Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2014 (10 page)

Rather than get in, the Old Man clutched the vehicle's side, standing on a narrow running board. He saw Jimmy's look. "I prefer an open view," he said, as he pulled a cable from beneath the side mirror and hooked it to his belt buckle. "I hope the aftermath wasn't too difficult."

"I—no, it was fine."

"They didn't hold you responsible."

"That's true," Jimmy said, but it felt like a lie, a technical evasion allowing him to believe there was a distance between his will and his actions.

"Good." And as if he understood exactly Jimmy's fractured nature, he said, "Now you have a choice to make, Lieutenant. Stand clear." Jimmy stumbled backward over broken wood, but stayed upright.

The car lifted up on the sound of a thousand startled birds. In moments, it was gone. Jimmy was still looking up when flashing lights fluttered through the alley. Firefighters jumped down from their vehicle. Jimmy steadied his feet, then went out to see whether he could lend a hand.

The storm brought steady rain, but no great downpour and no tremendous winds, so the exercise area stayed dry. Lightning ripped down in the distance, never getting nearer than the mesas. The thunder, though: that was the show, protracted and rolling, unhurriedly approaching each final concussion.

Two dogs and four men accompanied Methusaleh. From the first, the dogs seemed off, sniffing the air, distracted, inattentive to commands. Covey didn't like it. He shouted over the thunder, then moved closer to the dog handlers in order to be heard.

"It's the storm," he said. "They don't like it. We should—" he said, when both dogs went for him. "Restrain them!" he shouted, but the dogs were wild, ferocious. The final guard held his ground, attentive, somewhat, to the kneeling, shackled man. Waving toward the security room windows and the camera above Covey, the guard shouted for support. The dogs abruptly settled, Covey got a breath, but they lunged again, tangling their lines, pulling one handler into the other. The final guard moved to secure the prisoner, to hustle the man inside, but then the dogs abruptly turned on him. One broke its handler's hold and ran breakneck over the armed guard, knocking him down, then turning and running over him again. Covey, up against the fence, raised his weapon.

Thunder exploded. In the middle of the yard, the ground gave way before the prisoner's knees. Methusaleh rolled forward and was gone. The dogs suddenly calmed, and Covey and the guard on the ground rushed to the breach. There they hesitated, beginning, it appeared, to kneel before crumpling alongside one another. Covey shrieked (days later, he would say he felt arrows fly into his body) while the other man lapsed, fetal, into moaning (he told investigators he remembered nothing). The dogs observed coolly in the company of their handlers, who shouted uselessly to the fallen men. Why had no alarm sounded? A medical kit was presumably needed. Handing over his dog, one man ran inside.

In the security center, he found Jimmy sitting dazed and unresponsive before blank video screens, the two other BrightLine personnel unconscious on the floor. The man triggered the alarm, but the escape was complete.

For half an hour, all they could get out of Jimmy was the same sentence, again and again: "He's too good." Tears drained down his cheeks as Weston watched him become aware of his surroundings—not like someone waking up but like someone learning to see. Still, he only said, "He's too good."

Weston put a hand on Jimmy's shoulder. "Too clever by half," she said. "Still a dozen steps ahead of us."

But that wasn't what Jimmy meant.

Someone guessed at what triggered the reaction in the dogs, but a scan of a wide range of frequencies detected by the outdoor microphones found not only ultrasonic whistles, seeming to have several origination points, but also subaural rumblings around the base, the movements and perhaps communications of whatever had worked from below to set the prisoner free. Had there not been a thunderstorm at the time, someone might have noticed the murmurings underfoot.

Half a dozen armed men, suited against toxic emissions, entered the underground chamber. Three possible routes of egress revealed themselves. By the next day, the army had flown in equipment to provide images of what lay beneath, but those tunnels cut deep and out of range. What signal had the prisoner provided to his underground accomplices so they knew the very moment to enact his release? No evidence remained of the subterranean gasses that had caused the diverse psychological woes affecting the guards (in any case, the effects faded within days).

