Cold Allies (25 page)

“Good morning,” the general said stiffly. He was always formal with her, and she hadn’t bothered to correct that. She wanted him formal, she wanted a little distance. Good Lord, the man was like a fly at a picnic.

“Oh, hello,” she said, as though surprised. “How nice to see you.”

He didn’t bother with pleasantries. He never did. Instead he took a seat on the government-issue sofa and got right to the point.

“I dreamed about the library again,” he said.

“How stunning. This means, of course, dear, that the Eridanians like you. Otherwise, they would not let you visit so often.”

He waved the compliment aside as usual, but Mrs. Parisi persisted. Men’s egos were bottomless pits. And a general’s ego must be even deeper. “It’s very rare, you know. They’ve taken quite an interest in you.”

“I’m no closer to communication,” he said. “They don’t come to me, damn it. They won’t speak to me. This is the chance of a lifetime, one of the most important events in history. God, don’t they know how I feel?”

Lauterbach was frustrated, Mrs. Parisi realized with a thrill of alarm. The Game had traps and pitfalls. There came a perilous moment in it when the subject vacillated between faith and rejection. The general was at that point now. She could read disillusionment in his hazel eyes, along with an addict’s keen yearning.

“Well, dear. It’s just a matter of time.”

He startled her by shouting, “Goddamn it! There isn’t any time!” Abruptly he stood and walked to the window. Outside, in the yard, a lethargic rain was falling, turning the prefab walls of the neighboring hospital dark.

She stared at his back, hating him with such an awesome, mind-numbing intensity that she was surprised he could not feel it.

“Warsaw is about to fall,” he said. “Before the Arabs have a chance to march into Germany, the President wants to negotiate a peace. He’ll give the Arabs half of Europe. I’ve ...” For an instant his voice failed him, a disorienting skip in a scratched record. “I want the Eridanians to help us. If I have to stop the Arab advance myself, I’ll stop it ugly ... The aliens’ civilization is centuries older than ours. We must seem like children to them. Tell them we need them. For Christ’s sake, explain that we’re powerless.”

“Well, dear. They think war is silly.”

She’d lost him. She could see his shoulders slump. “You must concentrate on dream communication,” she said, knowing she must keep him busy at a task. This Game was the longest and most grueling she had ever played. Let her concentration falter, and she would lose him completely.

He didn’t turn. She sat staring at his accusatory back.

“I don’t understand why you can’t tell them yourself,” he said.

“The one who wants the help must ask directly, and they’re trying to give you that chance. Follow the printed instructions I’ve given you. Record your dreams every, every night. That’s the important thing.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said softly into the open window. The rain-swept breeze tugged at his voice.

“Wonder what?”

“I wonder why I come back.”

Mrs. Parisi knew, although she dared not tell him. She was Scheherazade, and he was addicted to her stories. He had to keep coming back to find out how it would end.

IN THE LIGHT

Justin stared at the poster of an angular black F-117 riding the clouds. Above him, attached to the square light fixture, dangled the slender dart-shape of an F-22.

His room was as he remembered it: filled with model planes and toy soldiers. A Bible sat open atop the nightstand, beside the Bugs Bunny lamp. He took a breath. The room smelled the same, too: a mixture of paint and modeling cement.

“Get your bat and glove, Justin,” his mother said.

He turned to see her framed in the doorway, a melting form of blue dress and pink flesh. There was no way to tell where the material ended and skin began, or which part was alive.

“Get your bat and glove,” she repeated. “Someone’s come to play.”

Outside the open window, cerise bougainvilleas tapped their enameled petals against each other, impatient nails on wood. He opened his closet and grabbed the bat by its taped handle, his pitcher’s glove by its thumb.

‘They’re waiting,” his mother told him.

Without looking into her face, he brushed past her and went into the yard. Mike Johnson was there.

Mike hadn’t grown. His blond hair trailed over his forehead the way Justin remembered. He stood in his usual sprung-hip, twelve-year-old stance. Freckles came and went like twinkling dark stars across the pulpy expanse of his cheeks.

“Hi, guy,” Mike said.

