Voice of the Whirlwind Read online

  No, Steward thought. The Colonel wouldn’t…He felt his fists clenching by his sides, the nails digging into the palms.

  The Colonel had. He’d trained the Icehawks and then sold them. The…other…wouldn’t lie about something like that.

  Steward’s eyes were burning. He felt a pain in his throat. The betrayal had a name.

  “But to get to the Colonel I’m going to have to do some things…that I’m not comfortable with…that I’m not going to talk about in a recording. I may end up dead because of that, but I don’t think so. It looks as if Curzon has things planned pretty well.

  “But remember what I said. What I’m going to do is important to Curzon, and that means I can’t trust what he’s telling me. And there are people higher up the ladder who might be lying to him.” There was a pause. Steward heard a glass being put down on a table, close to the mic. The warming vid smelled faintly of hot plastic.

  “What I’m trying to say is that I want de Prey, and Curzon wants something else, and we both know it. So after I get de Prey, Curzon won’t have a hold on me anymore, and that might mean I won’t be of any more use to him. He may decide to put the ice on me. So if I end up dead, it’s most likely my own side that did it.”

  The glass made a metallic slipping noise near the microphone, as if he’d tried to pick it up but only pushed it farther away. Then there was a space of silence just long enough for him to pick up the glass more carefully and take one long swallow. When the voice came back, it was tired, the pauses between each word long.

  “I don’t know why I’m sending you this. Except to say I’m sorry. For the years gone. It’s just…for the record, I guess.”

  Another silence. Another drink. “One last thing.”

  Three beats of Steward’s racing heart.

  “Sorry I took so long.”

  A silence, a click that echoed a distant, months-old termination. Then nothing but a long, endless hiss.

  *

  He played the video several more times that afternoon. The rest of the time he lay on his bed, watching the reflections of sunlight from mirrored windows stretch slow-moving fingers across the precise pale white of the ceiling.

  Several times the telephone rang. He let it ring.

  Late in the afternoon he changed into sweats and went down into the therapy room. Before he left, he taped the cartridge to the back of a sliding door in his bathroom cabinet, then tore the envelope across twice and put it in a wastebasket in the hospital lobby.

  The therapists had gone home for the day. The place smelled of chlorine from the whirlpool and echoed to the slap of his sandals. Steward did his warm-ups and stretches, then stepped to the treadmill and turned it on. He pushed up the speed till he was sprinting, the sound of his breath louder than the whine of the machine, the thunder of his footsteps. It seemed to him, in some unclear fashion, as if he were running toward something. His breath became a pain in his lungs. He stumbled against the cool chrome railing, caught himself, ran on until the machine’s automatic counter turned it off. His hand hovered over the switch for a moment, then he stepped to the floor.

  He stood still for a moment, catching his breath, waiting for the room to tell him what to do. He walked to the mats. He began running martial-arts exercises, first kata to find a rhythm, then short, violent patterns, imagining there were hands behind him that wanted to touch him, seize him, hold him back. He spun, parried, drove elbows into bone, fingers into eye sockets. The patterns grew longer, stronger. He felt a furnace of anger burning somewhere in his belly, driving each punch, each thrusting kick. He spun, his leg cocking, then lashing out. He tottered for a moment on the edge of balance, recovered…his vision was blurring, the dark empty room fading. Air poured like liquid down his throat. The patterns were driving him now, holding him up, moving him like a purposeful tide. He kicked out again, seeing a face, or something like a face, on the distant edge of his blackening vision, bushy brows, intense eyes, a background of stars…. He felt he could brush the face with his fingertips, break it with the torque of his instep, but he lost it, the face or whatever it was, and fell, the mat slamming hard against his shoulder, the side of his head.

  Galaxies created themselves in vast blooms of light, all in the small universe behind his eyes. He rolled onto his back and sucked in air. His eyes blinked at the sweat flooding his vision. He put out a hand to touch whatever had been there, but it was gone. Soon, he thought.

