Kalifornia (25 page)

“You’ll never get me!” she would cry out of context. The
therapists thought she was talking to them, but they smiled and continued to
hurt her in various ways essential to her recovery.

Meanwhile, the crowd around the house grew steadily. Cars dipped
through the canyon for a glimpse of Kali. Tourists crowded the balconies of
restaurants on the opposite brink, overstressing the structures until, early
one Sunday, a flock of gawking tourists—along with a handful of innocent
brunchers—were precipitated into the abyss. Whereupon a mob of the deceased’s
relatives converged on the Figueroa manor, begging Kali to bring them back from
the dead as she had done her mother. Kali’s military escort were put to work
holding back the agitated fans. The soldiers paraded the grounds of the house,
patrolled the rooftops, even watched the doors and took up posts in the
interior of the house. Kali watched through all of them; they served as her
private closed-circuit remotes.

She was watching in this manner one afternoon when Alfredo
approached the apparent captain of the guard with an unsettling question.

“Excuse me,” said her grandfather. “How are you and your men
holding out? Like troopers, eh? You’re doing a fine job, I mean to say. But I
have a question I wonder if you can answer.”

Kali watched him through the soldier’s eyes, playing peekaboo. She
was half tempted to make the captain wink at him, or coyly whisper, “It’s me,
grandpa.”

“How did you find Kali?” he asked. “Who hired you?”

It was a good question. Kali didn’t know the answer herself. The
soldiers, being so much in her power, never spoke of personal things—or
anything at all. Any conversations they had were simply Kali talking quietly to
herself, to create a semblance of normal behavior. This seemed important
somehow, at least until she revealed the extent of her power.

Still, her grandfather needed an answer.

“Kali called us,” she said the captain. “She signaled through our
wires, showed us the way through the Holy City, and we rescued her.”

Kali had told her grandpa a little about the temple, but not much.
He nodded slowly, unsure if this made any sense, then strolled away.

The answer was good enough for him, but not for Kali.

Where
had
they
come from? She supposed she could try relaxing her hold on a few of the
soldiers and see if they started talking among themselves; but she was afraid
they might do something unpredictable if she let go for even an instant.

One of the dog soldiers crossed the captain’s line of sight. The
fierce, loyal dogmen had followed the human soldiers faithfully from the Holy City, despite the fact that none of them was wired or controlled by Kali.

Her captain whistled to the dog. “Here, boy!”

The soldier quickstepped over. “Sir!”

“Is it true that you dogs have poor long-term memory?”

The dog looked mildly offended. “Sir?”

“I’m curious. Do you recall things only by their smell, or do you
actually think about and remember things that aren’t explicitly present?”

The dog was now plainly insulted. “I am more than eighty percent
human, sir, and proud of my heritage. My exceptional sense of smell is
enhanced by an exceptional memory. Nor is it true, as some humans seem to
think, that I am color blind. I can appreciate a Motherwell or a Peter Max with
the best of them.”

“Hm. Then I suppose, just as a test, you’d have no trouble telling
me who ordered us into the Holy City? Who sent us to find that young goddess?”

“I recall the circumstances clearly, sir, but I can hardly give
you the name of the one who hired us. The orders were encoded through Snozay
Central. Is this a trick question?”

“Snozay Central,” Kali’s captain murmured.

“May I go now, sir?”

“Yes. Good boy.”

The dog walked off with a sneaking backward look. Snozay Central
was merely a dispatch office, sending trained soldiers to assist in private,
small-scale disputes. Ideally the guards were on hand to prevent violence; but
they were also licensed to use violence on behalf of their employers, provided
they did not stray beyond certain broadly defined parameters.

Kali shunted her attention directly to the central dispatch
office, of which the mercenaries and thousands of other soldiers were simple
extensions, remote fighting-sensing units. Within a matter of moments, by
ransacking records, she traced her escort’s original orders to their apparent
source. It was easy but tedious, methodical work. The order calling them to the
Holy City had been placed by a command center at a higher level, of which the
various mercenary centers were only branches.

She paused at this juncture, peering back through the wired flow
of information as though examining a trail of crumbs. She could see, extending
backward from her, a myriad of astral wires, each ending in a bulbous,
human-shaped cul-de-sac: a human life—in this case a soldier. Mercenaries like
these worked all over the nation, guarding banks and chemicals; some were at
weapons practice, others eating lunch, while night watchmen slept away the day.
She could enter any one of them right now, from where she hovered.

But looking forward, she saw that this main line was but a thin
branch stemming out of a much thicker limb. She rushed ahead on the data
boughs, climbing closer to the trunk of the tree, and as it advanced her
consciousness darted lightning-like to fill wires that were becoming newly
available. She found herself simultaneously in thousands of cities, listening
to a babble of conversations, engaged in a million activities. Some tasks were
overtly military, but others were bland desk jobs, people doing nothing. She
could have entered them, made them move as she wished, but she sensed that it
would take time to learn how to coordinate such complex actions; she might
cause too much chaos.

Patience.

In the meantime, she had yet to find the source of that original
order, which had trickled down to Snozay Central from somewhere very high in
the information hierarchy. There were many more rungs on the ladder.