Justin looked away from Mike to the clouds looming over the neighboring roofs. “I’ve figured out what you are, you know,” Justin whispered. “You’re daydreams. You let me see everything I want to see, only nothing’s quite right. My F-14 wasn’t on fire like I saw out of the bus window, was it? The truth is, I punched out because I didn’t have the right stuff anymore.”

“Let’s choose sides,” Mike said. “Let’s play some ball.”

Justin looked into the street. Beyond the shade of the mango tree five boys were ringed like worshipers about a weak-chinned, skinny soldier. “You brought the gomer?”

“I want to choose sides now,” Mike said.

As they walked over, Mike told him, “You choose first.”

Justin pointed to a pale imitation of a kid. “Him.”

Mike flinched, as though Justin had slapped his spongy cheek. “Well, I want Gordon.”

The gomer blinked. Through his uniform, his skin, Justin could see the line of the sidewalk and the grass.

“Oh, don’t bother,” the sergeant said vaguely. “That’s all right. I don’t think I need this anymore.” He turned and walked away.

When the gomer was out of earshot, Mike turned to Justin. “Why didn’t you choose Gordon?” he asked angrily.

“I don’t know.” There was no way Justin could put his objection into words. He simply didn’t like the sergeant’s type. The softness in his eyes, the timidity in his hunched shoulders. “What’s the big deal with him, anyway?”

“He won a battle all by himself,” Mike said. “And then we let him die.”

“Too bad,” Justin said. He dropped the glove. Grabbing the ball away from one of the kids, he tossed it in the air and hit it with a solid crack from his Louisville Slugger. The ball, of course, flew over the rooftops.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” Mike said. And all the kids walked away, leaving Justin standing by himself. He stared after them, hurt and frightened by their rejection.

So the gomer had won a battle, and for that the aliens had let him die. The one thing Justin had learned from the aliens was the nature of illusion. But war had taught him that as well. There was no medal of honor worth death, no streets-of-gold reward, no God there to catch him. And in the F-14, Justin had been alone, just he and his decision.

“Yeah?” Justin whispered bitterly. “So you don’t want to play anymore? Well, that’s too fucking bad.”

CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

Gordon walked along the beach, the sand sucking at his shoes. Somewhere a gull was cracking a clam against a rock. If he listened closely, he could hear it, a persistent tap-tap.

The boy named Mike walked beside him, scuffing his feet into the water, sending sand-colored crabs racing. Seeing the pallid crabs run was eerie, unsettling, as though Gordon had caught the movement of ghosts at the edge of his vision.

“Gordon?” a voice called.

He opened his eyes. Toshio Ishimoto was sitting next to his bed in the clinic, a frown on his round face.

“Did I wake you?” Toshio asked.

Gordon looked down the bed at his blanketed feet. Past the line of cots, two nurses walked, pallid as crabs, silent as specters.

Toshio’s voice was hushed. “I never explained what I saw when the CRAV was swallowed by the light.”

Gordon closed his eyes. He was on the beach again, and Mike was staring up at him, his huge eyes dark with affection.

A touch on his arm. Gordon looked around. In the clinic, the movie with Toshio was still playing. “The aliens weren’t attacking,” Toshio said. “I understand that now. What they offered me was Nirvana, and I was afraid.”

Confused by the movie in the clinic, Gordon closed his eyes again. On the shell-laden beach, Mike was talking about the ocean.

“Each molecule is unique,” Mike said. “And yet it is part of a whole. When the raindrop hits the waves, it believes it is lost, but only for a frightening moment. Equanimity. Distance. This is what makes you brave. But are you brave enough, Gordon?” He laid a damp, flaccid hand on his arm. “Do you have enough courage to ask for what you want?”

Toshio was saying urgently, “Listen, Gordon. Listen to me.”

With an effort, Gordon pulled himself from the beach to the rain-scented clinic, where Toshio was waiting.

“I think you have found such a place,” Toshio said. “A sort of Nirvana. But you give yourself too easily, as you gave yourself to the CRAV. Gordon, please. Before you lose yourself completely, come back.”

‘‘Come back,” Mike whispered.

