River of Blue Fire (42 page)

“
Hello, General sir
,” he said, and laughed, then turned to the man who had been sitting at Corporal Keegan's desk. “You hear that, Murphy? At least someone connected with this man's army gives me a little respect.” The general came around the desk and kneeled down in front of Christabel. He smelled like something she smelled on cleaning day, like furniture polish maybe. From close up, his eyes were still like a bird's eyes, very bright, with pale flecks in the brown. “And what's your name, honey?”

“Christabel, sir.”

“I'll bet you are your daddy's pride and joy.” He reached out and took her cheek between his fingers, just for a moment, very gentle, then stood up. “She's a beauty, Sorensen. Did you come down to help your daddy work, honey?”

“I'm not quite sure why she's here myself, sir.” Her daddy walked toward her, almost as though he wanted to be close in case she said something wrong so he could stop her. Christabel did not understand why, but she felt scared again. “Why are you here, baby? Where's your mommy?”

“She called the school to say Mrs. Gullison was sick, so I should come here. She's shopping in the town today.”

The general smiled again, showing almost all his teeth. “Ah, but a good spy always has a cover story.” He turned to her daddy. “We're due back in Washington in three hours. But I'll be back beginning of next week. And I'd
love
to have some definite progress. I recommend that to you highly, Sorensen. Even better, I'd like to come back and find you-know-who under full guard in a suicide watch cell, ready for questioning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The general and his three men headed toward the door. He stopped there after the first two went through. “Now you be a good girl,” he said to Christabel, who was trying to get the idea of a suicide watch out of her mind, and wondering who would wear something like that. “You mind your daddy, you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Because daddies know best.” He gave her a little salute, then walked out. The scowly man went out last, looking very spyflick, like if he didn't keep watching carefully, Christabel's daddy might run up behind the general and hit him.

After they all left, her daddy sat on the desk and stared at the door for a while. “Well, maybe we should get you home,” he said at last. “Mommy ought to be back from shopping by now, don't you think?”

“Who are you supposed to find, Daddy?”

“To find? Were you listening to that?” He walked over and messed up her hair.

“Daddy, don't! Who are you supposed to find . . . ?”

“Nobody, sweetie. Just an old friend of the general's.” He took her hand in his. “Now come on. After the day I've just had, I think I can take a few minutes off work to drive my daughter home.”

I
T
was odd, but the thing that awakened Jeremiah Dako was the silence.

The oddity was that as one of only two people roaming through a huge, abandoned military base, he should have been startled by anything
except
silence. Living in the Wasp's Nest with only Long Joseph for company was most of the time like being the last inhabitant of one of the ghost townships that dotted the southern Transvaal, where the Tokoza Epidemic had emptied the shantytowns so quickly that many of the fleeing residents left even their few miserable possessions behind—cooking pots, cardboard suitcases, tattered but wearable clothing—as though their owners had all been snatched away in a second by some dreadful magic.

But even the deserted Transvaal worker stations had been open to wind and rain and the incursions of wildlife. Birdsong could still be heard echoing through the dusty streets, or rats and mice scrabbling in the rubbish dumps.

The Wasp's Nest, though, was a monument to silence. Shielded from the elements by uncountable tons of stone, its machineries largely stilled, its massive doors so tightly sealed that even insects could not slip in and the air vents so finely-screened that no visible living organism could enter, the base might have been something from a fairy tale—Beauty's castle, perhaps, where she and all her family slept, powdered in the dust of centuries.

Jeremiah Dako was not a fanciful man, but there were times in the eternal night of indoor living, when his companion Joseph Sulaweyo had finally slipped into fitful sleep—a sleep that seemed plagued by its own malign fairy folk—when Jeremiah stared at the vast cement coffins that were now his responsibility and wondered what tale he had stumbled into.

He wondered, too, what the Author expected him to do.

