Logan Trilogy (18 page)

Logan's run was over. He had climbed to the summit of this metal mountain.

Around him, on all sides, the city spread pulsing, sensuous wings of light. Far below, the multicolored shimmer of Arcade devoured darkness with tongues of crystal fire.

Measured voices on the quad level directly beneath him. Sharp commands. The Sandmen were only seconds away. Logan spun toward the roof door.

Jessica was there.

Her hair glimmered like spun copper, the lights of the city caught in its soft strands. Her face was carved ivory against the night. She was beautiful.

"You need help," she said.

"No one can help me now," he told her. "Not even you."

She rippled and changed. And Jaq was there in her place.

"They're going to kill me," the boy said.

"Not you!" cried Logan. "You're young. Your crystal's blue!"

"I have no crystal." And Jaq held up his right palm. It was clear.

Logan started toward his son, wanting him to understand everything, wanting to tell him he was sorry he had ever been a Sandman, ever hunted and killed runners like himself, ever used the Gun…

But the Deep Sleep men were there, on the roof, weapons out and aimed at his son.

At Jaq!

The boy backed away from them, fear rising like smoke in the pale green of his eyes.

"It's me you want!" shouted Logan.

They ignored him, closing on Jaq in a tightening circle. The boy was at the roof's edge; he could retreat no further.

Hands fisted, Logan threw himself at the Sandmen. A backhanded blow from the barrel of a Gun stunned him, dumped him to the roof. He raised his head to scream.

Too late. Too late for everything.

They'd forced Jaq over the edge—and the boy fell in soundless, dream—spinning slow motion, doll-like, down…down…down…into the flame-sharp lights of Arcade.

The Sandmen swung their rifled eyes to Logan.

"Homer him," said their leader, softly.

And the charge leapt from a Gun, sang in a hot yellow arc toward Logan. Who stood to meet it.

Astonishing pain. A ripped dazzle of seared nerves as Logan collapsed in upon himself, fingers clawing air. His body exploded, flared out in ribbons of shocked flesh, into a thousand separate units of anguish. He was only pain and agony and sundered bone…

He was awake.

"You all right?"

Logan flinched back from the citizen's question.

Not his question, not his voice. Jessica's.

She was touching him with warm, gentle hands, smoothing away the nightmare.

"The Sandmen," said Logan, staring up at her, his face flushed and sweating. "They killed Jaq."

"There's no more killing. The cities are dead, Logan. The system is dead. When will you believe that?"

"I believe it," he said.

"Then why do you keep having these dreams?"

He shook his head. "I don't know…" He looked at her. "This dream was different. In all the others, I was the only one they hunted. In this one, Jaq died."

"I wish you could stop having them."

"I'm worried about Jaq. How is he?"

"A little better today, I think. But he's still—"

"He's not better," said Logan flatly, rising from the bed to slip on a velvrobe. "And he's never going to be until I do what Jonath told me to do." A moment of silence. "I'm going to Stoneham."

"He'll…want to see you before you go."

Logan nodded.

He walked through the sagging wooden house to his son's room. The mammoth three-story Colonial mansion facing the banks of the Potomac floated like a landbound ship on acres of green lawn, now gone to seed and wild growth. In its day it had served the elite of Washington; its vaulted, high-ceilinged rooms and wide hallways had echoed to week-long parties and lavish state dinners. Now it was a time-eroded relic to an unremembered past.

As he moved toward his son's room Logan thought again of the irony in this situation: Jaq had been

one of the strongest boys on Argos, impervious even to the plague and sickness which had devastated the colony. Yet now, within a dozen sunsets of their return to Earth, the boy had fallen victim to an illness which spread fever through his young body, which softened bones and thinned muscles, leaving him weak and shaking, unable to function.

Logan had gone to Jonath who, at twenty-seven, was the oldest of the new breed of Wilderness People, serving as their leader in this rugged world beyond the womb cities.

"What is it, what's wrong with him?" Logan had asked.

"Earth is what's wrong with him," said Jonath. "Your boy has no immunity to protect him from a virus which our adult bodies would instantly reject. I would say he has contracted a form of viral pneumonia, an infant's disease."

"How do I cure it?"

