Strings (31 page)

Cainsville, April 11

LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT Cedric was summoned by an anonymous voice on the com. He headed for the spiralator with his mind churning an immiscible mixture of relief and apprehension. There was no more nonsense of flashing lights. He was borne swiftly and silently down to ground level.

He was at once surrounded by an armed escort. They were all large-economy gorillas; even the women among them looked tough enough to snap him with one hand. Nor were they an honor guard—they gave him a thorough body search. He could almost find that amusing—him, dangerous? He knew none of the faces, but he saw some of those faces register shock when they recognized his, for he was a celebrity. He had died tragically on world holo the previous day, lost on a nightmare planet of a distant star. His presence back on Earth was a physical impossibility.

The mixture of uniforms told him who was going to be at the meeting. Four bulls wore Institute red, four grass green, and four shiny gold. The greens bore shoulder-patch logos of a stylized, five-line house containing a globe, and that was the symbol of the World Chamber. The golds’ shoulders said simply
BEST
.

He was more surprised to see that the visitors were armed. That was a major breach of standard practice. That explained why the four Institute bulls were glowering so resentfully, why hands hovered so obviously near holsters. Eight Daniels and four lions—and all of them so tense that they almost crackled.

He had expected to be led to a meeting room, but nothing like that happened at all. He was crushed into a two-man golfie, with a gold bull on one side and a green on the other. He tried making conversation, and neither would speak a word.

Soon he was in unfamiliar territory. The streets and corridors were deserted. He would have expected to see at least a few people around, even at that hour. He wondered if Cainsville could be under martial law.

Other golfies raced ahead and behind and, when the road was wide enough, kept pace on either side. He found such celebrity treatment ridiculous, and in a brighter moment would likely have found it amusing. Of course, he was not being guarded for his own sake, but rather to protect others, as if one moment’s lapse in vigilance might let someone turn him into a walking bomb.

Ridiculous or not, the possibility was being taken seriously. His destination turned out to be a medical facility like the one when he was first admitted to HQ, back in Nauc. He groaned loudly and said, “Not again?” No one registered that he had spoken. The reception room held at least twenty people in lab coats, but even they were color-coded, with green and gold outnumbering red. They all turned to look at him and waited expectantly. Resignedly, Cedric began to unzip.

If possible, the ensuing examination was even more thorough than his ordeal of four days earlier. The visitors took at least an hour to satisfy themselves that there was nothing inside Hubbard Cedric’s skin except Hubbard Cedric and one earpatch. They struck a piece of shiny metallic tape over that to inactivate it. When at last they could find nothing more to scan, poke, or measure, they reluctantly allowed him to dress himself again. His clothes had a rumpled look, and he could guess that they had been inspected also. When he asked for a comb, his request was brusquely debated and then refused. Not only did the greens and golds distrust the reds, they obviously distrusted each other also. Who could say what infernal machine might be hidden inside an innocent-seeming comb?

After that nasty tribulation, he was taken to a waiting room and told to sit. He sat on a hard bench and leaned against a hard wall while another half hour dragged by in sickening small-hours lethargy. His questions were ignored. His only diversion was dabbing tissue at his wretched nose, which had started dribbling blood again. The medics had done that while exploring his sinuses.

He had known that there was another victim being examined at the same time as himself, for he had heard voices from cubicles he had recently vacated, but he had not been sure who it was. Finally the door opened, and he saw Gran standing outside. She was thin-lipped and flushed, much less spruce and poised than usual. Sauce for gander is sauce for goose now? Cedric began to grin, shaping a wittily catty remark, but the look she gave him caused it to die of an attack of discretion.

Again he was crushed into an overloaded golfie as an enlarged procession took off on an even longer journey. Again the road was unfamiliar to him, and deserted. The hour was late, the lighting dim. The prospect of meeting two of the world’s most powerful men held no attraction. He was sleepy and hungry.

He mooned gloomily over Alya. The window to Tiber might be open at that very moment. She might already have departed, never to return. He remembered the look in her eye when she spoke of her new world. He hoped it had checked out well. He hoped she had not been so stupid as to wait around for him. He did not think he was going to see that new world again.

