Asimov's Science Fiction: June 2013 (19 page)

Bare feet padded. I looked up, expecting a bare body to follow. Daphne didn't strike me as the modest sort.

She stepped around the corner, squinting against the chrome-reflected light. She wore her slacks, her shirt. She carried her shoes, jacket, and purse.

"Hey," I said. "You, uh, don't have to leave, you know." I, being the modest postcoital type, wore a pastel blue robe.

She set her effects on a leather-topped stool. Tucking the shirt into her pants, she offered a rueful smile. "You don't kick 'em out afterward. Got it."

That had an edge to it that bothered me. I hadn't played any tricks on her, hadn't
lured
her here.

"I don't have any hard and fast rules about that sort of thing." I sounded annoyingly defensive, even though I was still speaking the truth to her.

"I told you, Bob. I don't do jealousy."

This felt like we were three weeks into a relationship, one experiencing a first hint of souring. Nonplussed, I folded my arms and regarded her.

"Giving me the X-ray vision?" she asked. Earlier tonight that would have been coy. Now it was—something else; I didn't know what.

"What's gotten into you?" I asked.

Her smiled widened and strained. "You got into me. Remember?"

"That's cheap," I said. I was sensing her emotions of course, but hadn't deliberately opened my receptors. Damping down isn't something the Agency teaches. A Vigil has to learn that alone, if he or she still wants to function as a person.

Daphne was a whirl of strong feelings. I sensed bitterness that was like calcified rage.

She dropped one shoe—
thwakk
—on my hardwood kitchen floor and stepped into it.
Thwakk.
She stepped into the other.

Reaching for her jacket or purse, she abruptly halted. She jerked her gaze across the counters at me, past a rack of steel skillets hanging at eye level. "Tell me, Bob. Have you, as a Vigil, ever been wrong? I mean, other than today. When you pounced on me for no good reason. Have your special abilities ever failed you?"

I met her glare. "Other than today? No." But today
had
been a screw-up. I cringed inwardly over what might have happened—the worst-case scenario—had I alerted the hospital's security staff or the police. She had, after all, been armed.

Daphne seemed to measure my statement, and decided it was true. "Well, good for you. But not every Vigil can say the same."

"We're not robots. We're people." Some of the prejudice I had encountered in my life, even within the Agency, was quite dismaying.

If she was going to leave, she should do it. It was late; I was suddenly weary and dispirited, and had an early morning awaiting. But the evening had been pleasant up 'til now. Much more than pleasant. Some part of me wanted to know what had gone wrong.

"It was a week past my eighth birthday. I was with my mother. We were crossing a downtown plaza." I was speaking these words, but it was like I was listening again, like when Daphne had told me how it was for her at age six, absorbing the news of the terrible events. She had gauged the reactions of the adults around her. She hadn't understood, of course. These awful things seemed to be happening very far away, almost in another reality.

It hadn't been that way for me. That day became my
entire
reality. And in a sense, it has stayed that way all these years later. Despite the work I do to prevent anything like it from happening again. Despite all the women. Despite every human exertion on my part to live a life beyond that day.

Daphne stood and listened, there in my kitchen at one in the morning. I described the rising voice of the crowd, Saturday shoppers, concentrated in an area. "I thought the commotion meant something wonderful was happening—a parade, a circus. A surprise. I thought my mother had arranged it. I was still giddy from my birthday a week before, which had been such a good one, so many presents."

Then I described the violence, rolling like a wave. At first I had thought it was something we were all supposed to do, like a game, but I realized very quickly I was wrong. The neurotoxin had no taste, no odor; it didn't appear as a mist. Of course not. Why would the terrorists want to give any warning?

"My mother was shaking. She dropped the bag she was carrying. My mother's hands knotted. She let out this...
cry.
I knew something was happening to the people around us. But I didn't think it was happening to her. How could I think that? She was my mother—my protector, my sanctuary. Then she turned, and I saw her face. Savage. Ferocious. Not human, not a flicker of humanity there..." I drew a ragged breath. The next came more smoothly, and I observed, "She was about your age at the time."

