Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps (23 page)

“You killed him,” Fiona whispered.

“Damn straight,” Stephen hissed. “He knew, right? Where this information about the underground could be found? Now he doesn’t. We have to do the rest of these, too.”

“No,” Matthew said, voice shaky. “We can’t kill them in cold blood. Brother Justin-Brother Justin and the rest will find something to do with them.”

Stephen wanted them all dead-what if one of them had recognized him? But he brusquely agreed.

“Fine. What now, then?”

“Find Justin and the rest,” Fiona said. “Destroy the terminal. Then-” She grinned. “The information Monkey left me is in the U.S. Five will get you a hundred that `Brother William’ there has a jet somewhere and has already registered a flight plan with Psi Corps to go pick it up. The whole operation will be covert, so he won’t be scheduled to check in again until he gets there. He probably has border clearances, everything.”

“Maybe, maybe not. And we can’t fly his plane if it’s keyed to him.”

“That we can get around,” Matthew said. “Brother Justin has the equipment for that, and to transfer the clearances to our fake idents. Fiona, you may be right.”

“We’ll see, won’t we? Matthew, are you okay?”

“A little drained. I’ll be fine.”

“Stephen?”

“I’m okay.” He paused. “Thanks to Matthew.”

“Sorry I caught you in the freeze, there, for a second. It’s hard to be selective.”

He nodded curtly.

“Well. Let’s get to work, shall we?”

An hour later, they were high over the South China Sea, streaking eastward toward America.

CHAPTER 11

Natasha Alexander joined him at the start of his second mile, looking trim in her black bodysuit. She slowed her pace to match his.

“Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning, Ms. Alexander. I hope you won’t run me to death today.”

“I’ll try not to-sir.”

“You have something to tell me.”

A look of dismay crossed her features.

“Am I leaking? I hoped I had learned better control than that.”

“You have fine control of your blocks and guards,” he said. “It’s your face and voice that give you away.”

“Oh.”

“We spend so much time here teaching you to deal with other telepaths, we forget the more ancient forms of mind reading. The late Senator Crawford-now there was a man who could read minds, though he had no trace of telepathic ability. Until my forced display in Yucatan, even the most powerful telepaths failed to detect me, nor did I really fear that they would. Crawford, I worried about.” Their pace had slowed even more, he noted. Time was, he could run at a good clip and still have wind for a conversation. at least this early in the run. “Don’t let an old man bore you,” he said. “What do you have for me?”

“As you know, we’ve learned very little from the various cult shrines. Though there is one peculiar thing 1 ought to mention.”

“That being?”

“A myth. When we questioned the survivors of the Qahsah cave site in Yucatdn about the metal-or what we thought was metal, anyway-they all told the same story. It’s a variant of an ancient Mayan myth. The upshot of it is that there were twin brothers who descended into the underworld to battle the lords of death by playing a sort of ball game against them. The lords of death won and killed the brothers. Their heads were cut off and buried. From one of those heads, a tree grew, and the tree produced a fruit that looked like a human skull. A daughter of one of the lords of death came by. Her name was Blood Woman-“

“Blood Woman?”

“Yes. I think that’s where my great-grandmother got her name.”

“Likely. Go on.”

“Anyway-this part is strange-the skull spit into her palm. She became pregnant and gave birth to another set of twins, identical to the first. When they grew up, they, too, went to battle the lords of death. They defeated the lords of death, but one of the twins was killed. The other rose up into the sky and became the morning star. The one who died did something similar to his father-a tree grew from him, and then a skull grew from the tree. But this one spit in the palms of many women, and was reborn in small pieces all over the world. Finally, a special woman took the skull itself. That piece of-of whatever it was we found in Yucat an is supposed to be part of the skull. “To make this more interesting, I’ve found variants of this story at some of the other cult sites. The names and details change-at the Indonesian site, for instance, the two brothers were shining diwas-sort of like angels.”

He mulled that over as they reached an incline, and he didn’t have the breath to talk, anyway. On the downhill slope, he glanced over at her.

“That could encode some memory of genetic manipulation . The twin brothers-clones? The spitting in the palm, some sort of injection?” He sighed. “Sometimes I think Humans go way out of their way to make the comprehensible as incomprehensible as possible. Do you have any thoughts on this?”

“The lab boys think that `metal’ is really organic-that it might have been somehow alive at one time.”

