Trinity's Child (46 page)

“Just thinking about it stops you in your tracks, doesn't it?” he said quietly.

Moreau turned and looked at this man beside whom she had flown for so many months and seen only in one dimension, just as she had acted out her own life in only one dimension. “I don't know if I want to see it, Kazaklis,” she said. “It's as if it might promise me too much.” Kazaklis thought she sounded embarrassed.

“It promises you another day, Moreau. No more. No less. Be glad it's there. Be glad the sea's there. Be glad something's there we couldn't screw up.” His voice choked, almost imperceptibly. He paused, thinking of his father, thinking of the love-hate, thinking of the brute innocence and the raw wisdom, both of which he had rejected, but both of which had left their indelible mark. “I'm glad. I'm glad Halupalai's there.” He paused again, not looking at her. He seemed far away. “I'm glad you're there,” he said very quietly. “Here,” he added in a whisper.

Moreau felt the tears forming again. She fought against them and lost. Beneath the sleeves of her flight jacket the hair tingled on her arms, bristling against fireproofed fiber. She was shaking. She reached out, unthinking at first, and touched his arm. Then she clenched it. Then she clambered suddenly, awkwardly, half out of her steel seat, one leg tangling in the steering column, the other snarling itself in the mesh of the eight white engine throttles between them, her arms stretching past Master Caution lights and Bombs Released lights. She wrapped both arms around him, tucking a white helmet beneath a white helmet, and held him tightly. He fumbled briefly, shaking, too, and then he held her. For a moment—the quickest flutter of time not measured in Zulu— they embraced and the solitary shuddering of the one absorbed the lonely shuddering of the other till neither shuddered.

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, Moreau withdrew. She stared, frightfully embarrassed, into the grungy curtains. Numbly she took the wheel and pressed the raw trembling out of the bomber as they had pressed the trembling out of each other.

“I'm sorry,” she murmured.

“Why?” he asked.

The question was put with such utter simplicity it required no answer. The bomber droned south, both of them staring into the dirty curtains. Minutes passed before Moreau asked, “Do you think we'll see another sunrise?”

“I don't know, Moreau,” Kazaklis replied. “I think we've both missed too many sunrises—too many days—already.” Together they reached forward to draw back the curtains.

Neither of them spoke. The scene was flawless—as if man had never touched it. On Moreau's side of the aircraft the sky, stretching west toward Asia, remained the deeply regal purple of their earlier glimpse, stars still twinkling. But as their eyes passed left, toward the east and home, the sky and the stars faded into violet and then soft mauve and then faint blue. Slightly above them, wisping freely at perhaps forty-five thousand feet, a few delicate strands of cirrus clouds caught the first fiery hints of day. Below them the ocean spread endlessly in surreal ripples. After a moment, to the far left of Kazaklis, the orange arc of the sun peeped out of the sea, then emerged rapidly. It was, without question, the most beautiful sight they had ever seen, the searing rays dashing along the horizon, the sun springing back into their world.

“Hey, Halupalai,” Kazaklis radioed into the back of the compartment. “You have to come up and see this, buddy.” Halupalai's voice returned evenly. “No, thanks, commander. I'll wait.” The pilot's heart sank.

Kazaklis watched a moment longer, until the sun sat like a great orange egg on the edge of the earth, the planet's atmosphere seeming to hold it back briefly, compressing the orb into an ellipse. Then it burst free, full and round. Kazaklis turned and pulled the red filter from his viewing screen, replacing it with green for daylight flying. They would fly with the windows exposed now. They needed to see. He carefully stripped the medical tape and his one-fingered glove from his old filter and placed it on the new. He edged the plane slightly right, keeping it in its southwesterly drift. Moreau watched and then replaced her filter, too. She chuckled lightly, although no humor was attached to it. “Green filters,” she said. Kazaklis looked at her questioningly. “The green screen reminded me of you and your silly computer game.”

Kazaklis grinned. “Space Invaders. I felt like killing you in the alert room.”

“Why'd you take it so seriously?”

Kazaklis shrugged. “Passed the time.”

“It was more than that.”

