Futures - Four Novellas Part 17

"I have studied the parkland in the diplomatic quarter," Demi said. "I have talked with its gardeners, walked its paths ... I think I understand a small part of what this city once possessed."

Yani Hakaiopulos breathed deeply, then reached out and briefly caressed the side of her face. He said, "You truly want to do this thing?"

"I want to learn," Demi said.

"Well, if you can endure an old man's ramblings, I will do my best to tell something of how it was done."

They talked a long time. An hour, two. I sat outside the office while they talked, and drank weak, lukewarm green tea, with Corso fretting beside me. He was worried that Dev Veeder would learn about our little escapade.

"Go and see your daughter," I suggested at last, tired of his complaints.

"She's in school, and her teacher is this fierce old woman who does not like her cla.s.ses disturbed. It's okay for you, boss. Veeder can't touch you. But if he finds that I brought his girlfriend here-"

"She isn't his girlfriend."

"He thinks she is."

"Well, that is true. She is cursed by her beauty, I think."

"She's dangerous. You be careful, boss."

"What nonsense, Mr. Corso. I'm nearly as old as your friend Yani Hakaiopulos."

"He's a great man, boss. And she got him telling her his secrets almost straight away. It's spooky."

"Unlike most of you, I think he wants the city rebuilt."

"Spooky," Corso said again. "And she said she was talking with the gardeners."

"Oh, that. She has had transducers or the like implanted in her brain." I touched my temples. The knife- blade of a headache had inserted itself in the socket of my left eye. The air in the warrens was bad, heavy with carbon dioxide and no doubt laced with a vile mixture of pollutants, and the brightly lit reception area was very noisy. I said, "She told me that she can interface with the computers which control the climate of the parklands and so on. And through them, she can, in a fashion, communicate with the gardeners. There is no magic about it, nothing sinister."

"If you say so, boss," Corso said. He fell into a kind of sulk, and barely spoke as he led us back through the warrens to the main part of the city, and the rooftop where he had left the airframe.

Uev Veeder found me the next morning at the cafe, where I was waiting for Lavet Corso to make an appearance. The colonel came alone, sat opposite me and waved off the old man who came out of the half-collapsed guardhouse to ask what he wanted. He seemed amiable enough, and asked me several innocuous questions about the progress of my work.

"I find this Ba.s.si intriguing," he said. "A shame he's dead."

"I hope I might bring his memories to life."

"Hardly the same thing, Professor-Doctor Graves, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Not at all. I am quite aware of the limitations of my technique, but alas, there is no better way."

"It's interesting. He was a fool, an amateur soldier who chose to stand and fight hi a hopeless situation, yet he was able to rally the entire population of the city to his cause. But perhaps he was not really their leader at all. Perhaps he was merely a figurehead raised up by the mob."

"He was certainly no figurehead," I said. "The a.s.sa.s.sination of his fellow members of the government shows that he was capable of swift and ruthless action.

He was tireless in rallying the morale of those who manned the barricades-indeed, when the invasion of Paris began, he was captured at an outlying barricade."

"The sole survivor amongst a rabble of women and old men. They were fighting against fully armored troopers with hand weapons, industrial lasers and crude bombs."

"And he escaped, and went back to fight."

Dev Veeder thought about that, and admitted, "I suppose I do like him for that."

"You do?"

Dev Veeder was staring at me thoughtfully. His dark, almost black eyes were hooded and intense. I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was seeing through my skin. He said, "Marisa Ba.s.si didn't have to escape. He didn't have to fight on."

"He would have been executed."

"Not at all, Professor-Doctor. Once captured, he could have sued for peace. If he truly was the leader of the mob, they would have obeyed him. He would have saved many lives; some might have even been grateful. The Three Powers Alliance wouldn't have been able to install him as head of a puppet government, of course, but they could have pensioned him off, returned him to wherever it was on Earth he was born."

"Sicily."

"There you are. He could have opened a pizza parlor, become mayor of some small town, made a woman fat and happy with a pack of bambinos."

"The last is unlikely, Colonel."

"But he stuck to the cause he had adopted. He went back. He finished the job. He may have been an amateur and a fool, Professor-Doctor Graves, but he had a soldier's backbone."

"And caused, as you said, many unnecessary deaths, and much unnecessary destruction."

I gestured at the devastation spread beyond the foot of the plaza's escalators: the rotting parks; the streets still choked with rubble; the shattered buildings.

Dev Veeder did not look at it, but continued to stare at me with a dark, unfathomable intensity.

I made a show of peering at the empty air above the rooftops of the city and said, "My wretched guide is late."

"He'll come. He has no choice. This talk interests me, Professor-Doctor. We haven't talked like this for a while."

