The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (33 page)

As soon as the observers were in a safe place, Kupi tapped keys on the instrument panel to generate splitting power. Joss heard the gathering roar, and saw her fire Black Thunder in an unusual manner, a slow-arcing, wide-spraying shot that disintegrated all of the buildings, fencing, and other structures with just one blast. It was something that most other Splitter operators could not do, a crowd-pleasing demonstration of her skills.

Most of the time she didn't bother with this technique and just blasted away repeatedly, until everything was turned into goo. She never announced in advance what she intended, which Joss found interesting. At times, she had a tendency to be creative in her work, even artistic.

When Kupi was finished, Joss adjusted his helmet's headset so that he could hear a past-century John Lennon song, “Imagine,” and then climbed into the bucket seat behind the Seed Cannon. He tapped the opening sequence, causing the turret to spin around slowly, so that the glowing green barrel pointed at the work area. He fired twice, spraying seeds over every square meter of the destroyed villa.

When Joss completed his portion of the work, he climbed down onto the turret platform and removed his helmet, to talk with Kupi.

“Hey, Stuart!” a man shouted. “What do you need the Janus Machine for? Show us some of your tricks!”

Joss shook his head, turned away.

“Come on! We drove all the way out here to see you!”

“Well, drive all the way back!” Sabe McCarthy shouted. “Who invited you? We're on duty, doing the Chairman's good work.”

Some people booed, while others called out, demanding to see Joss's special talents.

“This isn't a sideshow!” Kupi shouted.

“I'm sick of my ‘talents,'” Joss said to Kupi as the two of them turned and went inside the passenger dome. “I want my life back to normal.”

They closed the door, shutting out the crowd noises. “I don't think you'll ever be completely normal again,” she said. The two of them hadn't made love since his return, and he didn't know when—or if—they would again. He felt very tense.

*   *   *

THAT NIGHT, JOSS
went to bed thinking about the seeds he had generated two days ago, without the use of equipment or SciO seed cartridges. Green light had lanced from the vinelike skin of one hand, bathing a flawed area on the ground, a place that Tom Ellerby had missed.

He wanted to know what had happened to him, enabling him to generate new life like that. Joss seemed to be evolving or mutating toward something, learning new powers as he changed constantly. Though curious at times, he was not really eager to discover more about his abilities, and wished they would be gone in the morning when he woke up.

Yes, that would be perfect. He tried to visualize it all gone, and even more, that it had never occurred at all. None of it, and that he'd dreamed the whole thing, an incredibly realistic dream.

Joss went over this idea in his mind, savoring possibilities, considering ramifications, looking for bits of evidence that none of it had ever really occurred. He tried to remember details that would prove this premise, evidence to remove a mountain of doubt. There must be something obvious.

As he went over events repeatedly, his mind circling, he began to drift off to sleep. But sleep within a dream? It seemed impossible, and yet it might very well be occurring anyway.…

In the dream (within a dream?) he again saw the Sonora jobsite where the J-Mac crew had been cleaning up the landscape after digging trenches to repair an underground water supply. A patch of moist, ungreenformed earth had remained after Ellerby fired the Seed Cannon; the man had skill limitations, was not up to Joss's standards.

Going over that day again, Joss saw the vinelike scars on his skin bulge and glow, and he saw in a detailed, breakaway view that this was from the sun generating photosynthesis in his body. It was a frightening realization.

His dreaming gaze wandered over the dry landscape, away from the area that Kupi had hit with the Splitter cannon, and which Ellerby had greenformed so imperfectly. Joss found himself staring close-up at undisturbed soil with all of its organic, cellular, and genetic components. Moments later he realized it was raw material, because he drew upon those ingredients and greenformed without equipment, rearranging the soil and coalescing it into the varying shapes of seeds for plants that were suitable for the Sonora region—seeds that he scattered over the jobsite in a rain of sparkling green.

Joss's mind seemed to be controlling this, telepathically generating the seeds of life from waste dirt, as if he were God.

