Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (27 page)

So Stacy had dumped the whole
megillah
in Susannah’s lap—and simultaneously deprived her of the freedom to explore the issue through normal channels. Susannah was tempted to forget the project entirely, because it was crazy. What was Great-Grandfather thinking—if he was even thinking at all? Nuclear weapons had finally left their world as a tool of force and diplomacy, and good riddance. They could deal with their enemies the old-fashioned way, on the ground and in the air, stroke with counterstroke, and not try to destroy everyone in one great bang, finished and secure for all time.

And then she remembered an old family rumor. It came from the years when Susannah was a youngster, just out of college. Stacy would have been a teenager then and known nothing about it. But it was a lead.

Susannah called her Great-Aunt Callie, arranged a meeting, and asked that it take place in the black walnut orchard inside the family compound. There, amid the rattle of twisting branches, shaded and baffled by their slender green leaves, the two women could talk privately. Only Susannah’s array, which monitored the background humming of her brain, would be available to record the conversation, because Callie had never taken the cut. And Susannah could route her thoughts into a one-way black box for half an hour.

“Why would John talk to Stacy about this without consulting me first?” Callie asked, when Susannah had explained the Patriarch’s request and how she received it.

“Perhaps because he knew you would try to talk him out of it? Perhaps he wanted to study the project’s feasibility, learn the details, and be ready with his arguments. Then he could discuss it with you intelligently.”

“Well, you’ve gone and spoiled that. Why did you come to me, anyway?”

“I can obtain—or have our intelligent chemists think up, and the fabricators cook up—all sorts of new and exotic materials. But heavy metals, fissionable materials, would require something like transmutation of raw elements in an atom smasher. And fusibles like deuterium and tritium, which we can process from seawater, still need a fission core to kick them off. It’s technology beyond our capability.”

“Are you thinking of an expedition to recover the old linear accelerator and its positron-electron rings at Stanford? They went out of commission fifty years ago when the main tunnel collapsed in the Great Bay Quake.”

“That’s one possibility,” Susannah said slowly—although, in truth, she hadn’t thought of it before. “But there’s also a legend in the family suggesting you know how to get a weapon.”

“Oh!” Callie suddenly went quiet, obviously in a trance of remembering. “Not a weapon, just enriched uranium and plutonium. And it wasn’t me, but a young man I knew—my Italian godson, actually. Besides, he was working
against
the family’s interest, not for us. I only learned about his activities through the federal authorities, who were actually tracking his boss, the woman who put the whole thing together.”

“Would you know how to get in touch with him, or her, or whoever?”

Callie shook her head. “We closed that door—permanently.” She walked on, looking down at her shoes in the grass. “You know, back then, we tried to stay on the side of the angels.”

“John must feel we can no longer count on angels for our protection.”

“And you go along with this? You
want
us to have such a weapon?”

“Oh, hell no!” Susannah said. “I think John’s gone crazy, and Stacy should know better. How do you
bomb
someone? Doesn’t he realize that having a weapon so powerful implies having a delivery method—airplanes, rockets, something—with the range to get the device to the target without incinerating yourself?”

“Maybe it’s just the deterrent effect he wants,” Callie suggested. “If it were known the family had the weapons and could use them, we wouldn’t need to have an actual target in mind.”

“A dangerous deterrent … But I have orders from the Patriarch. Can you help?”

“Thirty years ago, they were smuggling reactor-bred uranium and plutonium out of a facility that reprocessed spent fuel somewhere in Malaysia—which is now part of greater China. You should probably start with the other reprocessing plants, ones in friendlier territory.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Susannah said. “But it’s not going to make us any safer.”