After I said nothing more for almost a full minute, Daphne asked, "It was the first attack? The start of the Neuro-Chemical War?"

I had described the scene in detail. "Yes."

"How did you survive?"

I'd already told the harrowing part. The rest didn't matter. I shrugged. "I got lucky. Jumped down a grate into a storm drain. I was small enough to squeeze through the bars."

She sagged. She reached out to steady herself, grabbing the stool, hand dropping on her purse.

I remembered talking with her at the club earlier. I thought of the intimacies we had enjoyed only a short while ago. Suddenly the whole scenario seemed unlikely, like something that had been arranged.

"Why did you want to see me tonight?" I asked. I was thinking now of the questions she had started asking me in bed. Questions not quite about Agency procedures, but ones that might nonetheless lead to such questions.

Daphne went still. Something flickered across her features. I resisted the temptation to 'path her, to deliberately plumb. She wasn't the usual fare I brought home. I had told her the most intensely personal story of my life. That wasn't anything I normally did.

"Why?" I repeated.

Amber and bronze eyes peered past the hanging skillets. "I got lonely," she said, her voice low.

I was about to reply when my receptors erupted, blaring:
fury, fury, fury—

No warning, no buildup. Just suddenly and violently
there.

I recoiled. Daphne still had her hand on her purse. I really shouldn't have been surprised by her gun. Civilians carry them routinely. People worry about amokers, and who can blame them. Everyone fears crowded places. Amokers are interested in high casualties, high-visibility incidents. So says the Agency profiles.

She was moving all in a rush now, opening the purse. Adrenaline lit me up. My left eyelid twitched spasmodically. I had fallen back against the edge of the sink. Now I lunged forward.

I wasn't a hero. Wasn't a superhero. But I lifted a skillet off its hook anyway, pivoted, cocking back my arm, and sent it spinning and careening.

It
whanged
against a reflective facing, missing her by a clear six feet. Daphne turned back with a fist filled up with her handgun. I realized only then that she'd been racing for the front door. The fury was still flooding from her, recognizable as amoker rage—almost a caricature of it, in fact.

She was looking at me down the barrel of her weapon. I stood exposed. In the aftermath report I was going to be wearing this pastel blue robe. I closed my eyes.

Her footfalls
thwakked
their way hurriedly to the door. I heard her wrenching it open, then silence.

I had to open my eyes, had to make myself do it. When I did, I was, for the briefest instant, in a plaza looking up at my mother's contorted face. But the chrome sterility of my kitchen reasserted itself. I went to my link and made priority contact with the Agency.

The small graying man should have been backed into a corner, should have been slumped on his knees, one hand raised defensively and stiffened by death. A bewildered and beseeching expression stamped on his face. There was none of that. Jesse Verges lay on his back on the ground, surrounded by collegiate structures silhouetted against the dusk. He appears peaceful. Put him on a sofa and cover up the perforations the overzealous campus security left him with and he would be a sixty-year-old man dozing on his couch, nothing more. The Vigil responsible for the catastrophically false alert stands back from the body, wearing a dumbfounded look. I don't meet a lot of Vigils, and I've never met this notorious one. We are not really a community. But I share the Vigil's shame anyway, even though I wasn't the one making this worst of all possible mistakes. Maybe empathy is my weakness. Maybe it's a weakness we all need.

Misconceptions still abound, even a quarter century after the squalid two-month spree of bioterrorism that was the Neuro-Chemical War. The terrorists' operations were as shabbily organized as their ideology. They were taken down swiftly—even if it could not have been fast enough.

Those afflicted by the neurotoxin were not amokers. They were victims, as surely as the people they themselves killed during their mindless frenzied rampages.

When I was in high school, some kid said the wrong thing about my mother to me. I had bitten a hole through his cheek before I was finally pulled off him. That was my last year of civilian life. The Agency started collecting us, all who had been exposed to the diabolical neurotoxin as prepubescents and had survived the subsequent chaos.