Gordon closed his eyes and watched the long breakers hiss and foam against the shore. He cocked his head. In the roar of the whitecaps he thought he could hear Toshio’s summons.

“What is it?” Mike asked.

Gordon didn’t answer; and after a while the sea forgot his name.

IN THE LIGHT

The library held a bell-jar silence. A rainy-day glow silver-plated dust on the sill. Taking a breath that tasted of mold and old books, Rita turned away from the window. The swollen knob of tweed and flesh that looked like Dr. Gladdings was watching.

There was a keen hunger about him.

The real Dr. Gladdings had been a dry soul who sucked up parched answers, a parasite attached to the paper and ink of his books. The replica of Dr. Gladdings sucked her living thoughts.

The touch of the pointer had killed the Arab. The officer’s face had changed in an instant from moist brown to desiccated beige. Which had answered some questions. Angels, even those consigned to Purgatory, didn’t kill people. And only one thing killed like that.

There were no dry paper-and-ink answers here, just clammy-mouthed ones. If she squashed this Dr. Gladdings, he would leave a stain on the wall, like a leech, a tick, a vampire.

“But he wanted you to drink of him,” the false Dr. Gladdings said. “You felt it and responded. You’re a good girl, Rita. A kind girl. You always were.”

“Shit. I didn’t even know he was real. Nothing seemed to matter then. I’m not sure it does now.”

Dr. Gladdings’s forehead puddled into a frown. “I’m sorry to find you’re so cynical, my dear, since you tasted him, too.”

She looked away, remembering the oddly pleasant sensation as the pointer fell. The silent stacks of books were leaning slightly toward her, as though their interest had been piqued.

“The Arab had a fine, rich flavor, don’t you think, Rita? A taste of date palms and rivers through deserts.”

A glissando of fear ran down her back. “Are you going to kill me, too?” she asked.

“If we did, you would taste spicy,” Dr. Gladdings said, smacking his rubbery lips. “All shrimp Creole and hot jazz.”

She kept her gaze on the falling sleet outside the window, in order not to see the blow when it came. She expected to feel the sharp stab of a proboscis, a viscera-deep tug, a sudden, deadly suction. But nothing touched her, only the chill breeze seeping around the edges of the glass.

“Will you?” she asked.

His answer came from a safe distance. “Because you wanted so badly to live, we took you. Why should we kill you now?”

“So why didn’t you take the others? Why didn’t you suck them dry?”
Or had they?
An image of Dix the color of spoiled cheese.

“They were too close to dying to savor; and death should taste, my dear. In your spice I think there would be a certain carbolic flavor,” he said. “A tang of cayenne and formaldehyde.”

She hugged her arms and shivered. The sleet made a soothing clatter against the glass.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her with mild annoyance. “I soak up fear and blood and longing. The blood tastes sweet, the fear rank.”

The sleet was mesmerizing. She closed her eyes and suddenly she found her mind drifting back to her mother’s house, to her own tall, wide bed.

“Ah, yes,” he said in a hushed voice. “The flavor of memory is best of all. It is a varied jambalaya. Think about your past, Rita. Your old house. Would you like to go there?”

If the aliens had drawn so apt a caricature of Dr. Gladdings, capturing his weaknesses with a few deft strokes, she wondered what horrors they would show her in her mother. “Don’t do that,” she snapped. “Don’t try to sell me your damned make-believe. You and I both know New Orleans isn’t there anymore.”

“Shhh,” he soothed. “Shhhh. Think about the kittens suckling in your childhood closet. You remember the calico you named Miss Patch? That’s good. I taste milk and warm, purring fur at the back of your mind.”

Rita walked away through the stacks of books. By the oak table, General Lauterbach was waiting again, an unchanging caricature of a man. She wondered what truth the aliens wanted to tell her about him.

“I envy you,” the general said. “What makes you so goddamned special?” Suddenly he blinked. His hazel eyes lost their whetted edge and seemed simply unsure. “I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

“Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want you here.”

