Firechild (38 page)

His parents had scoffed at all religion. Though his dying grandfather had begged for a priest, he had never seen a better reason for belief in the survival of the human soul than the blind animal dread of death. The human soul—

But Alphamega had to be something else than human.

He found himself pondering all the perplexing evidence of that. Frankie Bard had brought him stories too crazy for belief. She had somehow talked to Belcraft across many hundred miles. She had revived and healed the wounded Mexican after his death under severe interrogation. Mickey Harris, drunk one night at the club, had cursed her as a witch too tough for anything to kill.

The laws of her being were all unknown. He found no way to grasp what she was, nor even any sane reason why she should matter to him now. Yet he felt haunted more and more by that unaccountable dread that she faced new danger, too deadly even for her.

Excitement stirred the
pueblito
when a high-flying American spy plane located what was left of the jet and American agents came to guide Mexican officials to the spot. News of that gave him an uneasy night. The camshaft from Torreón  had never come. He was still stuck here, next door to the investigation.

The garage owner drove out in search of salvage and came back to tell of two bodies found in the wreckage. One was the missing security officer, the other perhaps the Mexican convict, though its state of decay made identification difficult. Those offered rewards had grown larger and still larger; many American millions for recovery of the missing heiress; many hundred thousand for the arrest of that mysterious third passenger, or even for proof of his identity.

He wanted to catch a bus or vanish into
el campo,
but he had let that illogical trust in his luck keep him here too long. The time for flight had gone. He had to play Jim Gibson, keep on joking with the
campesinos
and looking for odd pebbles in the arroyo.

Somehow, though the camshaft was always still to come
manaña,
his luck held. The police and the visiting Americans came to doubt that anybody could have lived through the crash. The missing heiress and her captor must have been dropped off to meet confederates at some secret airstrip before it happened.

Next day a truck rolled through the
pueblo,
carrying twisted fragments of the jet toward Torreón . The heiress vanished from the news, replaced by reports and denials that a sudden outbreak of the Enfield organism in South Africa had wiped out the whole population of a black homeland.

Though still he felt curiously secure, that dim concern for the child kept on nagging, until one night he saw her again in another dream. If such visions were no more than dreams. She had been somewhere far away. Trying to return, she was lost in the dark of space, out where she could see the roundness of the planet and the dazzle of the sun
On
its side.

The thread of her life had drawn too thin to guide her home, and she was seeking help from the man she called Panchito. It was Panchito who had brought her body from the fallen
avión
to the place where she had left it. Searching for him or the path he had followed there, she had come up
El Escorpión
instead.

“No scorpion now.”

He saw her happiness to see how completely he had healed, but that faded when she found the color of hope gone from around him. She knew he couldn’t guide her home. He shared her sick despair. Not for herself, but for the whole round world beneath her. If she failed to reach her body, to make it live again, to finish her mission for
El Querido
Vic, then his life and hers were wasted.

He felt her joy when she found Panchito’s mind and then the path he had taken from the wreck. He followed as she perceived it. The jolting ride across the dry
laguna
to the highway. The long drive south. The turn at the bridge. The climb through the brown foothills toward the saw-toothed summits. The dark tunnel cut into the cliff.

He came with her back to Panchito. They found him sitting on the sharp-smelling green stuff he had cut to make a bed for her, her stiffened body in his arms. After the icy night, it was very cold. He held it hard against his heart, praying for it to live again.

She tried once more to slip inside it, but all the machines of her being had been too badly crushed when the
avión
fell. The sleeping Sax had taught her how to repair the damage to Panchito and to
El Escorpión,
but she knew no skills to remake herself.

Together, they felt Panchito sob and saw the stains of tears across the dark grime on his unshaven face. Sharing her hopelessness and pain, he wept with her for Sax and
El Querido
Vic, and for all the sad world Vic had wanted her to aid.

Perhaps—

He saw new images in her mind, things too strange even for a dream. They sprang from the desperate hope that help might come from the far-off children of fire if she kept on begging the greatness of her need.

Those were images wrapped in strangeness, even to her, shadow-forms shaped more like dancing flame than anything she had known, living in the strange places of their strange city where it turned like a giant wheel of fire around the spinning brightness and the dreadful blackness that had twisted space and swallowed a star.

