Rainbows End (3 page)
Keiko sighed. “Damn. All my life, I’ve fought the cults. I thought the great nations were beyond the most monstrous evils… but this, this would make me wrong.”
Günberk nodded. “If we are right about these labs and if we fail to properly… deal… with them, that could be the end of history. It could be the end of all the striving for good against evil that has ever been.” He shook himself, abruptly returning to the practical. “And yet we are reduced to working through this damned rabbit person.”
Alfred said gently, “I’ve studied Rabbit’s track record, Günberk. I think he can do what we need. One way or another. He’ll get us the inside information, or he’ll create enough chaos —
not
attributable to us — that any evil will be clearly visible. If the worst is true, we’ll have evidence that we and China and even the nonculpable parties in the U.S.A. can use to stamp this out.” Suppression attacks on the territory of a Great Power were rare, but there was precedent.
All three were silent for a moment, and the sounds of the festival afternoon swept around Vaz. It had been so many years since his last visit to Barcelona… Finally, Günberk gave a grudging nod. “I’ll recommend to my superiors that we proceed.”
Across the table, Keiko’s prismatic imagery shimmered and chimed. Mitsuri’s background was in sociology. Her analyst teams were heavily into psychology and social institutions — much less diversified than the teams working for Alfred, or Günberk. But maybe she would come up with some alternative that the other two had missed. Finally she spoke: “There are many decent people in the American intelligence community. I don’t like doing this behind their back. And yet, this is an extraordinary situation. I have clearance to go ahead with Plan Rabbit — ” she paused ” — with one proviso. Günberk fears that we’ve erred in the direction of employing an incompetent. Alfred has studied Rabbit more, and thinks he’s at just the right level of talent. But what if you are both wrong?”
The devil
!” he said. Alfred guessed that some very quick silent messaging passed between the two.
The prisms seemed to nod. “Yes. What if Rabbit is significantly
more
competent than we think? In that unlikely event, Rabbit might hijack the operation, or even ally with our hypothetical enemy. If we proceed, we must develop abort-and-destroy plans to match Rabbit’s progress. If he becomes the greater threat, we must be prepared to talk to the Americans. Agreed?”
Ja.
“
Keiko and Günberk stayed a few minutes more, but a real café table on C. de Sardenya in the middle of the festival was not the proper place for virtual tourists. The waiter kept circling back, inquiring if Alfred needed anything more. They were paying table rent for three, but there were crowds of real people waiting for the next available seating.
So his Japanese and European colleagues took their leave. Günberk had many loose ends to deal with. The inquiries at CDD must be gracefully shut down. Misinformation must be layered carefully about, concealing things both from the enemy and from security hobbyists. Meantime, in Tokyo, Keiko might be up the rest of the night, pondering Rabbit traps.
Vaz stayed behind, finishing his drink. It was amazing how fast his table space shrank, accommodating a family of North African tourists. Alfred was used to virtual artifacts changing in a blink of the eye, but a clever restaurateur could do almost as well with physical reality when there was money involved.
In all Europe, Barcelona was the city Alfred loved the most. The Rabbit was right about this city. But was there time to be a real tourist? Yes. Call it his annual vacation. Alfred stood and bowed to the table, leaving payment and tip. Out on the street, the crowds were getting rather extreme, the stilt people dancing wildly about among the tourists. He couldn’t see the entrance of the Sagrada Familia directly, but tourism info showed the next certain tour slot was ninety minutes away.
Where to spend his time? Ah! Atop Montjuïc. He turned down an alley. Where he emerged on the far side, the crowds were thin… and a tourist auto was just arriving for him. Alfred sat back in the single passenger cockpit and let his mind roam. The Montjuïc fortress was not the most impressive in Europe, and yet he had not seen it in some time. Like its brethren, it marked the bygone time when revolutions in destruction technology took decades to unfold, and mass murder could not be committed with the press of a button.
