The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 6

  The sound of footsteps came down the stairs. Trellis turned from the pit. Chastity led the Marine Corps patch man toward them. Her hand held his as they walked into the chamber. The man’s knuckles were white. His eyes were closed. Trellis imagined how hard he must be gripping.

  “You might not want to see this.” The man with the knife pulled his hood over his head.

  Trellis backed away until his hands met the wall.

  Chastity stood on her tiptoes to whisper into the Marine Corps man’s ear. He mouthed something back to her, and with evident difficulty, let go of her hand. She directed him to the edge of the pit, then faced him toward Trellis, his eyes still closed.

  Without a word, the hooded man drew his knife across the candle, as if he were coating the blade. He stepped around the bench to stand beside the man. Their breathing filled the room along with the thudding rush of Trellis’s pulse. The hooded man met Trellis’s eyes. “It’s a one to one trade. One life. One bomb.”

  He plunged the blade into the man’s chest and then pushed him over the edge in a single move.

  Trellis blinked. Except for a runnel of blood creeping down the hooded man’s wrist and a single drop that fell to the stone floor with a hollow plink, there was no motion and no sound. The rush of Trellis’s beating heart seemed to have stopped. No one breathed.

  “What did you do?” asked Trellis, his voice a dry squeak.

  Jennifer said, “Made the world safer.”

  Pushing himself away from the wall, Trellis approached the pit’s edge. The hooded man and Jennifer moved aside. From the pit, air continued to push steadily out, just as clean and dry as before.

  The hooded man crossed the chamber and knelt at a small chest. He took out a towel and carefully wiped the knife blade. A hand touched Trellis’s wrist. Jennifer stood beside him. “Somewhere in a Kansas silo or a Russian submarine in the Atlantic or an arms depot in India, what used to be a warhead is now an inert hunk of metal, and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people are a little safer. You need the right knife, the right spell, and the throat of the world.” She swallowed hard. “And a suicide bomber.”

  “Did you really kill him?” Nothing about the scene struck him as real. The feeling that he could still be dreaming came to him again. In a moment, he would be back to pursuing starlets, and maybe this time they wouldn’t be too slippery to hold. He clenched his fingernails into the palm of his hand, but the pain did nothing to wake him. Was the Marine Corps man still falling? Trellis thought about the line of people waiting outside the trailer, all the people he’d seen gathered at the trailer since yesterday.

  “Not killing,” said Jennifer. “He allowed it himself. There’s a difference.”

  Blood rushed from Trellis’s face. He swayed, and for a second he wondered what would happen if he fainted. “You’re monsters.”

  Jennifer’s eyes teared up. “Yes, I suppose we are. It’s hard to live with. I won’t have to for long. There’s a bomb with my name written on it in my future.” She still held his wrist. “There may be no forgiveness for us, what we do here, but we’re small monsters stopping giant ones, and the victims here are volunteers.”

  Chastity’s voice came down the stairs. “Are you ready for the next?” She sounded profoundly tired.

  Trellis twisted his wrist away, covered his nose and mouth as if the air were poisonous, a contagion to be blocked. Half way up the stairs, he nearly knocked over an old man wearing a bathrobe holding Chastity’s hand. In a blink Trellis stood inside the mall, gasping for breath. Soft music washed over him. A young mom balancing a toddler on her hip put a dollar in quarters into the rent-a-stroller display. Three teenager girls wearing ear phones talked animatedly as they looked into each others’ bags from The Gap. “That color would look so good on me,” said one. “Oh, you can borrow it whenever,” said her friend.

  Trying not to stagger, Trellis found an empty table in Café Court. Shoppers came and went carrying trays filled with pizza or hamburgers or rice bowls. Conversations babbled around him. After he’d sat for over an hour, his breathing settled but his muscles hung without an ounce of strength. The mall music played an instrumental version of Barry McGuire’s “The Eve of Destruction.” A string and piano rendition of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” followed.

