David's Sling (20 page)
SPLAT. A bright pink liquid smacks against Bill's face, blinding him. Gasping, he inhales the fragrance and tastes the sweetness of the champagne punch.
WHUFF. Another rainburst of champagne plasters his chest. It strikes his camera, drenching it with a short- circuiting, rose-colored tint. Bill is crippled—rendered as helpless as a quarterback struck in the gut by a hurtling lineman. He can no longer pan or zoom or focus.
THUNK. A woman's head and shoulders press against him. He blinks his eyes, clearing them so that he can see the tackler. She leans against him, her face and hair buried against his chest. Her perfume has a subtle scent, yet it reaches Bill despite the overpowering effervescence of the champagne.
She lurches against him again, then straightens and looks up at his astonished face. He sees blue eyes, too beautiful to ignore; they remind Bill of the quiet blue of the deep waters of Puget Sound. She steps back unsteadily. Her hand rises to cover her mouth in embarrassment; her other hand holds an empty glass. "I'm so sorry," the tipsy beauty apologizes. "Let me clean you off." She closes on him again and commences to suck the champagne from his shirt.
He grabs her by the shoulders to thrust her away, but she buries her nose deeper in his chest, close to his throat; he weakens under the caress. Under the force of her forward motion, Bill steps backward, clinging to her awkwardly.
The confrontation continues between Nathan Pilstrom and the tall stranger. But it is beyond Bill's reach, now that this woman has ruined his flatcam. He looks around; a new crowd grows around him, deciding that the Zetetic Institute is not as interesting as a drunken woman and a champagne-spattered man. With a sweeping glare he strengthens his grip on the girl, turns, and half-carries her from the room. Without his camera, there is no point in staying anyway.
As they cross the entranceway, she utters a wicked laugh. Her hands run around his waist, burrow deep in his back pockets. "Did I get your attention?" she asks.
Bill flushes; the air in the hall cools his forehead, but he bums with heat from the woman's hands, from her mouth upon his throat. He mutters incoherently. She replies with a murmur that tingles against the delicate skin beneath his ear lobe.
Who the hell is this person, anyway? Many women have thrown themselves at him before, with his handsome face and famous name; many more women would beg a night with him in the future.
Some have been even more beautiful than this one, though she is quite striking. He pushes her away; she caresses his hands, running her fingertips lightly up his forearm, bringing his fingers in contact with her neck, her cheeks.
He shakes himself, determined to master the situation. Though other lovers have been more beautiful, this one is . . .
special.
Her wide green eyes beckon to him from beneath lightly colored eyelids, a touch of makeup that is perfect, as though this woman has studied him, has analyzed his desires, has created psychometric charts of his behavior and now has come to lure him—but lure him where? Away from the confrontation brewing inside? It's too late to prevent the destruction of the Zetetic Institute—he has all the footage he needs. Besides, the woman has already succeeded if that is her purpose—he remembers with a small wrenching feeling the destruction of his flatcam.
Does she just want to lure him back to his apartment? He asks her; she answers yes.
He takes her, with her maddening eyes and teasing hands, back to his home. In the living room, her attack upon his shirt renews; he is half-unbuttoned before he can disengage to retreat to his bedroom and remove his flatcam. He slips the tape into his video system, a vast complex of the best equipment in the world.
He returns to her. Again the wrestling begins—but this time the girl struggles with an opponent who is free to respond to her every movement.
Now she weakens in turn. She escapes his arms and hurries to the bedroom, promising a quick return. He waits; the door opens; she strides out with a new and sober awareness. Her dress covers her again with full propriety; her eyes hold a cold glare. She utters a single furious epithet, swings the front door of the apartment wide, and leaves in a shattering slam of wooden door against metal frame.
Bill lies still a moment, then, leaping to his feet, howls in hopeless, helpless, furious frustration.
He calms himself. His life, his soul are not enmeshed with the intricate peculiarities of the female mind. His heart is in his flatcam. He returns to his bedroom to see the material he has collected, with which to destroy the Zetetic Institute.
The tape begins. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He howls again and wrenches the tape from its drive. Yes, it is the original.
With disbelief he replaces the tape and skips, faster and faster, across its surface. It is blank. She has destroyed it. She has cut out his heart.
