’d wake up,” Marian said. “I kept thinking of you. Is that the way you used to wake me?”

Sunrise began to paint the tip of the Washington Monument lavender.

“I went to Langley,” he said.

A yellow flame in a corner of the balcony. The gentle glow cupped Marian’s cheek. She lit her cigarette and with a click extinguished the lighter.

That face. He had seen it softened in sleep, contorted with fear. He had seen it grow old. Forty-seven years, and he had never really known her.

“You planted the bomb at Dulles,” he said.

She tilted her head and blew a thread of smoke at the ceiling. “Yes.”

“You kidnapped Cousins and Helpers, and Howard experimented on them.”

She pulled her leather jacket tighter against the moist dawn chill. “Yes.”

Reen looked across the lawn. The tops of the tallest trees had netted the morning and were ablaze.

“You told me too much,” she said quietly. “You handed me all that responsibility. What did you expect me to do? Did you think only Cousins loved their own? Did you think that just because we’re not as good as you, you could destroy us and we wouldn’t care?”

“No. No. I never thought that,” he whispered.

“King Leopold in the Congo.” Her voice was wry and amused. “That’s how you acted. Sometimes you were such a condescending bastard, Reen. You had to love everybody, and I was only good at loving one thing.” She looked out pensively at the tender apricot sunrise. “But it came down to genocide, didn’t it? Secrets and genocide. If I wanted to live with myself, I had to stop you before the birthrate went any lower.”

A promising ruddy sun peered over the horizon. “The birthrate doesn’t matter, Marian. Your DNA is now infected with the same flaw as ours is. Except that we produce Loving Helpers. Sometime in the next generation you’ll begin to produce nothing. Your DNA will not replicate anymore.”

A throaty sound of surprise. She got up and walked to the edge of the balcony, resting her elbows on the railing. The Potomac below was a dusky pink ribbon in the dawn.

He thought she would weep. It shocked him when she chuckled. “God help me. I’ve been a spook too long. If I were normal, I wouldn’t find this funny. But I’ve never been normal, have I?”

A flick of her adroit human fingers. The cigarette arced toward the lawn, a ruddy falling star.

“You outfoxed me. That sweet innocent little face. That pint-sized childlike honor. I thought humans were better at deception, Reen. We were so good at it, I felt sorry for you. Oh, Jesus.” She laughed. “You learned a lot from Jeff Womack. Political half-truths. You even hid things you shouldn’t have. I didn’t know you couldn’t sleep without others around. When you told me that, you scared me to death. I thought I could always protect you.”

“If you hadn’t put the Cousins in with the Helpers, you would have found out that we die if left alone.”

She turned to face him. Behind her, down the gentle bowl of the sky, the violet brightened to a rim of gold.

“Here,” she said, taking a plastic bag from the pocket of her jacket.

He took it. Small pink squares at the bottom, like confetti. “It’s an antidote. Enough for you and Oomal and the Cousins from Gerber. It works like adrenaline. Under stress, your body produces an endorphin that shuts down your system.”

Confetti. Like something from a child’s birthday party. And pink, the color of dawn.

Her voice was hurried. “When everything starts, put one in your mouth. It’s adhesive. There will be a burning sensation. Your pulse will race–”

“When what starts?”

“Stay in the White House. You’ll be safe here. The troops will guard you. Vilishnikov promised me that.”

“Marian!” he shouted, alarmed. “What’s going to happen?”

“Vilishnikov put all military troops on alert two days ago. At nine o’clock Eastern Standard Time they’ll attack the Cousin installations. Your defense can scramble electronics, but I know from what you’ve told me that you’re not prepared for a sudden overwhelming attack. I don’t want you to set foot outside the White House, Reen. I don’t want you to try to stop it.”

The plastic bag fell from his fingers.

“Pick it up!” Marian ordered angrily. “Damn you! Pick that up! Go in there and give it to the rest of those Cousins! At nine o’clock put one in your mouth. Make sure the others do, too.”