"Well, you've been busy."

"I have?"

"With your new prisoners. And of course, escorting Demi."

"Dr. Lacombe?"

I felt heat rise in my face. "Yes, of course. Dr. Lacombe."

'Tell me, Professor-Doctor Graves, do you think that Marisa Ba.s.si was one of your great men?"

"His people-those who survive-think that he was."

"His people. Yes. Do you know, many of them cry out his name in the heat of questioning?"

"I don't see-" "Usually, those subjected to hot questioning scream for their mothers at the end. When they're emptied, when they've given up everything. Huge bloodied babies s.h.i.tting and p.i.s.sing themselves, unable to move because we've broken every major bone, bawling for the only unfailing comfort in all the world. But these people, they cry out for Ba.s.si." Dev Veeder's right hand made a fist and softly struck the cradle of his left. He wore black gloves of fine, soft leather. One rumor was that they were vat-grown human skin. Another that they were not vat-grown. He said, "Can you imagine it, Professor-Doctor? You've been broken so badly you know you're going to die. You're flayed open. You've given up everything you've ever loved. Except for this one thing. Your love of the man who led you in your finest hour. You don't give him up. No, in your last wretched moment, you call out to him. You think he'll come and help you." "That's ... remarkable." "Oh yes. Remarkable. Astonishing. Amazing. What do you think you would call out, if you were put to the question, Professor-Doctor Graves?" "I'm sure I don't-" "n.o.body knows," Dev Veeder said, "until the moment. But I'm sure you'd call for your mother, eh?" His smile was a thing of muscles and teeth, with only cold calculation behind it, "Was Marisa Ba.s.si a great man? His people think so, and perhaps that's enough." I said, eager to grasp this thread, "He lost his war. Great men are usually remembered because they won." "It goes deeper than winning or losing," Dev Veeder said. "The important thing is that Ba.s.si took responsibility for his actions. He was captured; he escaped and returned at once to the fight. Technology makes most men remote from the war they create. At the end of the Second World War, which was, as you know, the first truly modem war, neither the crew of the American aircraft Enola Gay nor most of the technicians and scientists who built the atomic bomb, nor even the politicians who ordered its use, none of them felt any guilt over what they did. Why not? The answer is simple: the destruction was remote from them. In the uiet War, most people were killed by technicians millions of kilometers away. Technicians who fought the war in eight-hour shifts and then went home to their spouses and children. Remoteness and division of labor induces both a diminished sense of responsibility and moral tunnel vision, so that men see the task of killing only in terms of efficiency and meeting operation parameters. In my line of work it is different, of course. That is why I am despised by so many, but I believe that I am a more moral man than they for at least I know exactly what I do. I see the fear in my victims' eyes; I smell their sweat and their voided bladders and guts; I get blood on my hands. And I am often the last person they see, so I do not stint my sympathy for their plight." I said, "It must make breaking their bones difficult." "Not at all. I do it with a clear conscience because they are the enemy, because it is necessary. But at no time do I reduce them to ciphers or quotients or statistics. They are not targets or casualties or collateral damage. They are men and women in the glory of their final agony. People hate me, yes. But while they think they hate me because of what I do, in fact they hate me because they see in me what they know is lacking in them. Nietzsche had it right: the weak ma.s.s always despises the strong individual." I was sure that Nietzsche had said no such thing, and told Dev Veeder, "Nietzsche tried to erase moral responsibility and went mad doing it. On the morning when they finally had to haul him off to the asylum, he rushed out of his lodgings, still wearing his landlord's nightcap, and tearfully embraced a carthorse.

The amoral philosophy which the n.a.z.is would adopt as their own in the Second World War, the creed which would shatter Europe, had already shattered his mind."

"Do you fear me, Professor-Doctor?"

"Fear? What a question!"

"Because, you know, you should. This place, where you play-act the role of conqueror of the world, it will have to go. It endangers security. I will see to it," Dev Veeder said, and stood up and bowed and loped away.

I knew that Cris DeHon had betrayed me, but when I returned from my research in the ruins of the city and confronted him, the neuter denied it with an uncomfortable laugh.

"Why should I spoil all the fun?"

"Fun?"

"The plot. The play. The unfolding mysteries of the human heart."

"You have no right to talk of such things, DeHon. You opted out of all that."

DeHon clutched its breast dramatically, "A cruel cut, Graves. I might be des.e.xed, but I'm still human, and part of life's great comedy. If nothing else, I can still watch. And I do like to watch."

"Nevertheless, you told him."

"I won't deny that our gallant love-struck colonel asked me if I knew where his sweetheart had been while I was talking with him at that party. You still owe me for that, by the way."

"Not if you told him."