I'm one of the ones they don't talk about much in the stories
, he decided on a night when the readings were unremarkable and the hours went by slowly. It was only a slightly painful realization.
The man holding the spear by the door. The one who brings in some magical something-or-other on a velvet pillow when someone important calls for it. One of those people in the crowd who shouts “Hooray!” when everything ends happily. I've always been that man. Worked for my mother until I was grown, worked for the doctor for twenty-four years after that. I might have run away from it all for beautiful beautiful Khalid if he had asked me, but I would have wound up keeping house for him, too. I would have been in his story, that is all, instead of the doctor's or my mother's, or right now this crazy thing with machines and villains and this big empty building under a mountain
.

Of course, a spear-carrier role was not entirely without rewards, and neither was this multistory ghost town. He had time to read and to think now. He had not had much time for either since he had gone to work for the Van Bleeks. All his spare time had gone into assuring his mother's comfort, and although Susan would not have begrudged him the occasional quiet hour spent reading or watching the net while she was deep in her researches, the mere fact of her trust had spurred him on to great—and almost always unnoticed—efforts. But here there was literally nothing to do except to watch the readouts on the V-tanks, and make sure the fluid levels stayed topped up. It was no more difficult than maintaining the doctor's expensive car—which was now parked in the lowest of the Wasp's Nest parking lots, and which would be gathering dust if he didn't go up there every few days to clean it with a soft cloth and agonize over the ruined grill and cracked windshield.

He sometimes wondered if he would ever get to drive it again.

Jeremiah, despite not liking the fellow very much, would have been willing to devote more of his leisure time to conversation with Long Joseph, but Renie's father (who had never been exactly warm) was growing increasingly remote. The man spent hours in brooding silence, or vanished into the farther reaches of the base and returned with his eyes reddened by tears. Jeremiah had liked it better when the fellow was just nasty.

And Jeremiah's every attempt to reach out had been rebuffed. At first he had thought it was only the man's pride, or perhaps his hopeless, provincial prejudice against homosexuality, but lately he had come to realize that there was a knot in Long Joseph Sulaweyo that might never be untied. The man lacked the vocabulary to define his pain except in the most obvious ways, but more critically, he did not seem to understand that there could be an alternative, if he would only try to find the answers within himself. It was as though the entire twenty-first century had passed him by, and he could imagine emotional pain solely in the primitive ways of the prior century, only as something to be raged against or endured.

Lately, as though the inner turmoil were coming to a rolling boil, Long Joseph had taken to walking incessantly, not only vanishing for long journeys through the base—Jeremiah had thought at first he was searching for alcohol, but surely he had given that up by now?—but even pacing in a most maddening way when they were in the same room, always moving, always walking. In the past few days Joseph had even begun singing to himself as he did so, filling the long silences between irregular conversation with a tuneless murmur that was starting to make Jeremiah feel like someone was poking him repeatedly in the back of the head. The songs, if that was what they were, did not seem to have any application to Long Joseph's situation. They were just old popular standards, repeated over and over again, sometimes—bereft of their original melodies and with the lyrics mumbled or even turned into nonsense syllables—just barely, though irritatingly, recognizable.

Jeremiah honestly did feel sorry for the man. Joseph had lost his wife in a horrible, lingering way, his son was all but dead with a mystery illness, and now his daughter had gone away into danger, although she remained cruelly, deceptively near. Jeremiah understood that Long Joseph was hurting badly, and that the absence of anything to drink had removed one of the man's few emotional crutches, but that did not mean that the mumbling and the pacing and the incessant idiot crooning were not soon going to make Jeremiah far more crazy than Long Joseph could ever aspire to be.

Thus it was that when he awakened in the middle of the night, several hours before he was due to take his next shift from Renie's father, the silence—the absence of even the distant whisper of Joseph's songs—startled him.

Jeremiah Dako had dragged the military-issue camp bed down to the underground lab in part because he had been working longer and longer shifts watching over the V-tanks, filling in for Long Joseph when the man was late returning from one of his rambling walks around the complex—or sometimes when he did not come back at all. At least, that was the reason he cited, not without some heat, when Joseph Sulaweyo demanded to know his reasons for moving a bed into the lab.

