Boundary

  Tonight, as had become their daily habit, she'd accompanied him back to his cabin after dinner. Madeline's own cabin was not much farther along the ring. Finally, after several weeks of that ritual, Joe had worked up the nerve to invite her in.

  "So what's playing at Cinema Joe?" Madeline asked, her hands on her hips as she surveyed the cabin.

  "Entertainments old and new. What's your pleasure?"

  "Movies suit me fine."

  "Not into the fancy gaming?"

  Madeline shook her head. "That's definitely A.J.'s territory, not mine." She hesitated fractionally. "I prefer to let someone else do the entertaining."

  "Genre? Time frame?"

  "Well . . . " The unexpected blush looked especially pretty. "I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you."

  "Unless you're about to profess a love for McDonald's cuisine, that would be impossible."

  "Almost as bad. I like superhero movies, or anything where the good guys kick lots of butt and the bad guys are really bad." Madeline looked genuinely embarrassed.

  Joe couldn't keep from laughing. "You're kidding! Usually that's the kind of thing the guys are supposed to like and the girl rolls her eyes at."

  "Stop laughing!"

  "Hey, I'm not. I may be a snob about food, but I'm no literary giant."

  He flicked through his memory. "How about Nemesis Factor?" he suggested. It was one of his recent favorites, combining spy thriller with a super-martial-artist vigilante heroine.

  "Oh, yes! I kept catching bits and pieces of that one, but never got a chance to see it."

  The movie decided on, the two settled into the couch to watch. Joe started the usual male-on-a-first-date fretting about whether-andif-so-when he should try to slide his arm around the woman involved. But Madeline cut the whole obnoxious business off at the pass. Casually, but firmly—the same way she carried out her professional duties—she took his hand and put his arm around her. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do, leaned into his chest and nestled her head on his shoulder.

  It might, just possibly, have been the single most thrilling moment of Joe's life.

  While Madeline made a very nice armful, once the movie started Joe found she was far too much of a fan to just sit back and watch. It was actually more like watching a movie with one of the guys. She practically jumped up and shouted when a particularly cool set of moves was used, and she'd occasionally heckle the bad guys while onscreen.

  But when the main villain, Valmont DuChan, got his major scene—using his unnaturally charismatic appeal to gather followers in a cultlike organization to use terror tactics against the entire city— Madeline went quite uncharacteristically silent. She then excused herself to go to the bathroom, and didn't come back out for a while. When she did, Joe noted she seemed rather pale.

  "Madeline, are you okay?"

  "Sure, why wouldn't I be?" she responded, almost curtly. She sat back down and, to his delight, leaned back into him. But almost as soon as she did so, he realized just how tense she was. The body that had seemed so soft and feminine earlier now felt exactly like that of a very well-conditioned female athlete. Not quite as hard as a rock, but awfully close.

  Not knowing what else to do, he started the movie again.

  "Could we watch something else?" Madeline asked suddenly.

  Joe stopped the movie and turned to her. "Sure, of course. But look . . . What's wrong? Did I do something to upset you?"

  She looked startled. "No, of course not. It's just . . ." Her eyes shifted to the screen, with its frozen image of Valmont DuChan's face staring out with a fanatic's gaze.

  "God, I can't believe this. I haven't had that stirred up in years." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  "Madeline, come on. Give."

  She was silent for a long time. Joe resisted the impulse to say anything. He just sat there, quietly waiting with a questioning look on his face.

  After what seemed like hours, she sighed and nestled into him again. Then she spoke, almost whispering in his ear.

  "I'm an orphan, you know."

  "No, I didn't. I'm sorry."

  "I'm not sorry at all. My biological parents . . ." She glanced at the screen. "Shut it off, would you, please?"

  After Joe did so, she closed her eyes again. "You know who the villain in that movie is modeled after, don't you?"

  "Hmm? Well, yeah. Washington LaFayette, I assume."

  "My parents were with LaFayette. Order of the Seventh."

  "Oh, God." Joe couldn't think of anything else to say, his mind racing back to recall what he knew of one of the darkest events in American history.

  Washington LaFayette, while still quite young, had risen to prominence as a charismatic preacher and gotten himself elected to Congress. His handsome face was commonly shown in interviews, and he maintained the image of a reasonable and compassionate man, albeit perhaps excessively devout. After three terms in Congress he resigned, according to his claim, to devote himself fully to his ministry.

  Image was all it was, however, for LaFayette was certifiably insane. In his private life, he was a radical "patriot" convinced that various "Un-American" forces serving the Anti-Christ were deliberately undermining the country through covert means. He built up an organization dedicated to "purifying" the country and "defending" it from these nebulous enemies.

