Jem

  "He isn't satisfied with me," General Weinenstat reported. "Maybe you should give him a minute, Godfrey."

  "Shit." Menninger put down his pen at the exact place on a remobilization order where he stopped reading and nodded for her to switch over.

  The face on his phone screen was that of Marshal Bressarion of the Red Army, but the voice was his translator's. "The marshal," she said, sounding tinny through the scrambler, "does not question that you and the Combined Chiefs are acting under the President's orders, but he wishes to know just who the President is. We are aware that Washington is no more, and that Strongboxes One and Two have been penetrated."

  "The present President," said Menninger, patiently restraining his irritation, "is Henry Moncas, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives. The succession is as provided in our basic law, the Constitution of the United States."

  "Yes, of course," said the translator after Bressarion had listened and then barked something in Russian, "but the marshal has been unable to reach him for confirmation."

  "There have been communications problems," Menninger agreed. He looked past the phone, where Rose Weinenstat was shaping the words "in transit" with her lips. "Also," he added, "I am informed the President is in the process of moving to a fully secure location. As the marshal will realize, that requires a communications lid."

  The marshal listened impatiently and then spoke for some seconds in rapid-fire Russian. The translator sounded a good deal more uptight as she said, "We quite understand, but there is some question of lines of authority, and the marshal would appreciate hearing from him directly as soon—hello? Hello?"

  His image faded. General Weinenstat said apologetically, "I thought it was a good time to develop transmission difficulties."

  "Good thinking. Where is the son of a bitch, by the way?"

  "Henry? Oh, he's safe and sound, Godfrey. He's been ordering you to report to him for the last hour or so."

  "Um." Menninger thought for a moment. "Tell you what. Send out a radiation-safe team to escort him here so I can report. Don't take no for an answer. Tell him he'll be safer here than in his own hole." He picked up the pencil, scratching the pit of his stomach. Which was complaining. He wanted orange juice to build up his blood sugar, a stack of flapjacks to give a foundation for the next cup of coffee, and that cup of coffee. He wanted his breakfast, and he was aware that he was cranky because he was hungry. "Then we'll see who's President," he added, to the air.

  On the edge of the Bahia de Campeche the Libyan vice admiral had got his crew together and his submarine up to two hundred meters, running straight and level. None of them were functioning well, with prodromal diarrhea and vomiting often enough so that the whole ship smelled like a latrine, but they could serve. For awhile, at least. They did. Libya's naval doctrine called for one big missile instead of a few dozen little ones. As this one big one broke the surface of the gulf it was immediately captured by a dozen radars. The scared but as yet untouched tourists on their lanais in Merida saw bright, bad flashes out west, over the water, as a Cuban cruiser locked in and fired ABMs. None of them caught it. It was a cruise missile, not ballistic, easy to identify but hard to predict as it drove itself north-northwest toward the Florida panhandle. A dozen times defensive weapons clawed at it as it crossed the coast, and then it was lost to view. There were plenty of installations along the way charged with the duty of detecting and destroying just such a weapon, but none that were functioning anymore.

  The latest picture from Margie showed her with one foot on the shell of a dead Krinpit, looking tired and flushed and happy. It was as good a picture of his daughter as God had had since her bearskin-rug days, and he had it blown into a hard print for his wallet. General Weinenstat looked at it carefully and passed it back to him. "She's a credit to you, God," she said.

  He looked at it for a moment and put it away. "Yeah. I hope she got her stuff. Can you imagine her mother? I told her Margie wanted some dress patterns, and she wanted me to put in about a thousand meters of fabric."

  "Well, if you'd left her raising to her mother she wouldn't be getting the kind of efficiency ratings you've been showing me."

  "I suppose not." The latest one had been nothing but praise, or at least up to the psychologist's report:

  Latent hostility toward men due to early marital trauma and mild inverse-Oedipal effect. Well compensated. Does not affect performance of duties.

