David's Sling (16 page)

She peered through the peephole at the visitor. The visitor was a man, as she expected. The messages on Jobnet had been signed with the name Kurt, though with electronic mail, that didn't always guarantee the gender. Her hand hesitated on the doorknob. She hated to deal with men. Somehow, she always seemed to disappoint them; certainly, they always disappointed her.

She jerked on the doorknob and faced Kurt McKenna.

Her face flushed with a first small shock of dislike. He displayed all the features she found most unattractive in men. He had a sternly chiseled face, with the beauty of a sculpture. He held himself with a military straightness that bespoke an inbred arrogance. His eyes were direct and abrupt—eyes that wrote people off easily, never giving them a second chance. Her dislike grew rapidly.

Her skin prickled as she felt her dislike reflected by him; her vision wavered with the intensity of their resonating emotion. She was sure she would soon hate him.

She didn't want to hate him. She hated hate. How had this man done this to her? Why didn't he go away?

He stepped forward; she held her ground. "Ms. Lott speich. I have a job for you."

The words seemed normal, except for the forced precision of his speech. She considered closing the door on him, but that would not be civilized. Unwilling to turn her back on him, she stepped back and pointed to the chairs in the corner of the living room that served as her office. "Sit down."

He did not share her fear of turning away; he swept across the room and sat in her chair. Lila pursed her lips, then realized he had not done it intentionally: he had no way of telling from the careless way she had left the chairs, which was which. Normally she made the choice clear for people by escorting them.

The other chair had no arms. She twisted it around so its back was to McKenna and sat down facing him, her arms draped across the top of it. In this position she had the solid mass of the chair between her and McKenna, which made her feel better.

"Here." He dropped a packet on the table. "These are pictures of northern Iran."

"Iran!" She tore the packet open and riffled the photos with a practiced eye. They were fresh shots from the new full-spectrum, high-resolution French Spot IV satellite. She smiled at the crisp detail, both optical and infrared. She didn't get to handle good stuff like this too often, though she was one of the best image analysts in the world. Her genius paid off most effectively when reconstructing the damaged pictures.

"Great photos, aren't they?"

The certainty in his voice made her recoil from his arrogance, but he was right. Lila remained silent.

"Ten years ago those photos would have been so classified that the name of the classification would have been classified. Today any schmuck can pick them up for the price of a post card. '

"A post card?" She cast him a look of disgust. Hyperbole didn't impress her.

"Well, the price of a book of post cards. Anyway, photos like these sometimes mess things up for the men who defend our country."

She looked back at the pictures with a deeper appreciation. She smiled at the thought of the hawks in the military industrial complex bubbling with impotent anger. "What do you want me to do with them?"

"We have indications that the Soviet army invading Iran is destroying the wheat fields, as well as most of the other crops. We need to know how extensive the damage is, and how fast the damage is spreading."

"You have several series of these photos, taken on different days?"

"Of course."

She pursed her lips at his quick dismissal of her question, but he continued.

"We also need to know
what
the Soviets are doing that's making such a mess, so that when we send relief, we can send something to straighten it out. Otherwise, people will starve." Kurt paused. "
That's
why we came to you. It'll be tough figuring out the cause of the problem, even with these photos. I understand you're the best."

Ordinarily Lila would have demurred, but this McKenna provoked her. "Yes, I guess I am," she said with a too-casual wave of the hand. She carefully replaced the photos in their envelope. "I presume you have these stored digitally somewhere that I can get at them, right? Certainly you didn't overlook such a critical yet tiny detail."

"I didn't." He reached into his pocket, pulling out a credit card. "Use this. We'll pay for the time directly, and all the photos are there. You can find their sort order in the main directory." He rose to leave; she rose, too. She didn't want to let him look down at her.

"We haven't discussed the fee yet," she said.

He stopped. "I know how expensive you are. I'll give you a ten percent bonus, for having to work with me."

She opened her mouth, closed it in stunned silence. He felt the jarring hostility as strongly as she did.