A quick triple pump from his heart. His head swam, and he sat down hard on a lounge chair. The delicate light of morning flooded the Mall and the leafless cherry trees.

He checked his watch. Six A.M. Oomal was wrapped in slumber in the room next door. At Andrews the Community was tucked into niches. In West Virginia the children were still riding their dreams.

“Will it work on the children?”

“What?”

“Will it work on Angela? Marian, did you ever once think about your daughter?”

He could see the answer in her face. “Get out,” he told her.

She hesitated. “Promise me you’ll use the antidote.”

“Damn you. Goddamn you.” Oomal’s words, but his own hushed voice. “A house in the country. Me all to yourself. Marian, must you always get everything you want?”

Turning his back on her, he watched morning fill the streets.

No cars moved on Constitution Avenue. The windows of the nearby buildings were dark. Saturday, he remembered.

It was Saturday, and the morning was so quiet, he could hear her every soft footstep as she left.

“GIVE ME
your
gun,” Reen said.

The Secret Serviceman in the colonnade looked up in dazed and sleepy alarm. Reen recognized him: the same agent he had encountered on the stairway after Jeff Womack’s assassination.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“I need a gun. Give me your gun.”

Indecision. Then, “Sir, there
are
regulations. I can’t give you mine, but ...” The agent got up and walked with Reen to Landis’s office. A jingling of keys as he opened a steel gun safe. “This is a nine-millimeter federal issue. Ever handle a gun before? No? Okay, this is the slide. Pull it back to chamber the first bullet. After that, well, it’s an automatic, sir. It pretty much does the rest on its own. Here’s the safety. Leave that on until you have to shoot. The magazine’s loaded with Hydra-Shok hollowpoints. The gun’s light. Should be light enough for you to use. But it’s got plenty of stopping power.”

Reen took the automatic. Heavy, not at all light. It looked very much like Hopkins’s gun. His three-fingered hand and claw felt unwieldy on the grip.

The Secret Serviceman was young, earnest, and anxious. “About the assassination ... are you worried we can’t protect you? Or is there something going on the Service should know about? I admired President Womack very much, sir. And I know he was fond of you. Both President Womack and President Kennedy left very specific instructions as to your safety. An agent hasn’t been assigned to you, but that can be remedied. I can call–”

“Don’t bother. It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

Reen took the gun and left. On the landing of the staircase he remembered to pull the slide to chamber the bullet. Then, despite what the agent had said, he flicked off the safety.

He took an old gym bag out of the desk drawer in Jeff Womack’s study. Stuffing the gun into the tote, he walked into the bedroom and looked at the slumbering Cousins.

They seemed so peaceful, so innocent that some compassionate thing in Reen wanted to go away and leave them there.

“Oomal,” he called.

In the dim blue light, one of the cocoons stirred.

Louder: “Oomal!”

Radalt pulled the sheet down from his face. Next to Radalt, Oomal grunted and shrugged himself out of his bonds.

“Get up. All of you need to get up. Don’t bother bathing.”

“Are you okay, Cousin?” Zoor asked, crawling out from his sheet. “You sound–”

“In three hours the army will attack. We have to get the recombinants off Earth.”

Oomal’s fingers slowly unhinged, and his sheet fluttered to the floor. “Get the Gerber commuter,” he told his staff. “Fly up to one of the main ships to get more runners. There are twenty-one recombinant centers. I want them all cleared in two hours and those children up in space where they’ll be safe.”

Sakan made a graceless, overwrought gesture. “But what about the payroll? What are the workers going to do if we’re not there to sign the checks?”

“It’s all right,” Oomal said. “Everything will be all right. Go on.”

With troubled backward looks the Gerber execs left the room.

“She was here, wasn’t she? Marian was here,” Oomal said when they were alone.

“I want to go to West Virginia.”