  I really hope that's so, thought Godfrey Menninger. Rose Weinenstat looked at him carefully. "You're not worrying about her, are you? Because there's no need—wait a minute." General Weinenstat touched the thing in her ear that looked like, but wasn't, a hearing aid. Her expression turned somber.

  "What is it?"

  She turned off the communicator. "Henry Moncas. His shelter took a direct hit. They're trying to find out who's President now."

  "Shit!" Godfrey Menninger stared at the remains of his breakfast for a moment and saw none of it. "Oh, shit," he said again. "It looks bad, Rosie. The worst part is we never had a choice!"

  General Weinenstat started to speak, then changed her mind.

  "What? What were you going to say, Rosie?"

  She shrugged. "No good second-guessing, is it?"

  He pounced on her words. "About what? Come on, Rosie!"

  "Well—maybe moving into Canada—"

  "Yeah. That was a mistake, all right. I'll give you that. But not ours! The Greasies knew we couldn't let them move troops into Manitoba. That was Tam Gulsmit's mistake! Same with the Peeps. Once we were engaged we had to take Lop Nor out—quick, clean, minimum casualties. They should've accepted it instead of retaliating—"

  But he could hear voices within him denying it, speaking in the tones of Tam Gulsmit and Heir-of-Mao. "We were safe moving troops in to protect the tar sands, because we knew you couldn't afford to invade."

  "You shouldn't have bombed Lop Nor. You should have known we would have to retaliate." The voices within God Menninger's mind were the only voices they would ever have again. Heir-of-Mao lay with eyes bulging and tongue protruding from his lips, dead in the deep shelter under Peking, and the atoms that had once been Gulsmit's body were falling out from the column of fire over Clydeside.

  The Libyan missile had bypassed Atlanta and Asheville and Johnson City, matching their terrains against the profiles imprinted in its memory. The safety interlocks on its thermonuclear charge were falling away one by one as its tiny, paranoid brain began to recognize its nearness to the thing it was unleashed to destroy.

  "It's bad, Rosie," said Godfrey Menninger at last, rising to return to his desk. Maybe he should have let Margie's mother have the raising of her. Then Margie would probably have had a husband and a couple of kids by now. And perhaps— perhaps the world would have been a different place. He wondered if he would ever hear from her again. "Rosie," he said, "check Houston. See if the communication links with Jem are holding up. With the other colonies, too, of course."

  "Right now, Godfrey? Give me ten minutes; I've got a call coming in from the DoD."

  "Ten minutes is fine," he said; but before the ten minutes was up he was dead.

  TWENTY

  THE CORACLE first appeared between showers, far out over the water. In the pit beside Ana Dimitrova, Corporal Kristianides—no, Lieutenant Kristianides now, she corrected herself —stood up and turned the field glasses on it.

  "Krinpit," she said. "Son of a bitch. Lay your gun on it, Nan, but don't fire unless I tell you to."

  Unnecessary order! Not for worlds would she have fired. Not until she saw for herself that there were only Krinpit in the boat, and not Ahmed Dulla. Perhaps not even then, for this insanity of guns and shooting was awful even to play at. She had not yet had to fire at a living being, was far from sure that she could, and had said as much; but no one wanted to hear. But the good thing about her machine gun was that it had a telescopic sight, and she was glad enough to aim it.

  The coracle disappeared into a squall, but not before she
had seen that there was no human being in it, though it was large enough for several.

  When it appeared again it was larger and nearer, and she could see that the single Krinpit was working furiously to keep it bailed and the trapezoidal sail intact, and paddling to bring it straight into the camp. By then everyone had seen, and at least a dozen weapons were pointed at it. Over the PA system Guy Tree's voice shrilled an order to hold fire. Down on the beach Marge Menninger stood, a GORR under her arm, oblivious of the rain that soaked her. Ana wiped the wet off her sight as carefully as she had been taught and looked again. She had no skill at recognizing individual Krinpit by sight, but this one did not look familiar.