Jimmy's part in the escape—of which he remembered nothing—was harder to parse, though cameras had recorded his every action, from his rising from his seat as Methusaleh left his cell, to his steady progress down the corridor and into the security center, to the two unaccountably quick and unerring blows that disabled the man and woman at their stations.

Oblonski showed up. They had Jimmy tell his story while Oblonski stood impassively, arms crossed, eyes to the floor, more reflective than Jimmy had ever seen him. When Jimmy had finished, Oblonski waited a beat, said to Weston, "He's telling the truth," and left without a word to Jimmy.

Quarles was in the hall outside Weston's office when she and Jimmy emerged. He asked, "Who was that, General?"

Weston pincered her fingers around her forehead as if in pain. "Our lie detector," she said.

They put him on extended leave and offered him counseling. Flight after flight of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq needed it more, he truly believed; he'd seen them. But the offer wasn't something to cavalierly refuse, and he knew himself well enough to see he had been broken before, and this had left him in ruins, all the walls pulled down. He spoke more than was his tendency in his counseling sessions, and he got to hear what he thought, and he got to hear the things he'd done. Not bad. Not bad. But he was haunted by the deeds of the man in the cell.

He sat in silence, not calling it prayer or meditation, allowing whatever was deepest in him to surface. He listened to the voices at his center and the nothing surrounding every voice, but he couldn't tell which voice was telling the truth. How does a man interrogate himself?

He recalled himself saying, "He's too good." That was the final key:
Good. Righteous. Just.
And seeing himself as a decent man, as a person devoted to justice, how could he help but work to free the innocent captive?

The first birds settled at the edges of the wide pools of water left behind by the fire-fighters. From the bench by a gazebo, in the small green at the center of town, Jimmy could see the last house to have caught fire. Much of the front was gone, given over to a hole extending from the roof down into the first floor as if something the size of a whale had taken a tremendous bite; before dawn, the scene appeared flat and unreal. He wondered again whether another world lay under this one, fully functioning, in cavernous mazes under the earth. Now that he'd seen the car lift into the air and carry off the Old Man and his associates, it was possible to believe anything, hidden realms above the earth as well as beneath, or a secret world running alongside the one Jimmy knew—though Jimmy felt there ought to be limits to how far this fantasy played out. Otherwise, nothing was reliable.

It was too early now, but when he had the chance, he would call Bekka. She, at least, was reliable.

Thematic attacks. A repetition of destructive histories. Fire...

Jimmy was tired, so it took him a minute. Earth, air, fire...

He knew where to go next. Perhaps it had been too recent, but no violence by water had been more dramatic. Jimmy needed to go where people had been abandoned, where any remaining vision of an intact nation had fallen apart.

He pulled off at a hillside rest stop not far from Montgomery, Alabama. At the parking lot's far end, by a picnic table, trees with enmeshed limbs cast ruffled shade; Jimmy tucked the car there, cracked open the window, tilted back his seat, and slept. The sounds of passing cars and people entered his dreams, but nothing woke him for hours.

He didn't reach New Orleans till the sun had nearly set. The air smelled of water and reproach. He thought, "Haven't these people suffered enough?"

The hotel was in a part of the city that hadn't been flooded, but the owner had fled Katrina well in advance of the storm. A wiry, circumspect man, he told Jimmy as he handed him a key, "I took off again when Rita come along. That one didn't touch nothin' but the Ninth Ward. But I don't take chances with my life."

"That's a good policy," Jimmy said.

"Mm-hm. Playin' it safe with my
one
life," he said. He came around the counter to point across the courtyard. "Over on the left there. Up above. You can park you' car right by those steps. You here to sightsee or you plan to give people some he'p?"

Jimmy heard himself say,

"I plan to help if I can."

"They's plenty to do. Be plenty to do for years and years till it all washes 'way agin."

"I imagine so," Jimmy said, and he went to move his car. The day before, stopping briefly in Atlanta, he'd gone online at an internet café and located this establishment. Then he'd placed an ad in the
Times-Picayune,
on the theory that the eyes and ears in service to the great man were multitudinous and ever-vigilant.