"Perhaps I did let a little something slip. Please, don't look at me that way! I didn't mean to, but our colonel is very persistent. It is his job, after all."

The small, bright-eyed smile with which this admission was delivered let me know that DeHon had deliberately revealed something about the a.s.signation to Dev Veeder. I said, "It was innocent. uite innocent."

"I do not believe," DeHon said, "that Demi Lacombe is as innocent as she likes people to think she is."

This was at a reception held by the Pacific Community's trade a.s.sociation. Several of its companies had just won the contract to rebuild Dione's organic refineries. Most of us were there.. Dev Veeder was standing to one side of a group of biochemists who were talking to Demi Lacombe. He saw me looking at him, and raised his bulb of wine in an ironic salute.

When I had returned to the plaza that afternoon, I had found that Dev Veeder had been true to his word.

The cafe was gone, its mismatched chairs and tables and the sh.e.l.l of the half-ruined guardshouse cleared away. Later, I discovered that the old man and woman who had run it had been sent to work in the vacuum organism fields, a virtual death sentence for people their age, but I did not need to know that to understand that Dev Veeder had made his point, and I managed to have a brief word with Demi at the buffet of sushi, seaweed, and twenty varieties of bananas stewed and fried and stuffed-exotic food shipped from Earth at G.o.d knows what expense for our delectation.

As I transferred morsels I would not eat from the p.r.o.ngs of their serving plates to the p.r.o.ngs of my bowl, I told Demi, "He knows."

"He doesn't know. If he did, he would have done something."

"He has done something," I said, and told her about the cafe . Had I known then about the fate of its proprietors I would not have dared to even speak with her.

She said, "I'm going again tomorrow. If you are too scared to help me, Professor-Doctor Graves, I will

find my own way across the city."

With a pang of jealousy, I thought of the way that Yani Hakaiopulos's fingers had caressed her face. The two of them sharing secrets while I waited outside like a court eunuch. I said, "Colonel Veeder will be watching you."

"He has to make a presentation about security to company representatives, and I've told him that I will be working in diplomatic quarter's parkland." She touched her temple. "If his men do try to follow me hi there, and so far they have not, I'll see them long before they see me. And I know you won't tell him, Fredo. But we shouldn't talk any more, at least, not here. I think Dev is getting suspicious."

"He is more than suspicious," I said. My cheeks were burning like those of a foolish adolescent. "And that is why, I am afraid, I can no longer help you."

I did not go into the city the next day, for if I did I knew that I would have to go back to that ruined park and wait for Demi to emerge from the cliff, like Athena stepping newborn from the brow of Zeus. If nothing else, I still had my pride. She will need my help, I thought, and I was wounded when, of course, she did not seek me out.

The day pa.s.sed, and the next, and still she did not come. I discounted the third day because she was taken out into the city by Dev Veeder; but on the morning of fourth, hollow, anxious, defeated, I summoned Lavet Corso and ordered him to fly me straight to the ruined park.

He knew what I was about, of course; I made no pretense about it. We landed on the black slime of the lawn, and I saw a rill of water falling from the cleft in the black basalt cliff and felt my heart harden.

"Take me back," I told Corso.

"Sure, boss, but I'll have to wind the prop first."

While he worked, I said, "You knew all along, didn't you?"

"A woman like that coming down to the warrens, well, she's hard to miss, boss."

"I suppose that she is talking with that gene wizard. With Yani Hakaiopulos.

"I don't like it either, boss."

"You were right about her, Mr. Corso. She uses men. Even old fools like me and your Mr. Hakaiopulos.

There was a school of thought in the late twentieth century that men-even great men-were ruled by their genitals. They couldn't help themselves, and as a result they either treated all women like prost.i.tutes, or the women who were involved in their lives had an undue influence on them. It's long been discredited, but I wonder if there isn't some truth to it.

We can never really know what is in the hearts of men, for after all, most refuse to admit it to themselves. At least your own great man, Marisa Ba.s.si, was not troubled by women. The sector where he went looking for s.e.x ..."

"The Battery?"

"Yes, you took me there. One must admire, I suppose, the meticulousness of city planners who would design a neighborhood where men can go to find other men, free of cla.s.s, driven only by desire."

"It wasn't really designed, boss. It sort of grew up. And it wasn't just gay men who went there."

"Do you think he went there while he was organizing the resistance to the siege?"

"I wouldn't know, boss."

"No, of course not. You did not know him, as you keep reminding me, and you are a family man. But I expect that he did. Leaders of men are almost always highly s.e.xed. We can't condemn such impulses."

Corso locked the crank of the prop and stood back, dusting his hands. "You're not just talking about Marisa Ba.s.si now, are you?"