  Sight came back slowly, the room leaching into him like a slow dawn. He sat up, stood, bounced on the balls of his feet while he cooled down, until his breath was no longer a shriek in his throat.

  He went to his room, threw off the soaked sweats, showered. As the warm mists rose around him, he felt the tingle of anticipation. He’d look behind the medicine cabinet door after drying off, not before. As if he didn’t care.

  When he looked, the cartridge was still there. Satisfaction danced from his fingertips as he peeled the tape away. He drew on slacks and a T-shirt and put the cartridge in his back pocket. As he stepped out of the room and locked the door, he heard the telephone begin to ring.

  Outside he chose a mirrored canyon and began walking, heading toward the dim shadow of the mountains beyond. It was early evening. Cars slid dimly through gridded streets. People were pouring out of apartments and restaurants, moving along the concrete. The interface between the condecos was lively, full of people looking for fun, for something new, hustling each other. At a fast-food store Steward bought a plastic bottle of beer, and vatshrimp in a red chili sauce. He ate dinner as he walked.

  The buildings diminished in size. This was the old part of town now, winding streets cut by bits of rugged terrain left in its natural state, like parks. The people were different, livelier, probably without as much money. They played instruments, passed bottles. Steward went into a liquor store and bought a bottle of old genever wrapped in foam insulation that would keep it cold for days. He drank as he walked, rekindling the fire inside him, feeling it spread warmly to his toes, his fingertips. The mountains were fully visible now, three peaks clothed in twilight gray. He kept walking.

  Cars hissed by on the dark street, trailing wisps of music. His leg muscles were driving him steadily uphill. The moon rose, a narrow sickle cutting through the fixed stars of satellites, power stations, orbital habitats. Shining on the metal cylinder where Natalie lived, alone with her postwar child. Cool breezes touched Steward’s face, his arms. The air smelled of pine.

  In another hour he was in the foothills, still moving. He sipped the genever whenever he felt his fires threatening to burn low. He was surrounded by a darkness that seemed tangible, friendly, like the inside of a tented blanket. Through the pines he glimpsed occasional glimmers, distant houses stuck to the rising slope like limpets. He walked toward the moon.

  When he came to a place where he couldn’t see any more lights above him, he stopped. He took a couple of slow swallows of genever and turned, looking at the jeweled spiderweb of the city below, the flashing red lights on the upper corners of the glass towers. Coleopter turbines moaned somewhere in the distance. He sat down, crossing his legs in front of him, and wondered if a telephone, somewhere, was ringing for him. Carefully, Steward imagined the sound.

  I’m getting there, he thought. I’m getting near the center. The cartridge, in his back pocket, dug into his flesh. He ignored it and took another drink. Lights guttered through a haze of rising air. Wind moved high in the pines but failed to stir the hair on his scalp. The wind sounded like a million people cheering, all seated around him in some dark and vast stadium. Cheering what he was becoming.

  *

  In the morning, unshaven, unbathed, reeking of juniper gin, he had some difficulty hitching a ride back into town. He’d slept on needles, under a blanket of boughs, and there was pine sap in his hair, staining his clothes. He filled his empty bottle with spring water and sipped it as he walked most of the way to the hospital.

  He could hear Dr. Ashraf’s voice murmuring i
n the sound of his room’s air conditioning. Protesting. Telling him he had to forget what he thought he knew, what he thought he cared about. Telling him to make his own life without reference to a deformed, crippled past.

  “Fuck that, Doc,” he said out loud. “They cut you into chunks with a knife and I bet they never even told you why.”

  If you wish to find the unclouded truth, he told himself, do not concern yourself with right or wrong. Conflicts with right and wrong are a sickness of the mind.

  The oldest Zen poem. He liked the sound of it.

  He called Ardala at work and told her he was checking out of the hospital.

  “What happened to you yesterday? I was calling. Police again?”

  “Can I stay with you till I get some work?”

  She laughed. “Why not? Stop by for the key.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Steward showered, changed, and packed. His possessions filled one small athletic bag. He put the bag on the bed, took a last look around the room. His gaze lit on the vid, and hesitated. His hand moved involuntarily to his back pocket, feeling the outline of the vid cartridge through crisp denim.

