Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps (27 page)

Even so, she lowered her voice to a whisper.

“You could have shut the underground down ten years ago, shut it down cold. I’m certain of it. But you didn’t, and I think you’ve even helped them a little. Why?”

He cracked a rare grin.

“I thought you had figured that out,” he said. “I leaked it to you very slowly, watching you carefully the whole time.”

“But the risk-what would you have done had I tried to betray you?”

“I honestly didn’t think you would, but if you had-I don’t really have to tell you, do IT’

“No, sir.”

“And you really want the answer to this question? Even knowing that you may not like what you learn?”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“When I first became Senator Crawford’s aide, I was infiltrating the MRA organization-not to sabotage it, necessarily, but to understand it from the inside, to form an opinion of it. Over time, my opinion of it grew, and I began to see its importance. “When I touched the artifacts from Mars, I came to understand something else. Something truly profound. There are beings out there in the cosmos, Ms. Alexander, beside whom even the Centauri look like cavemen. Some, I’m certain, are benevolent-those who made the artifacts on Mars, for instance. At least so it seems. But I also have the impression-no, the certainty—that there are others, who could and would destroy our race with no more thought or effort than you and I would expend to kill a bug on our kitchen floor. “When we meet those beings, we will need every weapon we can get our hands on, and among those weapons I include ourselves . We will need the most powerful teeps we can find-more powerful than any we presently have, I think. Pl4s, P30s, if such a thing is possible. And stable telekinetics.” He heaved a sigh. “I can’t even tell you why I think that, exactly, and for some reason it angers me when I examine it closely. But I am certain.”

“So the arranged marriages were your idea. To prepare us to fight these aliens, if they truly exist?”

“Oh, they exist. But no, the genetic matching was already in place when I started working for Crawford. I encouraged it.”

“And the underground? How does that fit?”

“Evolution. Think about it. Which teeps escape the grasp of the Corps? The smartest, the strongest, those who best know how to work together and alone. The underground is the gene pool that we draw from. If it were to disappear-if there was no underground-we would lose the selective process. Intentional selection-breeding-can produce faster results, but evolution does the unexpected. I think-I thought, anyway-that we would need both to produce our best future.” Natasha turned her book over in her hand a few times, clearly disturbed by what had been said. “Speak your mind, Ms. Alexander.”

“I never-sir, I’ve always understood that you had some deeper agenda, some purpose that drove your actions. I’ve always admired you, always trusted your judgment. You’ve always seemed to be completely rational, governed by reason …” She stopped, apparently unable to finish.

“You never imagined that, at the bottom of it all, there was an article of faith? I don’t blame you for being disturbed, Ms. Alexander. I would be disappointed in you if you weren’t. I’ve struggled with this for years myself.” He turned for a moment to the small port, gazing out at the enigmatic stars beyond. “Let me put it another way, Ms. Alexander,” he continued. “One you may find more palatable. Assume I’m wrong about our powerful, alien enemies, and my intuitions are proved just so much fantasy. We still have the normals to deal with. Right now, however much we hate to admit it, they are our masters. I am the director of Psi Corps only because they do not know what I am. The next director will probably be a mundane, and who can guess what direction politics might take in the future? “I have seen our situation shift too many times in my life. It will shift again. Perhaps one day they will decide that Earth would be better off without our kind altogether. If they have us all registered , all in the Corps, all in one place-well, that will make their job the easier, won’t it? “Personally, I think the Corps is our best chance-already we have more power than EarthGov suspects. And one day-one fine day-normals will awaken to find that it is we who are the masters , as it should be. But that day is not yet come, and until it does, I think it wise not to keep all of our eggs in one basket. The underground is not the enemy, Ms. Alexander. Normals are the enemy.” He turned away from the stars. “I’ve never said these things to anyone, Ms. Alexander. I once loved a woman, and I never even said them to her. But I grow old, now. And I know you-I know you understand me.”

Her gaze was steady on his again.

“I think I understand you perfectly , sir. And agree completely.”

“And what do you think of my sanity now?”

“I think,” she replied, matter-of-factly, “that I have never met a saner man in my life.”

