Forever Peace (24 page)

"So is that why I don't ask you?"

"I don't know, Julian." She raised her voice a little. "Unlike some people, I can't read minds!"

He set the magazines inside the suitcase and carefully sealed it shut, thumbprinting the lock. "I really don't mind if you go," he said quietly. "This is something we have to get through, one way or another." He sat down next to her, not touching.

"One way or another," she repeated.

"Just promise me that you won't stay permanently."

"What?"

"Those of us who can read minds can also tell the future," he said. "By next week, half the people involved in the Jupiter Project will be sending out resumes. I'm only asking that if he offers you a position, don't just say yes."

"All right. I'll tell him I have to discuss it with you. Fair enough?"

"That's all I ask." He took her hand and brushed his lips across her fingers. "Don't rush into anything."

"How about... I don't rush and you don't rush."

"What?"

"Pick up the phone. Get a later flight to North Dakota." She rubbed the top of his thigh. "You're not going out that door until I convince you that you're the only one I love."

He hesitated and then picked up the phone. She knelt on the floor and started unbuckling his belt. "Talk fast."

THE LAST LEG OF my flight was from Chicago, but it overshot Seaside by a few miles so we could get a glimpse of the Inland Sea. "Sea" is a little grandiose; it's only half again as big as the Great Salt Lake. But it's impressive, a perfect blue circle sketched inside with white lines of wakes from pleasure craft.

The place I was headed was only six miles from the airport. Taxis cost entertainment credits but bikes were free, so I checked one out and pedaled there. It was hot and dusty, but the exercise was welcome after being stuck in airplanes and airports all morning.

It was a fifty-year-old building style, all mirror glass and steel frame. A sign on the frizzled lawn said ST.BARTHOLOMEW'S HOME.

A man in his sixties, wearing a priest's collar with everyday clothes, answered the door and let me in.

The foyer was a white box devoid of ornament, except for a crucifix on one wall facing a holo of Jesus on the other. Uninviting institutional couch and chairs with inspirational literature on the table between them. We went through double doors into an equally plain hall.

Father Mendez was Hispanic, his hair still black, his lined dark face scored with two long old scars. He looked frightful, but his calm voice and easy smile dispelled that.

"Forgive us for not coming out to greet you. We don't have a car and we don't go out much. It helps maintain our image of being harmless old loonies."

"Dr. Larrin said your cover story contained a grain of truth."

"Yes, we're poor addled survivors of the first experiments with the soldierboy. People tend to shy away from us when we do go out."

"You're not an actual priest, then."

"In fact I am, or rather, was. I was defrocked after being convicted of murder." He stopped at a plain door that had a card with my name on it, and pushed it open. "Rape and murder. This is your room. Come on down to the atrium at the end of the hall when you've freshened up."

The room itself wasn't too monkish, an oriental carpet on the floor, modern suspension bed contrasting with an antique rolltop desk and chair. There was a small refrigerator with soft drinks and beer, and bottles of wine and water on a sideboard with glasses. I had a glass of water and then one of wine while I took off my uniform and carefully smoothed and folded it for the return trip. Then a quick shower and more comfortable clothes, and I went off in search of the atrium.

The corridor was featureless wall along the left; on the right were doors like mine, with more permanent nameplates. A frosted-glass door at the end opened automatically as I reached for it.

I stopped dead. The atrium was a cool pine forest. Cedar smell and the bright sound of a creek tumbling somewhere. I looked up and, yes, there was a skylight; I hadn't somehow been jacked and transferred to somebody's memory.

I walked down a pebbled path and stood for a moment on the plank bridge over a swift shallow stream. I heard laughter up ahead and followed the faint smell of coffee around a curve into a small clearing.

A dozen or so people in their fifties and sixties stood and sat around. There was rustic wooden furniture, various designs arranged in no particular order. Mendez separated himself from a small conversational group and strode over to me.

"We usually gather here for an hour or so before dinner," he said. "Can I get you a drink?"

