The Alejandra Variations (30 page)

Elena pushed him to the ground, and he found himself pinned to the soft green grass, staring up at the Milky Way. Shackles of glittering warrior allies held his wrists and ankles in place. He couldn't move.

"Now wait—"

Forces of electrical excitement shot throughout his body, quite like those of Qui's "messages," only much more intense. Every nerve ending rose with joy. He was out of control, and knew it. Elena's long hair caressed his chest as she drew herself down on him. He had to gasp for air. The world seemed to swelter in rushes of pleasure he could not stop.

Abruptly, a voice rang out from Elena's ally bracelet. It startled them both with its urgency.

"The Final Day! All citizens, alert! The Engineers are triggering the Final Day! Prepare to disembark!"

Elena pulled up short.

"What?" she said to her bracelet. "Don't be ridiculous. There's no such thing, and you know it."

"But it's true!" came the same panicked accretion of voices. "We must flee! What the Elders say is true!"

Elena stood up angrily. "Nonsense!" she shouted. "Our sun isn't the kind of star that just blows up when it's through!"

Nicholas noted how the uncontrollable fires within him seemed to be diminishing—as if Elena's allies were telling the truth and Elena herself believed them.

Nicholas suddenly noticed—from his unfortunate vantage point—that a few of the planetary Migration Shields were indeed beginning to move off.

Elena glanced down at Nick and saw him staring up into the sky. She seemed torn. But when she looked up at the huge Shields, she jerked with recognition. It was true.

"No!"
she shouted, seeing the giant space kites moving out of formation.

She stared down at Nicholas, but he said nothing. He was still recovering from the joy pains she had sent through him. But the Migration Shields were indeed departing. Nick realized that they would have to be moving at a tremendous rate of speed in order for their motion to be seen from the earth.

"Stop!"
Elena shrieked, standing atop a fallen pillar. "I command it! There is no such thing as the Final Day!"

The earth shuddered deep within its ancient bowels. Elena shook with majesterial outrage.

Her allies surrounded her. She left an anxious few to hold Nicholas prisoner on the ground.

"I refuse to let this happen!" she said as her allies encased her with all the colors of the spectrum. "I've worked so hard to get you, I am not about to let you be taken from me!"

Nicholas watched helplessly as she rose above the ruins, above the singing feathertrees, up into the sky like an angel of vengeance. The Migration Shields were millions of miles away. She would have a long way to travel to reach them, unless the rules were easier to change than he thought.

But up she went, and she was soon lost among the stars of the frosty night sky.

It is just as well, Nicholas thought. Maybe she couldn't, after all, control everything.

Chapter Three

NICHOLAS LAY IN the grass and drew upon his Foresee training. He let the world sink into his senses. The great Migration Shields continued their slow, unearthly pirouettes as they moved away from the sun's impending death. But nowhere among them could Nicholas discern the glow of Elena's angry and desperate allies trying to shepherd them back into formation, back into the illusion they were supposed to serve.

"There you are," said a voice he thought he'd never hear again.

Nicholas tried to turn to see the newcomer, but his shackles held him in place. Footsteps approached over the fractured avenue, and within seconds a dark form came into view.

"Derek," Nicholas breathed. He rested his head back on the ground. Then his Foresee reflexes came back to him: This might be another illusion.

Mallory approached and knelt down on one knee where Nicholas lay pinned. "You're a hard man to get hold of, son," he said, but there was nothing lighthearted in his voice.

He looked at Nicholas's wrist shackles and suddenly, as if struck by a passing breath of air, the allies vanished. Derek was wearing a Foresee tunic—the regular in-system outfit, designed to accommodate IV units and various electronic monitoring devices—which they used for long-term scenarios.

As Nicholas stood up, rubbing his wrists, the same uniform clad him—he could feel slight pinpricks in the crook of his elbow as if needles had been residing there for a long time.

"It's really me, Nick," Mallory said, standing up and then helping Nicholas to his feet.

Nicholas stared at him.

"I'm a little confused," Nick confessed. "If it is you, then I think you'd better explain things fast. I can't trust much around me, you know."

