The Alejandra Variations (25 page)

A man runs up the opposite side of the street and crosses over through honking, angry automobiles. The man looks agitated.

It is Derek Mallory.

"Derek!" Nicholas smiles. "Whatever are you doing here? This is a pleasant surprise."

Mallory has a worried look on his face. "Nick, are you all right?" he asks.

Nicholas shakes his best friend's hand warmly. "Never better," he says cheerfully. Derek seems puzzled. Nicholas doesn't understand.

"What's the matter, Derek?"

"Didn't Melissa tell you about the bomb?

"What bomb?"

"The one we're all supposed to be looking for!"

"Oh, you mean the Keeper. The Unit says that there's another Keeper about three days to the east of us. No problem, though. I'm on vacation right now, anyway."

"Nick, wake up! This is important! We're talking about millions of helpless people!"

"Nonsense. I figure about twenty-five to thirty to a Clantram, except the first one and the last. That's where the men are. Cesya and I are up front. The rest are women. You should see some of them. They're gorgeous."

Mallory looks up at the imposing buildings. "Help us find the bomb, Nick."

"The bomb."

"Right." Mallory is very excited now. "Staci and Reitinger are a couple of blocks away in the Transamerica Building. Melissa thinks the whole thing's similar to the Rio layout.

"Rio de Janeiro?"

"That's right. It's in one of the buildings, we think. Libyans supplied by agents of the KGB."

"Derek," Nicholas laughs. "Don't get so excited. The KGB isn't that stupid."

"President Runciman's in town, and he's got all of Foresee worried as hell."

"OK," he says. "Where do I start?" He is agreeable. Besides, it's such a nice day.

"I'm taking the Wells Fargo Bank Building. You take that one there. Across the street. The Sentinel Building. It's abandoned, but Mnemos says it might be a possibility.

"OK."

"Great!" Derek Mallory says with vast relief. He slaps Nicholas on the shoulder.

"Hey, watch the shoulder! That's why I'm on vacation, pal. Injured in the line of duty, and all that."

"Sorry, Nick. We don't have much time!"

Mallory runs off. Nick calls after him, "There's time enough at the end of the world. And plenty of women, too."

He whistles, thrusting his hands into his pants pockets, walking across Kearny Street.

The stroll is enjoyable beneath the raspy song of gulls and tired old albatrosses. A number of pretty secretaries smile at him. He smiles back.

The elevator still works in the Sentinel Building, so Nick takes it to the penthouse on the seventh floor. It is an odd, turn-of-the-century structure, dwarfed by the larger buildings around it. The penthouse is still a bachelor's pad, filled with plush furniture. The dude who lived here last really knew how to do it right, Nicholas thinks to himself, admiring the decor.

He steps up to the wide window. "Now, I wonder where that nasty old bomb is hiding?"

Behind him a silky voice suddenly purrs, "I knew you would come, Heart."

Emerging from a bathroom at the rear—and a recent shower—she stands dripping wet. Cesya. Off comes her shower cap. A towel caresses her silky form: her breasts quiver slightly. Gold tresses fall about her bronze shoulders. She is bronze everywhere.

"I have to find a bomb," he tells her.

Cesya slinks up to him. He is enthralled by the hypnotic motion of her breasts. Drops of water bead the large pink circles of her nipples.

"The Keeper is far away," she tells him. Wet footprints follow her across the carpet. "We can enjoy ourselves here. The Unit says we have three whole days."

Exciting things are beginning to awaken in him. Cesya drops her towel on a leather chair and slowly begins to undo his trousers, staring into his eyes.

A small clock radio suddenly rouses on the coffee table, and a woman's voice calls out his name. "Nicholas! Stay away from that woman. There is work to do. The bomb. Find us the bomb!"

Cesya grabs the radio and smashes it on the table, pulverizing it with one hand. She's very strong.

"I have to find the bomb," Nicholas insists.

"Nicholas," Cesya says. "Don't listen to them. You belong to me!"