  Kill the Buddha, he thought.

  He put the cartridge in the vid set and pressed the ERASE button. He thought of the variable-lattice alloy threads that filled the cartridge, the video coded on their molecular structure, and then he imagined them all changing, the message disappearing, becoming void. As he looked into the blank face of the set, it seemed to him as if his reflection was sharing a secret with him.

  The clerk was surprised when Steward told him he was leaving the hospital. “Your course of treatment isn’t over,” he said.

  “I’m not sick. I’ve adjusted.” Steward crossed his heart. “Honest.”

  “But it’s already paid for.”

  “Maybe I’ll come back later. If I fuck up.”

  He signed a form that made him responsible for himself and added his thumbprint. Before he left the lobby, he reached for the bracelet on his left wrist, hooked it with two fingers, pulled. It stretched like mint licorice, then snapped. He put it in an ashtray and then stepped out onto the street.

  Sounds boiled up around him. Noonday heat. Realities reflected in bright mirror glass.

  Steward felt right at home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Steward went through the heavy security in front of the condeco’s door and registered as a guest, a process that included thumbprinting an agreement to comply with the rules of the condecology’s constitution. As usual, this was based on the concept of “self-limiting options,” which so far as Steward could tell meant the inhabitants mutually agreed not to think about certain aspects of reality that might prove troubling. The rules here were fairly liberal, Steward saw, and forbade him to possess or distribute weapons, certain recreational drugs, named types of religious or political literature, proscribed software, and the more extreme forms of vidporn. Public nudity was forbidden, cohabitation was all right. Watching vid or headvid on channels not licensed by the condeco was grounds for expulsion. Steward was given a six weeks’ temporary pass, took the elevator to Ardala’s apartment. Once there, he walked among the small rooms, just orienting himself.

  The apartment had all the signs of the upwardly mobile: tasteful furniture, small alloy-and-crystal tables, a flat liquid-crystal video display hung on the wall. Abstract wall paintings, all desert tones, that were careful not to make any kind of statement.

  The intention of the decor—the careful abstraction of all hint of personality—was carelessly sabotaged by the artifacts of habitation: Ardala’s laundry scattered over the furniture, a few of her niece’s bright plastic toys sitting where her niece had left them, the jumble of filled ashtrays and cigarette lighters, the wineglasses misted with fingerprints, the cream blur of scansheet printouts, half-worked crosswords, and dogeared issues of magazines called Gals and Guys, which turned out to be weekly publications in which the unemployed advertised their talents. A turtle-shaped floor-cleaning robot wandered hopelessly among the ruins. The only place that was spotless was the kitchen, which she apparently never used. Steward looked in the refrigerator and found only wine and a few vegetables.

  Steward remembered furnishing the apartment in Kingston he’d shared with Natalie—how they went to fifteen stores before they could agree on a kitchen table, a rectangular transparency supported by a single twisting column of orbital alloy, seeming too thin to support the weight of the glass…. It had been the first piece of furniture Steward had ever bought new.

  Steward and Natalie had always kept their series of apartments spotless, the glass table shining. It had seemed a sort of military virtue to care for their equipment.

  He hadn’t really noticed the litter the first time he’d come here. The lights had been off when they came in and never really got turned on. The second time, he’d been bothered. He was still thinking like an Icehawk.

  Now he didn’t mind at all. He was something else now.

  He paced across the carpet. Fabric scratched his bare feet. His mind hummed, a blur of ideas that hadn’t yet taken shape, flickering, assembling, dissolving without his conscious thought, moving against a background of stars.

  His mind elsewhere, he stepped out for supplies. He bought the makings for salmon en croûte and, just because he felt like celebrating, two bottles of champagne. There weren’t any glasses, so he washed the dishes.