"You'll need Sterozine. A nursery medroom would carry it, but the primary nurseries are all inside the cities and impossible to reach."

"Why impossible?"

"When the cities fell, the Scavengers took over. Ex-cubs…gypsies…looters…They run in packs. No one goes in or out. The People need food and supplies from the cities, but the Scavengers are in total control. You'd never reach a primary nursery alive, and even if you did they'd never let you leave.

They carry Fusers, and burn down anyone who penetrates inner-city territory."

"There are secondary nurseries…Sunrise…Stoneham…"

"Yes," said Jonath. "In your place, I'd try them. But their med supplies may have already been stripped."

"It's a chance," Logan had said. "If Jaq's not better by tomorrow, I'll try Stoneham."

Jonath nodded. "…a chance."

"He may not need the drug," Logan had told him. "Jess thinks that she can pull him through this. I hate leaving them alone." He sighed. "Couldn't you be mistaken?"

"Easily," said Jonath. "I'm only guessing. We'd need a med machine to be certain. Without a full diag

there's no way to be sure, but all the symptoms…"

The symptoms: weakness, fever, flushed features, twitching muscles…They were all in evidence as Logan looked down at his son. He leaned closer, touched the boy's fevered cheek.

Jaq's eyes fluttered open. He smiled, a pained stretching back of his pale lips.

"I'm going to find something that will make you well," said Logan. "You'll be strong again. Soon."

"I—can't be alone." A note of panic.

"You won't be. Jess will stay with you until I'm back."

"I hate being sick," Jaq mumbled softly. Again the pained smile. "But I love you, Logan!"

Strange; this business of loving. Sandmen never loved. Logan had grown up believing that love was a useless emotion shared by cowards, by runners who refused to face their responsibilities to the system. He'd heard them say they loved one another, before he'd Gunned them. He'd terminated them with the word still on their lips. And felt contempt.

Did you "love" in a glasshouse? Sex wasn't love. Did you "love" a pairmate?

When you were weak and small and needed it, the Loveroom gave it to you (Mother loves you…loves you…loves you…) but, until Jessica, he hadn't thought he'd ever share it. Not Logan 3, a master of the Gun, a hunter of weaklings and cowards and misfits. Now, miracle of miracles, he had two human beings to love and who loved him: his wife and his son. Husband…wife…son. Old labels, worn by those who had rejected the system and gone back to ancient customs. Ugly, how the Thinker had twisted everything, distorted emotion, crippled and warped. Jaq had been right about Ballard: he was a god. He'd killed the Thinker…

Jess walked out to the paravane with him. Logan wore a dark blue citizen's tunic, open at the neck, vested in leather.

"You'll be back before dark?"

"Yes," he said, climbing into the control pod, activating the gyroblades, rear blade first, then overhead.

The blades shivered into motion, began revolving in a vibrating blur, feeding power into the small craft.

They were on a section of high grass facing the Potomac, and the afternoon sun flashed fire-colors off the wind-sculptured rocks scattered along the dry riverbed. Before the Little War, before climactic changes had blocked off the Potomac, it had flowed richly with water. Must have been beautiful then, thought Logan, this spot facing the river. So much had changed…

"He's sleeping now," Jess said, her voice keyed to the rising hum of the blades. "He'll be all right until you get back."

Logan leaned out to kiss her.

She was crying.

Afraid I won't find the drug, Logan told himself. Afraid I'll be too late. But I'll find it! Jess, I'll find it!

Trim level: corrected. Gyro controls: stable. Power curve: normal. Logan engaged vertical thrust—and the paravane soared gracefully upward, quickly attained cruising altitude, then tipped westward in a singing rush of blades.

Toward Stoneham.

STONEHAM

Each major city area had its secondary nurseries, its Stoneham and Sunrise units; Logan had terminated a female runner once, near Stoneham, in the Angeles Complex. ("Please don't hurt me, Sandman! I want to live. I'm only twenty-one…that isn't really old…can't you…") And the homer leaving the Gun. And the girl scrabbling along the high fence, the horror in her eyes. And the homer—

Stop it!

Logan shut down the memory.