  Unfortunately, LaFayette was far more intelligent than most sociopaths. Even as his insanity grew, he was mostly able to conceal it, while tightening his grip on his own core group. LaFayette was able to gain total control over those most closely associated with him, who were divided into various "Orders," with the highest being "Order of the Seventh." They accepted everything he said and did, even when his personal habits as well as his political views became more and more extreme.

  He designed a number of "purifiers"—his euphemism for targeted weapons of mass destruction—and was on the verge of actually beginning a strike against the most "contaminated" areas of America when one of the intelligence agencies finally realized what was going on. In a last-minute raid on LaFayette's compound, twelve officers of various enforcement agencies were killed and a number of others wounded. Four hundred and twenty-three of LaFayette's followers also died, the majority by suicide. LaFayette himself was shot before he could trigger the devices which would have destroyed the whole compound.

  "Jesus. You couldn't have been much more than, what, eight?"

  "I was nine." She looked up at the screen again, which was now dark. "Mike Dixon—the actor they chose—did an awfully good job. He even looks something like LaFayette."

  A lot of things about Madeline Fathom that had always puzzled Joe now started making sense. "That's why you went into intelligence, isn't it, with a specialty in security? I wondered, since . . . well, you really don't seem the type."

  She nodded. "They saved me. Killed him just before he killed all of us in the compound. My parents"—she spat the word out—"were ready to die with him. Did die with him, thank God, when they committed suicide. But they'd already stopped being anything like 'parents' to me by the time I was five. I knew they were grooming me to be one of LaFayette's so-called 'brides'—the bastard was partial to girls who'd just reached puberty—and I did everything in my power to avoid catching his attention. Which wasn't much. Fortunately, it was all over before that could happen."

  The icy, calm way she spoke the words didn't seem to belong to a human voice at all. Joe groped, trying to imagine the self-control she must have started developing at an age that was normally the most carefree in a human being's life.

  "I knew I couldn't fight him, that no one could fight him. But then the soldiers came, and they did fight him. And they brought me somewhere safe. I told myself when I got older that I'd make sure that people like him couldn't hurt anyone ever again, and that I'd help the people that saved me. And . . . that's what I did. I was training for it by the time I was ten. Never had any other career I wanted."

  She took a deep breath
, and stood up suddenly. "Sorry that I ruined things. Look, can I take a rain check on the evening. Please?"

  "Sure, of course."

  She smiled. "Thanks, Joe. I like you an awful lot, just so you know. But . . . this kind of thing isn't easy for me."

  Joe rose also. "You want me to walk you back to your cabin?"

  She chuckled, a bit darkly. "I think I can manage, even if this is the rough part of town."

  "See you tomorrow, then?"

  "Yes." She turned to go, stopped, and suddenly kissed him on the cheek. A moment later, she opened the door and slipped through, closing it behind her.

  Joe stared at the door long after it closed, gently fingering the cheek she'd kissed.

  "I will be good God-damned," he said finally.

  As always in moments of stress or deep emotion, Joe's thoughts turned to food. Not eating it, but cooking it. Nothing relaxed him so much as working in the kitchen. Like most of the crew, wanting to enjoy the company and the conversations, he usually ate in the mess hall. But, needless to say, his kitchen was fully stocked.

  The recipe he chose was a very tricky one. But that suited his mood—even more, his purpose.

  Joe Buckley was not particularly experienced in the business of falling in love. But he was very intelligent. Falling in love with Madeline Fathom was going to be a lot trickier than any recipe, so he'd better start warming up.

  Chapter 32

  We are definitely making progress," Skibow said. "Oh, yes, quite a bit, thanks to you two," Dr. Mayhew agreed.

  A.J. and Helen smiled together at that. They had rather warm feelings towards the linguists, who had catalyzed their relationship. "So do you want to share?"

  "Well, of course, we do!" Dr. Mayhew said tartly. "Who wouldn't want to brag a bit?"

  Her English accent gave her a schoolteacher air, especially with her prematurely gray hair pulled tightly back. "Take a seat and we'll give you a linguistic tour of what we've learned so far. We actually have some guesses as to the meaning of some words, which we'll get to in a bit."

  "The first thing that strikes anyone when looking at these is that the writing is in curves, where we would use straight lines," Dr. Skibow began. "This seems to fit fairly well with the natural tendencies of Bemmie's manipulatory appendages and viewing arrangement. It's a bit more of a leap, however, to guess at the next level of structure. I believe we mentioned that we thought the various groupings of letters equate to words. This does rely on the assumption that the symbols are, like letters in English, basically phonetic in nature. That assumption, in turn, is based on the fact that so far we have found a very limited set of symbols used in what appear to be words—thirty-four, so far—plus a set of symbols we believe to be numerals in base nine. The very small number of symbols leads us to think they used an alphabet rather than a syllabary, although that's just a guess right now."