His backup! Always upon returning home with fresh video, he starts the backup recorder to cut a dupe. He reaches for it now. With trembling fingers, he jabs the buttons to begin its replay.
Words and images flow to him: the Mansfield room and the debates of Nathan Pilstrom.
The woman destroyed his tape, but she did not destroy his newscast. He turns from the video player; the tape's contents bum brightly in his brain without amplification. Playing it in its entirety, the Zetetic Institute sounds heroic. But there are moments of value.
"To eliminate nuclear weapons, all we have to do is build better weapons"—the words of a world-destroyer.
"Turn plowshares into swords"—the words of a warmonger.
"Yes, it would devastate North Carolina—the words of an unfeeling theorizer.
"We accept partial responsibility for the attacks on smokers"—the words of a fanatic.
Bill clenches his fist. He feels the harsh strength of the crushing motion and smiles in satisfaction.
October 2
How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself— defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it
—Zetetic Commentaries
Leslie paused at the beginning of the corridor. Nathan, he knew, never walked this hall without taking a moment to gaze at the PERT chart. The Sling Project's PERT chart dominated the walls, burying the oak veneer beneath thousands of modern hieroglyphics. Often Leslie passed it by without a glance; but then, Leslie traveled the hall far more often than Nathan.
When Leslie did pause amid the colorful lines and boxes, he did so to study the individual branches, to prune and tend and nurture them; the PERT chart was the incarnation of his part of the project. He gave the chart the same intense concentration that programmers gave to their software. In such a manner, he concentrated upon the branches this morning.
The green forest had grown with stately decorum, overrunning many of the boxes that had once glared pink or even red with danger. The pink had settled into a thin band creeping up one wall and down the other, separating the green past from the uncolored, black-lined boxes of future. The whole project raced against that pink band, trying to turn it to green before it could reach farther into the black. A program manager considered his forest's growth acceptable as long as the band of pink did not thicken, as long as it did not grow faster than the trailing green, and as long as it did not turn red. For a moment, he postponed his considerations of the meaning of the red.
The black future had become clearer: the first order of business for the software team had been to break up the major software tasks into exhaustive lists of carefully circumscribed, well-defined subtasks.
To define is to limit
. Leslie could hear Jan telling him the Zetetic comment, a phrase stolen from Oscar Wilde. In the initial steps of a project, when flights of creative fancy supplied the ideas critical to success, you needed to be careful not to define the problem too well, lest it limit the creative process. But once those initial concepts had sparked together, fusing at last into a clear vision, it became equally critical to define, to limit, with ruthless vigor. You did not want to be surprised halfway through the engineering that transformed ideas into products.
Amos, Juan, Kurt, and Lila had done an excellent job in defining the Sling Project's transformation path. They had completed the details for the PERT chart. Sadly, this brought to bear another Zetetic commentary on the lightning-speed Information Age:
If it is complete, it must be obsolete
. Obsolescence occurred when the PERT chart's unbendingly factual description of the present offered no hope of reaching the planned future. On the Sling, a handful of urgent tasks already burned with the heat of a forest fire, threatening to consume that future.
The red boxes told this story. The single red box that had driven him and Nathan so hard to find Amos and Juan and Lila now lay in tranquil green, but before its transmutation, it had ignited speckles of new, bright fires.
Since Amos had started, he had put out many fires, healing a number of the newer red boxes to forest green. Other green boxes, representing the work of so many people, might grow toward the pink in an impersonal race, but the reds and pinks that dominated the software team's future represented personal battles. Those battles would take everything they had to give. They didn't have time to fight the absurd political battles that FIREFORS now demanded of them. They didn't have time to play absurd games because of a ban on telecommuting.
Leslie couldn't believe that the politicians had really pulled such a stupid stunt. Nathan had pointed out the analogy to the home-based sewing industry and its destruction by the textile mills, but Leslie didn't buy it at first. There were surely more telecommuters to fight this ban today than there had been clothing makers to fight that earlier law. On the other hand, the telecommuters were not organized as a political force. Sanity had no effect on politicians unless it was concentrated in a power bloc. The organized power blocs belonged to the older, Industrial Age institutions, such as the tobacco companies.