  In the music he could hear the stone chamber breathing before the man with the Marine Corps patch pitched backward, the solid thud the knife made when it connected, like a fist hitting a watermelon. But he also heard air raid sirens and the chant of “duck and cover.” And for a long time his thinking locked into a droning mantra, the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns the light of a thousand suns (It was murder, wasn’t it, what he saw? Surely murder!). He caught himself sobbing. Seek safety now, he longed to shout to the patrons around him. SEEK … SAFETY … NOW, and he wondered how he could have gone day to day for all his years with such denial, such forgetfulness.

  How would he go on from today?

  Time passed. He knew it did. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he should do. All that mattered waited in a silver Airstream sitting on the edge of the parking lot, ten feet from passing traffic, a block from a Starbucks to the north, a block from Barnes and Noble to the south, and directly above the throat of the world, a deep, dry and hungry well.

  The night guy sat in the chair opposite Trellis. “Mall’s closing in twenty minutes, bud, and you haven’t started the evening check list. You all right?”

  Trellis leaned back. His vertebrae crackled. How long had he been hunched at the table? He looked around. A couple of the restaurants had pulled their security gates part way from the ceiling, even though they weren’t supposed to close up before the end of the day. The dark blue of twilight filled the skylights above.

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” His voice didn’t quiver, which surprised him.

  The night guy’s expression turned concerned.

  Trellis forced a smile. “Really, give me a minute.”

  Soon after the night guy left, Jennifer filled his seat. In the mall’s light her hair was more silver than gray and the age rays around her eyes were more pronounced.

  “I would have thought you would pull up stakes when I left.”

  Jennifer shook her head. “You wouldn’t call the police. Only people willing to come our way find us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but it occurred to him that the night guy wouldn’t have known what Trellis was talking about if he had asked him about the trailer.

  She wrapped her hands over his. “You didn’t answer me earlier. You do have nuclear nightmares, don’t you? You wake up at night so sick with fear you can hardly move? That’s why you came to us.”

  Trellis tried to remember. Did he have those dreams often? Were his dreams so horrible that he blocked them from his memory every night? With Jennifer’s warm hands covering his own, he was suddenly sure that he did. He’d always had the dreams. They truly were ghastly, and now that he knew, he doubted he would ever fall asleep again with peace in his heart.

  He thought Jennifer saw what he was thinking in his eyes. Maybe she’d said this very thing to other souls who quit denying what they’d known all along, who looked up and saw Damocles’s dangling sword. She said, “There’s magic in the world, Trellis. It’s not the magic you think about from fairytales, but it’s there just the same trying to protect you. There’s magic out there trying to save us all.”

  She squeezed his hands once. “There will be a place for you in line, Trellis. There will always be a place for you, when you’re ready.” She stood to leave. “I have to get back. Midnight’s coming.”

  OF LATE I DREAMT OF VENUS

  Like a shiny pie plate, Venus hung high in the observation alcove’s window, a full globe afire with sunlight. Elizabeth Audrey contemplated its placid surface. Many would say it was gorgeous. Alexander Pope called the bright light “the torch of Venus,” and some ancient astronomer, besotted with the wink
less glimmer, named the planet after the goddess of love and beauty. At this distance, clouded bands swirled across the shimmering lamp, illuminating the dark room. She held her hands behind her back, feet apart, watching the flowing weather patterns. Henry Harrison, her young assistant, sat at a console to the window’s side.

  “Soon,” he said.

  “Shhh.” She sniffed. The air smelled of cold machinery and air scrubbers, a tainted chemical breath with no organic trace about it.

  Beyond Venus’s wet light, a mantle of stars shown with measured steadiness. One slipped behind the planet’s fully lit edge. Elizabeth could measure their orbit’s progress by the swallowing and spitting out of stars.

  Elizabeth said, “Did you talk to the surgeon about your scar?”

  Henry touched the side of his face, tracing a line from the corner of his eye to his ear.

  “No. It didn’t seem important.”

  “You don’t need to live with it. A little surgery. You heal in deep sleep. Two hundred years from now when we wake, you’ll be… improved.” She lifted her foot from the floor with a magnetic click and then snapped down hard a few inches away. “I hate free fall. How long?”