  "For a short time," Mayhew picked up the narrative, "we thought that we had a larger set of words, and a rather confusing set thereof, than we did. However, one of the pattern-matching programs noticed that a lot of the words were mirror spellings of other words. After some comparison, we realized that our alien friends do at least one thing very differently from us. And by 'us' I mean any written human language. Where we write left to right or vice versa, they write outward from the center. The text in their approach is written something like this, if they were writing English."

  She activated a display and wrote:

  xof nworb kciuq ehT Jumped over the lazy dog

  "So our initial survey would've had a total of nine words, when there's actually only eight unique words present, as 'the' appears twice. This method of writing brings up some very interesting questions as to just how our friends perceived things. Any human trying to read this way would start getting her brain scrambled pretty fast. Awfully dizzy, at least. In any case, we then were able to arrange a list of all the words and the order in which they appeared at any given point. That gave us a total starting vocabulary, if we could translate it, of about two thousand unique words from all sources, with a lot of those words being very common. Those are presumably the equivalents of 'the,' 'a,' and so on, but without knowing something of the actual meanings involved we're now getting out on the far fringe of guesswork.

  "Once we had the clue of color to show us that we were in fact on the right track—and to bring up a whole bunch of symbols our visible-light images had missed—we attempted to assign meaning to some of the words based on context. If a word occurs in a particular context and not another, you can assume with at least some confidence that the change in context has something to do with the meaning of the word. Similarly, if you always see one word in conjunction with another word or symbol, you can guess that there is some strong relationship between the two."

  "We have been going over the various 'noteplaques,' as we've decided to call them," Dr Skibow said, "and we hit some paydirt in the form of maps. Some of the maps we've been able to match up to known Solar System bodies, including Mars and at least a couple of the moons of Jupiter. Another one, we think, refers to Saturn and its moons."

  Helen cocked an eyebrow. "You 'think'?"

  Skibow shrugged. "Well, everything else matches quite well. But if that Bemmie map is accurate, Saturn had a moon about half the size of Titan, sixty-five million years ago. Which it certainly doesn't today."

  "That's . . . possible," A.J. mused. "Even on the astronomical scale, sixty-five million years is a hefty stretch of time. An extrasolar body might have come into the system and yanked that moon out altogether. Or, for that matter, I've never been too satisfied with the current fashionable theory about what caused Saturn's rings." Somewhat grudgingly: "I admit, it's not my field of expertise."

  Helen saw that Mayhew's plump face seemed to be undergoing a struggle of some sort, as if the linguist was trying to keep from laughing. When their eyes met, Helen smiled faintly, to show that she understood the source of the humor.

  A.J. Baker? Publicly confessing he doesn't know everything?

  For all of Mayhew's evident amusement, it was just as obvious that she wasn't irritated. People—including Helen—put up with A.J.'s unthinking intellectual arrogance, easily enough, because there was never anything mean-spirited about it. His attitudes didn't derive from personal competitiveness or a desire to belittle anyone else. They were just a side effect of the man's fascination with the universe.

  Skibow continued. "We're hoping that in some of the other still-sealed rooms we'll get some more maps or similarly interpretable diagrams, because on the maps we found labels, just like we label our maps. We think we've got a handle on at least part of their system of measurement—on the large scale, anyway—and we're getting words out of it.

  "Here's one. This word"—a series of Bemmian symbols shimmered in the display—"means crater, we're almost sure. That's because every time we find the equivalent spot on our maps, there's a crater right at that point. So far, at least."

  "That'd mean an awful lot of repetitions of the word, across something like Mars."

  Mayhew shook her head. "Not every crater is labeled, Helen— far from it. Only a few on each map. Presumably they were points of interest for our friends. Even on our astronomical maps we don't label every crater, only the larger ones. As these people were presumably actually landing on these bodies, I would therefore theorize that these were craters they landed on or had an interest in."

  "Maybe not, though," A.J. countered. "Maybe the word isn't crater. Maybe it's mine or quarry."

  Skibow raised an eyebrow. "Good point. It could, I suppose, also mean colony, if they were settling the area."

  Helen made a face. "I see your problem. You're in the same position we were when we had the single arm-plate from Bemmie, trying to reconstruct something incredibly complex from almost no information at all."