The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (40 page)

Joss shrugged. “Who knows? My first memory is of crying, and then of a man finding me and lifting me up into his arms. He was a big, burly man, Trig Stuart. I took his surname after he and his wife adopted me, but I've always called them my uncle and aunt.”

“Mmmm. You're from the woods, and you have unusual powers, including an ability to generate seeds for plants. What are you, some kind of a weird forest creature?” She touched the vinelike scar on his forehead.

“No, just coincidence. As you've undoubtedly heard, I was in an explosion a few months ago, and transformed by it. There's a logical explanation for my powers, and it's nothing supernatural.” He grinned. “I'm weird, yes, but not
that
weird.”

“I see.”

He looked at her intently, saw kindness in her eyes and said, “Evana, I'm sorry if I've been unfriendly toward you.”

“Oh, I understand perfectly! I tend to be too outgoing when I like someone, and that can frighten people off. Are you scared of me?”

“Of course not.” But he admitted to himself that he was fearful of her, a little. Joss was having feelings of affection for this young woman, and they were coming on too quickly for his comfort. He needed to slow things down. But not too much. He liked what he was feeling, and what it portended for the future.

They continued down an even narrower section of trail, with him behind her. “What was your family like?” she asked.

“Uncle Trig and Aunt Gertie were great in every way. My childhood couldn't have been better. They raised me in a loving home, let me participate in sports, and gave me a good education that enabled me to do well in the Green States of America. I have no complaints about them.” His eyes misted over. “She's gone now, but Uncle Trig is still doing OK.”

“I get the feeling they weren't hippies, that they were a good old-fashioned American family, with apple pie on the counter and Sunday dinner at Grandma's.”

“Pretty close, though all that changed in the revolution, when Uncle Trig joined the Army of the Environment and was forced to give up the Protestant religion he'd practiced all his life. He won medals for heroism, but didn't want to make the military a career. He and Aunt Gertie were always sad about not being able to adhere to their faith, but they went along with the new system.”

Joss held on to tree roots or low branches whenever he could to keep from falling, made his way down the trail carefully. In contrast, Evana was sure-footed in her bare feet, sometimes waiting momentarily for him before continuing to make her way along the trail.

“You're still close to your uncle?” she asked.

“We stay in touch, but I don't see him much anymore. I'm an agnostic, but after my aunt died, I got ahold of a black-market Bible and gave it to him.”

“Good for you. That was a brave thing to do.”

“Maybe, but I needed to do it.”

“My mother was a flower child,” Evana said. “She lived with Rahma Popal, a few years before he was involved with the Berkeley Eight and the Corporate War. He's had relations with a lot of women, and fathered an uncounted number of children.”

“So I've heard. I doubt if there are very many children like you, though. You're one of a kind.”

“We're individuals, both of us, not types!”

“That's right!”

“With all of my brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, can you imagine what my family reunion would look like? It would be complete pandemonium.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked. The trail was so steep downward that even she had to slow considerably to keep her footing. She helped him down a difficult, slippery section of small, loose rocks.

“I don't think so,” he said. “People are superficial, concealing what they're really like. It takes time to figure them out.”

“Well, I don't know if I believe in love at first sight, either. But I think I could fall in love with you.”

“Don't be silly. You don't even know me.” He felt a chill of pleasure run down his spine, and thought he might be blushing. She looked back at him, but if she noticed, she didn't say so.

“Maybe you're right. Oh well, I only said I
could
fall in love with you. I didn't say that I already have.”

Joss fell silent as they made their way back down the hill to the meadow, and into the forest settlement. With Evana's bold declaration, he wasn't sure how to handle the situation. He wished he had met her under more normal circumstances.

Normal
, he thought bitterly. He didn't know what that meant any longer. He longed for the way things used to be, before the ReFac explosion, even before Chairman Rahma and his zealots took over the Americas.