The auto navigated its way out from the octagonal city blocks of the Barcelona basin and ran quickly up a hillside, grabbing the latch of a funicular that dragged them swiftly up the side of Montjuïc. No tedious switchback roadway for this piece of automation. Behind him, the city stretched for miles. And then ahead, as they came over the crest of the hill, there was the Mediterranean, all blue and hazy and peaceful.
He was at just the spot he had ordered on the tourist menu, right where twentieth-century guns faced out from the battlements. Even though these cannon had never been used, they were very much the real thing. For a fee, he could touch the guns and climb around inside the place. After sundown there would be a staged battle.
Vaz strolled to the stone barrier and looked down. If he blocked out all the tourism fantasy, he could see the freight harbor almost two hundred meters below and a kilometer away. The place was an immensity of freight containers rambling this way and that, chaos. If he invoked his government powers, he could see the flow of cargo, even see the security certificates that proclaimed — in ways that were validated by a combination of physical and cryptographic security — that none of the ten-meter boxes contained a nuke or a plague or a garden-variety radiation bomb. The system was very good, the same as you would find for heavy freight anywhere in the civilized world. It had been the result of decades of fear, of changing attitudes about privacy and liberty, of technological progress. Modern security actually worked most of the time. There hadn’t been a city lost in more than five years. Every year, the civilized world grew and the reach of lawlessness and poverty shrank. Many people thought that the world was becoming a safer place.
Alfred looked across the harbor at the towers beyond. Those hadn’t been here the last time he visited Barcelona. The civilized world was wealthy beyond the dreams of his youth. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the rulers of modern states realized that success did not come from having the largest armies or the most favorable tariffs or the most natural resources — or even the most advanced industries. In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population
and
providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom.
In the twentieth century, only a couple of nations had the power to destroy the world. The human race survived, mostly by good luck. At the turn of the century, a time was in view when dozens of countries could destroy civilization. But by then, the Great Powers had a certain amount of good sense. No nation-state could be nuts enough to blow up the world — and the few barbaric exceptions were Dealt With, if necessary with methods that left land aglow in the dark. By the teens, mass death technology was accessible to regional and racial hate groups. Through a succession of happy miracles — some engineered by Alfred himself — the legitimate grievances of disaffected peoples were truly addressed.
Nowadays, Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and small criminal gangs could acquire it. That was where Keiko Mitsuri was the greatest expert. Even though her work was hidden by cover stories and planted lies, Keiko had saved millions of lives.
The Red Queen’s Race continued. In all innocence, the marvelous creativity of humankind continued to generate unintended consequences. There were a dozen research trends that could ultimately put world-killer weapons into the hands of anyone having a bad hair day.
Poor Günberk. He had the truth exactly backwards. Effective YGBM would not be the end of everything. In the right hands, YGBM technology was the one thing that could solve the modern paradox, harnessing the creativity of humankind without destroying the world in the process. In fact, it was humankind’s only hope for surviving the twenty-first century.
And in San Diego, I am so close to success
. He had insinuated his project into the bio labs three years earlier. The great breakthrough had come less than a year ago. His test at the soccer match had proven the delivery system. In another year or so, he’d have developed higher semantic controls. With that, he could reliably control those immediately around him. Much more important, he could spread the new infection across whole populations and engineer a few universally viewed transmissions. Then he would be in control. For the first time in history, the world would be under adult supervision.
That had been the plan. Now incredibly bad luck had jeopardized it.
But I should look at the bright side; Günberk came to me to fix the problem
! Alfred had spent a lot of effort digging up “Mr. Rabbit.” The fellow was clearly inexperienced, and every bit the egotistical fool that Günberk believed. Rabbit’s successes were just barely impressive enough to make him acceptable. They could manage Rabbit.
I can manage Rabbit
. From inside the labs, Alfred would feed the Rabbit just the right misinformation. In the end neither Rabbit nor Alfred’s colleagues in the Indo-European Alliance would realize they had been fooled. And afterward, Alfred could continue undisturbed with what might well be the last, best chance for saving the world.