"Coffee smells good." He led me to a table with samovars of coffee and tea and various bottles. There was beer and wine in a tub of ice. Nothing homemade and nothing cheap; a lot of it imported.

I gestured at the cluster of Armagnacs, single-malts, anejos. "What, you have a printing press grinding out ration cards?"

He smiled and shook his head, Ming two cups. "Nothing so legal." He set my cup down by the milk and sugar. "Marty said we could trust you enough to jack, so you'll know eventually." He studied my face. "We have our own nanoforge."

"Sure, you do."

"The Lord's mansion has many rooms," he said, "including a huge basement, in this case. We can go down and look at it later on."

"You're not kidding?"

He shook his head and sipped coffee. "No. It's an old machine, small, slow, and inefficient. An early prototype that was supposedly dismantled for parts."

"You're not afraid of making another big crater?"

"Not at all. Come sit over here." There was a picnic table with two pairs of black-box jacks. "Save a little time here." He handed me a green jack and took a red one. "One-way transfer."

I plugged in and then he did, and clicked a switch on and off.

I unjacked and looked at him, speechless. In one second, my entire world view was changed.

The Dakota explosion had been rigged. The nanoforge had been tested extensively in secret, and was safe. The Alliance coalition that developed it wanted to close off potentially successful lines of research. So after a few carefully composed papers—top-secret, but compromised—they cleared out North Dakota and Montana and supposedly tried to make a huge diamond out of a few kilos of carbon.

But the nanoforge wasn't even there. Just a huge quantity of deuterium and tritium, and an igniter. The giant H-bomb was buried, and shaped in such a way as to minimize pollution, while melting out a nice round glassy lake bed, large enough to be a good argument against trying to make your own nanoforge out of this and that.

"How do you know? Can you be sure it's true?"

His brow furrowed. "Maybe ... maybe it is just a story. Impossible to check by asking. The man who brought it into the chain, Julio Negroni, died a couple of weeks into the experiment, and the man he got it from, a cellmate in Raiford, was executed long ago."

"The cellmate was a scientist?"

"So he said. Murdered his wife and children in cold blood. Should be easy enough to check the news records, I guess around '22 or '23."

"Yeah. I can do that tonight." I went back to the serving table and poured a splash of rum into the coffee. It was too good a rum to waste that way, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I remember thinking that phrase. I didn't yet know quite how desperate the times were.

"Cheers." Mendez raised his cup as I sat back down. I tipped mine toward him.

A short woman with long flowing gray hair came over with a handset. "Dr. Class?" I nodded and took it. "It's a Dr. Harding."

"My mate," I explained to Mendez. "Just checking to make sure I got here."

Her face on the handset was the size of my thumbnail, but I could see she was clearly upset. "Julian—there's something going on."

"Something new?" I tried to make that sound like a joke, but could hear the shakiness in my voice.

"The Journal jury rejected the paper."

"Jesus. On what grounds?"

"The editor says they 'decline to discuss it' with anyone but Peter."

"So what does Peter—"

"He's not home!" A tiny hand fluttered up to knead her forehead. "He wasn't on the flight. The cottage in St. Thomas says he checked out last night. But somewhere between the cottage and the airport he ... I don't know..."

"Have you checked with the police on the island?"

"No ... no; that's the next step, of course. I'm panicking. I just wanted to, you know, hoped he had talked to you?"

"Do you want me to call them? You could—"

"No, I'll do it. And the airlines, too; double-check. I'll get back to you."

"Okay. Love you."

"Love you." She switched off.

Mendez had gone off to refresh his coffee. "What about this jury? Is she in trouble?"

"We both are. But it's an academic jury, the kind that decides whether a paper gets published."

"Sounds like you have a lot tied up in this paper. Both of you."

"Both of us and everybody else in the world." I picked up the red plug. "This is automatically oneway?"

"Right." He jacked in and then I did.