Those unknowable children of fire had promised life and new learning for her, if she would stay with them. Even wearing no bodies she could see, wrapped in their frightening fire that seemed to cover only beating hearts of fire, they had shone with more than fire, glowing with a love she understood.

They were her own kindred, akin because the dear Vic had made her able to share their strangeness. They were very wise. They would surely know the secret working of her body.

Perhaps, if she went back to beg again—

Red danger flared across the tunnel mouth. Through the fixed and staring eyes of Panchito, she saw a man standing there, his face dark and cruel and grinning.

Bright mirrors hid his eyes, but she knew his cruel hands from the interrogation cell. Stark and black against that red-blazing fog, he raised an ugly gun.

“Misericordia de diós!”
Panchito knew him.
“El Cucaracho!”
The gun jumped, and the dream was broken.

44

“Adiós!

B
elcraft stood blinking at Anya, feeling sick. Clad in shorts and halter against the Mexican heat, she was pink from the sun and streaked with sweaty dust, yet still aglow with a long-limbed perfection that seemed to deny her dazing confession.

“How could you—” He had to get his breath. “Have you told anybody were Meg is?”

“The hit man.” Her sun-freckled face grew tighter. “The human rat they call Cockroach. A child killer, who ought to die himself. Clegg picked him for the mission. He’s the Indian type with the mirror glasses that just splashed you.”

“If he harms Meg—” He stared into her green-eyed defiance. “I’ve got to stop him.”

“No chance.” Watching him warily, poised and cool, she shook her head. “A professional killer, armed to the teeth. Ahead of us now, on four good tires.”

“I—I—” He caught his breath, staring down at the toy-sized radio in his hand. “And you—” He waved it at her, helpless. “You’ve been calling that killer every day. Guiding him to Meg. That’s why you made love to me. I—I ought to kill you.”

“You could try.” She shrugged, though he heard a tremor in her voice. “Others have failed.”

“Of course I can’t.” He sagged into bafflement. “I didn’t even bring a gun—” He bit his lip. “I suppose that’s the reason you warned me that smuggling weapons could land us in a Mexican jail?”

“It really could.”

He stood silent, blinking at the grease-smeared device in his grease-smeared hand. A clever invention. He turned it, staring at the removable insert that had held the actual face cream, the nest of wires and batteries and computer chips it had hidden, the tiny mike, the thin antenna that could be unreeled to transmit the message. The broken jar slid out of his fingers and shattered again on the rocks.

“Killing—” He choked on the word. “Killing isn’t my business. But if Meg is killed—” He shuddered to a wave of nausea. “I hope you know what you’ve done.”

“Sax, I don’t know.” Her voice had fallen soberly. “Nobody does. That has been everybody’s problem since the whole thing began. Alphamega came out of the same lab that killed Enfield. But why it happened or what she is or how she came to be—”

Her sun-colored shoulders tossed.

“Meg can’t be blamed!”

“Who can? We’re blind. Nobody knows what new city or what whole nation is to go next. Anybody able to command such disasters can kill the world or rule it. With EnGene gone, that queer child was the only key to what happened. Clegg was trying to wring it out of her. The KGB sent me to get it for the Soviet.”

“She couldn’t—she couldn’t kill anybody!”

“A good many thousand died in Enfield. Clegg believes she has you bewitched.”

“Clegg’s insane!”

“Perhaps he is.” She nodded, and he couldn’t help a fleeting pleasure in the sheen of her bright hair where the sun struck it. “But Sax, look at yourself. Captivated by a little pink worm, from your very first glimpse. Throwing away your whole medical career, for no sane reason. Claiming to be guided in your strange behavior by visions that come to you alone. Any court would commit you.”

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

“I don’t—don’t understand what she has done to you.” She frowned uncertainly, her fine eyes graver. “But I haven’t been enchanted. She frightens me. When I tried to weigh your hopes for her against the risk of catastrophe, I decided she should die.”

“You’re terribly wrong.”