  Disappointment of a hope. But what a foolish hope, she scolded herself. How improbable that Ahmed would once again miraculously appear. And even if he had, who was this Ahmed who had taken her and used her and left her again? He was not the person of Sofia, she thought gloomily, and roused herself and tried to think more constructively.

  It was a failure. There was so little to think constructively about! The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. What went on in the secret conferences among Marge Menninger and her warrior knights in the headquarters shed she did not know, nor wish to. But it might well be the death of all of them.

  The Krinpit was in the shallows now. It raised itself and splashed over the side, and the coracle bobbed away as it lurched ashore. It seemed to be in bad shape. It staggered in a half-circle on the shore and then fell to the ground with a painful crash as Colonel Menninger and half a dozen of her warriors formed a wary perimeter around it.

  Perhaps they would kill it, she thought. Well, let them. Everyone else was standing and staring, but Ana's attention wandered—until one of the riflemen came running toward her.

  "Dimitrova, front and center!" he was calling. "It's the one that speaks Pak! Colonel wants you to come translate!"

  When Ana Dimitrova was nineteen years old, precocious senior at the University of Sofia, candidate for the callosectomy that would forever sunder the two halves of her brain and lead to a distinguished career in translation, she had watched a film on the subject. It was not her choice. They would not accept her application without it. The first part was quite tedious, though instructive, as it described the anatomy of that senseless and defenseless kilogram of pinky-gray jelly that mediated and transformed and commanded all the senses and defenses of the body. Before her very eyes a surgeon took a human brain in his hands and peeled away tissue to expose that great suety bridge that connected the two halves and that, in her, she would ask someone to sever. There was a long explanation, quite hard to follow, of how nerves crossed, so that the right half of the brain seemed to take responsibility for the left half of the body, and vice versa: strange quirk of anatomy! She saw how the nerves carrying visual impressions intersected at the optic chiasma, but not completely—as though prankish evolution had tired of the joke and decided not to finish it. All that part of the film was difficult to absorb, as well as unsettling to look at. But then there were some comic parts. Each half of the brain commanded its own network of afferent and efferent nerves. The efferent nerves, the ones that directed action, were spared in the resection or reconnected afterwards, which was why the split-brain people were able to walk without stumbling. Most of the time. The afferent nerves, the ones that accepted sensory impressions from the world, were kept apart. So each half of the brain could receive and process and store its own information, not shared with the other. That was why translation became easy.

  But.

  But some kinds of afferent input were not value-free. They produced glandular responses. They caused emotions. This was where the comic part came in. The film showed a woman, one of the earliest volunteers for the surgery. She had an earplug in one ear and was reading from a prepared text. The voice-over narration explained what she was doing: delivering a translated talk to a mathematical congress. But while one half of her brain was reading and translating and speaking, the other half was listening to the words coming in over the earplug; and those words were the filthiest of scatological jokes. The woman began to stammer and falter, and over her face spread the rosiest of blushes, though the operating half of her brain had not an idea in the world why. Blushes. Stammers. Headaches. Depression. They were the symptoms of leakage from one half to the other. The scar tissue that blocked the flow of impulses through the corpus callosum let each half of the brain work efficiently on its own. But feelings seeped through. All the time Ana Dimitrova was translating for Colonel Menninger she could feel them pounding at her—

  "He says that as the People's Republics are no longer a force, he wishes to help us against the Fuel Bloc."

  "Fucking great. What's he going to do, scratch them to death with his sharp little feet?"

  —and the headache was the worst she had ever had: sickening, sandbag blows at the base of her skull. She felt nauseated and was not helped by the Krinpit.

  Sharn-igon was repulsively ill. Even the dull, recurrent rasp of his name—Sharn-igon, Sharn-igon—was badly played, like a defective radio. His carapace was a sickly yellow instead of the rich mahogany it had been. It was cracked and seamed. At the edges of it, where undershell joined the massive armor of the top, seams did not quite join, and a thin, foul liquid oozed out.

  "He has molted," she explained to the colonel, "and feels he is about to molt again. Perhaps it is because of the chemicals the Fuel people used against them."