“Yes, that’s fine, Reen. But I have a responsibility. The Community–”

“Oomal, think! Humans and Cousins are becoming extinct. If there is to be any future, we
must
save the children.”

The truth hit Oomal like a blow. He looked around the room, bewildered, then shook his head to clear it. “The Community ship’s over by the West Wing. We’ll take that.”

He hurried from the room, Reen after him. At their passage the maids looked up from their cleaning; the Secret Service agent in the colonnade glanced up from his daily report. The ship was parked on the lawn, Thural standing by it. His sleep must have been thin for him to awaken so early.

Thural’s gaze flicked to Reen and then settled on Oomal.

“Get on the ship’s net. Alert the Community at Andrews. Tell them to send the word out,” Oomal called. “The humans are planning an attack.”

Thural tipped his head as though he thought Oomal was making a poor joke.

“Do it now, Thural,” Oomal said as he bounded onto the ramp, Reen at his heels. “And take us to West Virginia.”

Thural followed them. “But I am under rebuke, Cousin.”

“Just
do
it!”

“They will not believe me.”

Oomal turned, his face contorted. “Goddamn it to hell, just
do
it!”

Stunned, Thural walked down the short hall to the navigation room.

When the ship lifted, Reen said, “I want you to take the children to Mars station.”

Oomal stared out the window. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to keep them away from the rest of the Community. Promise me that.”

Reen saw the glimmering string of lights along the George Washington Parkway blink out. For a moment he feared that it had something to do with the coming attack, then realized that it was only the automatic timer kicking in.

Time had come for the Cousins. Past time. In
his mind he saw lights going out all over the universe.

“When you’re safe,” Reen said, “I’ll go back to help the Community.”

After a silence Oomal asked, “What do you have in that bag?”

“A gun.”

“For Christ’s sake. A gun?” Oomal’s voice wavered between amusement and grief.

Reen looked out the window at the gold dawn streaking the sky. “Oomal, I shouldn’t have trusted Marian.”

Oomal hooked the side of Reen’s tunic and drew him near. “Listen to me.” His Brother was so close that Reen could smell the spice of sleep on him. “I loved my human employees. And in a few hours the whole truth will be out. They’ll be wondering why I lied to them. They’ll wonder how I could have eaten dinner in their homes and gone to Little League baseball games, all the while doing my best to make their race extinct. You don’t have a corner on the guilt market.”

They stood like that, perilously close, closer than Communal Law allowed, and together they watched the ship leave the lights of Fairfax County behind.

Reen put his finger to the emblem on his Brother’s chest, thrilling at the contact of childhood Mind.

Oomal didn’t move but looked at Reen in query.

“Intelligence,” Reen whispered.

“Yes?”

“Both of us. We should have been more intelligent than to love the thing we were destroying.”

It had snowed in the West Virginia mountains, and the trees were thick with white.

“You know?” Oomal said wistfully. “In Michigan we used to go sledding with the human kids. I’ll miss the snow.”

The snow. The trees. Oomal’s humor. Angela’s beautiful hands.

Reen and Oomal made their way from the ship. At the door they met Thural.

“Did you call ahead to warn them?” Oomal asked.

“I warned them, but I do not know if they believed me.” Oomal nodded. “You’ve done all you can. Go round up the West Virginia Cousins and get them on the main transport.”

The children’s’ house smelled of blueberry muffins. In the dining room the recombinants were having breakfast. As Reen and Oomal entered, Angela jumped up from the table and ran over to hug Reen’s waist. His hand dropped to cradle the warm bulge of her cranium, the wisps of blond hair.

Quen came around the table, his expression furious. “You bring him here?”

“Get the children together, Quen,” Oomal said. “Get them on board the transport. We’re going to Mars station.”

“Mars station is deserted!”

“Now, Quen.” Oomal’s face was strangely impassive. Shock? Reen wondered. Or an effort not to alarm the children?

Mrs. Gonzales emerged from the kitchen, a spatula in her hand.