She considered throwing the photos at him. Why had she let him into her apartment? Why hadn't she refused his job? Knowing that people might starve if she failed, she couldn't just throw him out. As much as she hated this man, those people were more important. She vowed to rise above him in this moral sense.

He stopped at the door. He seemed more relaxed, now that he was leaving. "I take off tomorrow for D.C. The card contains my phone number. If you have any questions today, I'm at Rickey's Hyatt."

"When do you need my results?"

"Yesterday," he responded as he left.

She turned to her work station, to unlock the digitized versions of McKenna's photos. A brief, suspicious bafflement crossed her mind. Why did this man care about wheat fields in Iran? He belonged to the military-industrial complex; she could smell it. He might care about the Soviet tanks, finding ways to destroy them, but she was sure he didn't care about those people. She should have asked him while he was there, but she had been so eager to get him out of her apartment she hadn't asked all her questions. What did he really want from her? She would ask him when she had to speak to him again.

With a shrug she opened the main directory McKenna had given her on the new account.

Nathan stood outside Bair Drug and Hardware, watching the occasional car cruise down the main street of Steilacoom. Here in the state of Washington, God had ordained five months of deep blue skies to be shrouded by seven months of slate gray clouds. The gray clouds kept out the tourists who did not understand. The gray clouds made the blue skies special for those who did understand: Steilacoom was a bright jewel placed in a dull metal setting. No one took the blue skies for granted in Steilacoom. This month was a blue sky month.

Nathan walked down Lafayette Street to its intersection with Wilkes. To his left he could see the haunted restaurant E.R. Rogers, facing away toward the water. A soft breeze, made damp by the Sound, carried a message of tranquility. Every corner of Steilacoom held this peaceful tranquility, a tranquility that was hard to find in the frenetic Zetetic headquarters just outside the nation's capital. Fortunately, Nathan carried his own tranquility within him. He had held that inner tranquility ever since Jan first taught him to feel relaxation, to always remember what it feels like to be calm.

But an earlier Nathan Pilstrom had not found tranquility so easily. In past decades, that earlier Nathan had sought out the Steilacooms of the world, desperately trying to internalize their calming influence. That Steilacoom serenity always seemed so beautiful, like the still waters of Puget Sound he could see now below the edge of the road.

Sometimes that earlier Nathan had succeeded in grasping tranquility for a time, but always he had lost it again. Finally, Jan and the Institute and he himself had developed new ways to train the mind to make those images more permanent.

Remembering those earlier, anxiety-ridden days, he realized how much he had in common with Juan Dante Cortez. Nathan leaned against Bair's clean siding and waited.

A battered blue Chevy swung by him into a parking slot. The car door creaked open. A man Nathan barely recognized stood up.

Nathan had met Juan once, a decade ago in the software exhibition hall in Austin. Those had been heady times, when the computer software industry exploded across the world with the same flare that microcomputers had carried just a few years earlier. Nathan had been on the crest of that wave with the first educational software from the Zetetic Corporation. Juan had been there, too, a kid fresh out of college with a copter flight simulation that left experts gasping, wondering how he had cranked so much detail out of such a small machine. Juan had never even flown in a helicopter.

In those bygone days Juan had burned with the fever of the industry. But his fever had burned deep inside, almost invisible. He released that energy upon the world only through the rapid, continuous movement of his eyes and his hands. The rest of his body had seemed to be an insulator, a soft fleshy covering to protect everything he touched from the flamehot temperatures inside himself.

Looking at Juan as he stepped from the old car, Nathan could see that the fever had burned through. It had cooked through his whole body, stripping the insulation, leaving a lean, leathery remnant. His eyes watched Nathan calmly, even carefully; his hands no longer swept in an unceasing dance, but moved with care to close the door and sweep back his thinning hair. Nathan wondered if he himself looked so dramatically changed when Juan looked back at him.

Slouched, Juan hardly seemed taller than Nathan himself. He maneuvered around the parked cars with long strides. "Nathan," he said, with a shallow smile, "it's been a long time."

Nathan nodded his head. "Too long." He crooked his head. "Hungry?"

"Of course." Juan straightened up. "Bair's Drugstore is a pretty strange place for a business meeting. It's perfect."

