The Alejandra Variations (11 page)

Nicholas wanted to know more about DefCon, where it was and what it was like, but the floater sounded like serious business. "What's a floater, or shouldn't I ask?"

"You shouldn't," Lazlo said. "But I'll tell you anyway." He pointed at a small digital readout on the console. The numbers were slowly decreasing. "Remember the shark? Well, a floater's the same thing, except that it hangs around in the sky looking for trouble. Both are left over from the days of the Eridani."

There it was again:
Eridani.

Lazlo caught Nicholas's worried look and continued. "There are many more of these things left in the world than there are sharks. And we've got to spook this one before it lands on us." He pointed at the descending numbers. Altitude readings, Nick realized. "Otherwise Riordan's gonna be mighty disappointed."

"Who's Riordan?"

"He's our Counselor for this Period. Our leader, you might say. He's an Historian—they're in charge for the duration of this Period—and he's Lexie's mentor. He'll be real interested in seeing you. Not much survived from the days of the Eridani."

Nick faced him. "Listen, what's this 'Eridani' thing? Is it the Third World War?"

"Something like that. Riordan'll tell you better than I could. Right now we've got to get rid of that floater."

A red warning light began blinking silently before them.

"Damn," Lazlo breathed. "It's got us for sure. I thought it was too high up. It sees our iron trail."

"Iron trail?"

"That's what the Bore leaves behind. It passes through rock and converts it to iron. It has to do with fusion. You do know about fusion, don't you?"

"Yes," Nicholas responded, "but we never had anything like this." No fusion generator in his day could fit into the nose of something the size of the Bore.

"It's how we survived all this time underground," Lazlo said as he threw some switches. "We get everything from fusion. Food, water, you name it."

"I still don't understand," Nick protested. "Why do you have to live underground in the first place?"

"You don't know, do you?" the Captain turned to him, solicitous at his newness to this world. "It's the days of the Eridani. World War Three, you called it. That's why my men fear you so."

"Look, Captain, I'm not an Eridani, whatever they are."

"I know that," Lazlo said. "But they don't."

"So, who are the Eridani?"

Lazlo tamped out his cigar. "The ones who made the earth uninhabitable."

Nicholas had the feeling that he shouldn't pursue the issue any further. He was feeling sick. Perhaps it was the
genna
.…

"The earth's uninhabitable? After a thousand years?"

Captain Lazlo rose from his seat, taking off his goggles. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you your legacy."

Now he understood. "Eridani" would have the same connotations "Hitler" had had in his own time—
or worse.

They reached the hatch. Lazlo unpacked two suits from a storage compartment—heavy-looking things composed of that strange pliable metal. Lazlo said, "These will protect us, unless the floater finds us first."

The suit was as cumbersome as the old deep-sea diving suits of the early twentieth century. The helmet eased into its collar easily, but the suit itself seemed composed almost of lead.

The Captain dragged something wrapped in canvas out of a small compartment. "This is our ticket," he said.

They entered the escape hatch and sealed off the airlock to the inside of the Bore. When they stepped outside, Nicholas was astounded by what he saw. And shocked.

It was unlike any version of a post-holocaust world the "experts" ever thought would come about.

Everything around him was a sullen, uniform brown, like the early photographs of the planet Mercury. Nothing whatever grew in the deserted valley before them, nor was there any sign of life on the mountains far to the west. There was only dirt, rock, and globules of once-molten soil.

"Oh, my God," Nicholas said, helplessly, into the pin-mike at his cheek. Even after a thousand years, the earth had not healed. "What happened?"

Lazlo set his peculiar burden down and walked up to Nick. At Nick's belt was a box of some kind. The Captain pressed a button on it. He said, "It was the old wars. And the warheads. Blew everything off the goddamn planet."

As he spoke, Nicholas felt a strange sensation directly beneath his feet. His suit began to expand and thicken. Some wondrous mechanism within the soles of the boots was filling his suit, and the Captain's, with a layer of malleable lead, or some such other protective metal, drawn up from the earth. The joints at the elbows and knees were reinforced mechanically so that, despite the shielding that oozed through the suit, he could move easily.

