Cenotaxis (9 page)

My palms itch for the weapons Alice-Angeles could have given me if I'd moved sooner. One against five are odds I wouldn't wish on anyone.

But Alice-Angeles is holding only the torch in her hands, and she doesn't look surprised at all.

"Lucky he isn't selling lottery tickets," says a familiar voice. To my right, Helwise MacPhedron tugs off her helmet. "He certainly didn't see this coming."

"It's such a sick picture." Render's gravel voice comes from my left, allowing me to guess who the others are. Emlee Copas's small frame is planted firmly beside Render; Alphin Freer stands ahead of me, next to their leader, whose white-haired head emerges from behind its anonymous armor.

"Hello, Jasper," he says. "I'm sorry it came to this."

I stand up on legs that have returned to feeling as though they are made of water. "There's no limit to your cruelty, is there?"

"Not cruelty. Necessity. I needed to see how far you'd go." He has the decency to look abashed. "I'm certain now that setting you free won't solve anything. Believe me, that was still an option, but if I haven't convinced you not to fight, after all we've talked about, then I never will. I really do have no choice, now, but to keep our bargain. And besides—" I know what he's about to say before the words leave his lips. "I had to know whether there's any truth at all to your talk of seeing the future. As Helwise says, it looks like there isn't."

I want to scream my frustration. "This wasn't a test I could ever pass. You set me up to fail. There was no way I could have predicted that Alice-Angeles would betray me."

"Actually, I disagree. It's not the first time she's done it, you see."

I can only stare at Alice-Angeles, who displays no obvious regret or guilt. She is impossible to read on any emotional level.

"Were you the traitor the first time around, too?" I ask her. "Were you Bergamasc's spy?"

She makes no attempt to dissemble. "I was."

"Why, Alice-Angeles?"

"Because I don't want to die."

I am struck dumb with a sudden urge to weep. My trusted lieutenant has chosen to stand rather than fall with all the frags who have been lost to our cause. How can I argue with that? A theological denial would have been easier to accept; simple greed, likewise. But a poor, truncated mind finding the sense of self to say that she wants to go on... Who am I to tell her she can't?

"We can all live," I tell her in a voice that sounds broken, even to me. "That's what this is about. That's what this has always been about."

"Really?" barks Helwise. "Let's see how well you're doing this time tomorrow."

"Miracles are never what they seem," says Render through lips scarred and ancient. He sounds as though he's heard it all five times before. "Don't play if you can't lose."

A gloved hand grips my elbow. I don't pull away.

"Come on," says Freer.

"What should I do with her?" asks Helwise, indicating Alice-Angeles.

"Take her back to the barracks," Bergamasc says without glancing away from me.

I try to disappear into the sigh of the breeze as it sways through the forest's branches. If only I could evaporate and vanish into the night air, become one with the pollen and night insects. Then I would be free. Then I would truly be at one with the idea of God.

A leader falls alone, I think to myself. If he must.

"It'll be over soon," Bergamasc says. "Everything will be different, come this time tomorrow."

"Either way," I say, clinging to one last, forlorn hope that he might yet see reason.

He allows me that much. "Yes, either way."

After my second betrayal, I drift through days as though surrounded by a fog, attending to matters with the smallest amount of energy I can muster. Skirmishes come and go in a blur; blinking moments of prewar innocence leave me feeling existentially ill; I sulk in my cages like a depressed bear. I suppose I must be depressed, more thoroughly than I ever have been before.

In Karlstad, distracted by the presence of Alice-Angeles and the certainty of her future double-betrayal—is she doubting me even now?—I misdirect a skirmish that costs the lives of thousands. The very next day, I order an assault on an orbital complex that I had already cancelled, causing great expense and confusion. A stray round on a battlefield tears a hole through my right shoulder that, although it quickly heals, aches abominably.

I am in pain, regardless of what happens to my body. It follows me like a wild, black dog, its teeth sunk deep within me. I can't shake it, no matter what I do or where life takes me.

I don't want to die,
she said.
I don't want to die.