Nicholas stops her. "Just a moment, please. This won't take long. I'm one of the best. Melissa told me so once."

There is a turret dome on the top of the Sentinel Building, with access from the penthouse below. There Nicholas locates a telescope. He begins scanning the rooftops of San Francisco with the bachelor's toy.

Cesya comes up behind him and puts her arms around his waist. "We could be together forever, Heart. I will stimulate your pleasure centers like no woman ever has."

"This will only take a minute," he tells her, smiling. "Excuse me, please."

"There are no bombs!" she suddenly rages. "And we don't have that much time!"

"Sure we do. Three days. You said so yourself."

She runs to the other side of the telescope and lowers it slowly. Nicholas stands upright. Those bedroom blue-green eyes have only one desire, he can see.

"Well," Nicholas says, giving in. He removes his tie. "Perhaps it can wait."

Minutes later, they are in bed in the center of the penthouse studio apartment. The windows have been dimmed and music is playing. It is familiar music.

Cesya rubs her hand between his legs, causing him to become erect with desire. She holds him firmly, with a stroking motion. All of his pleasure centers belong to her.

Then the television set across the room flashes to life. A face appears in full color, looking directly at him. It is a woman's face. "Nicholas, break away from her. Fight her. We need you."

It is Rhoanna Martin.

"Rhoanna?" Nick sits up suddenly.

Cesya throws him back down onto the bed and straddles him in one quick motion. The face on the television screen continues to implore him as Cesya easily inserts him into her.

"Nicholas!" Rhoanna's ancient voice cries out.

"You're mine," Cesya smiles with rapture. "Mine!"

"The bomb," he says, looking up at her. "I must find the bomb."

She is transformed by ecstasy.

"You want the bomb? I'll give you the bomb," she groans. "It's right beneath you in this building. If I can't have you, then nobody can!"

Every nerve ending, every impulse, every delight is hers.

He cannot control himself. He feels fire rising in his loins, as he bursts copiously inside the bronze woman. She laughs, eyes wild with pleasure.

He dissolves in the furious heat of a sudden white light. And flows into nothingness.

The Fourth Variation

Chapter One

"QUI," THE VOICES gathered at his wrist called out.

"Yes?"

"Someone approaches," his allies informed him.

"No one approaches," he said.

"We would like to differ with you. Someone is approaching, and we thought you'd like to know."

Qui ignored the voices of his assembled allies. There were only a small handful of individuals left upon the old earth, and he couldn't believe that he was important enough to be disturbed just now—particularly when everyone he knew had followed the urge to migrate up into the frosty reaches of outer space. He knew that the Final Day was upon them all, whether they still dwelled on the dying earth or drifted in space far above it. Most had seen the wisdom of taking their allies into orbit, where the great Migration Shields hung in the sky, waiting.

No, Qui thought. There is no one approaching. The allies must be dreaming nervously again, wanting to escape from their bejeweled prison at his wrist and frolic in the light of day.

As it was, Qui wasn't in much of a mood to set his allies free or to deal with a stranger. He wanted to share that grand private spectacle with no one. The spectacle of the Final Day.

Absently, he fingered the glittering jem of the bracelet on his wrist. His allies stirred and shimmered anxiously within, but it was not time for them to appear. He would travel on foot to enjoy these last fading panoramas, despite the unrest of the incarnations at his wrist.

There was much upon his mind. It was as if a whole lifetime of confusion had suddenly come into focus, as if he had been looking for something that he had lost sometime back and now he feared that it would never be found. Whatever it was.

As he walked along the warm crystalline sands of the shore, he could almost feel the heavy accumulation of time and memory in every particle of earth beneath his feet. He enjoyed these melancholy sensations, even though his allies questioned his behavior. "After all," they told him, "why walk when a man can fly?"

Why, indeed? he thought.

Qui suddenly called out to them. "Allies."

"Yes?" came the simultaneous response from the thousands of voices waiting within the jewel.