He looked around through the clear quartz of the helmet lenses. "Where are we?"

Lazlo scanned the bleak horizon. "Somewhere in old Colorado. I'm not sure. The cities and roads are long gone, covered during the years of the great ash falls. Our maps aren't that reliable, and a lot of the mountains were pounded out of shape, especially in this part of the country. We found Omaha just by luck. Pure luck."

Nicholas had never been so depressed in his life. The sky was no longer blue, but a sickly, reddish-brown from horizon to horizon. Even the clouds appeared alien. They seemed disjointed, as if the atmospheric changes had been so great that the familiar meteorological formations were no longer possible.

"I can't tell you everything the last war did," the Captain stated. "I don't think anyone knows all the details. After the firestorms abated, the ash stayed in the atmosphere for years and years. Some say that was the worst."

Nicholas was speechless. No Mnemos system scenario had ever conjured up anything so devastating.

"All I know is that the last war took a while to beat itself out. DefCon survived totally underground, but the destruction to the ionosphere was more than anyone had anticipated. The ash destroyed most of what was left untouched on the surface. Nothing could grow. Seeds couldn't germinate. The sun wasn't seen for a whole generation. And no one I know has ever felt rain." The Captain faced the northern hills, turning away from Nicholas.

"When the ash settled, there wasn't a green thing left. We keep photosynthesis alive underground, but the Soviets had hit all our fission reactors, and there's so much plutonium scattered around the country that it'll be centuries yet before we can start over."

Nicholas could see minute particles of ash still in the air. The sun on the jagged western mountains seemed like a cancerous tumor, pustulent and ugly.

Lazlo pointed a gauntleted hand to the sky. "The Historians always tell us to watch for the Eridani. Those idiots. You can't even see the goddamn stars!"

Nicholas couldn't quite make the connection between the stars and
Eridani
, but kept silent. He turned and examined the Bore itself. He was astonished to discover that its nose was not a pointed drill arrangement but a flat plate that had a number of pentagons arrayed on it. Behind the Bore was a long, steaming trail of excreted molten iron. The Bore had aparently misjudged its depth beneath the hills and had come out in a shallow valley that was as barren as a rift on the moon.

Lazlo gestured with a thickly plated arm, pointing west. "The Bore was supposed to go under all this and come out there, in the Rockies." He looked up. "And now there's a floater somewhere up above."

The canvas around the package Lazlo held fell away, and an assembly of sticks, bright aluminum, and plastic joints dropped to the ground at their feet.

"Be careful," Lazlo advised. "Don't rip it. It's the only one we've got left on the Bore."

"What is it?"

The Captain bent down awkwardly and jerked back the top of a canister. Nick could hear a hissing noise. It was a balloon, and the hissing was coming from helium rapidly filling the voluminous spaces of an aluminum sack.

"It's a decoy, son. Floaters are easier to get rid of than sharks," he said. "A goddamn shark will follow you all over the place, and there's nothing you can do about it. A floater doesn't have that much sense. Like the Russians who made them." The intonation he gave to the word "Russians" made it sound like a curse.

The balloon rose and took shape. Nicholas was surprised at its size. The thing was enormous. He scanned the skies for the floater, but saw nothing but clouds and dust.

"You can't see it," Lazlo interjected. He held the balloon by its small gondola. "They drop down from very old satellites looking for heat. They got a lot of cities before it was over."

The Captain manipulated some dials on the package underneath the balloon. The device began to emit a rhythmic beeping noise like that of the little crawler that had been eaten by the shark in Omaha.

"Is it going to work?" Nick asked. It seemed so fragile in the harsh world around them.

"Usually does. Floaters go for anything that moves. I want to get rid of it now before it decides to follow us to DefCon."

"I see."

"And," the Captain concluded, "I don't want to be around when it goes off."

The quartz lenses around the Captain's eyes gave off a telling iridescent light. In them was the universal fear of nuclear bombs. He released the balloon.

Nicholas watched the decoy rise into the sludge-brown skies. It was impossible to tell what season it was—if there
were
seasons now that the climate had been altered.

Nick suddenly felt vulnerable out here in the open. He nearly jumped out of his leaden skin when a buzzer at the Captain's belt sounded loudly. The Captain made for the Bore as quickly as his suit would allow.

