ReVISIONS (27 page)

“We will?” Did that mean she would go with a man who had the violence gene? He asked her.

She turned the pages of The Book. “Pacal, do you see any individual genomes here? Any attempts to say what an individual is or may do?” He saw the branches of cousinship, but no personal genomes. Kina went on, “The Book says that reading a genome isn't the same as understanding that animal.”

Although she offered him a way out, he couldn't help but pursue the topic. “But Kina, I have the V-gene, and I did kill Altun Ha.”

She nodded. “Yes. But I think you're better than what you've done.”

She forgave him his crimes. But was that a fatal softness in her, or a deeper wisdom? He had to admit that just because the V-gene and the murder of Altun Ha happened together, it didn't mean that one caused the other. He wanted to believe he could change. And so he resolved to justify her faith in him, to be better than what he'd done so far. To be worthy of her. To prove his genome didn't rule.

He watched Kina as she closed The Book. She carefully wrapped it in heavy cloth, and tucked it into their knapsack. “The Book is a good size for traveling,” she said, smiling with both sides of her mouth. “Nice and small.”

When she had finished, she asked. “Will you journey north with me, Pacal?”

He wanted to say he would go anywhere with her. But all he said was, “Yes. If you'll have me.”

Her answer was in her arms, as she pulled him down to lie with her in the sand, to watch the stars and listen to the surf.

Lying next to Kina, Pacal thought about the Temple's Repository, with its 700,000 names. He was glad they would be traveling light.

 

 

 

 

S
ERI stood at the observation port, watching intently as Mushir—his khaki-clad back to the one-way mirror—emptied the hikers' packs out one by one on the broad table. The hikers themselves were seated in folding chairs along the cinder-block wall of the bleak room, nervously watching both Mushir and the guard at the door.

“United States government maps,” Mushir announced, shaking a laminated document out to open it. “You don't trust the tourist office in Bishkek?” He paused and stared at them. “It's been years since we purged those maps. The trek maps are perfectly up to date.”

No answer from the hikers, but of course none had been expected. “They don't look like a hard lot,” offered Prizmak. “Tough, certainly, they'd have to be to have gotten this far. But terrorists?”

“What does a terrorist look like?” mused Seri aloud. Prizmak was an older man, but idealistic; still, Seri had always found his idealism to be of a harmless sort—disposing him to doubt evil where it seemed to manifest, rather than becoming fanatical about the justice of his politics and religion.

“They're young people from the Demon States, with no purpose to their lives,” he continued. “Seduced by the offer of excitement. I could almost feel sorry for them.”

“I don't understand the need for these . . . these
Gestapo
tactics,” one of the hikers said forcefully, with the air of a woman who had been pushed past the limits of her patience. “We came here to climb a mountain, that's all.”

“You're a long way from Khan Tengri. You know that.” Mushir made the observation as though it was of general interest and no particular importance, sorting through the contents of the packs. “Cameras. Yes. Very nice. Thirty-gigabyte disk storage? Never mind, they'll have a look later.”

“Khan Tengri,” one of the other hikers muttered under his breath, but not so softly that the room's microphones didn't pick it up. “Done to death since the zeros. Almost as bad as Denali.” Seri had to stifle her smile of recognition; she'd heard that rant from Paul before. Climbers could be so elitist . . . but he was very good at almost everything he'd ever put his mind to.

“And yet Khan Tengri's the permit you've got. How did you get that past your guide? Or did you come across the border from Xinjiang?” Mushir continued looking. “GPS device, disabled, old model. I wonder whether that's actually all it does.” He turned to the hikers. “What do
you
think?”

“I think this is just a misunderstanding. We're sorry if we've trespassed. It's inadvertent. We haven't done anything wrong. Well, maybe we've stretched our permits a bit. That's all.” That was Georg, calm, reasonable, appealing for understanding, for a little flexibility in an unfortunate situation. “The cameras don't matter, though we'd hate to lose the documentary for our trek. Will our permits be revoked?”

It was almost too innocent a question. Seri couldn't see Mushir's face, of course; she could imagine, though, the quick sharp glance from beneath his black eyebrows, the dangerous light in his dark eyes. “With extreme prejudice.”

Georg exchanged looks with one of the women, someone Seri didn't know. “In that case,” Georg said. “I expect we'll want to contact our government representatives. Except for Conners, of course, but there's a British representative in Karakul, I think.”

It was actually farther to Karakul from here than back to the capital at Bishkek, but if they were lucky that would help present the appearance of having been simply off course on an attempt at some lesser-known peak, rather than on their way to their true destination: the nuclear plant at Iskamir.

Prizmak shook his head, smiling. “Of course you want to contact your governments,” he said, folding his arms with an expression of satisfaction. “You always do. You're not going to get away with it, you know.” Although they couldn't hear him, he was talking to the hikers, Seri reminded herself, firmly. Prizmak was the administrator here at the nuclear plant. He had no interest in what was going on in maintenance. Time to take a risk . . .

Seri coughed, gently, to attract attention, waiting for Prizmak to give her permission to speak. Finally he nodded.

“I know one of them, Administrator,” said Seri. “We were in school together. The American—Conners.”

“Really?” For a moment Prizmak looked eager and interested; then he collected himself. “We should tell Mushir, when he comes out. You think they came to sabotage the plant?”

He couldn't really ask where, exactly, that had been, without exposing the charade on which the entire plant depended for trained engineers. There were colleges within the Wells of the Desert client states that accepted women, and many of them had excellent engineering programs. For maintenance of increasingly aged nuclear plants in earthquake zones, however, not even the Wells of the Desert dared rely on anything less than the very best training—training still available only in the Demon States. It was a small deception, but necessary. As far as the administration was concerned, Seri had taken her degree in Kabul, not Michigan.

