“Have you noticed anything different with me?” she asked, afraid of the answer and covering it with transparently false nonchalance.
He thought it over while chewing bacon. “You’re questioning Lear and BZRK less. I mean, maybe it’s just that you’ve got more responsibility. But you used to be more suspicious, I guess. More critical.”
She thought about that. “Yeah, maybe so.
“I’ll help you look for wire.”
Plath hesitated and felt herself blush. She filled her mouth with egg. If she was still wrong, if somehow Keats was the person running the biot, or at least knew about it, then he would never find any wire. It could be a way to determine his loyalty. If he found—
She cut herself off in midthought as reality dawned: there was no way to determine loyalty. Ever. Keats might be loyal today and some nano creature of either side might be wiring him to switch sides tomorrow.
“It’s still inside me,” she said. “Maybe it’s trapped in my liver or whatever, but it’s still in me.” She nodded and wiped her mouth, then set her plate in the sink. “Yes,” she said decisively. “The aneurysm will keep. Help me look for wire. I want to know where it all is. And help me kill this thing, whatever and whoever it is.”
“And pull the wire?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t answer for so long that Keats thought she must not have heard him.
“And pull the wire?” he repeated, more insistently this time.
She shook her head. “Not yet, Noah.”
After that she wouldn’t look at him.
The other person making an interesting discovery was Imelda Suarez. Lieutenant Imelda Suarez, dammit. Hopefully there was an extra paycheck to come with that.
The Celadon, the mother ship, had dropped anchor six miles out from Cathexis Base, hundreds of miles from McMurdo. The ice was thick and crusty here, and no way the ship could edge up to the dock, not for another month at least. She had gone ashore in the Jade Monkey, running easily up onto the beach and roaring along until the LCAC found its home, a hangar and refit facility they all called the Blower Barn.
As soon as she’d done the inevitable paperwork, Suarez headed toward the Office—the administrative building. Things at Cathexis Base tended to be named simply, usually by function, but with an occasional touch of wit: the Blower Barn, the Chiller (a poorly heated dorm), the Toasty (the newer, warmer dorm), the Club, the Link (the satellite dishes), the Office.
In the center of the base, acting as a sort of central park, was a glass dome raised up on a skid-mounted platform. It was seldom transparent—condensation saw to that—but it clearly housed green, living things, ranging from small elm trees to tall grasses to irises and roses. But for the most part the Andalite Dome, or AD, as it was called for some obscure reason, was more practically planted with cabbages, broccoli, romaine lettuce, carrots, and onions.
The produce wasn’t anything like enough even to feed Cathexis Base, but it helped, and it was the place to go when you felt the ice start to close in on you.
As Suarez did now. Seeing the smudge of green inside the sweat-dripping bubble, she felt herself drawn to it, and decided checking in at the Office could wait. Getting into the dome was a process—you had to shed your gear and walk in wearing a T-shirt and pants alone. And you had to pass through a double airlock.
It was while in the airlock that she ran into Charlie Bronk.
“Coming or going?” he asked her.
“Just got in,” she said. Bronk was a small man with a too-tough name. He was a mechanic who often worked with Suarez. They weren’t friends, but they were cordial.
“I’m supposed to head out to Forward Green,” he said. “One of their cats is wonky, needs a new fuel injector.”
“There’s no one out there can do it?”
Bronk laughed. “At Forward Green? Pff. Those are scientists and God knows what all out there. Sally Wills is the only one can turn a screwdriver, and she’s on an evac to Wellington.” He lowered his voice. “A psych thing. She lost her shit.”
“Damn. Sally Wills? The redhead?”
Bronk nodded. “I don’t suppose … I mean, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s my son’s bar mitzvah and I’m missing it. I was going to Skype.”
“You can’t Skype from Forward Green?”
“There’s no communication in or out of Forward except to here. Security.”