Rita wondered how the general would taste. Of cordite, most probably. And the flat flavor of hot steel.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Embarrassed, she let her eyes drift to the tapping sleet at the window. The ghostly, translucent Lauterbach was as disturbing as the flaccid Dr. Gladdings. She had remembered the general as neat and self-possessed. Now he was messy, gale-tattered.

“I remember the first time I met you,” he said in a dreamy voice, a voice so private, she felt she was sipping at his thoughts. “Standing there,” he murmured. “A strong woman amid the smell of burnt bodies. Strange how admiration can come in the oddest places. Do they love you? The aliens? What can I do to make them love me, too? Please,” he said in a gasp, as though he had just then awakened. “Help me.”

She turned. “What do you want me to do?”

His face creased into a puzzled frown. “I can’t seem to remember. I dreamed earlier about falling and then about fire. The people in Warsaw. The President ...” The knitted weave of his thoughts faltered, dropping a stitch. “Listen to me, Rita,” he said urgently. “I need the aliens. Don’t you see? Tell them I’m sorry about what happened in the Pyrenees, what I forced them to do. I just want to talk. To explain things. I have something here ... something ...”

Hands trembling, he took a piece of paper from his breast pocket Unfolding the page, he smoothed it out on the polished wood.

“I need ... I need ...” His voice died in miserable confusion.

And he evaporated. She looked at the table and the blank white paper lying there.

WARSAW, POLAND

The sun was rising, turning the leaden sky a pinkish gray. Smoke from burning buildings made a sooty streak across the clouds.

Baranyk got to his feet. From where he stood he could see the ruins of Stalin’s Palace of Culture. Once, not so long ago, the old Georgian’s muscular, revolutionary-style erection had dominated the city. Stalin had always been an invincible prick.

“After Stalin, we are all impotent,” he muttered into his vodka bottle.

“Sir?” Zgursky asked.

“You are a good boy,” Baranyk said, clapping his arm around the aide’s shoulders. Under the general’s weight, Zgursky sagged. “A good boy.”

“Yes, sir,” Zgursky answered. “Thank you, sir. Wouldn’t the general care for some breakfast now?”

Baranyk hugged the sergeant tighter, crushing the boy’s head against his chest. “No,” he replied. “The general wouldn’t care for breakfast” Impulsively, he kissed the top of the aide’s cropped head.

When Baranyk released him, Zgursky staggered away, a stunned and disapproving expression on his peach-fuzz face. Baranyk’s booming laugh echoed amid the ruins. “I love you, Zgursky. I love you so much, I want you to accompany me to the artillery emplacements now.”

Zgursky sighed, wiped the top of his head, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Baranyk put down the empty vodka bottle and walked, the aide tagging after. The side street Baranyk chose was miraculously intact, its tree-lined length serene. A block later, they began picking their way through rubble. Along with the tang of smoke, the general caught a whiff of putrefaction rising from the shattered buildings. Not a dead cat. Not a dog. They had long ago been eaten. Only one thing left in Warsaw could smell like that.

The morning’s vodka rushed up his gullet. He leaned over in time to keep the flood from splattering his uniform. The pale vomit was streaked with red.

“Are you all right, sir?” Zgursky asked hesitantly.

“Of course.” He waved the solicitous sergeant off and walked on, Zgursky a little camouflage shadow at his shoulder.

“Perhaps you should go back to barracks and lie down, sir. You might need rest.”

Did the boy know how poorly he slept? Baranyk wondered. The aide’s cot was in the next room, close, so Baranyk’s low call would rouse him. Perhaps he had heard the creaks of the bed as Baranyk tossed and turned. The general darted a glance in the sergeant’s direction, but Zgursky had his head down watching where he put his feet.

“Am I a bad commander?” Baranyk asked quietly.

Zgursky’s head came up fast.

“Tell me the truth, sergeant, good Ukrainian boy that you are. Do the men say I am a good commander or merely a drunken one?”

Much to Baranyk’s astonishment, a gamin smile spread across Zgursky’ s face. “The men think you are a better commander drunk than any ten sober Arab generals.”

Baranyk stopped. Zgursky backed away quickly, as though fearful he might be kissed again.

