Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (32 page)
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Authors: Evil Triumphant
like distant islands. The white drapes had been pulled back to allow full view of the peaceful vista.
The far end of the room had been arranged as a media center, but the stereo and monitors remained dark.
Sinclair MacNeal stood at the little bar mixing two drinks, but he barely acknowledged me at all. His attention
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appea
red focused on Rajani, the Yidam's daughter. The expression on her face told me she had been infor
med
of her
father's death and that she grieved for him. The feelings 1 read from her included more grief,
but split
between mourning her father and regretting their inability to rediscover each other as father and daughter.
MacNeal brought her an amber drink in a small tumbler, then sat beside her on the couch. She took refuge
beneath his arm. Beyond them, Crowley stood at the window and looked out. Jytte stood near him, then turned toward me as I entered the room. "I am glad to see you here, Coyote."
1 stopped dead in my tracks as Jytte flashed a brief smile. I caught a feeling of relief from her, then a quick stiffening like a child realizing she'd been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. That faded after a second or two, then Jytte crossed to an overstuffed chair and sat down. Her movements flowed naturally, not stiffly, making me wonder if somehow the Empress of Diamonds was controlling her as she had controlled Natch.
Her outfit, an
olive jumpsuit, did not look as sexless as other things 1 had seen her wear, but it had not been augmented with diamond jewelry, so I was left assuming other forces were at work here.
I bowed my head to Jytte. "I am pleased to be here, Jytte. Rajani, I am very sorry about your father."
The black-skinned woman nodded once. "He used to be fascinated with the heroism that some people
exhibited during wars. 1 know he died happily if what Mr. Crowley has described to me is the truth."
"It is, Rajani, it is," Sinclair assured her with a hug.
"It is," I echoed him. "Jytte, did Damon tell you why 1 need to speak with you?"
The blond woman nodded and crossed her long legs. "He said I have some information that is important.
He suggested getting it might be unpleasant."
"It probably will be, and interrogation might get downright rough. 1 want you to know, though, that I respect you and would not ask this of you if there were any otherway."
Sinclair frowned. "Maybe there tsanotherway, Coyote. Jytte is really the core of this operation right now.
After you left, she took charge and has been very good at finding solutions to problems through very
innovative techniques. Maybe she can think of something that will save her from the third degree. Lay the problem out and we can see."
I nodded. "Fair enough. Jytte, we need to know the location at which Pygmalion held you before your
escape. You'll have to lead us back there."
Her head came up, but her face slackened into the emotionless mask I had always seen before. In my
absence, she had risen out of her shell to direct the effort against Pygmalion. In her capacity as our
communications coordinator, she often organized actions and had done so for the group when I arrived
back in the beginning
of the summer. Now, faced with the prospect of having to return to the prison that stripped her of her old body and stuffed her into the new one, her shell began to close around her once again.
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Jytte
folded her arms slowly and seemed to sink deeper into the white chair's plush upholstery. "I
remember n
othing of the time before Coyote found me."
Even as she spoke, 1 knew she was lying. "Then start there, Jytte. Start at the moment Coyote saved you and go back one second at a time."
Stroking his goatee with a gray-gloved hand, Crowley turned from the window. "I can help you, if you wish."
Jytte shook her head adamantly, and her bangs slid down to cover the left half of her face. "No. I do not want anyone intruding into my mind." Hostility rolled off her in waves that carried naked terror in the troughs. I saw Rajani shiver, and when she whimpered, Jytte's emotional output dropped. "Forgive me, Rajani."
I walked over to Jytte and dropped to my haunches in front of her. "No one wants to intrude in your mind, Jytte. We know, or we think, Pygmalion has a base on Earth in this area. The fact that you were found
nearby, that he dumps his failed experiments in Phoenix and the fact that he took Mickey from Flagstaff
all point to it."
"Why don't you get the information you want from Mickey?"
I sensed in her question a desperation to deflect attention from herself, but I also took it as a sign that her defenses were beginning to crack. "We cannot because we do not know that he was ever at that base."
Crowley nodded grimly. "In addition, Mickey is only a child. His grasp of geography, distances and other details would be impossible to decipher into useful material."
"What if I was taken when 1 was Mickey's age?"
"It wouldn't matter. You escaped as an adult." Crowley
seated himself on the arm of the couch near Sinclair. "There are things that you know which are valuable.
You have nothing to fear."