“Who knows?” Unhappily, she shrugged again. “It wasn’t just my own decision. The KGB has allowed me to work with Clegg—with your own government—to put Harris on her trail. Not that I like it.” Her face hardened. “A degenerate animal! I can guess how you feel about me, but I was taking orders. I—”

She gulped, and her voice sank lower.

“Believe me, Sax! I’ve dreaded this. The moment when I’d have to hurt you with the truth.”

“Let’s get on.” He swung abruptly back to the luggage he had been loading. “Meg has this Torres with her. Armed, I hope. Maybe—”

Her eyes had widened. “You’re taking me?”

“I can’t abandon you here on the desert. Get in the car.”

He climbed in beside her and drove on.

Out of the arroyo, he found the black van again. Already kilometers ahead, it was zigzagging up a far-off hill at a rate the little Buick couldn’t match. A powerful machine, probably with a four-wheel drive. Both vehicles must have been selected, the bitter thought struck him, to handicap him for just this contingency.

Yet he pushed on as fast as he dared. The twists and rocks and ruts and washes of the neglected road took most of his attention. Keri—or whatever her real name was—sat silent beside him, looking so miserable it was hard not to pity her.

“We’ve talked about Vic.” He spoke at last, almost in spite of himself. “He used to talk to me. I know what he hoped to create with genetic engineering. It was no sort of weapon, but something good—something that could transform the world toward perfection. His notions were often too dazzling for me. He used to talk about creating a benign virus, engineered to invade and remake our bodies.”

“Whatever he wanted, it all went wrong.” Her voice seemed small and bleak. “Enfield died.”

“I remember Vic’s last phone call.” Watching the road, he didn’t look at her. “A call I still don’t understand. Very brief and cryptic. Somehow upbeat, yet I got a sense of desperation.”

“He mentioned a letter?”

Surprised, he looked hard at her.

“Written and mailed just before he called. Which makes me wonder now if he foresaw the disaster. Though, if he did—” He paused to steer around a mud-hole. “Why didn’t he get out? Or at least warn your sister Jeri—” His voice caught. “I guess she wasn’t your sister?”

“Call me Anya.” She nodded. “Keri was a role I played.”

“Played well,” he muttered. “You took me in.” Pain drew his face. “I thought I was in love with you.”

“Love?” Her whisper seemed sardonic. “Love?”

They were jolting and pitching through a muddy wash. Beyond it, he pushed faster, watching the black van crawl up a distant hill. It vanished over the crest. He drove a long time in bitter silence.

“Sax!” she burst out suddenly. “I can’t stand it—the way you look. I know you won’t believe me, but I never wanted to hurt you. Not this way.”

Bent over the wheel, he tried not to hear.

“Listen, Sax.” Her voice rose unevenly. “I’ve done things you’d hate me for, but I’m not wicked. Not the way Harris is. I’m no killer. I told Clegg I couldn’t kill Alphamega. That’s why he sent Harris—”

“What’s the difference if she’s dead?”

Anya had no answer. He drove on, up another rocky slope and on across a barren mesa. The black van was out of sight. When he glanced again at her, she was sitting bolt upright, hands folded on her knees, staring straight ahead. Her forlorn expression wrenched him.

“Tell me.” He had to speak. “How’d you get into the KGB?”

“To escape something worse.” She looked at him searchingly. “If you care,” she went on at last, “I’ll tell you how it happened.”

He had to say, “I’d like to know.”

“I’d grown up happy. I was an only child, badly pampered. My grandfather was an engineer who made a fortune under the czars. Come the Reds, he was smart enough to compromise. Built factories and managed foreign trades for them.

“My father managed to inherit his status and some of his contacts. One friend on the Central Committee. When I was a child we had a summer dacha at Nikolina Gora, out in the forest west of Moscow. A Volga with MOC license plates, which meant you were somebody. My father was never a party member, but he stood high enough to let us shop at the party stores. Gourmet foods. Imported shoes and clothing. Fine liquors.

“Mother and I were allowed to go with him on missions abroad. When I decided to be an actress, he got permission for me to study in Paris and London, then pulled political strings to make breaks for me back at home. Of course I knew that most other people were not so well off, but
nichevo—”