The Coming Part 6

Suddenly the three academics were sitting alone at their too-large table in Room 301. Barrett turned to Whittier. "So. Do you think we've lost Bacharach for good?"

"Pretty sure," Deedee said. "He doesn't have any real stake in staying."

"He could lose his position."

"Al wouldn't lift a finger to retain his deanship," Rory said. "You know that. He'd gladly trade the extra pay and perks if he could do science full-time again."

"I've always wondered how sincere he was about that. Perhaps we'll find out."Rory got up. "I'll have some tentative scheduling for both of you tomorrow morning. Have to go confer with my second-in-command, over a beer."

"Thanks for your patience, Rory," Deedee said. "Difficult man to work with."

"Or against." Rory gave them a parting smile and closed the door quietly.

Deedee Whittier "You've met the governor before, Mai?"

"Twice, at formal receptions. This is the first time I've had an extended colloquy with him."

"He's a piece of work. Not really that stupid, I a.s.sume."

"No. He has normal intelligence, or at least the equivalent in animal cunning." They both laughed.

"And vast reserves of ignorance to work with. I think Pauling's going to be much more of a problem."

"He's going to take over."

"Already has. At least we don't have to deal directly with La-Salle."

Deedee nodded wearily. Carlie LaSalle, president of the United States, made Governor Tierny look like an intellectual. A completely artificial product of her party's a.n.a.lysts and social engineers, she gave the people exactly what they wanted: a cube personality who was nice to the core, with a gift for reading lines and a suitably inoffensive personal history. She was an anti-intellectual populist who had presided over four years of stagnation in the arts and sciences, and had just been reelected.

"We'll be walking on eggsh.e.l.ls," Deedee said.

"I was thinking bulls and china shops, actually, with Garcia. I like him but think we're well rid of him.

He won't disguise his contempt."

"No; he's no diplomat."

"What about Dr. Bell?"

"Aurora? She's pretty levelheaded."

"She was pushing Pauling harder than I liked."

"Mai, be realistic. Most of the professors in my department would gleefully take a blunt instrument to that son of a b.i.t.c.h. Besides, Aurora made the discovery, for Christ's sake. We're stuck with her."

He drummed his fingers on the table. "This is the problem. This is the problem all around. We're stuck with Tierny. We're stuck with Pauling and LaSalle. We already have to do a G.o.dd.a.m.ned minuet around them. It would be real nice if we had more control over our own side. Our own half of the equation."

Deedee took a mirror and a blue needle and touched up the edges of her cheek tattoo, which was fading. Someday she would get a permanent one, to cover the cancer scar, but her dermie said to wait. It might grow.

She worked for half a minute, frowning. "So be plain, Mai. What do you want me to do about Aurora?"

"Well ... as you say, we can't just dump her. I guess I just want to know more about her. Find some weakness we can exploit. Is that blunt enough?"

"Si, si. I'll put Ybor Lopez on it. He's trustworthy and a real computer magician. I'll have him put together a dossier on her. I ... well, I have something to make him cooperative." She snapped her bag shut. "For you, Mai. Just this once."

"I appreciate it. I won't abuse the information."

"Oh, mierda. I know you won't. You owe me one, though."

"You have it." They got up together and left the room.

Deedee wished she had kept her mouth shut. Traitor to her cla.s.s-she'd been a professor a lotlonger than she'd been an administrator. And to pull this on Aurora, of all people. She'd never been anything but helpful and kind. Ybor would probably find out she was an ex-con or a dope addict. Like him.

They started to go down the stairs, but heard the crowd murmuring three floors down: reporters.

They backtracked and used the fire stairs.

Deedee's office was two buildings away. She hurried through the noontime glare, the cancers on her face and shoulder saying, "You forgot your hat." The sunscreen was supposed to be good for eight hours, but she'd been sweating. In that air-conditioned room in Washington.

Lopez was locking up the office as she came out of the elevator. "Ybor," she said. "Hold it. We have to talk."