They wouldn't let me see Daphne. I wasn't a true operative. At least that was how many in the Agency saw me and my fellows. 'Paths were, basically, bomb-sniffing dogs. We didn't deal directly with security matters. We weren't the thinking part of the organization. My trying to subdue Daphne with that clumsily flung frying pan was the stuff of much snickering.

We Vigils merely sensed, within a certain physical radius, when someone was about to go apeshit and start a one-person massacre.

I loitered around the headquarters anyway. They still wouldn't let me in to see Daphne Verges. Until, abruptly, the interrogators
did
want me included.

The debriefing was excruciatingly thorough, probably something like the interrogation itself.

The operative in the suit who escorted me down the dark green corridor to the room was expressionless, but I sensed her unease. I made myself draw it all in—her disquiet, her contempt. Sometimes it's valuable to be reminded where you stand.

I was let into the room. It was just Daphne and two chairs.

She looked up. Her narrow face appeared thinner, but it wasn't from malnutrition or mistreatment. She had just finished lunch.

"Hello, Ms. Verges." I stood behind the unoccupied chair.

She offered a neutral smile. "Really? Come on, Bob. There's no one-way glass. We can talk familiarly." She quirked the smile at one corner to let me know she knew this room was one big microscope.

But there was still a mystery here.

"Okay, Daphne."

"Have a seat, Bob."

I sat.

It had been over two weeks since I'd last seen her. The Agency had picked her up with almost offhand efficiency once I'd dropped her name.

"I'm sorry I threw that skillet at you," I said.

I didn't know what she expected from my visit to this room, but judging from her sudden change of expression, this wasn't it. Her eyes softened, and that just made their depths more exquisite.

She said, "I'm sorry I pulled a gun. I didn't intend to use it, you know. I just needed to get out of your place, in a hurry. I shouldn't have been there in the first place. I thought I might get information from you."

The interrogation had revealed our night together. My private life was a part of this case. There wasn't anything I could do about that.

I had been sent in here to ask about the two sudden bursts of amoker fury she had demonstrated, one at the hospital, the second in my apartment. Persons emitting that peculiar intensity of sweeping rage are the ones who, in this day and age, are preparing to unleash mass violence on as many people as possible.

"I'm sure you didn't mean to hurt anyone," I said.

"You're sure?" She had been in custody awhile. She seemed to have acquired a certain self-possession, or maybe she was just resigned to her new circumstances. Whichever, she was still playful. I had thought about her a lot during the past two weeks. I would have thought about her even if she hadn't stormed out of my home waving a gun at me.

The people who were closely watching the proceedings in this room wanted me to pursue the information I'd been sent in to retrieve—sent in probably against strenuous objections from some parties.

Instead I said, "You were lonely."

She was picking a crumb from her lunch off the gray shapeless shirt she'd been issued. She paused with thumb and finger pinched above the sleeve. "What?"

"You were lonely, you said." My mouth was suddenly dry. I swallowed. I hoped she had wanted something more than information from me. "When I asked why you were with me that night, you said you were lonely."

"Yes." Her voice rasped. "I got lonely. After a year of it... I was lonely."

I didn't need my receptors to recognize the sincerity. Once more I spoke the truth to this woman. "I was lonely too."

We knew she was Jesse Verges' daughter, that he had come to visit her at her campus one autumn evening several years ago. The Vigil guarding the school against amoker attacks—campuses, from grade schools to universities, were popular targets that season—sounded the alert. Imminent threat. Take immediate action. Campus security did, and the unarmed and apparently wholly innocent sixty-year-old man was shot down dead.

It was a mistake. It was a bad call. A false read.

The Vigil in question was suspended, reprimanded, retrained, evaluated and eventually reinstated.

And Jesse Verges' daughter was now gunning for that particular Vigil. She knew what he looked like from the photos.

There had been a José Carubba in room 602 at the hospital the day I first met her, and he had indeed been admitted for kidney work. But Daphne Verges didn't know him. She had a gun and a carry permit, but she didn't own the weapon because she feared amokers. She was after a Vigil.

She had studied Agency methods. It wasn't a bad plan. But there was still something we couldn't figure out.