  "You don't look so fucking great yourself, Dimitrova."

  "I am quite capable of continuing, Colonel Menninger." All the same, she moved away from the Krinpit. The exudations of his shell had darkened the sand around him, and the smell was like rancid fat. Moving did not help. The headache, and the pain behind it, grew with every moment.

  Marge Menninger ran her hands through her wet hair, pulling it back so that her ears were exposed. She looked almost like a little girl as she said, "What do you think, Guy? Have we got ourselves a real blood-hungry tiger?"

  Colonel Tree said, "One does not refuse an ally, Marge. But the Greasies would eat these jokers up."

  "So what is he saying exactly, Dimitrova? That he'll tell all his Crawly friends to attack the Greasy camp if we want them to?"

  "Something like that, yes. What he says," she added, "is not always easy to understand, Colonel Menninger. He speaks a little Urdu, but not much, and he speaks it very badly. Besides, his mind wanders. It is a personal matter with him, to kill. He does not care who. Sometimes he says he wants to kill me."

  Menninger looked appraisingly at the Krinpit. "I don't think he's in shape to do much killing."

  "Must one be well for that?" Ana flared. "I am sick in my heart from talk of killing, and from killing itself! It is a wicked insanity to kill when so few persons are still alive."

  "As to that," said Margie mildly, raising her hand to stop Guy Tree from exploding, "we'll talk another time. You look like shit, Dimitrova. Go get some sleep."

  "Thank you, Colonel Menninger," Ana said stiffly, hating her, perhaps hating even more the look of compassion in Margie's eyes. How dare the bloody trollop feel pity!

  Ana stalked off to her tent. It was raining hard again, and lightning lashed over the water. She hardly felt it. At every step the throbbing in her head punished her, and she knew that behind the headache a greater pain was scratching to come out. Pity was the solvent that would melt the dam and let it through, and she wanted to be by herself when that happened. She stooped into the tent without a word to the woman who shared it with her, removed only her shoes and slacks, and buried herself under the covers.

  Almost at once she began to weep.

  Ana made no sound, did not shake, did not thrash about. It was only the ragged unevenness of her breathing that made the black girl in the other cot rise up on one elbow to look toward her; but Ana did not speak, and after a moment her roommate went back to sleep. Ana did not. Not for an hour and more. She w
ept silently for a long time, helpless to contain the pain any longer. Hopes gone, pleasures denied, dreams melted away. She had held off accepting the thing that the Krinpit had said almost in his first sentence, but now it could not be denied. There was no longer a reason for her to be on Jem. There was hardly even a reason to live. Ahmed was dead.

  She woke to the loud, incongrous sound of dance music.

  The storm of silent weeping had cleared her mind, and the deep and dreamless sleep that followed had begun the healing. Ana was quite composed as she bathed sparingly in the shower at the end of the tent line, brushed her hair dry, and dressed. The music was, of course, that other of Marge Menninger's eccentricities, the Saturday night dance. How very strange she was! But her strangeness was not all unwelcome. One of the fruits of it had been the patterns and fabric that had come in the last ship. Ana chose to put on a simple blouse and skirt, not elaborate, but not purely utilitarian either. She was a very long way from dancing. But she would not spoil the pleasure of those who enjoyed it.

  She cut past the generator, where the Krinpit was rumbling hollowly as it scratched through the clumps of burnable vegetation for something to eat, a guard with a GORR trailing its every step, and visited the fringe of the dance area long enough to get something to eat from the buffet. (Of course, she had slept through two meals.) When men asked her to dance she smiled and thanked them as she shook her head. The rain had stopped, and sullen Kung glowed redly overhead. She took a plate of cheese and biscuits and slipped away. Not that there was far to go. No one walked in the woods anymore these days. They lived and ate and slept in a space one could run across in three minutes. But all who could be there were at the dance, and down by the beach were only the perimeter guards. She sat down with her back against one of the machine-gun turrets and finished her meal. Then she put her plate down beside her, pulled her knees up to her chin, and sat staring at the purple-red waves.