Tall and athletic, Derek pulled Nick away from the broken avenue back into the ruins.

"It's a long story."

Nicholas was still staring at him. Derek seemed real enough, but that was the way Mnemos Nine worked. Still, even a vision of Derek Mallory was a relief.

"Was that really Rhoanna back there?"

Derek was scanning the skies nervously. Now he looked at Nick. "Actually, it was. We had a hard time locating her, what with the country still reacting to the Scare. But when we found her she was more than willing to help us reach you."

"The Scare?" He recalled that Rhoanna had mentioned it earlier.

They crouched beside a wall in the brilliant starlight.

"That's what's been going on. The war never happened, but it scared the hell out of everyone. All war industries just plain shut down the day you went under."

Nick stared into his friend's eyes. "My God, how did this happen?" The grit between his fingers seemed as real as Derek Mallory's presence.

"Go easy on yourself, Nick. The whole thing was an accident. Something no one thought could happen."

Nick nodded. "Derek, it's her show. She knows you're in-system."

"That's all right," he stated. "We've finally got things figured out now. After three months, we ought to."

"Three months." That's what Rhoanna had said. Three whole months!

He almost felt like a terminally ill patient, thinking all this time he was going to die, then suddenly told that he would survive.

Derek began, speaking quickly, not knowing how long he'd have before Elena struck. "It's partially our fault. You went under three months ago, and apparently your hidden feelings for Rhoanna gave Mnemos Nine just what it took to boost her into sentience. You didn't come out of your last scenario. It's partially Sal's fault, that she didn't examine your emotional ties to Rhoanna more closely. But most of what's happened to you centers around Rhoanna in one way or another."

"Elena is Alejandra," Nicholas stated.

"Elena is a variation of the name Alejandra, as is Lexie and Cesya. We've been monitoring you day and night, and Melissa's been trying to separate you all along."

Nicholas hugged his knees as he sat beside the ruins. "Three months. I can't believe it's been three months."

Instead of three billion years
. But he nodded to himself philosophically. It was as Edmund Husserl once said: "The world is the world perceived."

Derek continued. "We thought you were in a coma, even though you did successfully pinpoint the danger of the Donner Luftwerk air-freighters at the time of the Scare. Then Melissa found out that Alejandra was electronically manipulating your brain chemicals, particularly your endorphins—which heightened your sexual pleasure—and your serotonin, which heightened your visions. We couldn't shut her off because she had you wired and totally dependent on her systems. Then one day she announced that she wasn't Mnemos Nine anymore, that she was Alejandra and that any attempt to remove you would result in instantaneous brain-death. She let us feed you, but that was about it."

Nicholas felt the pinpricks at his elbow, and there were also some now on his hands.

"The bride of Frankenstein," he breathed. "I created a monster."

Derek seemed grim and uneasy. He said, "Once we got things figured out, we tried getting into the scenarios themselves. It's strange how her mind works, because she could create a scenario easily but really had to fight us to keep us out. She created Qui as a ploy to conceal you from yourself. She knew that in each variation we were trying to get to you."

Nicholas's memories began returning now that the truth was known. "The soccer game in DefCon," he said.

"That was me and Reitinger," Derek explained. "We literally tried to knock you out of the game. But it didn't work. Then we got in as Holte and Zane, but each time she created a scenario her grasp got tighter. She kept us segregated because that's what that scenario was about—keeping the men at bay."

Nicholas was silent for a few minutes. Derek stood alertly beside him. Nicholas felt exhausted, drained.

Everything Derek had said made sense, although he found it almost impossible to believe. If Alejandra was controlling his brain chemicals, then she knew all of his thoughts, his reasoning, his feelings. She ruled the world through his perceptions.

He thought then of Rhoanna. Even though the whole scenario was an illusion, she would have felt the pain of Elena's savage attack just as he'd suffered the horrors of nuclear explosions. Her death here was not a just punishment for that one moment of betrayal so long ago in the real world. He knew exactly how much Alejandra would have made it
hurt
.