As they entered the village, Joss saw Kupi speaking with the white-bearded tribal leader, Mord Pelley, standing with a number of villagers.

“There they are!” someone shouted.

“What's the matter?” Evana asked.

Kupi glared at Evana, didn't say anything. Then she looked at Joss disapprovingly. Joss moved away from Evana, stood nearer to Kupi.

“Terrible,” Mord said. “Theo Garcia has been murdered.”

“What?” Evana said. “We were just with him and Zeke, until they got tired and went back.”

“Zeke stabbed him to death.”

“How could that be?” Evana asked.

“Fifteen minutes ago we found Garcia in the meadow, bleeding from a knife wound to the stomach. He said Zeke Ambrose did it. Then, gasping, he said, ‘Zeke is not what he—' and then he died.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“We don't know. But it could be that Ambrose is not what he appears to be, that he's an operative of some sort, planted by the GSA or the Corporates.”

While Joss and Evana tried to comprehend what had just occurred, Mord Pelley spoke with the anarchist Acky Sommers and other men who were coordinating an effort to find the fugitive, tracking his localized transponder. The men departed quickly.

Then the old man gazed at the villagers who were gathering around him as the awful news spread. “I'm afraid our tribe has been compromised,” he said.

 

45

We suspect that Dylan Bane is using the vanishing tunnel technology to carry out highly lucrative robberies and burglaries in Eurika and Panasia. Police reports from overseas indicate that witnesses have seen small tunneling machines pop up out of the ground, with one or two armed men aboard each craft who carry out a quick crime caper and then escape like gophers. Somehow Bane is getting the mini-craft overseas and using them for criminal moneymaking activities—in areas he considers easier pickings than the GSA police state. This suggests that he might have important overseas allies.

—a confidential Greenpol report

“I HAVE FAIRLY
good news for you,” Director Ondex said.

“That's an odd way of putting it,” Rahma said.

At midday, the gray-bearded Chairman and the tall, patrician Director walked through the immense aviary and greenhouse complex, atmospherically controlled zones that were filled with endangered birds and plants from all over the world. Exotic birds swooped low overhead and called out to one another, a loud, screeching cacophony.

“Our first vanishing tunnel machines are close to readiness.”

“How close?” The Chairman coughed, had been feeling increasingly run-down in the past few days. He had resisted efforts by Dr. Tatanka to treat him, hoping to beat whatever it was on his own. He had always considered himself a specimen of health, and rarely got sick. But he thought he had the flu now. According to the doctor, it was probably an Asian variety that was going around, and she worried whether he could beat it without her help.

Continuing to cough, Rahma wondered how such a virus could have found its way across the seas, considering the terrible state of relations between the GSA and the Panasians. Maybe it was a new weapon, a way of infecting the populace. Whatever it was made him thirsty, and he was drinking a lot of fluids.

Suddenly he remembered the sealed diplomatic valise containing a letter and offensive photographs that he'd received from Hashimoto.
Sealed
valise, with an odd odor inside that dissipated quickly. He cursed, and clenched his teeth. Had the outrageous leader found a way of transmitting the illness to him through contact with those papers? Too late to do anything about that now, except to call Valerie Tatanka and let her treat him. But what if it was something really insidious, something incurable that Panasian scientists had discovered?

“We'll be ready in a few weeks,” Ondex said, finally answering the vanishing tunnel question. “Perhaps five or six at the most, and we'll be loading the machines with military personnel and hardware.”

“We don't exactly know where to hit the enemy, though, do we? And we aren't sure if Bane is acting on his own, or if he is allied with another force: the Corporates, the Panasians, the Eurikans, or a combination thereof. Maybe one we don't even know about.”

“I strongly suspect it's the Panasians,” Ondex said. “In order to obtain raw materials and other necessary components for our technology, we have extensive operations—and our own SciO operatives—overseas. We have developed new circumstantial evidence—
strong
circumstantial evidence—that Bane has been relying on the Panasians for financial support, and perhaps for more than that.”