“Yes.” He nodded to himself.

She gave him a puzzled look before going on.

“I know that various corporations experimented with that sort of thing earlier this century, but none of them got anywhere. Even the Centauri don’t have anything like it.”

“That we know of,” he cautioned. “Have you considered asking the Centauri about it the artifact , I mean?”

“No. I somehow think that would be a very bad idea.”

“I think I see your point, sir.”

“You have something besides all of this, don’t you?” Fresh excitement tinged her voice. “Yes, sir. I went back to my demographic database, the one I used to make the teep/cult connection-I’ve improved the base, and I thought I might have missed something. I had.”

“Ohm’

“Yes, sir. We place the first generation of teeps born in the twenty-fifties and early twenty-sixties-“

“About the time the priest told us the world began.”

“Yes. And I’ve tied a very high percentage of teeps to original members of those cults. But I started running random checks against other demographic bases, chosen by stratified random sampling, and I found an even stronger correlation to both cult membership and teep ancestry”

“That being?”

“At one time or another, they all visited or lived in Antarctica.”

“Antarctica?”

“Yes, sir. Despite a few military incidents and the Chilean war of 2035, Antarctica has been international territory since the late twentieth. Every major country has a base, if not a colony, there.”

“And there are a lot of tourists. Are you saying every tourist or colonist in Antarctica is a teep ancestor?”

“No, sir, only a very small fraction. It’s just the conjunction of that with the other data sets that is suspicious. That’s not all, though-” He chuckled, and that forced him to stop running altogether. Natasha slowed with him. “Sr?*

“At the Mountains of Madness,” he said.

“Sir?” she repeated.

“An old story, by an author named Lovecraft. Never mind. Is there more?”

“Yes, sir, there is. I checked the logs of the various colonies and tourist expeditions. All the teep ancestors we have records of-and that’s not many from the total, sir-but of the ones I have, all of them seem to have gone missing for a few days. They claimed to have been lost, but showed few signs of frostbite or malnutrition.”

“That,” Kevin allowed, “is very interesting indeed. Did they all vanish near a common location?”

“Yes, sir, they did.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. And you have that location, I presume.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well. Let’s go, then.”

He stepped out for some air. The air was ninety below. Kevin Vacit had twice been to the Moon and once to Mars, but in its own way the bottom of the Earth was more desolate than either, and certainly more dangerous. Anabatic winds that whipped up to a hundred and twenty miles per hour and temperatures that dove to a hundred and thirty below made it the solar system’s harshest, coldest desert with an oxygen atmosphere. Small wonder that, after almost three centuries of settlement, Antarctica still had only a few more inhabitants than Mars. At the moment, the winds were a mere thirty miles per hour, so he could see most of the Vostok colony-a series of domes and covered walkways, some caked with ice, others freshly thawed. An ugly place with a population of less than a hundred.

“It is a cold place, but I find it beautiful,” a muffled voice said behind him. Kevin turned to regard Sergei Zviyagin, a middle-aged man bundled, like himself, in a heavy parka.

“Hello, Commander,” he said.

“It is a big place with little motions. I call it a white book of a thousand pages-and hidden in those pages are a few haiku, written , perhaps, in invisible ink.”

“That seems apt,” Kevin remarked.

“Well, my thanks, Director. I aspire to be a poet, you know. A poet-detective. And I must wonder—as a poet-detective-what haiku are you looking for, written out there on the sastrugi, around the subglacial Gamburtsev Mountains, at the Pole of Inaccessibility ? What could be of interest out there to your organization?”

“We’re searching for a colony of rogue telepaths.”

Zviyagin stared at him for a moment, and then burst into deep belly laughter.

“You see, Director! You see how wise I can be, in my way? I’ve waited, waited, waited for a chance to speak to you out here, where ears and microphones hear nothing but snowy hiss, unless you stand very close. And now none of your people-or mine-will know that I laughed at you. Nor will my people know that you insulted me. “You want me to think you believe there are telepaths, burrowed down in the ice that covers the Gamburtsevs, gradually evolving into creatures of crystal? Come, Director. Your people-your Psi Cops and soldiers and scientists-they have put a strain on our existence here. Our once orderly lives have been disrupted, and you wish to repay me only with something I can laugh at?”

Kevin turned his face back out toward the white plain.