They went back into the outer office, a spare uncluttered place where Ybor ran interference for her.

She sat him down in the visitors' chair and perched herself on the desk.

"I need your expertise, Ybor. And your silence."

"Something illegal, Dr. Whittier?"

"No. Shady, but not illegal."

"Okay. You can trust me."

She let out a long breath and chose her words. She used Spanish. "-I don't have to trust you, Ybor. Because I have you by the hair."

"No comprendo."

"-I've seen you shooting up, twice. Tell me it's diabetes."

He slumped. "How the h.e.l.l did you ever see me?"

"-What is it?"

"Se llama 'Jose y Maria.' "

"Some kind of DD?"

"Si." A designer drug. "-You give them some blood or sperm and they customize it."

"-As much as you know about science, you let them do that?"

"-It's hard to explain. You don't do anything?"

"-Nothing big. Nothing illegal."

"De acuerdo." Ybor switched to English. "Who do you want me to kill?"

"I just need your jaquismo. Get into and out of university personnel files and some munic.i.p.al records without leaving any tracks. Try to find some dirt."

"So who's the villain?"

"She's a nice person, not a villain. I just need some leverage. Aurora Bell." She looked oddly expectant.

He shook his head slowly. "So what happens if I don't find anything? She's not exactly Mata Hari."

"I don't expect you to find something that's not there. Just do your best and be extra careful. How long?"

"Oh ... this afternoon. Say four."

"Thanks." She slid off the desk. "Sorry about, you know. Anytime you want to go into rehab ... "

"Yeah, well. You know. It's not like that."

"I don't know, actually. But so long as it doesn't interfere with your work, it's not a problem. Not for me." She walked out, leaving the door open.

Ybor LopezHe shut the door and locked it and leaned against it for a few seconds, eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched. Then he went to the supply closet and unlocked the backup files safe, a fireproof metal block to which only he had access. He took out the Jose y Maria hypo, dropped his pants, and put the applicator nozzle flat against the large vein in his p.e.n.i.s. He fired it, wincing, and rubbed the sting away.

By the time he had his pants pulled up and the hypo locked back in the safe, the drug was coming on.

He sat down and reveled in it, the clean pure power that roared through his veins, the light that glowed from inside. The absolute confidence. What could she know about this? He felt a moment of compa.s.sion, of sorrow, for people who went through life without having this. A gift from his own body, grown from his own seed. There was nothing wrong with it. It was the law that was wrong.

To work. Leave no tracks, all right. No voice commands. No backup crystal. Go under the machine's intelligence and use it like its twentieth-century predecessors: simple commands executed sequentially.

He did it all the time, for fun and the department's profit, as Whittier well knew. It was winked at; probably half the science and engineering departments had someone like Ybor, who could make an hour of computing time look like fifteen minutes. (The missing time would show up on accounts like Slavic Languages and Art History, who didn't have Ybors.) The same sort of skills could slip through the light encryptation that protected the privacy of personnel records.

It took Ybor about half an hour to set up the program that would a.s.semble a cybernetic image of the private life of Aurora Bell. It just took a few minutes more to have it do the same for Deedee Whittier, insurance. He pushed a b.u.t.ton to start it running and went out to get some lunch.

Good timing. Jose y Maria did make you feel famished about an hour after you popped. It was a healthy hunger, though; felt good.

He walked down tree-lined Second Avenue to downtown, studying the undergraduate girls. His appreciation of their beauty had an exquisite purity, partly because he couldn't do anything about it until a day or so after the drug wore off. But that was not really a problem, he told himself. For every thing there is a season. He tried to ignore the persistent itching pain at the injection site, the slight numb erection.

It wasn't just the way they looked, moving in their soft summer clothes. He could smell them as they pa.s.sed; smell the secret parts of their bodies as well as the public perfume, the astringent sunblock. He could feel the heat from their bodies on his face, on the back of his hand, as they pa.s.sed. He could almost read their thoughts, at least when they were thinking of him.