"Damn!" he shouted into the radio. "The floater caught the decoy's signal too soon! It's gonna come down right on top of us!"

Something within Nicholas was opening up his Pandora's box of panic. The buzzer at Lazlo's belt now sounded like sirens.

The sirens of Bombay.…

Here, though, there were no voices speaking to him. He ran after the Captain over the lifeless ground. His suit deflated with each step, triggered by the floater alarm.

Inside the lock Nick pulled the door shut, listening to Lazlo swear. His own heart was pounding to the beep of the alarm. Gusts of air scoured them clean of dust and radioactive particles in an automatic decontamination process. The Captain wasted no time whatsoever, and bounded down the corridor, past the still somnolent Boremen. Nicholas followed him to the cockpit, practically failing out of the miraculous suit. He strapped himself in.

Captain Lazlo started up the engines. The Bore sank at a steep angle. Lights flashed on the console before them. Seconds were being counted off on a digital readout. Only a few left.…

A giant thunderclap struck them suddenly. The mighty Bore shook like a leaf in a cyclone. The Captain gripped the arms of his chair tightly.

"Damn!" he swore. "That wasn't supposed to happen."

"What wasn't supposed to happen?" Nick asked.

The earth seemed to rock and slam against them. Nick thought about radiation. Were they deep enough to be completely protected?

The shock waves ceased, and everything became quiet.

Lazlo leaned back. "Floaters don't usually drop like goddamn rocks. It was as if it knew you were here."

Nicholas stared at him curiously. "Me? I thought you said it was attracted to the Bore."

Lazlo found his cigar and thumbed a lighter into flame. "It's part of the Eridani legacy, that's all. Like it was after you instead of the Bore or any of us."

"But how could that be?" Nick countered.

"Just a feeling I have. Like a gut reflex. I'm just glad I'm not in your shoes." The cigar glowed to life.

This seemed to be a different Lazlo. Perhaps it was the proximity of the floater, and its peril. Nicholas considered the gun at the Captain's side—remembering the redheaded boy, Titus, back in the stasis chamber, and how he had nervously fiddled with his gun, watching him with scared eyes.
Eridani.
Who wouldn't fear the Ancient Ones who'd brought about the destruction of the old world?

But the Captain didn't go for his gun. Instead, he sighed heavily and put on his dark-lensed goggles as the Bore headed down into the halls of the earth.

"You might be a jinx, son, but not because you're an Eridani. That's fairy-tale stuff. I know. I almost became a Historian myself. I know what lies in the past. But my boys back there don't. A thousand years is a long time, and these missions of ours never really amount to much. That's why we rate only apprentice Historians. But since we found
you
, we've attracted a shark and a floater. That tells us something." Lazlo was remarkably philosophical about the whole thing.

The Captain skillfully leveled out the Bore.

There was a slight, even gentle, hissing coming from somewhere under the seats. Nicholas knew it was time to go. He was alone again.

Nicholas slunk back down the corridor, trying not to inhale much of the
genna
. Passing the Boremen, he noticed that none of them seemed to be conscious of anything. Perhaps, he thought, these people only lived for their travels and
genna
. Were idle pleasures also a legacy from his own time?

He found Lexie wrapped like a baby in her blanket, but he turned away. There was a hollowness growing in his chest, and he knew that there was nothing for him back in her chamber. He stepped across the tilting corridor, found an empty chamber, and climbed in.

Here there was no
genna
, but before sleep found him, he had a single, frightening vision of Adolf Eichmann fleeing through the jungles of Argentina. He had no pity for the man. He knew what the name Eichmann meant to history.

He also knew about the bones in the Auschwitz ovens. Staci's bones. His bones: The Eridani had killed themselves off.

Chapter Three

THE WAR HAD ended so long ago that no one living knew even its approximate date. DefCon's best estimate was one thousand eighty-three years ago—give or take a year.

DefCon was not only the name for the city where Nicholas found himself, but the name of the surviving nation. Professor Riordan told him there was a saying from the Days of the Eridani that, wherever you went, you were always in DefCon.