My first betrayal, when it finally comes, is almost an anticlimax. We are in the Shivalik badlands, the mountainous region of former Kashmir that used to be known as the "lesser" Himalayas but that now rival the crumbling ramparts to the north. It is a strange landscape, one of jagged, dark-stone mountains adorned with the remains of castle follies, sky bridges, railway lines, and blimp docks left behind by the former inhabitants of the Earth—my ancestors, I suppose, or those of the ancient minds that created me. What would they think of me now, I wonder, as the dwindling numbers of my resistance movement wend their futile way to a rendezvous near the holy ruin of Badrinath. Nothing remains of the temple that once stood there, or the giant statue of Vishnu erected in the twenty-third century, but it was for over half a million years a continuously inhabited site of religious pilgrimage, surviving war, environmental change, and the evolution of humanity, among other challenges. It seems a fitting place from which to launch another attack on our enemy.

My thoughts, distracted as they are, focus on the meeting ahead and the rugged terrain underfoot. The Apparatus is bringing me up to date on recent events and advising me on our future options. I am not aware of anything untoward until we round a bend and see the relatively flat terrain that used to be the bed of the river Alaknanda. There, the motley collection of vehicles that I expected has been joined by a single, fat airship the same color as the snow in the distance. I am too far away to make out the details, but I recognize its class. It's the same as the one Bergamasc will use to ambush me the second time.

I hear myself speak as though from a great distance. "Where'd that come from?"

"Stolen from the base in Kampala," Alice-Angeles tells me. "It will have no small tactical value."

"I'm sure that's true," I say to cover the turmoil of my thoughts. This is clearly the day on which I am captured by Bergamasc, at last. There are so few pieces left to place in the jigsaw of my life that it can't be any other. What do I do? Should I resist or blindly go along with what fate has decreed?

The Apparatus continues its spiel without interruption. I barely listen to it, doubting that the gestalt is involved in Alice-Angeles' treachery but afraid nonetheless that it is being used to distract me. How will the moment come? Will anyone be hurt? I don't mind if I am taken, but the lives of my functionaries are too precious to be squandered on something that cannot be changed.

We follow a winding track down to the riverbed, breathing steadily of the thinly fragrant air. Above, clouds paint translucent streaks and swirls across delicate blue sky. The cold leaks through my insulation and breathes down my neck like death itself. I suppress a shudder.

There's a pistol at my side. I could pull it out and shoot Alice-Angeles in an instant. Would that solve anything? It might not even be possible. The weapon could jam; she could anticipate my move and block it with one of her own. Thus fate would be satisfied.

What if I were to turn the gun on myself and finish the task Bergamasc has set for himself, years before the threat has been uttered? How could fate possibly repair such a rent in causality?

The fingers of my right hand itch, and I draw them into a fist rather than draw the pistol.

Not even when the Apparatus interrupts itself do I break step.

"I have a received a coded communication from a nearby source," the gestalt tells me. "Its author claims to be known to you."

"Put it through."

"I have snipers all around this valley," comes Bergamasc's voice. "I myself have a bead on you. So keep on walking, just as you are, and don't try anything foolish."

Raising a hand, I call a halt and tell the Apparatus to let everyone to hear the conversation.

"I told you to keep moving," Bergamasc says with no appreciable lag between my action and his response.

"So why haven't you shot me?"

"I don't want you dead just yet."

Something whines past me and into one of the frags, who begins to fall before the sound of the shot reaches us. We converge on him as a group. Bright blood gushes from an arterial wound—not lethal, but repair agents take longer in the rarefied atmosphere to stem the flow than they normally would.

"Next it'll be the girl on your right," Bergamasc says, "and I guarantee it'll be a headshot."

I look up. Bergamasc is talking about Alice-Angeles. For a moment, I am tempted to call his bluff. Would he really shoot his own spy to get my attention? Could his be the hand that breaks the causal web, not mine?

"All right," I say, straightening and raising my arms. I scan the mountains around us but can't see any sign of snipers. "What do you want me to do?"