  Ardala came home with perspiration smearing her butterfly-wing makeup and dark sweat stains under her arms. Steward poured her a glass of champagne while she cursed her boss, the heat wave that Steward hadn’t noticed, the crowds after work, the awfulness of the boring people she met in the elevator. She threw her clothes into the bedroom, drew a cool bath, and drank the champagne. Steward, carrying the bottle, followed her into the bathroom. It smelled of the scented oil she’d added to the bath. He watched Ardala as he poured champagne for her, the small tanned breasts with their nipples that bobbed in and out of the water, the knees rising like islets, the dark submerged pubic moss. He put the bottle down and began to pull off his shirt.

  He remembered waves slapping at his shoulders as he lay atop Natalie on the shelving sand of Port Royal, partly hidden from view by pink and turquoise Jamaican boats bobbing in the warm bay…. About a hundred yards away a congregation of local Pentecostals was singing songs about rapture and redemption and the Glory of the Coming of the Lord, their high-pitched keening cries of praise echoing Natalie’s salt moans. Across the bay the Coherent Light ziggurat glowed in black self-contained hubris. Fish struck painlessly at their legs and thighs. The night had seemed full of certainty and love. Under them was the Port Royal of Henry Morgan, built on buccaneer pride and booty, which a backhand swipe of history had slid right into the warm welcoming sea, just as the whirlwind that was Sheol would sweep away Steward, Natalie, the certainty that was Coherent Light, the certainty and pride that had come from humanity’s sole possession of the vast universe….

  “Hey,” Ardala said. “This hurts my back.”

  “Okay,” Steward said. “Let’s switch places.”

  From his position Steward admired the arch of Ardala’s throat as she threw her head back, eyes closed, intent on her pleasure. Her sun-browned skin outlined the hollows of her clavicles, the bony points of her shoulders. When she came, she pushed her arm under his head and bent over him, her back arching, to make her choked whimpers right into his ear…. He put his arms around her, holding her close. The sensation of her breath on his ear, the sounds she was making, brought him to a sudden, unexpected climax. He heard, for a moment, the voice of the whirlwind.

  They finished the bottle of champagne lying in the bath, Ardala half-lying on him, her arm still under his head. Little threads of sperm floated densely in the water amid rainbow dots of bath oil. Ardala stirred the sperm with a finger. “Might as well give the homunculi a ride,” she said. “One last thrill before they go down the drain.”

  “The
salmon should be ready,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

  “You should have saved your money,” Ardala said. “I know you don’t have much. From now on, have dinner on me.”

  “I wanted to.”

  “What am I going to do with all that wheat flour you bought? I never bake.”

  She rose, water sliding in rainbow sheets down her flanks, and Steward kissed her, crawled out of the bath, and reached for a towel. He went to the kitchen, put their dinner on plates, and opened the other bottle of champagne. He brought the bottle back into the bathroom. Ardala had wrapped herself in one towel and was rubbing her hair with another. He poured champagne for her. She dropped the towel and took her glass. She drank, combed her hair, followed him to where he’d set dinner.

  “I’m going to try to get a job in one of the policorps,” Steward said after they’d eaten.

  Ardala looked up at him and crossed one leg over the other. Behind where she sat on a white plastic chair, a self-polarizing window resisted the sun, darkening the view of a bright aluminum-alloy expressway headed south to Phoenix.

  “You don’t have the money to buy in, right?” she asked. “You could do okay on their exam, but your knowledge is fifteen years out of date and you won’t be in the two percent they take for free. What’s left is terran indentureship, and that takes years.”

  “An Outward Policorps. Starbright seems like a good one. Into transportation. I think I’d like to travel.”

  Ardala frowned and reached across the table for a Xanadu, a blend of marijuana and mentholated tobacco. She flicked on a lighter. “You haven’t been listening.”

  “Yeah, I have. But I just want to get into space. I’ll figure out a way.”

  She drew on her cigarette and looked moodily out the window, where the brilliant serpent writhed its way to the Valley of the Sun. With her thumb, she rubbed an invisible smudge between her eyebrows. “Is space all that great?” she asked. She held out her cigarette.