Up she went.

It was day and night at once now, winter and summer
simultaneously. The planet’s hemispheres were bridged. She was asleep and
awake, speaking languages that at first she didn’t understand, though she had
access to so many speech interpreters that her comprehension grew
instantaneously.

She was everywhere. Kali reached out and covered the world, waking
up inside of everyone. She wondered if they could feel her coming to life
inside them, peering out through their masks; she looked at herself and saw
starts of recognition, though that couldn’t last long before she had to look
away. Feedback was a constant danger. Still, it was hard to control her
excitement: earth was like a huge toy begging to be played with.

At the same time, she felt something odd going on inside herself.

It felt . . . it felt as if something were
waking up and looking around inside of
her.

As if somebody were looking out of her eyes just as she was
looking out of everybody else’s!

What was going on in her?

Was she being monitored from within? Was there some part of her
disloyal to herself, some innate watcher planted before her birth? Whoever
planted it, had they also sent the order to the mercenaries who rescued her
from the Holy City? Only one thing was she sure of: if such a person existed,
they weren’t wired. She would have sensed them otherwise. They’d be her subject
now. She’d have come across some trace of them.

Unless they knew the way to jam her signal. And were using it,
expecting her.

With growing fear she realized that the mercenary dispatch had
been sent in such a way that when she went to trace it, she would invariably
work her way up through the branching paths to exactly this point. She had set
off little alarms all along the way, no doubt. By her actions, she had
inescapably woken the watcher.

She paused, frightened for the first time in her brief life, a
coldness suddenly running through every polynerve on earth and the moon.

The moon . . .

She saw it in the night skies of earth. Setting, rising, and at
the zenith.

The moon was underfoot as well. Some of her subjects stood in
moondust, in the earth’s reflected light.

“Who are you?” she whispered, talking to herself, to the thing in
her.

All over the planet and in the malls of its satellite, these words
were whispered. People touched their mouths, not realizing where the phrase had
come from; none understood why they heard it everywhere at once. Something was
happening . . . a quickening . . . something
fearful. They said it in chorus, a timid universal whisper:

“Who . . . ?”

***

“Kali?” Her grandfather’s voice. “There’s someone here to see
you.”

She opened the eyes of her tiny source body, the one in the
armored grown-up suit, the one sitting in a dark room in the Figueroa house.
Her search for clues had yielded nothing; the sense of a watcher’s presence
within her continued to grow like an alien cancer.

“Kali?”

“Yes, grandfather. Come in.”

The door opened a few inches; the light it admitted was broken by
the entrance of two men. First came Alfredo, smiling, proud. The other was
dressed in white and orange, covered with glinting bits of jewelry and crystal.
She knew him instantly, although she had never met him.

“Kali, I’d like you to meet the Reverend Governor of California, Thaxter Halfjest.”

Halfjest fell to his knees before her, seizing one of the robot’s
crystalline hands in his fingers and kissing it. She couldn’t feel his lips.

“Kali, this is the greatest of honors. I’ve looked forward to this
day since Alfredo and your grandmother Marjorie, bless her soul, first
announced their plans. I’m so glad to see you’re well. And the things you’re
doing—marvelous, just marvelous!”

Kali was at a loss for words. It took her longer than usual to
rise from the depths of herself. She resented every instant not spent pursuing
the watcher with every bit of her being. She wanted to root it out, to purge
herself of the thing. She hated feeling it lurking inside her. She hated the
thought that something else could use her.

Halfjest babbled on, gazing into her eyes, saying something about
Hollywood now, how Kali would be its greatest star, a natural. . . .

“The networks approached me, Alfredo, and asked me, as a friend of
the family, to talk you and Kali into doing a program. As her guardian—”

“A program? What are you talking about, Thax? Why couldn’t they
come to me directly?”

“Well, they said they’d be honored if I made the offer. Everyone
is dying to meet Kali—to see her live, if you know what I mean. They’ve offered
her a program of her very own. Since she’s already wired, the connections are
ready for her.”

“A . . . a show? Her own show?”

“People want to get inside her; they want to feel what she feels.
You know what they’re saying about you, Kali, since you brought your mother
back from the dead? They think you’re divine. They want you inside them. A
wire-show sacrament.”

“Divine,” Kali whispered.

The Daughters had said as much, and for a time she had believed
it.

But a goddess, a true goddess, tolerated no parasites. No watchers
inside. No . . . no baby-sitters! A goddess could not be
manipulated.

She stared at Thaxter. Instinctively, because it was what she did
best, she reached out to trace his wires, to slip inside them. His smile
widened as if to make room for her; as if he felt her coming. The RevGov was
live all the time, of course, constantly broadcasting to his fans. Which meant
they were all there inside him, watching Kali.

Then why couldn’t she find herself? Why no pain of imminent
feedback when she looked at herself through his eyes?

Just to be safe, she tuned completely into Thaxter Halfjest’s
program.

How strange.

On his wire show, the RevGov was alone, walking in a park, looking
at trees, smelling flowers.

His smile, out here in Figueroa manor, grew wider.