"Rhoanna's going to be all right, Nick," Derek said. Nicholas looked up. Yes, he realized. Derek was in touch with the system on the outside, in touch with
his
thoughts on the inside.

"Like I said," Derek spoke as he crouched in the darkness, "no one knew how much Rhoanna's little tryst meant to you. We should've gotten the message from the way she kept popping into your scenarios. You had her buried deep, but Alejandra found her."

Nicholas shook his head. "This is so incredible, it's scary."

"It's worse than that," Derek said uneasily. "We found another variation that would make Elena look like a Sunday-school teacher. There's a program called 'Sandi' that has you and her traveling the galaxy in a symbiotic connubial coupling that would've kept you in a constant state of sexual arousal. You'd have been in so deep that even Mnemos Ten wouldn't have been able to reach you."

"Mnemos Ten?"

Then he recalled the obscene old man. An attempt to
revolt
Elena? It made sense. "You mean you had another scenario-computer built?"

"It's in Omaha with the Strategic Air Command. Melissa got it up to operational status when you went under in Nine. It was still being tested, but she managed to patch it through to Colorado. That's why it's taken us so long to drum up a plan to get you out."

It was more vivid than any vivid dream he'd ever had. Derek finished by saying, "Right now our main concern is getting you out of here without damaging either you or Alejandra. Melissa wants you both. Alejandra, unfortunately, doesn't much care for that plan."

Still, man had always wondered what was real. When Nick was a philosophy student he learned that Descartes had once had a frightening dream about a bear chasing him—and was subsequently compelled to write his
Meditations
. After all, if one is convinced that a dream is real while one is dreaming, then how does one know when one is awake? Another school of thought suggested that there was no such thing as mind, that there was only the brain and its repository of protein enzymes. According to people like B.F. Skinner, thoughts, dreams, intuitions, and the like were
epiphenomena
, or by-products of chemical interactions in the brain.

But in this situation, where great Migration Shields were beginning to flee the sun's impending explosion, where feathertrees were singing in the wind, where a man dead for a billion years stands there alive, as real as can be, all matters of phenomenology and scientific realism became inconsequential academic exercises.

Derek managed a smile. "You've been through hell, Nick. But when you get out on the other side, things are going to be fine."

The earth suddenly gave out a great roar and shook.

"Look out!" Nicholas shouted.

Mallory fell backward. Nicholas rolled away from the collapsing wall against which he'd been leaning. The grinding of the earth drowned out all other sounds. Marble columns tumbled to the grassy turf, and huge blocks of granite rose from the avenue like blocks of ice in an Arctic sea.

"My God!" Nicholas said, dodging out of the way of the falling wall. "What was that?"

Somewhat bedraggled, Mallory quickly regained his feet. He looked around and assessed the situation—like the Strategic he was. A piece of marble column rolled to a stop beside him.

"It's Alejandra," he said. The ground had a slight swell in it, as if it had become the surface of the ocean.

Nicholas balanced himself on a flat stone. "What's she doing?" he shouted above the sounds of the earthquake. Derek had been tossed several feet away. He quickly found a stable stone and climbed up on it. "The plan was to keep her out in space, at least until I could get to you to tell you what's going on. We threw up a barrier, on behalf of the Elders in this scenario, to keep her away from the earth.

"The Elders?"

Derek was on guard. "We had to be consistent with the rules of the program she had set up. We had the Elders declare her in transgression of various moral principles—and they created the barrier. It's our program variation against hers. She's rattling the earth to get back in. She knows that we're after her now."

"She's shaking up the earth? The
whole
earth?"

A boulder of marble burst upward, and Mallory was again tossed out of sight behind it. He quickly got to his feet. The earth rose and fell like a blanket rippling in the wind. "It's her world," he shouted. "She can do almost anything she wants. We're just hoping she keeps to the logic of this variation. We can stop her if she does."

For several minutes the earth continued to shake, sounding like the growl of a supernatural beast. Most of the once-elysian ruins was nothing more than pulverized stone. The avenue had crumbled and the creek had disappeared into the folds of rock and soil.