Stunned by the dream, he awoke and sat straight up in bed. His heart was racing, and perspiration drenched his clothing. He'd had odd dreams before, including the one in which he imagined powers he did not actually possess. But this one seemed different. It was as if he had been given a window into the secret workings of his own drastically altered body.

 

36

With all the talk of extraterrestrials in the past century, the UFOs and purported alien autopsies, it seems that we have finally found a “green man,” but he's homegrown. He's an Earthling, not from Mars at all.

—underground newsletter

BACK IN SEATTLE,
Andruw Twitty had begun to give up on getting another audience with the Chairman. After being turned away from the guard station of the Montana Valley Game Reserve, he had made a series of additional attempts in the past week, sending daily messages to Rahma by sat-call, courier, and holo-net, each time saying he had important, damaging information to discuss about Joss Stuart. But to no avail. He had received no response whatsoever. Just silence.

All of his former roommate's belongings had been inventoried by SciO security officers and taken to a storage facility at the Berkeley Reservation, where the SciOs had been investigating his strange and disturbing powers—powers that seemed to increase each time Twitty heard about them.

A few days ago, upon learning that Stuart was on a J-Mac crew in northwest Mexico, Twitty had applied for a permit to go there. The request had been granted by his Greenpol captain, the woman who had earlier ordered him to take time off his duties as an eco-cop and use his unique relationship with Stuart to see what he could find out about him. Twitty had gone surreptitiously to observe Stuart and had reported his findings to his superior. But then, without explanation, she'd ordered him to return to his normal duties.

After a day of routine police work, he was in the health club on the seventy-eighth floor of the government-run apartment building. Later in the week he was scheduled to receive a new roommate, but he wasn't looking forward to that, or to continuing the old routine at work. He still had not obtained everything he wanted from the Stuart connection. Maybe some angle would occur to him while he was exercising, some way of getting back on the assignment he really wanted—the one he hoped would promote his own career through his past relationship with the famous Mr. Stuart. He did some of his best thinking at the gym.

This facility had a number of features that he could only categorize as novelty items, because they didn't really need to be that way. The unique vertical swimming pool was a case in point, and always seemed to him like a waste of time and energy—something designed by techno-geeks just to show it was possible.

Throughout the reservation for humans, horizontal space was at a premium, but they could have done this in a more traditional way, instead of causing a swimming pool to run up the side of a long, three-level interior wall! Looking in at it through the viewing windows, it seemed to be an optical illusion, with the water remaining in the pool and people walking beside it like flies on a wall. But it was no illusion.

In his tight-fitting swimsuit, Twitty passed through an airlock into a small chamber, and lay down on a wooden bench in the corner, with his feet against one wall. It was humid in there. He heard clicking and sliding noises, and presently he identified the
fwwmph!
of a gravity shifter. A moment later he found himself standing on the “wall,” with the bench against his back. Then, stepping through a second airlock, he entered the swimming pool chamber and dived into the water. So unnecessary, all of this technology and expense to set it up, but it did work, and was visually exciting.

He swam fifteen laps and was going to do more, but felt a twinge in one shoulder blade and paddled toward a ladder on the side. Twitty was just about to climb out when the implanted chrono in his wrist buzzed. The digital dial shifted, revealing a message there. The Chairman wanted to see him after all. Elated, he dressed and prepared to depart.

*   *   *

CHAIRMAN RAHMA POPAL
usually had other people do things like this for him. But now, under the circumstances, he felt he needed to do it himself.

Jade Ridell stood in front of his desk, waiting for him to speak. At first she had been smiling, but now, as she saw his somber expression, she began to look worried.

“What is it, my beloved Chairman?” she finally asked. She wore a long dress with images of exotic animals on it. Her red hair was formed into a ponytail, held in place by a silver clasp he had given to her.

He looked away for a moment, at the wall sign that read
ALL FOR GREEN AND GREEN FOR ALL
hoping it would give him the courage for what he needed to do next.

“I really don't like having to tell you this,” he said, looking across his desk at the young woman. He took a deep breath, because he had grown to care for Jade, more than most of the women he had known in his life.