  “Final countdown. We’ll be back in the carousel soon and you can have your weight again.”

  The scene from the window cast a mellow light. Silent. Grand. A poet would write about it if one were here.

  “Ahh,” said Elizabeth. A red pustule rose in the planet’s swirling atmosphere. She leaned forward, put her palms against the window. Orange light boiled in the clouds, spreading away from the bloody center, disrupting the bands. “It’s begun.”

  Henry read data on his screens. Input numbers. Checked other monitors. Tapped keys quickly. “A clean hit, on target.” He didn’t look at the actual show beyond, but watched his sensitive devices instead. “Beta should strike… now.”

  A second convulsion colored the disk, this one a brilliant white at its center which settled into a deep red, overlapping the first burst’s color. A third flash, duller, erupted on the globe.

  “Was that…?”

  “Perfect as your money could buy.”

  In the next ten minutes, four more hits. Elizabeth stood at the window while red and orange storms pulsed in Venus’s disk. Henry joined her, mirroring her stance. He pursed his lips. “You can see the dust. If this had been Earth, the dinosaurs would have died seven times.”

  The planet’s silver sheen faded somewhat, and lightning flashes flickered in the roiling confusion.

  “No dinosaurs ever walked there, Henry.”

  He sighed. “Venus has its own charms, or it did.”

  Elizabeth looked at him. The reflected light from the window caught in his dark eyes. They were the best part of him, the way they looked at her when he didn’t think she noticed. Sometimes she wished she could just fall in love with his eyes, but then she saw the scar, and he really was too short and so young, ten years shy of her forty, practically a child, although a brilliant and efficient one. She’d ask the surgeon on her own. Henry would hardly object to a few cosmetic changes while he slept. What else was there to do during the down time anyway except to improve? She had been considering thinning her waist a bit, toning her back muscles.

  Henry clopped back to his station, then studied figures on a screen she couldn’t see. “There are seismic irregularities, as predicted, making the final calculations more difficult, but the planet is spinning slightly faster now, just a bit. We’ve also pushed it out of its orbit a bit. The next series will bump it back. You’re one step closer to your new Earth.”

  She turned from him, irritated. “If Venus only becomes another Earth, I failed. We can make it better. A planet to be truly proud of. How are things on Earth, anyway?”

  His fingers flicked over the controls. “In the twenty-seven years we slept, your corporation in the asteroid belt has tripled in size, improving the ability to redirect asteroids above projections. We’re two years ahead of schedule there. The Kuiper Belt initiative is also ahead of schedule.” He reread a section. “We’re having trouble with the comet deflection plan. Lots of support for redirecting the Earth-crossing asteroids, but opposition to the comets. Some groups contest our aiming them all at Venus. There’s a lobby defending Halley’s Comet for its ‘historical and traditional values,’ as well as several groups who argue that ‘comets possess a lasting mythic and aesthetic relation with the people of Earth.’ The political wing of the advertising and public relations departments are working the problem, but they have requested budget increases.”

  Elizabeth snorted derisively. “Give them Halley’s Comet. It doesn’t have as much water as it used to anyway.”

  “Noted.” Henry sent the order. “Your investments and companies are sound.”

  “How is the United Nation’s terraforming project on Mars going?”

  “Badly. They’ve lost momentum.”

  “Too big of a project to run by democracies and committees. Too long.” She sighed. “If nothing needs my attention, then I suppose it’s time for bed.”

  Henry shut his monitors off, powered down the equipment. A metal curtain slid across the view window, separating them from Venus’s tortured atmosphere. “Two hundred years hardly seems like going to bed. Everyone I know will be dead when we awake.”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “They’re all twenty-seven years older than when you talked with them last. As far as they’re concerned, you’re the dead one.”

  A door opened in the center of the floor. Elizabeth looked down the ladder that connected the alcove with the rest of the habitat. The ladder rotated beneath her. She timed her step to land on the top rung, then moved down so she held the ladder, leaving her head and shoulders at floor level. The room turned slowly around her. “No second thoughts, Henry. You knew the cost going in.”

