Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps (33 page)
Read Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps Online
Authors: J. Gregory Keyes
Tags: #Space Opera, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #General, #Media Tie-In
He didn’t have to wait long. In what seemed only a matter of moments, he saw two dark forms, stalking down the stream, moving their rifles in careful arcs. He stayed still, blocking, until they were fifty feet away, thirty. He felt their minds and realized that he was lucky; they were bloodhounds, not Psi Cops. Twenty feet and one suddenly stiffened, turning his head this way and that. He couldn’t charge from where he was. He just stood up, very slowly.
“Hello,” he said.
The first man snapped his rifle up and fined. The bullet went wide, hissing into the water a yard to his left. The second man did the wise thing; spun in search of ambushers from another direction . Stephen surged into motion. The next round caught him in the chest, and the impact against his vest nearly toppled him backward, but he felt huge, massive, a neutron star, and an awful laughter bubbled up from his chest. The boy-and it was a boy, no more than twenty-fired again, missed—and Stephen drove the knife through his throat. The second Hound opened up on full automatic as Stephen turned again, using the impaled Hound as a shield. A bullet blew through the body and scored along his head, another weirdly smashed into his thign, but by then he had gone cold, and all that meant nothing. He dropped with the body, pulling a pistol free from its belt, and shot the second Hound between the eyes.
Then the river was silent. In the silvery moonlight, the blood was only one more shadow. Grunting, he pushed up, stripped the Psi Corps uniform from the larger man, and changed into it, no easy matter with a shattered shoulder. The chopper whirred over again, but it didn’t fire. Now there was no way of knowing who was friend and who was foe-the cops must be everywhere. Grimly he set out up the hill. He encountered only one more Hound, and his stolen uniform allowed him to get close enough to kill silently. But when he at last reached the abandoned house, there was no one there. Shell casings littered the ground, and the tall weeds had been trampled by boots. He slid against the wall, too tired to weep, too tired to think. He went to sleep, praying silently not to awaken.
EPILOGUE
It is a fact that the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun is-with a tolerance of a few nanoseconds-the same each revolution. It is nevertheless a fact that each year passes more quickly than the one before.
Kevin Vacit tried to measure his footsteps, as he could not the years. Tried to make them even, regular. But in his memory, the real rhythm of his life would not be fooled. Eternal days in the New Mexico sun, playing tag with Monkey, chasing lizards, and watching ants build jeweled hills. The bright, strong years with Lee, each day like a new epic, each moment condensed with peril and potential. Ninon Davion, and the years coming quicker, never time enough for anything. The last two decades-what were they? Mayflies laughing briefly at him as he tried to make it all last, create something that would continue after him, somehow.
He approached a door, and the guards, knowing him instantly, simply stood aside, asking no questions. His steps carried him on, past painfully young, clean-scrubbed nurses, smiling nervously as he entered the cr???e. He strolled past the rows of infants, some silent in sleep, some crying stridently, some noticing him vaguely as he walked by. He approached one, one particular one, that stared at him with wide, dark eyes. He touched the wrinkled parchment of his hand against the child’s new skin, and closed his eyes.
For the child, each day was still a universe, almost infinite, shaped by desires as simple as gravity, modulated by incomprehensible curiosities. Life should be lived backward, so we can end like this, merging gradually into the background unconscious of the universe. Instead, we grow more self-aware, more disconnected, the better to scream our terror and loss as we plunge into the abyss, unable to recognize that the abyss is just something we are apart of, an eddv in space that becomes, for just a moment, unique from all other things.
He blinked. Philosophy. Lee would have called it a damned waste of time. Lee would be right. He sighed and smiled in gentle self-mockery, and removed his hand from the brow of his grandchild. I’m sorry, Ninon. I’m sorry, Fiona. But this was the was the way it had to be. You can be proud, though. He’s a P12.
“You are my legacy,” he said to the ctuld, his voice so faint even he wasn’t sure he was using it. “You are the part of me that will go on. You are Psi Corps.”
He moved to the end of the little crib, to the blank tag there, and considered his decision. For this child, the Corps would truly be mother and father. He was no longer the child of Fiona and Matthew Dexter. He was a future still to be imagined. He paused an instant longer, and with a rare, wry smile, took a pen from his pocket and wrote a name on the tag. Then, measuring his footsteps, he walked away.
Freda liked the children, even when they were trouble. That was a good thing about Psi Corps-if you didn’t like what you did, everyone knew it. You couldn’t get away with neglecting the children, here. She cooed to her older charges and introduced herself to the the new ones. She was most curious about the one the director had come to see, but she checked the children in the order she came to them. It wouldn’t do to go out of order, perhaps miss one. When she finally reached the child, he was asleep. A very handsome boy, with a good head of hair already.
“Well, hello there, Alfred,” she said, very softly, looking to see what name was on the tag. “Welcome home, Alfred Bester.”
Table of Contents
Table of Contents