* * *

Despite a 7.1-magnitude earthquake fifty years ago and the near-destruction of the city, despite a decade of economic collapse, invasion, and war, despite everything the world could throw at it, the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero—that twenty-story wedge of white concrete on the waterfront, with the soaring interior atrium, glass-enclosed elevators climbing inside it like spiders, and a revolving restaurant on top—was still standing. It was a testament, Kenny Praxis thought, to good foundation work and better structural design. Of course, the company that had built and owned it was no longer in business. The hotel was still called the Hyatt only by those old enough to remember its history. Today it was run by a Japanese conglomerate under the name Hai-Oshi, which roughly translated into something like “yes, push me.” Not a great name for a high-rise hotel, if you thought about it.

After their third date, with more dancing and dining, Kenny decided it was time to take his relationship with Angela to the next level. He had almost forgotten that this energetic, enigmatic young woman had once been the little girl, Angie, his kitchen-table study companion from all those years ago. And yet something told him to be careful. Something in the forefront of his mind—and nothing to do with the wiring in his brain—was warning him of danger.

For that reason, he registered with a null identity which he had acquired on the black market, one that matched a fictitious persona the network was prepared to confirm through his cut. He paid in California greenbacks rather than debit one of the PFA accounts, which would have been traceable back to the family.

When he returned to Angela, who waited beside the artificially babbling brook that ran in a concrete channel through the lobby, he asked, “Are you sure you want this?”

“Are you getting cold feet, sir?” Her eyes went wide.

“No, but—I mean—we knew each other as children.”

“All the more reason, I would think, to do this now.”

“All right.” He took her hand and led her across to the elevator. Once inside, he drew her close and kissed her, without regard for the glass walls or for anyone below who might be watching.

They walked down to the room on the seventeenth floor, and he bent to open it with the hotel’s fob. The hallway was really an open balcony, exposed on one side to the whole atrium. When he straightened and turned, Angela was already half out of her high-necked pink dress. She worked the zipper up her back like a contortionist, wrapped her arms around her head, and pulled the whole thing off in one whisper of fabric. She stood there, in the sight of God and everyone, in high-heeled shoes and raspberry-colored bra and panties.

“Gee,” Kenny said, gulping.

“Get inside,” she ordered.

* * *

After they were done—done for the third time, Angela reminded herself dreamily—she lay back on the rumpled pillows and twisted sheets and let her mind go mostly blank. She was sensing rather than thinking, feeling rather than calculating, absorbed by the experience they had just shared.

Now Ken lay beside her, face down, and dozing. He deserved it.

He was a wonderful lover, everything she had imagined he would be. He was gentle, slow-moving, focused on her body’s needs, aware of everything she was feeling just as he felt it. He was strong enough to lift her, raise her, position her for the most intimate touches and sensations. She had feared the electrodes in his head would be a distraction, like having some zombie intelligence looking over his shoulder or, worse, giving him directions from an encyclopedic database of feminine anatomy. But no, their consummation was all Kenneth, all Angela, and nobody else.

After a long time, during which she replayed in her mind each phase of their lovemaking, he lifted his head.

“Wow,” he murmured.

“Wow yourself,” she said.

“Go again?” he offered.

“Can you?” she challenged.

“Um, not really,” he said sadly.

He lifted himself on an elbow to look into her face. His eyes were troubled, like a little boy who has sudden doubts.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I thought …” and stopped.

“No, what?” she insisted.

“Living alone, or living with Antigone and Helen, all those years, I thought you would be, well, less experienced.”

“Did you think I was a virgin?”

“I don’t know what I thought.”

“Would it matter if I wasn’t?”

“Certainly not,” he protested.

But it would though, she knew. “I am a virgin—with every other man in the world,” she explained. “But I’ve made love to you every night since I was thirteen years old.”

His face registered surprise, then shock. “I didn’t know. Thank you!”

“No, thank
you,
sir. For making an honest woman of me.”

* * *

Without explaining the real reason to anyone, just ordering it as part of her chartered Annual Planning Process, Susannah took a convoy of HUMV-IXs around through the South Bay and up into the hills behind the Stanford University campus. She asked her cousin John Junior and a detachment of his paid regulars to come along for military protection, but she didn’t tell him the purpose of the trip.

