Voice of the Whirlwind

VOICE OF THE WHIRLWIND

Walter Jon Williams

CHAPTER ONE

Steward hung suspended beneath a sky the color of wet slate. Below him the ground was dark, indistinct. There was the sensation of movement, of gliding flight. Sometimes Steward’s stomach fluttered as he dipped closer to the dark opacity beneath him. He could feel his nerves dancing, his own readiness building. The sky tipped and spun.

On the horizon there was flame. A ripple of deep, pulsing red, throbbing like an artery laid bare by shrapnel, shrouded in a drifting black cloak. Not the sun, Steward realized; something burning….

*

He was never afraid or surprised when he came awake from the dream. He woke refreshed, his limbs ready to move, dance, fight.

He knew that whatever it was he was drifting toward in that cold gray sky, it was something he wanted.

*

Dr. Ashraf had a corner office high in the hospital complex, invaded on two sides by bright Arizona sky. Etienne Njagi Steward could sit on a padded couch and gaze through glass walls across Flagstaff to the mountains: three peaks cut into fragments by rows of mirror-glass condecologies that reflected the rising land, the sky, the hospital, the shimmering line of bright alloy highway that cut through the towers. The mirrored buildings reflected reality, distorted it, multiplied it. Made it interesting.

The room was perfectly soundproofed. Even the bullet railway below the hospital failed to do more than create a minor vibration in the room’s glass wall. Steward could watch the world in the mirrors, but he was insulated from it, heard only Ashraf’s emotionless voice, the whisper of the air conditioning, the distant vibration of the bullet train. He wondered who Ashraf wanted him to be.

Ashraf sat behind Steward at a desk. There were readouts on Ashraf’s side of the desk, Steward knew, connected to monitors in the couch, voice stress analyzers, pulse and respiration indicators, maybe even sensors for analyzing perspiration and muscle tension. He hadn’t seen them, but sometimes when he turned to face Ashraf he saw the reflection of red LEDs in the doctor’s eyes.

Steward had been taught how to defeat such machines. He remembered long hours spent under deep hypnosis, drugs, biofeedback mechanisms. He couldn’t think of any real reason to use his skills, so for the most part he didn’t. He used them only when he talked about Natalie. This, he told himself, was more to keep himself calm than to fool Ashraf.

Once he told Ashraf about his dream. “Maybe it’s a memory of Sheol,” he said. “A parafoil assault or something.”

“You know that’s impossible,” said Dr. Ashraf.

Sometimes it seemed to Steward that he had as many personalities as there were reflections of the world in the condecos, that he was trying on personalities like masks in a store, one after the other, just to see if any of them fit. It was clear that the person who dreamed was unacceptable to Dr. Ashraf.

Steward never mentioned the dream again.

*

The walls of the hospital were striped with narrow bright colors that matched the identifying colors on the bracelets of the patients. If a patient was lost in the bustling, scrubbed corridors, he had only to follow the minute arrows set into the wall stripes. They would lead him to his own ward, where the walls were painted in his own color, where he was welcomed by the familiar antiseptic smell, and the familiar nurses. The nurses’ uniforms were pin-striped in the colors of the wards. Yellow was for Burns, red for Intensive Care, soothing blue for Maternity. Steward’s bracelet was a pleasant light green and signified his home in the Psychology Ward.

He wasn’t physically ill, so they let him wear regular clothes. When he took his strolls through the other parts of the hospital, he always wore long sleeves so that he could push the green bracelet far up his arm, under the cuff.

He didn’t want people thinking he was crazy.

*

“There was a war in Marseilles between the teen gangs,” Steward said. “These things broke out from time to time. I was a member of Canards Chronique, had been since I was twelve. We dealt in information, mainly. Software, proscribed wetware. Drugs, too. The whole range of what Americans call juvecrime. We were bright kids.” He remembered sitting with a blond-haired girl on a wrought-iron balcony, drinking whiskey and watching the Mediterranean for the last time. Heartbreakingly beautiful, the sea, bluer and deeper than the blond girl’s eyes, bluer than the reflected skies he saw from Ashraf’s window. He remembered the way distant automatic-weapons fire sounded, echoing off the stucco fronts of the houses, the low concrete gutters. He remembered as well his own weariness, the feeling that he didn’t want to do this anymore. He could play the game too well. He was tired of manipulating people.

The girl cocked her head, listened. “Sounds like the Femmes Sauvages on turf defense,” she said. “Who’s attacking?”

Etienne had been shopping that information around in the last twelve hours. “Skin Samurai,” he said.

The girl shrugged. There was a touch of sunburn on her cheeks, her nose. She looked at him. “Want to go inside?” she asked.

Etienne Njagi Steward lit a cigarette. “D’accord,” he said. He didn’t plan on seeing her again.

“I was only sixteen,” said Steward, “but I knew there were better things in life than dying for a couple square blocks in the Old Quarter.”

Dr. Ashraf’s oiled hair hung to his shoulders. His fleshy, immobile face betrayed little interest. “Is that when you decided to enlist?” he asked.

“D’accord,” said Steward.