“Yeah, it was. It was a lot like life. Like what we're doing. I wanted to beat it.”

“But you couldn't.”

“No.” Kazaklis paused thoughtfully. “That was the hook. You could never beat it.” He paused again briefly. “You said it. The better you got, the better it got. So you just kept feedin' it quarters. Funny, I think I had that damn computer game's secrets figured out better than the Jap who programmed it. I got to the point where I lost only to random malfunctions. They were programmed into it, too.”

“Programmed malfunctions?”

“Yeah. The shits, huh? How do you beat programmed random malfunctions?”

Moreau stared out the window into the false peace of the Pacific. “You think that's what we're in now?” she asked quietly.

“Sorry?” Kazaklis missed the subtle shift in direction.

“You think the world's in a programmed malfunction?”

Kazaklis stared at her but said nothing. He understood. He had no answer.

“You learned everything about that game except the ultimate secret, Kazaklis,” Moreau said without rancor. “You never discovered the secret of the narcotic.”

Again Kazaklis said nothing. But he had sensed that secret, too.

“You just keep shoving money into it, getting better and better, discovering new secrets, developing new strategies, escalating your ability, escalating your mind's technology.” Moreau paused. Her voice grew still more pensive. “Every time you escalate, the other side escalates. You advance. The adversary advances.” She slipped almost unnoticeably into a language of equal-versus-equal, man-versus-man. “You got better. He got better. You cracked one secret. He sprang another. You slugged in money. He responded. But the escalation never stopped. You could never win, Kazaklis, no matter how good you got. That was the secret. The only way to win was to stop.”

“And if you didn't stop, the malfunction got you.” Now Kazaklis sounded wistful. “Pretty smart little college girl, aren't you?”

Moreau felt tears forming again. “Not that smart,” she said. “My father explained it to me. It took him a lifetime to understand the narcotic.” She sniffled and tried to hide it. Kazaklis reached out and squeezed her elbow in support. “He must have been quite a guy,” Kazaklis soothed. “You loved him very much, didn't you?”

Moreau spun toward him, shuddering, the past tense jarring her sensibilities. Kazaklis understood instantly. “I'm sorry, Moreau,” he said quickly. “I didn't mean it that way. There's a good chance he made it.”

“Not a good chance,” she said flatly, pulling herself back together. “A chance. If he was home, he made it through the bombing. Now the fallout's coming.” She paused, but the tears were gone and the strength back. “He lectured a lot at the Academy. If he was there . . .” She thought of Christmas again. “I think he was ready.” She looked at Kazaklis. She knew so little about him. “Your family?” she asked.

Kazaklis glanced at his watch, seeing it was eight
A.M
. along the Coos. “My pa,” he said. “Mean old bastard. Tough as the Oregon woods. The old fart will fight it all the way.” The words were harsh but the voice soft and full of wonderment. Moreau had never heard Kazaklis speak quite that way.

“You also love him deeply,” she said.

A perplexed expression spread across his face. “Love him?” he asked vacantly. “My God, I guess I never thought I did. The old bastard.” He turned away and gazed thoughtfully into the eternity of the ocean. “I don't suppose the fallout's made it to Coos Bay yet.” He paused. “Another day. Two maybe.”

“What will he do?” Moreau asked softly.

Kazaklis turned back toward her with an ear-to-ear grin, no rascality in it at all, only pure pleasure. “If anybody will make it, Pa will make it,” he said with certainty. “The old coot wouldn't mind goin' in a flood or a forest fire. Anything natural. But he'll fight this shit like he'd fight the devil himself. Shoot a deer, find a cave, send out for all the whores in Coos Bay, and start himself a new master race.”

Moreau could not prevent herself from laughing, Kazaklis having presented the image of his father with such bizarre exuberance. “A master race?” she sputtered through her laughter.

“Sure!” Kazaklis exuded, and he was laughing harder than Moreau now. “Just look at me!”