I wasn't as good at transmitting as he was, even though I was jacked ten days a month. It had been the same with Marty the day before: if you're used to two-way, you wait for feedback cues that never come. So with a lot of blind alleys and backtracking, it took about ten minutes to get everything across.

For some time he just looked at me, or maybe he was looking inward. "There is no question in your own mind. It's doom."

"That's right."

"Of course I have no way to evaluate your logic, this pseudo-operator theory. I take it that the technique itself is not universally accepted."

"True. But Peter got the same result independently."

He nodded slowly. "That's why Marty sounded so strange when he told me you were coming. He used some stilted language like 'vitally important.' He didn't want to say too much, but he wanted to warn me." He leaned forward. "So we're walking along Occam's razor now. The simplest explanation of these events is that you and Peter and Amelia were wrong. The world, the universe, is not going to end because of the Jupiter Project."

"True, but—"

"Let me carry this along for a moment. From your point of view, the simplest explanation is that somebody in a position of power wants your warning to be suppressed."

"That's right."

"Allow me the assumption that nobody on this jury would profit from the destruction of the universe. Then why, in God's name, would anyone who thought your argument had merit want to suppress it?"

"You were a Jesuit?"

"Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass."

"Well... I don't know any of the people on the review board, so I can only speculate about their motivations. Of course they don't want the universe to go belly-up. But they might well want to put a lid on it long enough to adjust their own careers—assuming all of them are involved in the Jupiter Project. If our conclusions are accepted, there are going to be a lot of scientists and engineers looking for work."

"Scientists would be that venal? I'm shocked."

"Sure. Or it could be a personal thing against Peter. He probably has more enemies than friends."

"Can you find out who was on the jury?"

"I couldn't; it was anonymous. Maybe Peter could wheedle it out of someone."

"And what do you make of his disappearance? Isn't it possible he saw some fatal flaw in the argument and decided to drop out of sight?" "Not impossible."

"You hope something bad happened to him." "Wow. It's almost as if you could read my mind." I sipped some coffee, now unpleasantly cool. "How much did I let slip there?"

He shrugged. "Not a lot."

"You'll know everything minutes after we jack two-way. I'm curious."

"You don't mask very well. But then you haven't had much practice."

"So what did you get?"

"Green-eyed monster. Sexual jealousy. One specific image, an embarrassing one."

"Embarrassing for you?"

He tilted his head to about ten degrees of irony. "Of course not. I was speaking conventionally." He laughed. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be patronizing. I don't suppose anything just physical would embarrass you, either."

"No. The other part is still hanging there, though. Unresolved."

"She's not jacked."

"No. She tried and it didn't take."

"Wasn't long ago?"

"Couple of months. May twentieth."

"And this, um, episode was after that?"

"Yeah. It's complicated."

He took the cue. "Let's go back to ground zero. What I got from you—assuming that you're right about the Jupiter Project—is that you and Marty, but Marty more than you, believe that we have to rid the world of war and aggression right now. Or the game is up."

"That's what Marty would say." I stood up. "Get some fresh coffee. You want something?"

"Splash of that rum. You're not as certain?"

"No ... yes and no." I concentrated on the drinks. "Let me read your mind, for a change. You think that there's no need for haste, once the Jupiter Project's deactivated."

"You think otherwise?"

"I don't know." I set the drinks down and Mendez touched his and nodded. "When I jacked with Marty I got a sense of urgency that was completely personal. He wants to see the thing well in process before he dies."

"He's not that old."

"No, sixty-some. But he's been obsessed with this since you guys were made; maybe before. And he knows it will take a while to get going." I searched for words; logician's words. "Marty's feelings aside, there's an objective rationale for urgency; the black-and-white one of scale: anything else we do or don't do is trivial if there's the slightest chance that this could come to pass."

He sniffed the rum. "The destruction of everything."

"That's right."

"Maybe you're too close to it, though," he said. "I mean, you're talking about a huge project here. It's not something that a Hitler or a Borgia could cook up in his backyard."

"In their own times, no. Now they could," I said. "You of all people should see how."