*

Steward was weak when he came awake for the first time. There was a machine that breathed for him and a tube down his throat. He missed things: the implants, the socket he’d had at the base of his skull to take the cyber interface. His mind held memories of reflexes that he couldn’t match, strength that had somehow ebbed away while he wasn’t looking. He spent hours each day brutalizing himself beneath weights, running on the hospital’s treadmills, stretching the tender muscles in his legs, arms, shoulders. He practiced the martial arts, too, in a lonely corner of the physical therapy area, throwing punches, kicks, and combinations over and over again in cold, purposeful, sweaty repetition. Men and women recovering from surgery, or old people taking their first few trembling steps in new young bodies, turned their eyes away from him, from the grim savagery with which he was assaulting the air, his memories, himself.

The exercises filled the long hours, built muscle, honed reflex. They kept his mind occupied with immediate sensation, which was what he wanted. He had too much idle time. He didn’t want to dwell on memories.

Over and over again, in his corner, he went through the motions of crushing bone, gouging eyes, snapping spines.

As yet, he didn’t know whose.

*

In the room next to Steward’s was a man named Corso who lived with a crazed secondhand load of guilt and paranoia, having come awake and discovered that all his worst fears had come true, that his Alpha personality’s whole world had come apart like a broken mirror, and that he’d tortured himself for months with the shards before he finally threw himself off a bridge. And, now that he was back, it wasn’t over; all he could see in front of him was the yawning horror, the nightmare going on and on….

The doctors were trying to soften Corso’s world with medication, turn it warm and pleasant again until his therapy began to make a difference, but Corso still woke Steward every night with his moans, his screams. They rang out from the darkness as Steward lay in his bed staring into the soft-edged curtains of gauzy darkness, seeing in his mind’s eye the fading afterimage of the burning horizon, the sky that was a deeper darkness than that surrounding his bed.

In the room on the other side was a married couple, the Thornbergs. They’d made a lot of money in their lives and had invested in a couple of young bodies. They spent most of their nights making love. They seemed nice, but their conversation was all about investments, windows of opportunity, sports like squash and golf. Steward knew jack about investments, and the only sports he cared about were the ones he could bet on—racing, jai alai, the Australian firefight football that, back in a former life, he could pick up, about two in the morning, from the pirate satellites. The Thornbergs lived in some kind of Presbyterian condecology in California that forbade things like pirate satellite receptors, betting sports, news programs from the wrong side of the world, pornography. Their bodies were young, their minds elderly. Steward had nothing to say to them.

A lot of the people in the Psychology wing were like the Thornbergs. It didn’t seem to Steward that this was one of the personalities he would ever succeed in adopting. He wondered if Ashraf wanted him to try it on.

*

“Have you ever wondered why they chose you?” Dr. Ashraf asked.

“I fit their profile,” said Steward.

“But do you know what Coherent Light was after?” Ashraf persisted. “There were a lot of people trying to get in. Out of all those, they picked you. Educated you, fed you, housed you, trained you. You and the other Icehawks cost them a lot more than their normal run of employee. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”

“They wanted me. That was good enough.”

“You didn’t feel any loyalty to the Canards,” Ashraf said. “Not to their purposes or their territory.”

“That wasn’t the Canard ethic. The Canards were conscious anarchists, deliberately amoral. Their game was selling stuff. They didn’t care to whom.”

“You knew you didn’t want to do that.”

“No. I was tired of it. After a while it didn’t…offer anything.”

“I’ve seen Coherent Light’s profiles,” Ashraf said. “They’re declassified now. They’re pretty standard for most of the Outward Policorps.” Ashraf had a habit of steepling his fingertips in front of his mouth, and Steward knew without looking, from the muted quality in his voice, that he was doing it again.

“They desired people who needed to give themselves to something,” Ashraf said, “who felt something missing from themselves, who lacked purpose. They didn’t want to buy anyone. They wanted people—smart people, talented people—who would give themselves heart and soul to whatever Coherent Light stood for. They wanted the Icehawks to substitute CL’s purposes for whatever they felt was missing in them. They wanted complete loyalty, horizontally within the group, vertically to Coherent Light. So they looked for people who desired something to be loyal to. Who were searching for a personal savior, a savior named Coherent Light.” Ashraf paused. Steward stared at mountains cut by reflective ice. “What do you think of that?” Ashraf asked.

“I think they got who they were looking for,” said Steward.

*

Dr. Ashraf didn’t think it would be a good idea for Steward to look up Sheol just yet. Steward, curious, didn’t know whether he should follow Ashraf’s advice in this matter or not. In the end he compromised by calling up the library and asked for information on the Powers.

“Powers” was a translation of the aliens’ name for themselves. They were four-legged, two-armed, about the size of ponies—in the vids that Steward watched they moved fast, making odd, quick body movements, bobbing and jerking, their language a combination of clicks and snorts and organ-pipe whines that sounded like something akin to music. Their heads had no bone in them and kept twisting and collapsing, like balloons inflating and deflating.

Steward watched, wondering. This was, according to his data, what the war had been fought over.

Steward reran the vids a last time, then exited the file. He knew that this was not what Sheol was about, not really.

*

“What happened to him?” Steward asked. He was sitting in the padded chair today, facing Ashraf’s desk, the glass wall behind him.