Then he felt cold air on his face. The corridors had taken on a functional, echoing, rivets-and-hard-shadows look, and the temperature had dropped. The train of golfies trundled through a high metal doorway and Cedric snapped alert, astounded at what lay before him. The great dome was huge, larger even than de Soto or David Thompson, but it could not be a transmensor facility, for the floor was flat. In icy air, under a hard actinic glare, stood three great winged monsters. The smallest was a Boeing 7777, and the other two were supers, a Hyundai Six and a Euro Starscraper. All loomed enormous. He felt like a mite on the bottom of a bird cage, but it was not their size that astonished him as much as their mere presence. He had always understood that there was no airport at Cainsville.

With wheels drumming on rows of rivets, the golfies raced across the steel prairie of the floor toward the Boeing, which bore the house-and-globe logo of the World Chamber on its green tail. By the time Cedric was delivered to the steps, his grandmother was already halfway up. He thought despairingly of Alya and wondered where he was going to be taken.

The answer, apparently, was “nowhere.” The plane was outfitted like a home, or even a palace. He followed his grandmother through to a very luxurious lounge and there folded himself into a thick-pillowed armchair. Red, gold, and green guards all remained standing, all watching one another as much as the prisoners.

Prisoners?

“Gran? What the hell is going on?”

His grandmother pursed her lips, as if he were speaking out of turn. Then she said, “Look!” and pointed at a window.

Cedric swung around and peered. He was just in time to see the great exterior doors slide open. Snow and even darkness itself seemed to pour into the hangar and swirl around the floor—or at least the snow did. He watched the guards stagger as the wind struck at them. He moved to a closer chair and, in his eagerness, jostled his tender and swollen nose against the plastic. In a moment another giant Boeing emerged from the night, advancing under its own power. It was painted gold and bore BEST’s logo. The doors slid shut. A rumble of titanic motors died away. Even with four such monsters present, the dome was still not full.

Steps were wheeled forward; guards took up position. Cedric saw two men descend, saw them board golfies, saw those carts head off in procession through the interior door. One of the two men had been squeezed between a red guard and a green, the other between a red and gold.

Cedric sat back to study his grandmother’s coldly angry face across the room. “We’re hostages?”

She nodded.

“That’s crazy!” he said.

“Of course it is.” She smiled grimly. “Bulls are worse than lawyers.”

That remark had been aimed at the guards, obviously, but Cedric asked, “How?”

She sighed. “Everyone does it. Accountants did it to bookkeeping, lawyers did it to the law, teachers to education.”

“Did what?”

“Tangled it all up so it became meaningless,” she said sourly. “It’s the search for indispensability—and ninety percent of them are busy playing job politics most of the time, anyway. When I was younger—” She stopped, with a brief glare at the nearest guard. “We have two guests here tonight, but if I wanted to kill one of them during his visit, I could do so easily, in spite of all this tomfoolery.”

And that remark, although directed at Cedric, had been most certainly intended for the guards. Even her own reds scowled.

“How?” asked the one she had looked at, a bull-necked gold.

The director smiled frostily. “Watch closely and maybe I’ll show you.”

That ended the conversation.

Cainsville, April 11

“
RIGHT! NO! STOP
! I think…Yes,
right
!”

Alya’s head was splitting, ready to fall apart. She seemed to have been wheeling and spinning around Cainsville for hours. Time had lost all meaning. Corridors and echoing tunnels and open plazas had come and gone by the thousand, and she had not the faintest clue where she was. She had no idea how much remained of the hour Baker had promised her. Any minute now he might call her in, and she was certain that he could override her commands to the golfie. Urgency ate at her like acid. She teetered on the brink of panic.

Finding Cedric was turning out to be impossible. She was running two
satori
at the same time—that was the problem. She had never heard of that happening to anyone in her family before, not even in any of the strange old tales.

Tiber’s was the stronger, by far. Time and time again she arrived at de Soto Dome, where the window was waiting for her. The surprised guards had moved to challenge her the first time, but she had merely referred them to Baker Abel. They had checked in, then shrugged and let her go. By her fifth or sixth visit they were openly laughing at her.

Eventually she had learned to stop at every branching, every choice, and ask System which way led to de Soto. Then she tried to compensate for that in her hunches. but sometimes the right path—if there was a right path—had to be in that direction.

There might not even be a second
satori
. She might be fooling herself. She might have gone crazy, like all those terrified schizophrenic ancestors.