The primary nurseries were much larger, and handled most of the city infants; these outside units were designed to take up the overflow, but were complete in themselves. There was more than a good chance he'd find Sterozine at a secondary unit.

Adults had no use for the drug. It would fetch nothing on the Market, and would be a useless item to outland looters.

A good chance…

Had his mission been less critical Logan would have enjoyed the flight to Stoneham. The sky was a serene blue, the green land rich and rolling beneath him—and the paravane was sound and responsive, thanks to his work on it over the past seven days since he and Jess had found the machine, abandoned outside the city-ruins. It had been damaged in the city's fall, had fluttered down, broken-bladed, to kill its pilot. Logan's mechanical skills, honed in his years on Argos, had quickly restored it to perfect working order.

Fuel wasn't a problem, since the craft's solar-charged unit would provide unlimited range, and Logan was fully confident that he would encounter no malfunction in flight.

But thoughts of Jaq kept darkening his mind, canceling out the natural joys of soaring above the land…

Then he sighted the heavy mass of bulked gray stone rising from a hill to his left. Stoneham.

Logan cut primepower on the aft blade, swinging the paravane at a sharp arc downward and to the left, clearing the nursery's microwire fence. He gentled the craft to a smooth touchdown in the central court area, killed the blades, slid free of the controls.

Incredible silence. His landing had set off no alarm systems; no automated guards rushed toward him; no robotic defense devices were activated. He remembered running with Jess from just such a nursery as this in the Dakotas—through a chaos of sirens and bells—fighting his way free of machines and closing gates and menacing robots.

This time, nothing. He was free to walk inside.

Yet Logan felt uneasy, prowling the long, dust-silent corridors, searching for the Medroom. He'd hated growing up in this sterile environment, denied all outside human contact for the first seven years of his life. His talk puppet had been his only real friend ("I'll never forget you, Loge…never forget you!") and his dream of becoming a Sandman had sustained him. The pride he'd felt in the word in those days! Sandman! The psyc machines had brainwashed him thoroughly from birth. If it had not been for Jess…

Suddenly an old memory clicked into place for him: Playroom…Delivery-room…Cribroom…

Medroom. That was the way Autogoverness had taken him whenever he got sick, rolling along the hall with him, clucking at him in her soulless metal voice, telling him he'd soon feel fine, just fine.

Logan found the Playroom, entered—and instantly fell into a defensive crouch. Something was alive inside the room, flickering at him, away from him, at him again.

Logan smiled. In entering, he'd simply dislodged one of the vibroballs, and it was dancing its self-energized puzzle pattern from ceiling to floor. He reached out, caught and boxed it, moved quickly on.

The Deliveryroom. Logan stared with fresh awe at the large Hourglass dominating the chamber; it had always fascinated him. Inside: the glittering time crystals ready for implant in the palm of each new infant brought to Nursery. Logan closed his right fist around his own dead crystal, remembering the sick shock which had run through his body when his timeflower had begun to blink red-black…

red-black…red-black…telling him he had just twenty-four hours before Last-day.

Damn the Thinker and the horrors it had inflicted!

He turned to enter the Cribroom.

Logan was used to death; he'd dispatched it to others, had seen his friends die in Sleepshops, had faced massed death on Argos—but what he found here, in this dank, silent room, stunned him.

In each of the small, bullet-shaped cribs lining the four walls lay a tiny skeleton. Here were the delicate bones of a hundred babies who had died when the Thinker died, oxygen cut off, vital fluids denied them. Their small white skulls mocked Logan with dark, eyeless sockets as he moved past them toward the med supplies.

He found another corpse in the Medroom. An Autogoverness lay on her side, her dozen jointed arms frozen, rust already gathering in thin, red lines along her seams. In her metal fingers she grasped vials and bottles. Apparently she'd gone for the medicine in a vain effort to revive the dying infants, unaware of the fact that nothing she could do would save them. Logan stepped over her, tense and nervous.

Would he find Sterozine here?

Hurriedly, he ripped open panels, pored over shelved items, discarding, sifting, searching…At least the Medroom had not been stripped. If a secondary nursery carried Sterozine a supply should be here.

Teromitcone…Hydrafane…Ritlan-C…Eztem-F…