“Thank you. I trust you mean that. You’ve asked why we are going to Venus. The answer is that I think we’ll find an answer there. We’ll find our past, and in so doing-our future.”

The station commander pretended outrage when the Varona came into dock, but there was little he could do about it. There had, in fact, been a murder on board the Lucifer. It was unlikely in the extreme that a rogue teep had been involved, but Officers Trout and Sasaki-the two Psi Cops they had brought along-had their orders. When the Varona left Venus orbit, it would be with the corpse of a verified rogue, P10. In the meantime, Kevin had places to be. He had one of the Varona’s two shuttles outfitted for an orbital jaunt, so Natasha and he left only a few hours after their arrival. As he watched the wheel-shaped station vanish against the marbled immensity of Venus, Kevin’s confidence began to wane. Not his faith in his people, but in himself. He had come an awfully long way and risked a great deal for-for what? What did he really expect to find? There was no question of landing on Venus to investigate the anomaly. Oh, ships had gone down there, twice, and both times had discovered that reaching the surface was no problem. Leaving again was. Their own shuttle wouldn’t even make it through the clouds of sulfuric acid that veiled the goddess of love, much less endure the nine-hundred-degree, ninety-bar kiss of her surface. Nevertheless, Natasha piloted the shuttle into geosynchronicno , he supposed that was Aphroditosynchronic-orbit over the south pole, where they waited, watching hurricanes chase one another through the roiling upper atmosphere.

“We have oxygen enough to stay two more days. Lucifer Station keeps calling to ask if we need assistance.”

“Tell them no, again,” he replied, wearily. “Continue to hail the surface.”

Natasha did so. He didn’t sense any doubt from her, despite the two fruitless days they had spent, hovering above the planet. Her trust in him seemed in inverse proportion to his trust in himself.

Another day passed. He sent down the second of the surface probes-he’d sent one the first day. He beamed messages in all languages and on all wavelengths, from modulated radar to gamma bursts. He remembered Lee Crawford, trying to speak to the stars with a flashlight. In the dark, two Shalakos came to him. Kevin could just make out the outlines of the surrounding pueblo, the ladder emerging from the kiva, where the great mysteries were kept. The Shalakos gestured, and he followed them into the deeper dark of the kiva. There they danced, and sang of the days when his people had been creatures with webbed toes and feet, of the days when they had lived far beneath the earth. As they danced, they became the twin war gods, the children of the Sun, shining with all of their father ‘s brightness. They sang of leading his ancestors from darkness to the world above. The world was overrun with monsters, dark and terrible, but the twins went among the monsters, killed them with lightning and fire. On they sang, these masked dancers, of evils over which they triumphed, and of greater evils still to come. In the end, they had to go. In the end, they could leave only a wonderful gift for the children, whom they had brought from the depths of the Earth, raised from slimy things living in the waters to the five-fingered people of the pueblo. In the end, one of the twins died, and the other danced away. Kevin approached the corpse, still shining with terrible beauty, still masked. He removed the mask. He saw beneath it his own face.

“Sir!” He lurched awake, the dream stripping away from him, thoughts and feelings he hadn’t experienced in eighty years remaining at the edge of his mind. He had rarely thought of and never believed those things so dear to his mother, that world of spirit and faith she inhabited. For eighty years, his mother’s teachings had been nearly silent in him. Now they were awake. “Sir, there’s something happening.”

“What, Ms. Alexander?” Waking was harder at his age, as if his body demanded practice for death. He rubbed grit from his eyes.

“All of our sensors went down a few minutes ago,” she said with remarkable calm. “All of them.”

“Tap into the satellite net.”

“That’s down, too, and I suspect Lucifer Station is down. Something is jamming everything.”

Kevin pulled himself forward to the cockpit. The nose of the shuttle was pointed directly at the planet. Night bisected the view, clotted cream and darkness. Against the white and yellow arabesques , something was growing. A dot, a circle, not just coming closer, but blooming like an orchid, or perhaps like a beetle unfolding its wings. It was a ship, but a ship unlike any he had ever seen, and it continued to grow until there was no Venus, only the ship, its carapace scintillating, shifting vaguely and constantly. It opened a mouth and took them in. COME. The voice coalesced out of sudden static, as order emerging from chaos. It was impossible to tell if it was a voice of sound or the mind. He glanced at Natasha, who had gone alabaster.