She was on the verge of asking him why there would be secrecy, but thought better of it. That was the kind of question that might be thrown in your face some day if there was a problem. Cathexis Inc. might not be military, but when it came to secrecy, they sometimes went the military one better.
“I could do it,” Suarez said with a shrug. “Of course you’ll owe me. And I don’t mean you cover for me on cleanup. I mean something more like you pull a shift. Three shifts.”
They agreed on one shift and a round of clean-up duty. And that was how Suarez ended up on a loud chopper heading almost due south. It was a hellish ride. The wind had come up. In fact, at the halfway point the pilots discussed turning back. Antarctic weather wasn’t something you took risks with.
But satellite imagery gave them a nominally clear hour before the hammer came down, so they went forward.
If Cathexis Base was businesslike and humane, Forward Green was a bizarre cross between survivalist compound and Ritz-Carlton resort. From the frosty window of the chopper she could see that the buildings were arranged in a sort of diamond around what was very certainly the only swimming pool on the continent. The pool was covered of course, and as sweaty as the Andalite Dome at Cathexis Base. It was an ostentatious symbol of wealth, because water—actual, liquid water—was one of the rarest and most expensive of commodities. It spoke of a profligate use of power—the heat to keep the pool warm, the light to make it shine, the lift capacity to bring it all together in this place.
It was built aboveground, of course—the shifting ice would have crushed anything cut into it. It was covered by a plastic roof that formed three peaks, vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House.
Suarez guessed that the power source had to be a nuclear reactor. But how had that been approved? The green movement had made peace with nuclear power, but here? On the ice?. And in private hands?
Once she’d looked beyond that eye-popping artifact of another world, Suarez took in the rest of the place. The buildings were identical—seven three-story ski-mounted structures, with an empty slot where an eighth building might go someday.
The windows aimed out toward the ice were small, with metallic shutters that could be mechanically closed against the wind. The windows facing in, toward the pool, were larger than anything she’d ever seen before in energy-conscious Antarctica. Though they, too, were equipped with strong steel shutters.
She imagined what the place would look like locked down, with all those shutters closed. And then she noticed the four half-buried towers two hundred yards out from each point on the diamond.
“I’ll be damned if those aren’t gun emplacements,” she muttered. Not that she saw anything like weapons.
A mile away to the south and barely visible because the wind was now blowing crystals of ice through the air was a larger structure—long, low, and unadorned—that could only be some sort of hangar.
That’s where the souped-up hovercraft would be.
It hit her then full force: they didn’t have anyone who could fix a fuel injector? At a facility where they were building jet-powered hovercraft? Bullshit.
She hadn’t cleverly exploited an opening to reach Forward Green: she’d been lured there.
Lystra and Bug Man left Stockholm not by way of Arlanda Airport but by car, to a private airfield fifty miles out of town, out into the landscape of snow and dark pine trees.
Bug Man had only a light parka that George had supplied, in no way sufficient to deal with a Swedish winter. The run from the car to the welcoming light of the jet was enough to freeze him, but Lystra seemed indifferent, still weari
ng her blood-drenched red dress—though she had swapped her shoes for a pair of shearling boots. She would look almost cute, Bug Man thought, if she were younger. And a whole lot less insane.
It was warm on the plane, which took off within minutes of the door closing, soaring up into the night.
“Look!” Lystra said, and drew him out of his seat to look through the window on her side.
The sky was an eerie light show, green against black, the stars all rendered irrelevant. The green was a veil, translucent, shimmering.
“Aurora borealis,” Lystra said. “The northern lights.” She nodded. “We get them in the south sometimes, too. You’ll see.”
Bug Man watched for a while, acutely aware of her nearness. Crazy, yes. Too old for him, yes. Still …
She must have sensed it because she laughed, an almost girlish sound, and pushed him back to his seat.
But then she stood up, turned her back to him, and said, “Help me with the zipper.”
Bug Man swallowed hard. Okay, yes, he’d thought about it. But seriously? With a woman who had his sanity and life in her hands? He’d watched the TV as instructed, and he had seen the Nobel madness. He had even seen a fleeting shot of Lystra dancing and twirling away from the carnage.