Alfred climbed into the gun turret and admired the fittings. The Barcelona tourist commission had spent some real money on rebuilding these artifacts. If their mock battle this evening meshed with this physical reality, it would be very impressive. He glanced at his Mumbai schedule — and decided to stay in Barcelona a few more hours.
Robert Gu should be dead. He knew that, he truly did. He had been a long time dying. He wasn’t really clear on how long. In this unending present, he could see only blurs. But that didn’t matter, since Lena had turned the lights down so low that there was nothing to see. And the sounds: for a while he had worn things in his ears, but they were devilishly complicated and always getting lost or worn out. Getting rid of them had been a blessing. What sounds remained were vague mumblings, sometimes Lena complaining at him, pushing and poking. Following him into the John, for God’s sake. All he really wanted was to go home. Lena wouldn’t let him do that simple thing. If it really was Lena at all. Whoever, she wasn’t very nice.
I just want to go home
….
And yet, he never did quite die. The lights were often brighter now, though blurry as ever. There were people around and voices, the high-pitched tones he remembered from home. They talked as if they expected to be understood.
Things had been better before, when everything was a mumbling blur. Now he hurt all over. There were long drives to see the doctor, and afterward the pain was always worse. There was some guy who claimed to be his son, and claimed that wherever he was
now
was home. Sometimes they rolled him outside to feel the bright sun on his face and listen to the birds. No way was this home. Robert Gu remembered home. There had been snow on big mountains he could see from his folks’ backyard. Bishop, California, U.S.A. That was the place, and this wasn’t it.
But even though this wasn’t home, his little sister was here. Cara Gu had been around before, when things were dark and mumbling, but she’d always been just out of sight. This was different. At first he was just aware of her high, piping voice, like the wind bells his mother kept on the porch at home. Finally, one day he was out on the patio, feeling the sunlight brighter and warmer than it had seemed in a long time. Even the blurs were sharp and colorful. There was Cara’s high little voice asking him “Robert this” and “Robert that” and —
“What?” Robert’s tongue felt all sticky, his voice hoarse. It suddenly occurred to him that with all the mumbling and darkness maybe he hadn’t spoken in some time. And there was something else that that was even more strange. “Who are you?”
The blur moved directly in front of him, into the middle of the sunlight. This was not some hint of presence behind his shoulder or in his memory. The blur became a face just inches from his own: he could see the straight black hair, the small round countenance smiling at him as if he were the greatest guy in the world. It really was his little sister.
“I’m… I’m glad to see you, too, Robert. Would you like to go for a ride around the neighborhood?” “… Yes, that would be nice.”
Things happened fast then. Cara did something and his chair seemed to spin around. It was dark and gloomy again. They were inside the house and she was fussing like she always did, this time getting him a hat. She still teased though, as in asking him if he needed to go to the bathroom. Robert sensed that the thug who claimed to be his son was lurking just to one side, watching it all.
And then they were out — what, the front door? — and onto a street. Cara stayed beside his wheelchair as they strolled and rolled down an empty street lined with tall, thin trees… palm trees, that’s what they were. This wasn’t Bishop. But this was Cara Gu — though on her very best behavior. Little Cara was a good kid, but she could only be good for so long and then she would find some devilish tease and have him chasing her all over the house, or vice versa. Robert smiled to himself and wondered how long the angelic phase would last this time. Maybe she thought he was sick. He tried unsuccessfully to turn in his chair. Well, maybe he was sick.
“See, we live on Honor Court. Over there, that’s the Smithsons’ house. They transferred here from Guam last month. Bob thinks they’re growing five — oops, but I’m not supposed to talk about that. And the boyfriend of the base commander lives in that house by the corner. I’m betting they’ll be married by the end of the year… And there are some kids from school I don’t want to talk to just now.” Robert’s wheelchair took an abrupt turn, and they were heading down a side street.