"I figured that most of your prospective employers might not think of taking you to Bair's for lunch. That just shows what fools they are—as you and I know, the best way to soften up a programmer is to fill him with chocolate-chocolate malted sodas before you lay on the Big Nasty." He pushed on the oldfashioned drugstore door handle, jiggling it in the middle of the motion to catch the jam properly, and opened the door. Nathan and Juan may have changed with time, but Bair's Drugstore had not. This permanence was key to Steilacoom's tranquility.

"I hope you don't tell anybody else the secret of the chocolate-chocolate malted soda," Juan replied with more pep. "You could get me into a lot of trouble." After they both chuckled, Juan continued, "And I hope you don't have a Big Nasty for me with dessert."

"I don't know, Juan. You must tell me if it's nasty." They sat at the round table across from the soda fountain, next to the Franklin stove, and ordered turkey sandwiches and chili. Apple pie would follow for dessert. And of course they ordered chocolate-chocolate malted sodas.

The conversation drifted across the missing years. They talked about the slump in the software market that had followed the boom, the growth of the Zetetic Institute, and the growth of Juan's company—Inferno, Inc. They talked about the breakup of Inferno, and about Jan's death and Juan's divorce. They did not talk about what either of them had done personally in the past year. They finished the apple pie.

"How did you find your way to Steilacoom?" Nathan asked as a first serious probe.

Juan answered by turning away, to squint into the sunshine pouring through Bair's front window. "I came here to find my soul again."

Yes, Juan had a great deal in common with that earlier Nathan Pilstrom. "Have you found it?"

Juan continued to stare into the sunshine with an expression of yearning, as if he clung to the sunshine, but it pushed him remorselessly away. "I don't know."

"Are you happy here?"

The leathery face relaxed into a wry smile. "I am content. Is that happiness?"

"If you ask the question, you know the answer. There's more to happiness than being content. You have to have a purpose, too—a worthwhile purpose."

A spasm rocked Juan's whole body. He turned back to Nathan, and for the first time his eyes held some of their old volcanic fire. "Do you know why I came to Steilacoom, Nathan?"

Nathan knew, but he didn't dare explain how he knew. "Tell me."

"It broke me, Nathan. Computer programming broke me. You see, I'm a Method programmer."

"You're a what?"

"I'm a Method programmer." He paused. "You know what a Method actor is, don't you? A Method actor lives the part he plays—he
becomes
the person he is portraying." A mellow note entered his discussion. "A Method programmer lives the program he writes—he
becomes
the program he is creating." He shrugged. "One day I was debugging ParaPower, a tool for running parallel simulations of world economics. We could have used it for comparing alternative agricultural policies, and banking policies, and military policies. It was going to revolutionize the job of politics and statesmanship. It was . . ." His eyes drifted; another spasm shook him, until he focused again on the sunshine. "I was tracing a fatal error through the simulation's concurrencies." Again he looked hard at Nathan. "The next thing I remember was a pillow on a hospital bed. Six weeks had passed." He shrugged. "The medical community finds me quite fascinating. They studied me at great length. I seem to have a unique form of epilepsy, triggered by the kind of creative, meticulous thinking I do when I'm programming. It's different from any other kind of thinking I've experienced. Do you know what I mean?"

Nathan nodded. "And yet, you're programming now. And my friends at 9ID tell me you're doing a super job with their budgeting system."

Juan snorted. "Yeah. It's so boring I can hardly keep my eyes open when I think about it. " He closed his eyes as if to prove the point. "You might think of me as an alcoholic who, after going through a long period as a teetotaler, now makes his living as a wine taster." He opened his eyes again. "But you have to be careful not to like the wine too much."

"I see." Nathan clenched his teeth. How important was the Sling Project? He thought about the Information Age that might yet be stillborn if the governments of the world played their cards badly enough; he thought about the vast destructiveness of Industrial Age weapons and about the people who would die for no rational reason if another war began. "Juan, I've come here to offer you a very fine wine. But it has a purpose. Maybe the most important purpose we've ever encountered."