God only knew what the woman would do to him if he disappointed her.
He drew the zipper down. It snagged halfway and he had to tug at it for a bit, all the while with his nose just inches from her back.
Most of what he could see was tattooed. Blues and reds and greens. He couldn’t make out the patterns, except that most of it seemed to be faces. He saw eyes staring, mouths twisted in screams.
“Damn,” he whispered, and winced, hoping she hadn’t heard.
“You like my ink?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said too quickly.
“Want to see more? Want to see my latest one?”
He froze. Just absolutely froze. She let her dress fall to the floor.
“Oh … shit,” he said. There were faces on her back, on her behind, on her flanks. Not every inch was covered—maybe half of the available flesh.
More than enough. It was a horror show.
Faces. Men, women, one that might even be a child. All in agony or rage or some combination of the two.
He couldn’t breathe. He did not want to see more. He did not want her to turn around.
But she did.
Slowly, slowly; savoring his fear, the fear she could hear in his raspy breathing, in the way it caught in his throat.
Her front was even more horrific. Faces from hell were staring out at him. Two were new, still healing.
She pointed to the freshest-looking one with a coyly bent finger. She was being cute. She was playing with him. But oh, God, there was no way to fake this, no way for him to force his features into anything like a pleasing expression.
“That’s a man named Janklow. He didn’t want to sell me his medical testing company. Because of him, yeah, the whole game was delayed.”
Her breasts were just inches from him. Her eyes were the eyes of a rabid dog, focused on him with an intensity that made him tremble.
“Don’t you want to know who they all are?” she asked, and the hard, sadistic voice he’d heard before had replaced the cute come-hither tone.
He managed to shake his head. No. He didn’t have a single question. No, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to be back in England. He wanted to be back at Tesco, shopping for his mother’s onions. His fists were clenched so tight they ached.
“Sure, you want to know,” she said. “These are all the ones whose lives I have taken from them.”
“That actress? Do you remember, yeah? You must have read about it, seen it on TV? She dug her own eyes out with a knife. It was intense, Bug Man, very intense.” She tapped the other still-healing tat, on her sculpted hip bone. America’s Sweetheart in blue ink, bleeding red blood from her gouged eyes.
“What did she—”
“What did she do? Oh, she wouldn’t even remember, didn’t recognize me at all, why would she? I was in a hospital for a while for … stress?” She threw her head back and laughed. “Stress? I was crazy as a loon.”
Was? Past tense? Bug Man wanted to ask. But not as much as he wanted to go on living.
“My pap and mam, that’s what they had me call them. My guardians.” She spit the word. “The losers my daddy dumped me on. They started talking to me after I killed them.” She covered each breast with a hand, lifted them slightly so he could see the faces tattooed there. They appeared to have been crushed. Their eyes were …
“They would talk to me. ‘Be a good girl, Lyssie. Pray to the Lord for strength, Lyssie.’ Sometimes though, they would give me useful business advice.” She frowned at the memory, then thankfully she turned away, walked to a narrow closet, and pulled out jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was green with a big letter C over an outline of Antarctica.
Bug Man breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Ugly sweatshirt, but so much better than looking at that torture chamber on her body.
“I went crazy, yeah. Into the nuthouse with me. I was rich by then, had my businesses going pretty good, but yeah, off the deep end, yeah. Meds did nothing; they still talked to me.”
Your conscience, you sick bitch, Bug Man thought.
“Not my conscience,” she said, for all the world as if he’d said it out loud. He had to resist the urge to cover his mouth with his hand lest he say something to get himself killed.
“Psychotic break. Not functional. Everything falling apart … and he came back. Daddy. He said he would if it came to it, if, you know … if. I guess he thought I might eventually get weirded out over his killing my mother. Drink?”