“EarthGov has approved my stay here, and our business is a matter of internal security. That will have to be enough for you, I’m afraid.”

“I see.” He paused, rubbing his mittened hands together. “You search for something, a dark spot in a satellite photograph. Remote sensing registered a gravitational anomaly there a hundred years ago. Now it is gone.”

“You know something of this?”

“I know there are a thousand dark spots in the snow-mines that didn’t work out, homesteads, craters dug by missiles during the conflicts. But I think I know the one you are looking for.”

“Why didn’t you say this when I asked for information earlier?”

“Because I do not care to be kept in the dark on my own command . Because I do not care to be lied to. But -I will take you to it. I will see what you see. You need tell me nothing.”

The wind picked up. The snow tickled his nose like dust.

“Very well,” Kevin said, finally. “But, as you say-I can tell you nothing.”

The power sleds bumped painfully over a sea of frozen waves, formed where wind scoured away the softest ice, leaving behind jagged drifts. Sastrugi, they called it. It was something he could have done without, but the wind was too unpredictable to trust planes or helicopters. Even flyovers were canceled, and Kevin did not want to use the satellite systems. Too many people might notice his scrutiny of this place if he diverted orbital gazes. The Sun was out today, spilling a fury of heatless light upon the plain. His goggles helped-and would certainly filter out the high UV levels-but still, when he shut his eyes, he saw only flat redness. After many hours, a sort of blue-grey lens appeared in the heretofore uniform brightness, growing larger as they approached it.

“There you go, Director,” Zviyagin shouted. “Your hole.” It was, indeed, a hole. They stood at the rim of it, staring down. He could not see the bottom; a mist of snow dust obscured vision after a few hundred feet.

“How deep is the ice here?” he asked Zviyagin.

“Two kilometers. Maybe more.” He measured the diameter with his eye. A hundred meters? Two hundred? It was hard to say.

“The wind is better for flying right now?” he asked.

“Well, yes, right now, but that can change very abruptly=’

“We’ll risk it. Natasha?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Have one of the Garuda-class choppers meet us here.”

“Yes, sir. Can I tell them why?”

“I have to go down there.”

They descended through a cyclone of their own making, descended through time, past ice laid down when Lincoln was president of a fractured United States, when Alexander marched, when the Great Wall of China was built. Below waters that had last been clouds when Sumer was founded, when the first grains were planted, when Neanderthal and Homo sapiens shared the same forests in Europe, until at last they settled once again on the snows of their own century, a few inches that had drifted down to coat the hard earth, the foothills of the Gamburtsev Mountains, whose highest peaks never felt the Sun. “Floods,” Kevin ordered, and the world became light. Ice gleamed around them. Not the familiar ice of the world they knew, but ice bruised by two kilometers of its own weight. It was striated, black, aquamarine, subtle pearl, milk, jade. Chunks the size of cars had spilled from the walls, from here and higher up. Some seemed to have exploded like bombs.

“‘This hole can’t be too old,” Natasha whispered. “The ice shifts—not a lot, but it’s always moving.” He got a chill from her that had nothing to do with temperature. “Sir, it’s not safe. Another piece could fait anytime. The whole thing could collapse.”

“I know.” He turned, walking in a circle around the chopper, feeling something—a trace of something. He kept walking.

“Sir, radar doesn’t show anything but ice. I really think-“

He didn’t hear the rest, as light and sound exploded around him, wrapped him in vision. When someone died, something of them fingered. Their thoughts and memories, what they had been, what they might have been. Not for long-most often for fleeting moments only-but it did linger. A sort of shadow of the mind, cast upon the particles of creation itself, perhaps, fading as the universe moved without it. No one knew how it worked—any more than they knew how telepathy itself really worked-but it was, like telepathy , an observed phenomenon. Someone had died here. Something was left. A thing, a structure-a ship, huge, scintillating, alive. He saw chambers, corridors People, floating in transparent, fluid-filled tubes. Voices, throbbing below the level of understanding, voices like the grinding of worlds against one another. And duty-an important one. And pain. An enemy, a darkness. Pain and sorrow, memories of a thousand years, hopes for a thousand more. The air shattering. Life shattering. Gone. He became aware of his own breathing, harsh, like a runner in panic. Sweat had filmed over his face and was beginning to freeze there, and Natasha was holding his hand, shaking it, mindscreaming at him. Director! Mr. Vacit! Kevin!