“Kiev—”

“Forget Kiev, sir,” the sergeant said in a voice so sharp it flirted with insubordination. “Can’t you forget Kiev? You shout orders in your sleep, and I know you are fighting the battle all over again.”

After a moment, Baranyk asked, “I talk in my sleep? What do I say?”

“You try to call the tanks up, sir. You try to order the infantry back. Sometimes you call Major Shcheribitsky’s name so loud, he wakes up and comes down the hall to see what is wrong.”

Baranyk took a deep breath that tasted of vomit and soot. “I see.”

“Sir? You are the best commander I have ever served under,” Zgursky told him. “You don’t lose your temper. You always listen to us. That is the important thing. Forgive me for speaking frankly with you, sir.”

“Yes, of course,” Baranyk murmured as he began picking his way through the rubble.

He rarely lost his temper, except in defense of his men. That much was true. Unlike a Patriot missile, he never exploded at his mark; rather, like the ERINT, he used the power of his own bull-necked kinetic energy to crash his way through. He had risen through the ranks with an unerring radar for seizing opportunity, and with an unstoppable stamina.

Now all of that was gone. The Arabs had surrounded Warsaw, outnumbering his army five to one. The ANA wouldn’t launch a frontal attack, wouldn’t meet them like men, head-on.
Why should they?
he asked himself bitterly. The bombing, as it had during the Great Patriotic War, would again wear Warsaw out. When the Arabs crossed the Vistula, they would be met with apathy, not bullets.

The street emerged on a fussy little square with a fountain. On the western side, the side that had been hit, ruined buildings stood like movie-set facades, their blank windows open to nothing. Five women and a mob of filthy children were rag-picking in the charred ruins. Zgursky at his shoulder, Baranyk walked over to the fountain and washed out his sour mouth with the algae-covered water. Then he scrubbed his face.

“Now,” he said, straightening his uniform. “Do I look presentable?”

“Very presentable, sir.”

“My eyes not too bloodshot?” he asked. “I do not smell too much of vodka? I do not stumble or slur my words?”

“No, sir. Not at all, sir.”

“You would tell me, Zgursky? We will go see Colonel Jastrun now. It would not be good for the Poles to see me drunk. I do not wish my men to be ashamed of me.”

Zgursky’s young face tightened. “Sir,” he said, “your men will never be ashamed of you.”

CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

Just before dawn, the American general came back. Amazed to see him so early, Sabry turned his wheelchair from the window, tearing his gaze from the unlighted staff offices and the huge, floodlit prisoner compound beyond.

“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Lauterbach said. “But the nurses said you were awake.”

In the dim light from the bedside lamp Sabry noticed that the American’s face was drawn.

“No bother,” Sabry told him. He gestured at a vacant chair. “Please. Sit down.”

Lauterbach glanced at the chair, hesitated, remained standing at parade rest.

“General Sabry,” he began in a soft but formal tone, “I regret to inform you—”

Fear pulsed through Sabry like the cold touch of anesthesia. “Sit!” he said so loudly that a flicker of astonishment crossed the American’s face. “Please,” he added. “Please sit. It is always hard to give such news. I’ve done it many times. Indulge me, please. I want to talk.”

Lauterbach perched on the edge of the chair, hands on his knees, as though poised for escape. The wind shifted, carrying predawn cool and the scent of pine through the open window. “Do you know the problem with Westerners?” Sabry asked, staring at the fierce halogen brilliance of the prisoner compound, the tall spires of the guard towers. “They don’t listen well. Had we won the war, we would have taught you to listen.”

“A rather bloody lesson, don’t you think?”

The hospital quiet was thick, like the silence at the bottom of the ocean. Far down the hall Sabry could hear faint clinks of metal on metal as the medication nurse began rounds.

“I loved my son. He is dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Sabry glanced around the small, antiseptic room. “It is too quiet in this hospital, you know. Your doctors and nurses never argue and rarely laugh. Five Arabs in a room, and there is bedlam. Allied soldiers, even as they are dying, I have noticed, scream hoarsely, as though ashamed.”

Perhaps he was making the man uncomfortable. Perhaps he had said something he shouldn’t. Lauterbach’s face was impassive.