Kira had uncovered the tobacco industry's sudden support for the ban only days before the congressional voting. Hilan Forstil had called to alert them to the same problem on the same day, furious and apologetic that he had been kept in the dark so effectively by other members of Congress up on the Hill. Leslie found it unbelievable that the tobacco companies could wield so much power, but Kira had described lists of senators, representatives, regulators, newsmen, and others of influence whom the tobacco industry could in turn influence.
Of course, the tobacco industry had not implemented this attack alone. The Institute had stepped on a surprising number of toes, considering its tiny size. Nathan saw a deeper meaning in the new attack: the Zetetic Institute was the first power structure of the Information Age. It had grown just large enough to attract the notice of the Industrial Age power structures. The corporate oligarchies, the unions, the news media, the government bureaucracies—all the old institutions that held power—could see the dark glimmers of their fading importance in a new society. Their survival depended on the destruction of the Institute. Only extraordinary forces could deflect their opposition to the Information Age.
Too late, the Institute itself had become the rallying point for the telecommuters. Kira had started organizing opposition, with Hilan's help. A quick analysis had shown that they could not prevent the ban from going into effect: they could only hope to revoke the law before it dismembered the telecommuting work force. With a chill, Leslie understood why the laws against selling homemade clothing had never been reversed: when the unions broke the home manufacturers in the first battle, they left no one able to fight. Struggling to make a new livelihood, the losers had no strength left over with which to fight the politicians.
Now the Institute had to battle with the union/tobacco coalition, the FIREFORS bureaucracy, and the sheer technical difficulty of making the Sling work, all at the same time. These simultaneous campaigns demanded more than the Institute had to give.
In turn, Leslie and the Institute were demanding more of Amos than he would agree to give. Amos had been testy when Leslie had explained to him that he couldn't telecommute on this first day of the ban. He had dismissed Leslie's careful explanations of how important it was for Amos to drive to the Institute. He had complained that the primitive nature of the Institute's equipment would hideously impair his productivity, compared with what he could achieve at home.
Finally, Amos had surrendered under the unrelenting stream of Leslie's combination of apologies and pointed reminders. The harshest point was that, if Amos did not come in for work, there would soon be no Institute to work for.
The Institute was the most closely scrutinized corporation in the country: over a dozen government regulators would roam the halls to ensure that all the Zetetic workers in the city were working on-site. Authorities throughout the nation supervised Institute projects, ready to make arrests and pass incredible fines for the least infraction of the new laws. If they carried out the maximum legal penalties, they could destroy the Institute in a few days. Apparently, as the Institute grew stronger as the rallying point for the telecommuters, it also grew more important as a target for the opposition. Nathan's analysis seemed correct: the Institute now lay at the heart of the maelstrom.
As Leslie walked past the last of the red boxes on the PERT chart, he thought again about Amos.
Amos had been as close to anger as Leslie had ever seen him. The idea of driving through rush-hour traffic did not suit him. "Amos, stay cool," Leslie had said. "In a couple of weeks, this whole thing will calm down. When that happens, you can call in sick every damn day of the week, and work on 'hobbies' all the time. Then, when you complete a program module, you come in for one day, and we pay you a huge amount of money for that day's work. Your 'hobbies' will coincidentally look a great deal like stuff we need, but so what? Well fight it in court." Amos offered to be sick immediately, but Leslie answered, "I'm sorry, Amos, we can't do it yet. Just hang in there for a couple of weeks. Or rather, hang out here for a couple of weeks."
Leslie hurried to his office to watch for Amos's arrival. When he reached his window, the view filled him with horror.
Many people had spoken of the increase in traffic that the ban on telecommuting would create. The intersection at Sunrise Valley and South Lakes Drive had been a nightmare for years, even in light traffic. In heavy traffic, with ex-telecommuters who hadn't driven in rush hour for years, the intersection filled with a swirling mob of crazies.
But this was not the ugliness on the scene that most terrified Leslie. A mob of protesters packed the sidewalk in front of the Institute's driveway. Had Leslie not come in at an ungodly early hour of the morning, he would have had to confront this mob himself. Reading the signs they carried, he saw that they had come as a result of Bill Hardie's news broadcast the night before. Hardie had used clips from Senator Obata's reception—a series of Nathan's statements ripped from context, like obscene entrails ripped from the guts of a beautiful animal. Leslie had seen only part of it; he could not stand to see facts twisted with such expert malevolence.