But in a dark part of his imagination, he had also begun to lose trust in Long Joseph. Jeremiah feared that, in a fit of despondency, the other man might actually do something to damage the tanks or the processing equipment that made them run.

Now, as he lay in the darkness of the office he had chosen as his makeshift bedroom, listening to a very unfamiliar silence, he felt a cool wind of fear blow through him. Had it finally happened, then? Or was he just strung too tightly himself? Being trapped for weeks in a deserted underground base, listening to the echoes of his own footsteps and the mumbling of a crazy man, was not the way to keep anyone mentally healthy. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows—or at innocent silences.

Jeremiah groaned quietly and got up. His heart was beating only a little more swiftly than it should, but he knew he would not get back to sleep until he saw for himself that Long Joseph Sulaweyo was sitting in the chair in front of the tank readings. Or perhaps off using the toilet—even Jeremiah occasionally left the room on his own shift to answer a call of nature or to make coffee, or even just to get a little cold air in the face from one of the ventilation ducts.

That was probably it, of course.

Jeremiah slipped into the pair of old slippers he had found in one of the storage lockers—a comfort that made him feel at least a little bit at home—and walked out to the catwalk to look down at the level that contained the control panels.

The chair was empty.

Still very deliberately staying calm, he headed for the stairs. Long Joseph had gone to the kitchen or the toilet. Jeremiah would just watch the tanks until he got back. It was not as though there was ever much to do beyond the quite predictable work of topping up the water and other liquids on schedule, and flushing out the waste system and slotting in new filters. And what could be done anyway, short of pulling Renie and !Xabbu out of the tanks—against Renie's express wishes—unless there were a full-scale emergency? The communication system had gone bad the first day, and had proved itself beyond Jeremiah's skills to fix. So even if Long Joseph had wandered off, it wasn't as though he were leaving the helm of a ship in the middle of a sea battle or something.

All the readings were normal. Jeremiah checked them twice just to make sure. As his eye swept along the station for the second time, he noticed the faint light of the drawscreen. The stylus lay beside it, the only thing on the station not at right angles to something else, a single and minor note of disorder, but for some reason it made Jeremiah shudder as he leaned forward to read the screen.

I CANT TAKE NO MORE
, the note read, the labored handwriting black against the glow of the screen.
I AM GOING TO BE WITH MY CHILD
.

Jeremiah read it two more times, trying to make sense of it as he fought the strangling sense of alarm. What did the man mean,
with his child
? With Renie? Did he think he could join her just by climbing into the tank? Jeremiah had to restrain the urge to throw the great lids open, to make sure the madman had not climbed into the plasmodal gel beside his unconscious daughter. There was no need for him to touch the V-tanks, he knew. The readings on Renie's tank, on both of them, were normal—one set of vital signs in each.

A darker meaning suddenly occurred to him. Jeremiah stood up, suddenly very afraid.

If he thought his boy Stephen had died—if he had suffered one of his bad dreams, perhaps, or his depression had just beaten him down until the difference between comatose and corpse seemed nil. . . .

I have to go and look for him, the mad bastard. Jesus save us! He could be anywhere in here. He could just go up to the top story of the lab and throw himself off
.

Reflexively, he looked up, but the floors above the lab were silent, and nothing moved on any of them. The great snake-tangle of cables above the V-tanks was also unchanged, although for a moment one of the cable troughs, dangling unused, looked unpleasantly like a hanged man.

There was no body on the floor either.

“Good God,” Jeremiah said aloud, and wiped his brow. There was no helping it: he would have to look out for him. It would take a while, but not forever—the base was sealed, after all. But he would have to leave the tanks unsupervised, and that he did not like. Perhaps because of his own apprehension, the sleepers within seemed terribly vulnerable. If something happened to them while he was chasing after that crazy fellow . . .! He could not bear the thought.