She poured them each several fingers of bourbon. Bug Man gulped his down. He needed to pee desperately, but this was so not the time to ask to be excused.
“Nuts, yeah. So back he came, my daddy. And he said, ‘I know about this man, this scientist. He’s doing some weird stuff with nanotechnology. Maybe he can help. Only he refused, you see, and Daddy couldn’t kill him and neither could I, because, well, he was protected.”
“Burnofsky?”
“Burnofsky?” She shook her head. “But good guess. No, it was Grey McLure. He was just starting—freaking out over his wife dying and he couldn’t save her with his new toys. Then his daughter and the aneurysm, yeah. Yeah. People went crazy, though, see? Off this new thing he’d invented. This biot!”
The word came out in a roar that made Bug Man jump back.
“This biot. So, maybe, yeah, maybe if a dying biot would make a sane person crazy, hey. Maybe, right? Yeah? Maybe the other way, too.”
“Jesus. They gave you a biot.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. My very own. And then they killed it. And you know what? It worked. It worked. I wasn’t crazy anymore.”
The hell you weren’t, Bug Man did not say.
“The tattoos stopped talking to me. I could cope, yeah. I could manage. Making tons of money. And then I saw it—saw the game. Saw the way I could do it. Make a whole new world, yeah.”
She fell silent then, staring down into her drink.
Bug Man stood on wobbly legs and went to the bathroom. In the glaring fluorescence he stared at his own face as if staring at a ghost. He was shaking. He felt an urge to sit down and empty his bowels, but who knew what the crazy woman would do?
Oh, that’s right, he told himself. Not crazy. No, she was all cured.
He peed and washed his hands, and having used up all his stalling tactics went back out.
Lystra Reid had not moved a muscle.
He sat down.
And unprompted she said, “Oh, and the actress? Sandra Piper? Bitch cut me off in traffic.”
ARTIFACT
Plath: I need Caligula.
Lear: Name the place.
SIXTEEN
The news was all about the Nobel madness. Twenty-four hours a day. MSNBC, Fox, CNN.
Only the BBC made a connection to the biza
rre case of the New Zealand cops.
Only the Web site Buzzfeed made a connection between the Nobel madness and the inexplicable suicide of Sandra Piper.
Everyone, though, connected it to the bizarre death of the American, Chinese, and Brazilian heads of state.
Fear was spreading. A sharp observer would already be able to spot a wariness in people’s eyes and in their words. There was a feeling in the air.
Fear. Like the scent of smoke. Like the distant rumble of tank engines and clanking tracks. Like sirens in the night.
The theories about the cause were: food poisoning, mass hysteria, and some sort of terrorist attack using a form of nerve agent.
Only Cracked.com actually listed nanotech on its “8 Ways to Explain the Big Brain Meltdown.”
There were several loops of footage that ran more or less continuously online and on TV. One was a cell-phone video of a scene of madness from inside the Golden Hall. A second showed a bloodstained woman in a party dress rushing from the hall amid a panicked crowd, then suddenly launching herself at a passing woman and biting savagely into her neck. Another showed a former American secretary of state waving madly at invisible flying enemies.
Of course there were also clips of the new president looking solemn and vowing to give the Swedish government any assistance they required. Ditto footage of the British prime minister, the French president, and a long list of folks who had no idea what was going on, all vowing to get to the bottom of it.
Rye ergot. That was the first guess. Rye ergot, a disease caused by fungus that grows on some foods and can cause symptoms similar to an LSD overdose.
Tests for rye ergot were all negative.
“Just like Nijinsky,” Keats said. “It’s all connected.” He was watching the BBC coverage. “It’s all the same bloody thing, isn’t it.”
He was talking to no one. Plath was out, and though a part of Keats was with her—sitting on his hands, waiting for a cue—he felt alone. Abandoned. Both here and there. Both large and small. Slumped into his chair and on edge, ready for a race. Not for the first time, he wondered mordantly what he had to fear from madness. Wasn’t this already madness?