“The army plans to attack the Cousins,” Reen told her. “Stay here if you like. It will be safe enough for a while. We must take the children.”

After a long, steady look at Reen, the caregiver bent down to Angela. “Come on, sweetie, let’s get your clothes. We’re all going for a ride together.”

She ushered the children from the table and into the dormitories.

Quickly, without looking back, Reen hurried outside. Thural was still standing by the commuter, pretending not to have noticed Reen’s exit. Behind him the West Virginia Cousins were packing the transport to leave.

Stepping off the porch onto the snow, Reen went around to the side of the house, Jeff’s gym bag bouncing at his side.

Tali had spies, Reen knew. Hopkins had been a teacher of deception, Tali a good student. The spy from West Virginia would have been told to keep an eye on Reen. Whoever the spy was, he would follow.

He heard the door of the house open. Heard footsteps crunch in the snow. He paused and looked over his shoulder. Quen was walking behind him, and Thural was a few paces back.

Seeing him stop, they stopped, too, and peered at the snowbound trees in a parody of innocence.

“Go back to the ship,” Reen said.

Neither Cousin moved. Thural was engrossed in a tiny black-green pine, Quen in the eaves of the roof.

“Go back,” Reen said. “Please.”
Please, not Thural.

Thural finally turned and made his way slowly to the other ship, his boots leaving blue-pooled indentations in the white.

Reen turned and kept walking, hearing the squeak of his own steps, of Quen’s. Around a corner, in the center of a winte-blasted garden, he stopped and looked back. Quen was standing against the wall, beyond a row of spindly fig-tree corpses and the stick grave markers of withered tomato plants.

Reen unzipped the bag, took out the gun. “Quen,” he said.

The Cousin didn’t look up.

It took both hands to lift the automatic. Reen sighted to the center of Quen’s chest, just to the left of the lightning bolt.

“Quen,” he said in low apology and pulled the trigger.

A sky-splitting crack. Reen’s arms were jerked up over his head. Quen was flung backward. Blood sprayed the white wall, the snow.

On the ground Quen made a little sound, like someone surprised by bad news. He put his hand to his chest and then stared idiotically at the brown covering his palm.

Reen approached, and Quen finally looked up, looked right at him despite Communal law. His eyes were terrified.

It would take only a few minutes; Cousins never took long to die. But Reen couldn’t walk away and leave him. He lifted the gun again. Quen raised his hand as though to ward off the bullet.

The explosion made Reen’s ears ring. Quen’s hand dropped. Without a single tremor, without another breath, he lay still.

Reen slipped the gun back into the bag. When he walked around to the front of the house, he saw Oomal and Thural by the door of the transport. The children were boarding.

There was horror in Oomal’s face. “Reen? My God. I thought I heard–”

“No one will report back to Tali now. You’re safe enough. I’ll go to Anacostia and try to warn the Cousins.”

Angela stood in the line of children at the ship, making a snowball. When she saw Reen, she stopped her play and ran over, flailing in the ankle-deep snow. He sank to one knee and gathered his daughter to him.

Too bad, oh, too bad. If only he had broad shoulders and a wide strong back, he wouldn’t have failed her. He could have kept the world at bay.

“Go for a ride, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes,” he whispered into her hair.

The human need for embraces, it must have something to do with never wanting to let go. Angela against him, stomach to stomach, chest to chest, furnished him with a sort of magic. A daughter-shaped impression that, if his mind ever failed to remember, his body would never forget.

“Reen. It’s getting late.” Oomal took Angela by the shoulders and gently pulled her from her father.

Reen couldn’t get up. The cold snow had soaked his uniform so that he couldn’t feel his legs. Angela, standing next to Oomal, was looking at him as gravely as any Cousin. Her thumb was in her mouth. Then Oomal turned her around and walked her inside. Kneeling there, Reen watched his whole world rise, round and silver, into the robin’s-egg-blue day.