“Any Corporate involvement?”

“We suspect so, coming from elements that relocated overseas after we drove them out of the Americas. But the new evidence points most directly at the Panasian government. We're providing this information to the AOE chiefs of staff right now.”

“What about the crime capers Bane has been carrying out overseas, including in Panasia? Their government lets him do that?”

“Sure, to throw us off. The Panasians have to be his chief benefactor.”

“I thought so, I thought so! That Hashimoto needs to be exterminated, but how to do it…”

“I have something more that will interest you, Mr. Chairman,” he interjected. “Perhaps I might have told you about it earlier, but there is no harm done. In fact, I think you will be pleased.”

“Very little I hear from you ever pleases me, but very well. Let's hear it.” Rahma paused to look closely at an intensely red African orchid that looked too large for the slender stem supporting it.

“Our researchers have been busy. Last year we developed a powerful new splitting and greenforming machine that can be fired from a satellite. We call it the SJM, for Satellite Janus Machine.”

The Chairman arched his eyebrows as he looked at the aristocratic man. “How powerful?”

“With one satellite-launched weapon, we could spread Black Thunder all across Asia and the Pacific, destroying the entire Panasian nation before they could make a nuclear response, and greenforming over the land afterward. Or, we could do the same to Eurika—but as I said, the Panasians are our more likely foe.”

Rahma sucked in his breath. “When can you make it available to us?”

“It is theoretically functional as we speak, but hasn't been fully tested.”

“How on Earth do you test something like that?”

“Well, we've run through all of the laboratory projections, and every time the thing causes huge theoretical devastation, and then seeds the entire disturbed area—millions of square kilometers. For obvious reasons we can't perform real tests, but we're still certain it will work. Keep in mind that these important new developments—the vanishing tunnels and satellite weapons—are derivations of Janus Machine technology. Think of tributaries from a great river of technology, or branches from a tree. We keep finding new applications, new possibilities that stem from the core of knowledge.”

The Chairman nodded.

Continuing, Ondex said, “We've had the satellite in geostationary orbit over our northern continent for six months, having slipped it seamlessly into the place of a GSA communications satellite and then putting the comm-system back online with hardly a moment of down time, only a few seconds that didn't alarm anyone on the ground. And our orbiter has a bonus feature.”

“You SciOs and your damned secrets.”

“Don't get excited. We're on the same side.”

“Sometimes I wonder. You were supposed to have notified me of the new technology before putting it online.”

“I know, but there are good reasons why that didn't happen. Reasons I can't go into.”

Rahma muttered an expletive, and broke into a fit of coughing before finally stopping.

Waiting for his discomfort to subside, Ondex said, “As is customary, we SciOs will keep the secret of the orbital weaponry technology, but we are turning over the operation of the machine to the GSA government.”

“You have perverted the proper lines of authority, Arch.” Rahma's eyes burned from the sickness, were red and watery.

“My SciOs have a monopoly on the technology. You signed the GSA Charter guaranteeing that.”

“I wish I hadn't.” Rahma thought about how these Science Overseers were a two-edged sword. Up to now they had been helpful to the GSA, but what if they ever turned against him, and the greenocracy he had established? He realized that he could not worry about that now. There were too many pressures on him, and he had a limited number of choices.

“Think of the SJM as a big brother of the smaller J-Macs,” Ondex said. “It will be one more technological advantage for the GSA, enabling you to attain the ecological utopia that you so urgently desire.”

“Is a pre-emptive strike against the Panasians possible now?” Rahma asked. “Theoretically, I mean?”

“This has been developed as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one. With that in mind, its operation will be turned over to the NDS, our Nonhuman Defense System. They will make any decision to use the weapon, or not use it.” He paused. “The robotic NDS technology is, of course, something my SciOs developed at your urging, because you were afraid that humans might make emotional, illogical attacks—resulting in a massive retaliation that would destroy the good work you have done.”