What a wonderful day. He even loved the heat, the blast that glowed up from the asphalt as he floated across streets. It was as if he walked on the heat. Cars stopped for him respectfully, their horns music. Brakes squealing in beautiful unison as he triggered the street's emergency mode.

As he approached Hermanos, the smell of meats frying was almost too much for him. He swallowed saliva and walked into the cool and dark.

What were all these people doing here? Usually Hermanos was uncrowded until after one, when the Cubans and Mexicans started drifting in. There were only two tables unoccupied. Ybor sat down at the bar.

The owner Sara waited on him. She made him uncomfortable. He had known her before the accident, when she was a lifeguard at the Eastside pool. He had studied her body for hours when he was eleven and twelve, and it disgusted him to think of what it must look like now. But he always went to the bar when she was serving.

"Hola, Ybor. What'll it be?"

He didn't have to look at the menu. "Ropa vieja y vino tinto."

She wrote it down. "Old rags and new wine, coming up." She poured him a gla.s.s of red wine, cold, and went back to the kitchen.

Ybor took a sip of the wine and then held the gla.s.s between his palms, warming it. Like everything,the bar was transformed by the drug, made more real and more fantastic at the same time. The cheap paneling became a whorl of frozen life, tropical trees microtomed over and over. The liquor bottles with their rainbow of colors and flavors; from yards away he could smell them individually. The slow ceiling fans pushed gentle puffs of cool air over him, like slaves waving palm fronds. The mirror showed a young man capable of great things. Thirty-five was still young.

Sara brought the stew with a plate of warm tortillas and the green hot sauce Ybor liked. Ropa vieja, literally "old clothes," was beef slowly cooked in tomato sauce and peppers, until it fell apart into shreds. Ybor liked it but had chosen it mainly because he knew it would just be ladled out and brought to him. He could have starved to death while they were fixing a hamburger.

Sara watched him tear into it with a spoon in one hand and a rolled tortilla in the other. "I like a man who likes to eat," she said, smiling, and went off to fill a bar order.

This drug could make eating a cracker into a sensual experience. The spicy stew played an ecstatic symphony in his mouth, nose, palate; the act of swallowing was a complex and delightful counterpoint.

Sara came back. "So how about these aliens?"

"Como?" She going to carry on about immigrants again, interrupt this symphony?

"Right next door to you." She waved a hand at all her new customers. "All these reporters. All because of Aurora Bell."

That got his attention. "What'd Dr. Bell do?"

"What, you live in a G.o.dd.a.m.n cave?"

"Working all morning. What she do?"

"She got some signal from outer s.p.a.ce. Some aliens coming to Earth, like in the movies."

"Aw, bulls.h.i.t, Sara. You're bulls.h.i.ttin' me."

"Like you'd know bulls.h.i.t if you stepped in it," she said cheerfully. She whistled at the set over the bar and told it CNN. "Just watch for a few minutes."

Now what the h.e.l.l had he gotten himself into? The way Whittier had talked, of course she'd thought he knew.

The stew turned sour in his mouth and he swallowed with difficulty. s.h.i.t, what if they expected some newsie to hack the system and beefed up the watchdogs? They might catch the tap and it would point right back to him.

A live reporter standing in front of the building next to where he worked delivered a one-minute summation of the alien thing. There was Dr. Bell, sitting in her office with all the old paper books, talking about, Jesus, a million megatons? Okay, relativistic kinetic energy. Still. One h.e.l.l of a bang.

There was some commotion behind him and he turned around to see Aurora Bell walk in with Pepe Parker. They were good-naturedly telling the reporters no interviews; this was lunch. The big guy who runs the coffee machine in the morning came out to stand behind her with a cast-iron frying pan. Subtle.

Pepe raised a hand in greeting and he returned it. They saw each other every now and then at the dance clubs. Not a bad guy for a Cubano.

"Something wrong with the ropa?" Sara asked.

"Oh no, it's great. Let me have another wine, though."

"Tinto," she said, and refilled his gla.s.s.