She did confide something of her mission to Benjamin Auchincloss, a physicist on the family payroll who advised her on projects dealing with special materials and technologies. And he brought along, through his cortical array, the intelligence that identified itself as Quandam. Everyone else thought the name was a play on “quantum mechanics,” but it was actually a Latin pronoun, meaning “a certain person” of the female gender. The intelligence must have known that, but he—or more likely she—never explained the joke.

“You already know what you’re going to find there,” Auchincloss told her. “The place has been deserted for years.”

“Maybe,” Susannah said. “But you might spot something we could use.”

“What? To transmute metals? I sincerely doubt that.”

It was hardly a trip down memory lane for Susannah, who had studied at Stanford. Not having authorization to enter the campus, they skirted to the north of the fifteen-foot wall erected in the Time of Troubles, passing through the derelict shopping mall that had once borne the university’s name, and then up the broken track of Sand Hill Road into the rolling hills. The turnoff into the research complex was not blocked or even gated. The place seemed empty.

“Turn left on the loop road,” she told the driving intelligence, referring to an old map she held on her lap. When the machine turned, the rest of the convoy followed.

“You want to find the positron-electron accelerating ring,” Auchincloss said.

“What will we see there?” Susannah asked.

“History.”

They drove over washed-out asphalt roads, passed industrial-style buildings with vacant windows and blockhouses with no windows at all. From the number of parking lots that were slowly turning into tufted meadows, she guessed a few hundred people might once have worked there.

After they had gone a quarter mile, Auchincloss pointed to a low structure with curved walls on either side. “There,” he said. “That’s the original storage ring.”

“What did it store?” one of the guards asked.

“Atomic particles moving at near-light speeds.”

“Do you think you’re gonna find some now?”

The physicist laughed. “No, not a chance.”

Susannah had the convoy stop and dismount. She and Auchincloss went inside the building while the soldiers took up guard positions.

The ring was an open hall, with sight lines that vanished into the curving distance. Bolt holes in the concrete floor and the torch-cut ends of metal frames showed where once had stood giant magnets that shaped the positron and electron flight paths, RF-generating tubes called klystrons that pumped up the beams, and specialized monitors that traced their energy flows. Susannah supposed that if she gave Auchincloss time enough, he would follow the track of the colliding beams around the building and note where those bits of matter and antimatter had once been brought together and annihilated each other, which was the whole purpose of the experiment.

“There’s nothing here,” she said.

“Nope. Everything stolen or moved.”

“I shouldn’t have expected more, I guess.”

Thank you, thank you,
a voice sang in her head.

Quandam?
she asked. “I hear Quandam,” she said.

“He’s looking through my eyes,” Auchincloss replied.

It was in this place that physicists discovered the psi particle and the tau lepton,
Quandam said.
This room is deep in history. It is an honor to have been here.

Susannah refrained from commenting that the intelligence wasn’t really in the room—if a computer program could be said to
be
anywhere at all, other than in circuitry. Instead, she said, “Just an empty shed now.”

Please, can we examine the other facilities while you’re here?

“Are we going to find anything more?” she asked Auchincloss.

“No. If the Chinese didn’t take it for the technology, then vandals took it for the copper and steel. Why did we come here again?”

They had come because Susannah was desperate. It had taken her only a morning of stealthy online research to establish that, aside from the tailings at uranium mines in southern Nevada and western Arizona, fissionable materials seemed to have disappeared from their world—or at least been put beyond her reach.

The nuclear processing facility at Rocky Flats in Colorado now lay broken and rusting under the barrage of volcanic stone and ash. The breeder reactors at the Hanford Site in Washington State had been decommissioned and cleaned up long ago. Closer to home, the largest repository of spent fuel rods was to be found in the swimming pool and aboveground storage units at the commercial reactor on Diablo Cove, near San Luis Obispo. But even if she had the means to handle them and extract their enriched components, that site was guarded by a detachment from the California National Guard, the last of their command, pledged to hold the reactor in safe-store against intruders, maintain and monitor the pool and other radiation sources, and safeguard the area in perpetuity.