"Methusaleh," read the ad, "let me help. Perilous Lieutenant." He named the hotel, and the ad gave an identifying contact number. One way or another, he would get in touch, though the ad felt like a prayer, like the incense of something sacrificed that you hoped would come to the attention of an impossibly distant being.

The room smelled damp and felt damp. Jimmy shook out of his shirt and went into the bathroom. Washing up, he saw a tired figure in the mirror. He put on the light to see him more clearly and, a child again, he leaned toward his own face.

Perhaps it was the phone itself, a relic, a jet black object that possessed real mass, that made the ringing on the other end seem to come from the past, when the surprise of a distant voice magically bound you to people.

His mother answered.

"Mom, it's Jimmy."

"Let me get your father," she said, and her voice, though averted, became loud.

"James!" she called. "It's your son!" Then, returning, "Are you still with that girl?"

"Yeah."

"That's that girl Rayna knew." Jimmy's cousin had hooked them up.

"Bekka, yeah."

"Everything still good?"

"Yeah, yeah. Things are good. We're, uh, we're on a vacation together."

"Mm," she said, and he knew what she thought of that, how it was too fast, but she wouldn't say a thing, just make sounds that told you she was processing the information, judging it, and if you knew her, you knew her judgment.

He heard the rattle and hiss of his father picking up the other phone. "Hey hey!" his father called. "Jimmy!" It rendered Jimmy breathless.

"Hey, Dad," he managed, at the moment not certain of himself but feeling loved and understood. "You and that girl—what's it, Bekka?—still together?"

"Yeah, I—"

"We covered that," said his mother. "They're on vacation together."

"Oh, I see, I see. Where are you?"

"Ahm." A fly climbed the spotty red curtain. "Between destinations," he said.

"Why is there something instead of nothing?" He had asked this of Bekka on their first date, walking her home from an old-fashioned burger joint.

She had laughed and said, "You sure move fast. We're already on theoretical physics?" then laughed again at his stammering reaction. "Okay," she said, putting her hand on his upper arm, thrilling him, "I'll tell you what we say we know," and the rest of the way back to the steps of her apartment, she had given him the rundown on the slight edge matter had over antimatter at the creation of the universe, on the latest thinking about the multiverse, on theories she called crazy and ones she said were credible but that still sounded crazy to him, till Jimmy summed it up for her.

"So you don't know."

"I don't care what they say," she said. "Some things can't be questioned. And other things we can't ask."

The phone rang twice, and when she answered, he felt there was a world beyond the madness of this situation.

"Baby," she said, "are you all right?"

"I'm fine. I'm... I'm where I need to be. I wish I could tell you more, but I've got to keep this close for now."

"You're not in trouble."

"I am not in trouble," he said, tempted to follow up with, "but I'm headed for trou ble." He did say, "I promise to stay in touch. If that's what you want. This must feel like I've abandoned you."

"You have important things to take care of, is that right?"

"Yes. Yes, that's right."

"Well," she said, "I know you are a good man."

Across the miles, he felt her voice as a physical force that not only reached him, it altered him, making him the man she deserved.

He had been wrong about the true nature of the self. After showering, he had peered again into the foggy mirror. His nose touched the glass. The man over there was motionless, but in the world at his back, violence and terror ground down ordinary people as if their lives had no purpose but to be pressed under history's terrible weight. Good people could not allow that. There at his back, past that shower wall, past the building, people acted to lift the heel of violence.

You couldn't locate or understand the self by looking inward. You could only make sense of a self by observing its actions in the world. A good human was not a steady noun but a sequence of unexpected verbs. No matter if one sat in contemplation or acted for all the world to see: one became a full self by doing.

Dressed, he sat in the single chair by the bed. An air conditioner labored at his back. He could not stop looking at the door, and after a while, he realized he was trying to see through it to what lay beyond.

Something was coming. A man who intended to bring great harm had come to this city. Another man who intended to stop him—or at least stop his plans—was here as well. In a few moments, Jimmy would leave this room, heading toward the levees, in search of a destructive device or in search of the man he'd called Methusaleh. Or...