Joe Haldeman - The Coming

“I’ve always wondered how sincere he was about that. Perhaps we’ll find out.”

Rory got up. “I’ll have some tentative scheduling for both of you tomorrow morning. Have to go confer with my second-in-command, over a beer.”

“Thanks for your patience, Rory,” Deedee said. “Difficult man to work with.”

“Or against.” Rory gave them a parting smile and closed the door quietly.

“You’ve met the governor before, Mal?”

“Twice, at formal receptions. This is the first time I’ve had an extended colloquy with him.”

“He’s a piece of work. Not really that stupid, I assume.”

“No. He has normal intelligence, or at least the equivalent in animal cunning.” They both laughed. “And vast reserves of ignorance to work with. I think Pauling’s going to be much more of a problem.”

“He’s going to take over.”

“Already has. At least we don’t have to deal directly with LaSalle.”

Deedee nodded wearily. Carlie LaSalle, president of the United States, made Governor Tierny look like an intellectual. A completely artificial product of her party’s analysts and social engineers, she gave the people exactly what they wanted: a cube personality who was nice to the core, with a gift for reading lines and a suitably inoffensive personal history. She was an anti-intellectual populist who had presided over four years of stagnation in the arts and sciences, and had just been reelected.

“We’ll be walking on eggshells,” Deedee said.

“I was thinking bulls and china shops, actually, with Garcia. I like him but think we’re well rid of him. He won’t disguise his contempt.”

“No; he’s no diplomat.”

“What about Dr. Bell?”

“Aurora? She’s pretty levelheaded.”

“She was pushing Pauling harder than I liked.”

“Mal, be realistic. Most of the professors in my department would gleefully take a blunt instrument to that son of a bitch. Besides, Aurora made the discovery, for Christ’s sake. We’re stuck with her.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “This is the problem. This is the problem all around. We’re stuck with Tierny. We’re stuck with Pauling and LaSalle. We already have to do a goddamned minuet around them. It would be real nice if we had more control over our own side. Our own half of the equation.”

Deedee took a mirror and a blue needle and touched up the edges of her cheek tattoo, which was fading. Someday she would get a permanent one, to cover the cancer scar, but her dermie said to wait. It might grow.

She worked for half a minute, frowning. “So be plain, Mal. What do you want me to do about Aurora?”

“Well… as you say, we can’t just dump her. I guess I just want to know more about her. Find some weakness we can exploit. Is that blunt enough?”

“Si, si. I’ll put Ybor Lopez on it. He’s trustworthy and a real computer magician. I’ll have him put together a dossier on her. I… well, I have something to make him cooperative.” She snapped her bag shut. “For you, Mal. Just this once.”

“I appreciate it. I won’t abuse the information.”

“Oh, mierda. I know you won’t. You owe me one, though.”

“You have it.” They got up together and left the room.

Deedee wished she had kept her mouth shut. Traitor to her class—she’d been a professor a lot longer than she’d been an administrator. And to pull this on Aurora, of all people. She’d never been anything but helpful and kind. Ybor would probably find out she was an ex-con or a dope addict. Like him.

They started to go down the stairs, but heard the crowd murmuring three floors down: reporters. They backtracked and used the fire stairs.

Deedee’s office was two buildings away. She hurried through the noontime glare, the cancers on her face and shoulder saying, “You forgot your hat.” The sunscreen was supposed to be good for eight hours, but she’d been sweating. In that air-conditioned room in Washington.

Lopez was locking up the office as she came out of the elevator. “Ybor,” she said. “Hold it. We have to talk.”

They went back into the outer office, a spare uncluttered place where Ybor ran interference for her. She sat him down in the visitors’ chair and perched herself on the desk.

“I need your expertise, Ybor. And your silence.”

“Something illegal, Dr. Whittier?”

“No. Shady, but not illegal.”

“Okay. You can trust me.”

She let out a long breath and chose her words. She used Spanish. “—I don’t have to trust you, Ybor. Because I have you by the hair.”

“No comprendo.”

“—I’ve seen you shooting up, twice. Tell me it’s diabetes.”

He slumped. “How the hell did you ever see me?”

“—What is it?”

“Se llama ‘José y María.’”

“Some kind of DD?”

“Sí.” A designer drug. “—You give them some blood or sperm and they customize it.”

“—As much as you know about science, you let them do that?”

“—It’s hard to explain. You don’t do anything?”

“—Nothing big. Nothing illegal.”

“De acuerdo.” Ybor switched to English. “Who do you want me to kill?”

“I just need your jaquismo. Get into and out of university personnel files and some municipal records without leaving any tracks. Try to find some dirt.”

“So who’s the villain?”

“She’s a nice person, not a villain. I just need some leverage. Aurora Bell.” She looked oddly expectant.

He shook his head slowly. “So what happens if I don’t find anything? She’s not exactly Mata Hari.”

“I don’t expect you to find something that’s not there. Just do your best and be extra careful. How long?”

“Oh… this afternoon. Say four.”

“Thanks.” She slid off the desk. “Sorry about, you know. Anytime you want to go into rehab…”

“Yeah, well. You know. It’s not like that.”

“I don’t know, actually. But so long as it doesn’t interfere with your work, it’s not a problem. Not for me.” She walked out, leaving the door open.

He shut the door and locked it and leaned against it for a few seconds, eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched. Then he went to the supply closet and unlocked the backup files safe, a fireproof metal block to which only he had access. He took out the José y María hypo, dropped his pants, and put the applicator nozzle flat against the large vein in his penis. He fired it, wincing, and rubbed the sting away. By the time he had his pants pulled up and the hypo locked back in the safe, the drug was coming on.

He sat down and reveled in it, the clean pure power that roared through his veins, the light that glowed from inside. The absolute confidence. What could she know about this? He felt a moment of compassion, of sorrow, for people who went through life without having this. A gift from his own body, grown from his own seed. There was nothing wrong with it. It was the law that was wrong.

To work. Leave no tracks, all right. No voice commands. No backup crystal. Go under the machine’s intelligence and use it like its twentieth-century predecessors: simple commands executed sequentially.

He did it all the time, for fun and the department’s profit, as Whittier well knew. It was winked at; probably half the science and engineering departments had someone like Ybor, who could make an hour of computing time look like fifteen minutes. (The missing time would show up on accounts like Slavic Languages and Art History, who didn’t have Ybors.) The same sort of skills could slip through the light encryptation that protected the privacy of personnel records.