  He nodded at her. She saw in his eyes the yearning. The dream of a terraformed Venus hadn’t brought him onto the project, made him say good-bye to everyone he’d ever known, committed him to a project on a time scale never attempted.

  No, he came for her.

  The rotation turned her so she didn’t have to see his gaze. She continued down the ladder. Mostly she thought about the project and the long line of asteroids on their way to add their inertia to Venus’s spin, but below those thoughts ran a thread about Henry. She thought, as long as he remains a reliable assistant, what does it matter why he signed up? Henry Harrison isn’t the first man who worked for me because he wanted me.

  Two hundred years of suspended life, trembling on death’s edge, metabolism so slow that only the most sensitive instruments detected it. Busy nanomechs coursing through the veins, correcting flaws, patching breakdowns, keeping the protein machine whole and ready to function. Automatic devices moving the still limbs through a range of motion every day, maintaining joint flexibility, stretching muscles, reminding the body that it was alive because really, really, Elizabeth Audrey, the richest human being who ever lived, whose wealth purchased and sold nations, whose power now stretched over generations, was mostly dead. A whisper could end it.

  Maybe in her dreams she heard that deadly voice caressing her, and she would hear it for sure if she were a weaker woman, but if she did hear, she ignored it. Instead she dreamed of Venus transformed. A vision big enough for her ambition. A Venus fit for her feet. A planet done right, not like old Earth, sputtering in its wastes. A Venus fit for a queen.

  Elizabeth walked spinward in the carousel; the silky robe she donned after the doctors revived her flapped against her bare legs. Two hundred years didn’t feel bad, and the slimming in her waist gave her a limberness she didn’t remember from before. The air smelled fresher too, less metal-washed. It should, she thought. Much of her money was devoted to research and development.

  Henry joined her in the dining room for breakfast.

  “What’s the progress?” she asked. Bacon and egg scents seeped from the kitchen.

  He smiled. “How did you sleep? How are you feeling?
Good to see you. It’s only been two centuries.”

  Elizabeth waved the questions away. “Are we on schedule?”

  Henry shrugged. “As we projected, the plans evolved. There have been breakthroughs that make the job easier. We’ve shaded the planet with a combination of solar shields, aluminum dust rail-gunned from the moon, and both manned and unmanned reflective aerostat structures in the upper atmosphere, cooling it considerably, although we have a long way to go. An unforeseen benefit has been dry ice harvesting, which we’ve been selling to the U.N’s Mars project. Venus’s frozen greenhouse gasses are heating Mars. Of course, the bombardment of asteroids and comets has been continuous.”

  A young man, carrying a tray of covered plates, walked toward them from the kitchen. He wore his dark hair short, and his loose, pale shirt was buttoned all the way to his neck. He nodded at Henry as he put the tray in front of them, but he seemed to avoid looking at Elizabeth. Without waiting for thanks, he backed away.

  “Who was that?” Elizabeth uncovered a steaming omelet.

  “Shawcroft. He’s a bio-ecopoiesis engineer. Good man. He helped design an algae that grows on the underside of the aerostats for oxygen production. The surface is still too warm for biologicals.”

  Elizabeth tasted the omelet. The food made her stomach uneasy, and didn’t look as appetizing as she hoped. “What’s he doing serving me breakfast then?”

  Henry laughed. “To see you, of course. You’re the Elizabeth Audrey, asleep for two hundred years, but still pulling the strings. His career exists because of your investments. He won a lottery among the crew to bring out the tray.”

  “What about you? He acted like he knew you.”

  Uncovering his plate, Henry revealed a pancake under a layer of strawberries. “I’ve been awake for four years. He and I play handball almost every day.”

  Elizabeth chewed a small bite thoughtfully. Henry’s face did look older.

  “What did you think of my gift?”

  Henry touched the side of his face between his eye and ear. Without smiling he said, “For a couple of years I was mad as hell. I’m sorry you reminded me.” His fork separated a strawberry and chunk of pancake from the rest.