“Did you hear it?”

“Yes, sir. Sir, hull sensors are back up. It’s an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere outside, and pressure has equalized.” He peered through the port, but beyond lay only darkness.

“Well, Ms. Alexander,” he said softly. “Let’s go see your astronaut/angels. “

As he set foot on the floor, faint patterns began to appear-like a phosphorescence he had once seen on the surface of the ocean at night. The light gradually rose, mother-of-pearl, glints flashing from a dragonfly’s wing. It reminded him, too, somehow, of the kiva. So many echoes. And to the ear there was no sound, but below the level of sound-what Monkey used to sometimes call the “wind”—a faint modulated humming. Kevin couldn’t actually discern anything specific-no thought, no emotion. Instead what he got was a sense of perfection, like seeing the best solution to a problem, of suddenly understanding the symmetry in a pattern that had—an instant before-seemed elusive and chaotic. Gaining confidence, he reached his mind out further. Again an overwhelming feeling of familiarity surged through him like a wave.

I’ve been here.

YES.

A hundred times stronger than before, the voice filled everything. Where are you? Who are you? Kevin asked.

I AM HERE. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.

And the Shalako stood before him, blazing light and glory, its headdress like the rays of the Sun. A sense of awe-worship even-smote him so hard he almost tumbled to his knees. And something sounded inside of him, as a string sounds when a like-tuned string vibrates nearby. Vision engulfed him. He saw a war, fought on a scale beyond imagining. The enemy was darkness; the ships, black spiders. Worlds fell before them, whole races perished. They were entropy, they were the end of everything, they were the monsters out of the birth of time … An explosion of images, too much to understand. The war ended, but only for a while. They were not gone, the monsters, only waiting. Their enemies waited, too, these things that looked to him like Shalakos, like angels, like gods because it was the only way he could understand them. They waited, and they prepared the younger races for what was to come. Even the race so young it knew only the vaguest echo of the last war. Humanity . Two came, together, to prepare them. One died … The experience devolved into images, so fiercely bright and alien that he felt himself slipping away. He was dying, all that was him hurtling into nothing. But there was a way, a piece that could remain, a container that had been prepared for it. A place to wait, and sleep, and one day wake. He went into that place and rested. He was back in the cave, in his mother’s arms, and he felt her slipping away, and himself along with her, and the storm, the light, the Shalako, the gift. The moments became one, the death, the resting, the gift. The images became one. And he understood-some of it.

You made us, he told the Shalako. Took some of us, altered us for centuries, brought our genes back to Earth, implanted them in people.

YES.

To stand against these monsters. To save ourselves.

YES.

The gift-my gift-it was from you, somehow. What was it? Why do I see your-brother? Why do I feel what he felt?

THE MIRROR NEVER SEES ITSELF THE REFLECTION NEVER IS ITSELF

Kevin wanted to rephrase his questions, but there was a silent punctuation to the Shalako’s reply, a certainty that this vague riddle was his last word on the subject.

You-led me here.

YES.

Why? What am I supposed to do? A momentary pause, like looking over the edge of a very high cliff.

EVOLUTION CRAWLS TO IMPERFECTION. IT ENDS IN EXTINCTION.

And it was gone. The light faded.

GO NOW.

Back on the shuttle, surrounded once again only by space, Kevin stared out at the stars, seeing now the terror that lurked between them. The Enemy. He felt a hatred for it that was and wasn’t his. He heard the words of the Shalako. Natasha coughed softly behind him.

“Sir?*

“Yes, Ms. Alexander?”

“When you-What did it look like to you?”

“A bright spirit. My mother. Myself.”

“I saw an angel.”

“I suspect it isn’t so much what you see as what the thing you see represents.”

“It was-it was wonderful.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think he meant, at the end? It sounded almost like he was telling us to do something.”

“Evolution crawls to imperfection.” Kevin sighed. “I should have seen it long ago, but I didn’t. I’ve wasted time.”