"Keep coming down to the airship. Bring your injured frag; he'll be looked after, I promise."

"I have no reason to believe you."

"And I have no reason to break my word, provided no shots are fired."

I take one last look around. Is my enemy lurking behind that crag over there, or in that niche on the far side of the valley? Have his snipers been lying in wait for days for us to arrive, growing increasingly cramped, cold, and frustrated with every passing hour? Are they looking for the merest excuse to twitch their trigger fingers, or are they stiff from disuse and liable to hesitate for the fraction of a second required to draw my weapon?

There's no point speculating, and nowhere to run. I leave the pistol in its holster and help the frags carry their injured brother. Together, with frightened faces turned inward rather than out at the cold vista, we go down to meet our fate.

"How did you find me?" I ask later, when his graceful, camouflaged flyer alights in the midst of our outdated, war-worn fleet. He is wearing pristine all-white combat armor that accentuates the blueness of his eyes. With crunching steps, he walks around us, where we kneel, thoroughly searched and disarmed, with hands tightly plasticked behind our backs.

I almost enjoy drawing it out, bitterly, brutally intrigued by their lies.

"We put a tracer in the airship," he says. "Your friends missed it when they dusted for bugs."

"I'm sorry," says Alice-Angeles with breath frosting from her open mouth. "We should've been more careful."

You 're not sorry,
I want to tell her,
and you were very careful to keep this from me. I know everything you've done, so don't pretend for my sake. And don't spare yourself the humiliation, if that's what you 're doing. You'll deny me in your own good time. You'll choose life over everything we've fought for together, you and me.

"It's not your fault, Alice-Angeles. Don't blame yourself."

"Yes, anyone can make a mistake," Bergamasc says, gloatingly. I wonder if he is maintaining Alice-Angeles' appearance of innocence as a private form of mockery, or in the hope that she might come in handy later. Either would be in character. "It could've been you, Jasper."

"The only mistake we ever make," I tell them both, "is to imagine that fate ever goes other than exactly as intended."

"Is that right?" Bergamasc looms over me with his hands on his hips. "Perhaps you can explain what your God has planned for me, then. It'd save me working it out for myself."

God's plan,
I ache to tell him,
might be for you to murder me in cold blood when we have exhausted each other's patience.

My lips won't move. They feel frozen, like they belong to someone else. That only increases my internal defiance.

Tell him! Tell them both that you know what's going on! This is your chance to change things forever!

I finally speak, but the words that emerge are not the ones I want to say.

"Your fate will be revealed in time." I could be talking to myself, but the words come from somewhere other than inside my head. "There's nothing you can do to prevent it."

"Well," says Bergamasc, utterly unaware of the internal conflict raging inside my head. "I don't suppose there's any point delaying the inevitable."

He unholsters a compact pistol and places it at my temple.

Now my whole body feels like a cage, one that won't bend or flex as it ordinarily does. I am trapped, voiceless and powerless before the man who holds my life in his hands.

But I don't flinch because I remember waking up in captivity unharmed a day later. We will argue for months before our paths diverge. And I am not entirely powerless. I still have something he wants.

"Contingency forty-four," I tell the Apparatus, sure in the knowledge that this will propel the gestalt into a state of permanent muteness. My enemy can look in every corner of the world, and he won't find it. Silent, attentive, it would wait until the end of the universe before breaking its obedient silence, unless I bid it to stir.

"God's will be done," I say.

The gun barks loudly, even though it's only set on stun, and I too am silenced.

He comes to me on the morning of my last day, bearing breakfast on a tray, which he lays between us so the food is within my easy reach. I scan bowls of miso soup, nori, and furikake, with dishes of natto and rice seasoned by grated daikon, okra, and raw quail egg. One sliver of grilled fish for each of us and tiny portions of pickled vegetables complete the feast.

I feel bruised from my attempt to change the future—this future. The voice that spoke through my lips in the Shivalik badlands has left me feeling psychically battered. Was it God, or someone else entirely?