"Tell me the story again of Jacob Böhme."

The voices shifted minutely within the jewel as they searched for the one who would know. A voice finally spoke. "Jacob Böhme was a German mystic and theosophist who lived at a time when the earth was approaching its middle age."

"No dates, please," Qui requested. "I've had enough to do with time."

"Böhme grew up in the town of—"

But Qui interrupted. "That is not what I need to hear. Tell me again of his transformation."

"Yes," the voice said. Qui knew that the ally was a spirit—man or woman, he couldn't tell—who had lived in the same era, perhaps the same town as this Böhme. The ally continued: "It is said that one day he achieved a mystical vision of God when a light happened to glance off of a plate made of pewter."

"Ah," sighed Qui. "Bliss. Please explain."

There was a prolonged silence among his allies. None among them spoke, and there were
millions
of them in there. But Qui understood: It was a nontranslatable experience.

"I wish…" Qui began.

"Yes?"

"I wish that Böhme were among you."

"There are others like him," they chimed eagerly, their voices mingling like the crystals of an ancient Zen wind-bell. "We have a Sufi of the twelfth century, an Awakener of the twentieth. They can corroborate, but cannot explain."

Were bliss and happiness so easily found! he thought. The light off an ordinary plate. Something so mundane, so unexpected.

"Why are you so unhappy?" the allies asked, wanting to be helpful.

Qui looked out across the flat, calm ocean. The giant red star that the sun had become in its old age cast a crimson phosphorescence across gentle wavelets. Tides had vanished with the moon. Filigrees of pink clouds drifted in the sky, looking for some place to go. He felt the emptiness of the world.

"I don't know," Qui confessed. "I have been struck with the reality of my unhappiness—my imprisonment. And it's something I can't ignore easily."

"You have us to consider," his allies said with a predictable shimmer of uneasiness. "We would not like to perish on the Final Day."

Qui smiled sadly. "No one will perish, I can assure you. Now, please. I would like to be left in silence for a little while."

"Even though someone approaches?"

"Yes. Even though someone approaches."

He sighed heavily, looking out across the ocean. The sun was a blood-red eye watching him from the western lip of the world, filling up a quarter of the sky. Veins of an even darker, cancerous red lined the surface of the bloated orb. Qui could feel its weariness.

He had no idea how old the city before him was, although he knew that trapped in the ally bracelet among his former incarnations was an inhabitant or two who could perhaps identify it. There might be thousands of them. It didn't matter.

His allies were of some use, however. Earlier that day he had allowed them to transport him across the bleak nameless ocean to this large, nearly flat continent. Peculiar iron tubes surfaced on the land occasionally, rising and burrowing into the gloomy bowels of the ancient earth. Who had set them down or how long it happened didn't interest Qui. His feelings of unhappiness were his chief concern. He did not have the heart to tell his allies that he could not—would not—leave the earth until he had achieved happiness. Otherwise he would end up carrying his confusions and questions with him to another star system.

Qui walked along the shore until he found some marble steps that had once led to a landing but were now being swallowed up by the gradual advance of the sea. Much of the harbor had already sunk out of sight. If the earth lasted another decade, the city would find its new home among the fishes.

A large broken pillar lay like the trunk of a petrified tree across the steps. A delicate green moss had strung itself along one side.

It was a perfect place to rest and eat.

"I wish to eat now," Qui commanded as he leaned against the pillar.

A few allies twinkled and escaped from his wrist, and these glowing stars of life set out a light meal before him. Then they withdrew into their protective jewel, happy to have been of service.

The sun would take about another hour to set fully. He would have plenty of time to set up his tent and gather firewood for the morning, unless he decided to ask his allies to perform that chore. He drew up a handful of nuts from a glass bowl, tossing them into his mouth.

Something erupted from the ocean not far from him. He saw a
veltane
take to the air. With a sibilant cry, the creature flapped around crudely, shunting off heavy drops of water until it was light enough to take fully to the skies.