Then the golfie emerged from a narrow passage into a much larger one. Cold and metallic and sinister in the dim night lighting, it stretched off endlessly in both directions. It had rails on the floor, which she had not seen before.

“
Does either of these lead to de Soto Dome
?”

“Negative.”

She cringed, puzzling. Left? Or right?

She was going mad.

She did not know.

“Left,” she whispered. System ignored that tone. “
Left
!”

The golfie swung left and hummed along the big tunnel. The walls and floor were bare metal, rushing past. Lights streamed toward her and vanished behind. Her shadow leaped and leaped, hiding from the lights.

Then the little cart slowed and came to a stop before a large, implacable, circular steel door. Corridor and rails ended also.

“
What’s this
? I mean,
What’s inside this door
?”

“Bering Dome,” the golfie said.

“
Am I allowed inside
?”

“Affirmative.”

There was no decon, so Bering was not one of the transmensor domes. She sat and stared at the forbidding door for a minute or two, wrestling with indecision and self-doubt and that over-powering hunch that she must hurry back to de Soto and the safety of Tiber.

There was no comset on the wall. The round door was not of standard type and did not quite reach the floor—there would be a sill several centimeters high. “
What is this door used for
?”

“Data confidential.”

But she had no choice, except to retrace her path. She dismounted and felt her knees shake with fatigue.

“
Open the door
!” she told the golfie, and walked forward as the great circle swung inward. She stepped over the lip, noting how very thick the wall was. She strode a few paces down a sloping floor before she realized that despite the lack of decon facilities, the place looked very much like a transmensor dome. Perhaps it was an old one, now used for something else? The inside was even dimmer than the corridor, with lights twinkling near the center, filled with a quiet murmur, as of many people. She caught a curious odor of—of curry?

The door thumped closed behind her, and she wheeled around in alarm. Damn! Now she’d done it! There was no comset on the inside, either, and she had no wrist mike.

She began to separate out the threads of noise: muttering voices and babies crying. Her eyes were adjusting, too, seeing a huddled little settlement down where the floor was flat. The central object plate was blank, but the railing around it seemed to be hung with laundry. Ramshackle fences of canvas zigzagged around, providing some minimum privacy. She could hear a guitar strumming, and a distant group seemed to be chanting prayers. The baby noises were the worst, though—crying babies could drive anyone mad. Kiosks on the far side were obviously portable toilets.

Sadly, Alya started down the long slope. She had stumbled on the secret refugee entrance to Cainsville, and here were Baker’s two thousand. Bering Dome was a refugee camp. And when she gave him the go-ahead, all Baker would have to do was to close the window in de Soto Dome and open the same string here. She had failed! This was another door to Tiber, and the Tiber
satori
had won out over whatever she had felt for Cedric—which might have been all self-delusion, she supposed.

The scents and sounds were becoming clearer—and more familiar. Hubbard had played fair so far, for she could hear distinctive Banzaraki voices, her own people. That explained so much activity in the middle of the night—they were in the wrong time zone. Any minute now she would be recognized, and quite likely Jathro was somewhere in the mob, demagoguing, building loyalties.

The clamor of babies was as nerve-scratching as a nettle rash. And older children—from the noise, there were an awful lot of children. And the guitar…someone singing.

She knew that voice! With a cry of joy, Alya began to run, seeking that guitar.

She raced along pathways lined on both sides with bedrolls, sleeping people, people sitting cross-legged, people talking, people weeping, people looking up in astonishment, people calling out. She zigged and zagged, ever drawing closer. She ran around the central object plate with its fence of drying diapers. She could
smell
babies now! She began to notice paler faces. Not all Banzarakis, then.

And there he was!

He was standing with his back to her, but his height was unmistakable. Strumming inexpertly on a guitar, he was singing to a semicircle of seated children.

“Cedric!” She rushed up and grabbed him. She hauled him around, ending the song in a discordant jangle as she threw her arms around his skinny neck and kissed him. The children yelled delight.

Appalled, she backed off and stared.

It was Cedric! And Cedric’s blush. But not quite tall enough? His hair was too long. His nose was uninjured. He was maybe a couple of years younger, and he was aghast at this aggressive female who had just kissed him.

Her
satori
had not found Cedric after all. It had found a Cedric clone.