She looked frightened now.

“Here it is,” he said. “Your family has been arrested for a serious eco-crime, and placed on a relocation train.”

Tears came instantly to her dark green eyes. “Where have they been sent?”

“I can't answer that, but because of your family's disgrace you can no longer work here.” He almost choked on the words. “Jade, we can't spend time together anymore.”

“My Chairman!”

“I'm sending you back to the Missoula Reservation to report to the Job Assignment Office, with orders that you are not to be penalized in any way for the actions of your family. I'm giving you a break.”

She didn't look grateful. Darkness spread over her face, and she fought off tears. “You won't tell me where my parents are, or my little sister?”

“They're being processed by the system. We must have faith in the system.” He waved a hand dismissively.

She shot him a hard glare, but turned and left without another word.

Afterward, in the silence of his office, Rahma thought of her, and wished it might have been otherwise between them. But he could never spend time with a daughter of eco-criminals. It would undermine his stature and authority.

*   *   *

THAT EVENING A
uniformed, jackbooted Andruw Twitty stepped from the VTOL plane, where he was greeted by an aide who identified himself as Artie. This was undeniably the most famous hubot of all, from what Twitty had heard, with the human eyes of a dead war hero.

Unseen by the visitor, the large glidewolf soared overhead, circling the yurt compound and gazing down, watching every move he made. Though Twitty didn't know this, the creature had reached its full adult size now and was a common sight in the sky over the game reserve, so that few people or hubots on the ground took notice of her anymore.

Several times, Twitty looked upward nervously, remembering what had happened before, but in the waning light and mottled cloud cover he did not see the animal at all. But it was there nonetheless, and as Twitty and Artie entered the administration building the glidewolf settled quietly onto the rooftop.

Twitty followed the hubot to a third-floor office in one of the yurts, where Chairman Rahma sat at a large bamboo desk, studded with commemorative plaques that bore the faces of revolutionary heroes.

“You asked to see me,” the Chairman said. “This had better not be a waste of my time.”

“Oh, it won't be, sir.” Twitty removed his helmet, looked back nervously as the door shut behind him. The hubot remained in the room and stood by a balcony door, staring at him.

“Well?” Chairman Rahma said, glaring.

“There is more to Joss Stuart than the government realizes, sir. I'm very concerned that he's being permitted to go back to work on a Janus Machine crew. That's sensitive, important work, and he should not be trusted with it.”

He paused, waiting for a response—but the Chairman didn't say anything.

Letting his visitor remain uncomfortable, Rahma Popal flipped off the screen of a report he had been reading, the latest on the tensions with the Panasian government and their intractable premier, Woo Hashimoto. The fool was issuing a personal challenge to Rahma, suggesting that they meet in hand-to-hand combat and fight to the death, with the victor vanquishing the other nation. He offered an odd choice of weapons: knives or swords.

What an idiot he is
, Rahma thought.
Knives or swords? I am a man of
peace
, not of violence!

He had to admit, though, that the thought of sticking a blade into Hashimoto's gut appealed to him. Yes, it would be nice to do it personally, and watch him bleed to death, then hack him to pieces the way Hashimoto had done to the polar bear.

It occurred to him now, as it had before, that he could present himself to Hashimoto in the form of an avatar—in enhanced virtual reality form. That way he could at least frighten the man, and perhaps cause him to hurt himself.

Rahma envisioned his own bearded avatar chasing Hashimoto through his palace near Shanghai, wielding a virtual reality sword—perhaps one that was emerald in color, or some other impressive variation of green. It would be amusing to catch the Panasian leader in his underwear and force him out into the open, subjecting him to public embarrassment. Or Rahma could intervene on one of Hashimoto's numerous hunting trips, perhaps preventing him from killing an elephant or some other magnificent wild animal. The Chairman had seen images of the fool setting off on big-game expeditions, dressed in a heavy bearskin coat and carrying a large rifle, as if he thought he was an Asian Teddy Roosevelt, going after a grizzly bear.