The two of them broke down into hysterical laughter, venting all the guilt of
Elsies
and Klickitats and duties and fathers left behind; venting all the fears and sorrows, the griefs and uncertainties, too. In the back of the cabin, Halupalai heard the strange sounds over the roar of the engine. He turned to see them convulsed in mutual laughter. He nodded appreciatively. He liked that. It was a good sign. Going home was, too, and they were getting close now.

Long after the two injured men had been hoisted across the teenagers' muscular backs, and long after the perilous trek toward Olney had begun, Sedgwick emerged from his mind's blackness. He had no idea how much time had transpired. The scene made no more sense to him than the crazy half-dreams of the ghostly trip across the countryside. He awoke to see the large black woman present herself regally to a man in a hooded white suit. She announced, quite authoritatively, “We has brought you the President of the United States.”

A hollow and tinny voice responded from inside the white hood. “Sure thing, lady,” it said, “and the Pope's knocking at the back door.”

Kazaklis and Moreau had stopped laughing and were checking vectors. Halupalai's islands lay forty-five minutes away.

Moreau's mind had trouble focusing on the work. It raced with a dozen questions about the dead world they were about to pass over, still more about the unknown world that lay beyond. “I wish I had gotten to know you better,” she said suddenly. Kazaklis looked up from his plotting, surprised. “We don't even know each other,” she continued. “None of us. Do you think we can survive, locked together in some
New Yorker
cartoon of a desert island?”

Kazaklis turned away. His voice went very quiet. “We can't do any worse than the four billion people locked together on that big island beneath us. I like our odds better.”

She shook her head slowly. It was not a very optimistic reading. “Percentage baseball, huh?” she asked forlornly.

“To hell with percentage baseball,” Kazaklis said without emotion. “At some point, Moreau, you have to get out of Yankee Stadium and back to the sandlots.”

“Yes,” Moreau said. She gazed for a moment into the fluttering yellow gauges of the flight panel and the life she had chosen. “The roar of the madding crowd gets hard on the ears,” she said wistfully. “After a while that's all you hear and you can't understand the person next to you.” Kazaklis turned back toward her. “I still wish I had taken the time to know you better,” she said. He looked at her a moment longer. Then he said, “Check the vectors, will you?”

Moreau methodically returned to work, cross-checking their course. After a moment she looked up and asked, “We're really going to make the overflight?”

“Yes,” he replied tersely. But it was clear he was worried too. “Moreau, take a look out there.” He gestured disconsolately at the spectacularly clean and serene panorama that immersed them. “The world doesn't look that way anymore. We have to see the world once.”

She nodded in understanding. But she still asked, “And Halupalai, too?”

Kazaklis drew bleakly inside himself, not answering. Halupalai's islands had controlled this entire ocean. They had been the repository for more of the gray instruments of control than any other place in the country whose flag
Polar Bear One
flew. They had contained submarine pens and air bases for rapid dispersal of the weapons throughout their realm. They had contained the headquarters of CINCPAC and the Pacific fleet, satellite-tracking stations and elaborate communications bases to tie the control together. In Halupalai's paradise, grass-skirt hula dancers had fluttered talking hands at hidden megatons. No war would be fought without taking out Hawaii.

“Maybe Tyler was right,” he said. “This is all a bad dream. A great hoax. A test we failed.” He touched his symbolic glove and paused. “It's the height of the tourist season, Moreau. The gonzos will be cruising the curls off Waikiki and the flower shirts will be guzzling maitais at the Ilikei.” His voice trailed off.

“I understand, Kazaklis,” she said.

“I had a buddy once . . .” Kazaklis grew distant. “Did grunt duty in Vietnam. Halfway through, they pulled him out of the mud and the crud and the blood, stuffed him aboard Pan American, and twelve hours later they dropped him in paradise. Six days of rest and recreation on Waikiki. He chased poon and watched the fat flower shirts swillin' martinis like there was no mud and crud and body bags anywhere. For the flower shirts, there wasn't. Then the Army collared him and took him back. Jesus.” Kazaklis grunted. “Hell to heaven. Heaven to hell. All he did was duck after that. Said Hawaii was the reason we lost the war. Half the Army was waitin' for R and R and duckin'. The other half was rememberin' and duckin'.” He grunted again and stopped.