"Yes she does." Rajani set her tumbler down on the coffee table. "She has a lot to fear."
I looked at Rajani and frowned. "What can be more frightening than a Dark Lord being poised to take
over the planet?"
"Learning who and what you really are." The Yidam's daughter shook her head. "From what 1 have been told, Coyote, you should understand this better than anyone else. Imagine awakening one day with no
knowledge of who or what you are. You don't know anything about yourself, but when you come to, you
escape out of a nightmare existence. What you come to realize is that you do not recognize the face in the mirror, the body you wash in the shower or the voice you hear when you speak. You are trapped in a
prison created by someone else, and the worst of it is that any number of other people let you know they
would willingly trade places with you."
"I do understand that, Rajani. I
did
wake up in a nightmare with no knowledge of who or what I was. I discovered things about myself, and I learned to live with who and what 1 am. 1 didn't run away from my
past."
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Jytte
's soft whisper silenced me instantly. "That is because you knew from the start that your skill
s and
abilit
ies gave you value. 1 had no such reassurances. You built on a foundation of strength. I have no such foundation."
"How can you say that if you have not tried to find it?"
"I tried, but there was nothing to find." Her hands gripped the arms of the chair in which she sat. "From the beginning, I learned things about me that frightened me. When Coyote found me, he had to clothe and
feed me because 1 was unable to do that for myself. I was helpless.
Coyote said it was because I was not used to my new body, but I knew he was lying to keep my spirits up. I could do nothing because I was nothing."
Sinclair raised an eyebrow. "I've seen you work a computer unlike anyone else, and I've seen the best. You're better. Computer skills like that are more than just a gift—you had training and were very, very good. You weren't nothing."
"Mo?" Jytte looked over at him, her voice filling out with the challenge in it. "At first I clung to my computer skills in the vain hope that it would help me puzzle out my true identity. I assumed someone of my skills would have been useful and, therefore, would have been noticed when she disappeared. Using my skills, I
combed all the records— a//the records—looking for anyone who even came close to matching my
description. I came up empty—no computer geniuses had suddenly gone missing without an explanation
published later."
The occultist's green eyes narrowed. "Poorly defined search parameters for your hunt."
"Exactly. I started from another end and tried to decide how long someone would have to have worked with computers to gain my level of expertise. Even allowing for some inborn talent, I worked it out that I had been in computers for at least 20 years. The changes Pygmalion put me through made determining my age difficult, but I worked with an age of 30, plus or minus five years. That meant..."
I nodded. It meant a lot of things, but primarily it meant she had been exposed to computers at a relatively young age. While it was true that most children did get to work with some computer equipment during their schooling, the only ones who got strong training were the children of privilege. There again, though, a close association with computers would have to be tempered by all the other
things a child from a rich family would have available to him.
Crowley filled the silence. "It meant you were a chip-child. Maybe."
Jytte nodded in resignation. "It meant 1 was bom with congenital defects caused by bad genes or because one or both of my parents used chemicals without regard to the possible side-effects. It meant my parents or grandparents were of sufficient moral standing that an abortion was not seen as an option and of
sufficient means thatthey could afford to make me a sacker."
The term
sacker
struck a resonant chord in me. The term originally came from the acronym for Specially Augmented Child, which meant the child had been provided with a whole host of computer-operated
vehicles and appliances designed to promote independence. Through use of a computer driven by eye-
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blink c
ommands or a simple touch on a simpler keyboard, a challen
ged child could make the machines do
the t
hings he could not do for himself. The derisive term sacker came from the way some childr
en who
were bom with severe handicaps would be suspended inside one of their com-outer-controlled vehicles in
a nylon hammocklike sack.
"You don't know that." I shook my head. "You are supposing an existence that may not have been true."
"But the evidence is there, Coyote." Jytte stared up at me like a hunted and trapped animal. "Mickey was a severely deformed child who Pygmalion made beautiful. There are scattered reports of similarly
deformed children being whisked away—enough to suggest a consistent
modus
operand* for Pygmalion.
He healed himself and now, it appears, heals others in his own peculiar way."
Crowley cleared his throat. "Even with this speculation about your possible origin, you found no report of anyone like the person you feared you might have been disappearing, did you?"
"Mo."
Rajani shivered. "Which makes you think that you were seen as nothing more as a burden
upon
your family—a burden they willingly and happily had lifted from them when you were taken away."