Staring out the window, he felt overwhelmed by the effect of that broadcast. What a tragic coincidence, that the mob should block the entrance to the Institute on the very day that the government inspectors started demanding their presence! He called the police even though he realized how futile it was: how could even the police penetrate the tortured jam of steaming automobiles?
One of the cars ensnared in the traffic—a bright yellow Toyota—dodged around the barriers and broke through the throng, turned down the quiet lane toward the Institute, then slowed as it approached the Institute's driveway, as if planning to enter. But the mob apparently dissuaded the driver; he accelerated past the crowd as several fists shook after him.
By the time he disappeared around the corner, he had accelerated to an insane speed. Whoever he was, he had superb reflexes, unbounded confidence, and a total disregard for other drivers and legal restraints. Nuts like that fellow made the road dangerous for everybody. It took Leslie a moment to realize that the nut behind the wheel was Amos Leung.
Leslie watched the crest of the hill over which the Toyota had gone with odd confidence. Amos would surely return.
A few moments later his solitary figure, small and dark, eased over the hill with a fluid swiftness that blended with the windblown movement of the bushes. His direction shifted off to the right. Leslie realized that Amos was heading for the rear doors of the Institute, away from the mob. He almost made it, before someone in the mob spotted him.
Part of the mob hurried to block his path. The speed and efficiency of this small group surprised Leslie; then he noticed that the hurrying men seemed different from the main body of protesters. They were huskier, and they moved more purposefully.
The combination of the ban and the mob didn't seem like a coincidence anymore. Someone had planted thugs here to ensure that the Institute couldn't meet the requirements of the law.
What could he do? The building was mostly empty; he could not assemble his own mob to counter the one outside.
But Kurt was here. He might qualify as a mob all by himself. Leslie ran through the building yelling for him.
It took only a few gasping words to propel McKenna into action. Leslie trailed after him and considered the possible foolishness of this rescue effort. Of all the people he knew, Amos was the one most capable of taking care of himself.
Amos had grown up the son of a quiet, retired Chinese master of arms. His training had started when he had learned to stand. He had practiced every day with the diligence and discipline of a Soviet gymnast—with shuriken, with swords, with his bare hands. Leslie remembered a story Amos had once told of a confrontation in a New York subway. Three teenagers had encircled him. With his back to the wall, he had offered them his wallet, but they were not interested. They drew knives.
Amos had considered disarming them, but their combination of numbers and weapons introduced a small risk to himself. He had therefore decided to disable them. Several minutes later, he had called the ambulance for them.
But outside the Institute he faced more than three assailants. As Leslie burst out of the door, he saw that Amos stood backed against a tree. He seemed impassive and quiet; only the odd way he held himself suggested danger to the knowing watcher. Someone reached for him.
Amos seemed to disappear. An invisibly fast force leaped from where he had stood, a force that touched one thug after another. You could see the progression of the force by the roll of violent jerking across the crowd. The thugs dropped in stunning succession. Leslie heard the soft, soggy sound of human bodies falling.
The violent force paused for a moment; Amos appeared where it had left off, reorienting himself. The remaining thugs held their ground, but seemed dazed by the attack. Amos disappeared again.
A gunshot barked. Amos reappeared, sliding across the green grass. When the sliding stopped, Amos lay unmoving, his face filled with the impassive calm Leslie had known so often. Now, however, his calmness seemed unnatural.
Leslie returned to the building and called the police again. A helicopter came to the rescue, filled with paramedics. They arrived too late.
Kira stood before the flat dullness of the apartment door and stared into the peephole. Of course, from her side of the door, she could see nothing. But she had come for a confrontation; let it start even now, before the door opened. With an angry swing of her wrist, she raised the knocker and struck home once, twice, three times.
She waited. Dull thudding suggested the motion of a large man. When the sound stopped, she knew he had come to the peephole, and that his confusion mounted with every passing moment. She smiled disarmingly, and wondered whether the smile confused him even more.