“We'll get an escort together to send you all back to Bishkek,” Mushir was saying. “Consider your personal effects confiscated. They'll be returned to you in Bishkek after security analysis. Go with the guards when they come, and you'll get a hot meal and a shower.” He was packing things as he spoke; maps, cameras, cell phones. Luxury goods from the Demon States. Seri knew what kind of a temptation they represented. Such things could be got in Kyrghyzstan, but only for an almost irrationally inflated price.

The single guard at the door came forward with a box, to help; the hikers stirred restlessly on the bench, but there was no sense in trying anything rash. They didn't have their gear. It was summer, but that didn't mean that anybody could try to walk down out of Iskamir in their hiking boots and not be dead of exposure by morning. And they had no papers; they couldn't get out of the country unless there was a prearranged drop somewhere, and if it existed, the air security forces would spot it.

Mushir left the room and joined Seri and Prizmak a moment later. He set down the equipment he'd collected on the table in the observation room that mirrored the one in the interrogation room.

“No question in my mind,” Mushir said, motioning to the guard to put the box of residual gear down. “Greenies, maybe worse. Look at this camera. How much would you like to wager that the office in Bishkek is going to find a complete scale model of the plant in there?”

“Seri went to school with one of them,” Prizmak said. “Seri?”

“I don't think they're any worse than greenies.” She had to tread very carefully. “But I don't think they came just to bag an unclaimed peak. I know that John Conners used to go mountain climbing on the weekends. But I also remember that he was opposed to nuclear power, back when I knew him.”

Mushir turned cameras and phones over on the table, contemplatively. He would know about the open secret of her schooling; he was from the security forces, and she'd checked in with her local administration on her return from abroad. They had given her forged papers a cursory examination and signed her off as having lawfully returned from a legal absence.

“Well, there certainly don't seem to be any explosive devices here,” remarked Mushir. “That much is in their favor. We'll see what the police have to say about it, once they have a chance to question each of them separately. I may send someone back to talk to you, Seri, if that's all right.”

She nodded; it had been so easy for her to revert to the habits of her childhood, not speaking unless she was spoken to, and making sure that she didn't say anything at all that wasn't necessary. A woman's virtue, her mother and aunts had told her frequently, lay in her modesty. She wore her head scarf here in the plant because it helped keep her warm, but it served the purposes of modesty as a disguise just as well.

“You'll take them back under escort, then, Mushir?” Prizmak asked. “We don't really have an adequate holding facility here. Those storerooms are secure, but there's no heat.”

Mushir made a face. “It'll be a few days before I can arrange an escort for them. The Numingar bandits, you know. Do you need me to sign a chit for extra rations?”

Prizmak shook his head. “No. We can feed them—and if you don't think they're a threat, I suppose we'll be able to keep them comfortably enough. But I won't be happy until they're out of my custody.”

Nodding, Mushir escorted Seri and Prizmak out of the room—so that the hikers' gear could be secured, Seri assumed.

His wink was so quick and so subtle that she wasn't sure she even saw it.

 

Three days later Seri stood at the loading docks at the end of the long road leading to the Iskamir reactor, looking out over the steep slopes of the Tian Shan into the hazy yellow obscurity of the valley below. Mushir had sent vehicles and an escort. Seri was to ride with the convoy into Bishkek to provide her statement, and Mushir had thoughtfully sent along two female police officers to keep her company and preserve her modesty.

Beside her John sniffed deeply of the cold morning air, and wrinkled up his nose. “Even up here it stinks,” John said. “Does anybody remember what these mountains are supposed to look like? Even the snow is dirty.”

“It's Kyrgyz business, not yours,” she said frostily. “If the Demon States were so concerned about the welfare of mere hot-fueled nations, they know what they could do about it.”

John shook his head. This was an old argument. “There's no excuse for trying to run one of these old Soviet-era reactors, Seri; none at all. How old is Iskamir? Sixty years? And in a geologically active area.”

“We will not be the spaniel of the Demon States!” she snapped. It always came down to that. Yes, the United States was willing to share its cold fusion technology. Yes, all of Western Europe and much of Central Europe, the North American continent, Australia, Southeast Asia, all those places had the cold fusion, and no longer needed more than a steadily decreasing fraction of their former requirements for crude oil.

It didn't make the world any better for nations whose infrastructure had not been developed to the point where they could exploit the new technology, when the breakthrough had come—1997. The year of the Great Technological Divide. The year in which the impoverished nations of central Asia had become hostage to the oil of increasingly extremist Islamic states, oil they could only obtain by pledging to shun all contact with the hated Demon States.

Seri had been to the Demon States. She had seen what life could be like with an abundant supply of clean energy. She didn't like to be reminded, especially when she looked down from the mountains with their no-longer-pristine snowpack into the poisonous smoggy haze of the valleys. This used to be one of the most beautiful places in all of the world; she'd seen pictures.

She'd pledged to do her part in restoring it to its former beauty, whatever the cost might be.

“It doesn't have to be this way, Seri,” John said quietly, after a contemplative pause. One of the policewomen who stood nearby shifted a little closer, in order to be able to catch his words. “You don't live in a theocracy. You could work to change the policy. The choice your country made thirty years ago doesn't have to define its future. You can change the rules. The political landscape isn't chiseled in stone. This is Kyrghyzstan. Not Saudi. Not Iraq.”