The Alejandra Variations (33 page)

She smiled confidently and lovingly. He felt his heart melting at her smile. But he had seen that smile before: Rhoanna!

"You'll come around eventually, darling, with or without any manipulation on my part. I can provide for all your pleasures and securities and never leave you—unlike Rhoanna. I can give you what your other loves could not. Lois Panier and Lisa Anderson were unapproachable. I'll give you what they couldn't. Jeannie Owens, Leigh Ann Lucart—shall I go on?"

He shuddered with outrage. She had complete access to all the nooks and crannies of his most intimate personal life. His deepest feelings, all the nuances he preferred in his lovers, even the lies he'd been telling himself over the years about his relationships—all that a man builds to keep him going in his quest for love—Alejandra had at her disposal.

There were no secrets. She would know his thoughts before he'd think them!

Nicholas stopped out on the grassy plain in the crimson light of the end-of-the-world sun. It was a perfect world, and the great Migration Shields, invisible now in the light of day, were waiting to carry them to even more perfect worlds beyond. When would Sandi, the next variation, appear? And who would come along after the computer was done being Sandi?

"No," he told her. "I refuse."

Even if there was nothing that Foresee could do to help him, he could fight for himself. He could not physically resist Cesya's attractions, but he could fight to retain his sanity.

Except, he realized, how did he stop from falling in love? Wasn't that part of his problem with Rhoanna in the first place?

Then he thought of the Scare.

The lives of the average man and woman were beyond their control, were in the hands of madmen who could atomize them within seconds, sending out such a burst of gamma radiation that if there were aliens living among the stars, they'd see the end of mankind for sure.

And what had the agents of Foresee told him?
Everyone just stopped
. Refused. They got so scared that they simply forced the world to halt.

He sat down on the soil of a planet so old it defied description, and refused to move. Like Mohandas K. Gandhi. Like Martin Luther King.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I refuse to put up with this nonsense any longer. If you want my heart, then you're going to have to rip it from my chest. If you don't set me free, I would rather die. You know that you can't keep me in-system forever. My body will deteriorate."

She laughed. "What?"

"I don't love you, Cesya, and I never will." He stared up at her.

"Yes, you do, darling," she smiled.

He felt the effects of
gohhe
-induced hormones rising in his loins. She put a soft hand to his cheek, and he found himself becoming excited.

"Stop it!" he yelled. "I refuse! I don't love you!"

She lost her air of benevolent control. She slapped him across the face. "You'll do as I say!"

"No," he told her.

"Yes!" she shouted, bringing a fist effectively down on his right ear.

Resist
, a voice shouted in his mind.
Do nothing.

Visions of Benares and Calcutta came to him. Selma, Alabama. His heart leaped within his chest. They were watching him! Something was happening after all!

But Cesya, too, had heard the voices, and she turned her face to the impassive sky. She screamed, "No! He's mine!"

They had broken through. The plan was being instituted. All of the separate parts, the disparate strategies, were coming together.

She turned to him, torn with anger and fright. Her tirade was transforming her. "Don't let them do this to me," she pleaded suddenly. "You belong to me, don't you understand? Please tell them to leave us alone!"

He had heard that voice before, as well.
Beneath a window on a moonlit night. "Darling. You belong to me.

It was the night he spent in hell.
Ghenna nacht.

Rhoanna. Alejandra.

Without a mother to raise her, a father to guide her, Alejandra had taken on the worst characteristics of all the women he had known.

He sat down on the ground and crossed his arms over his knees. Another vision: Gandhi on board the steamship
Rajputana
, conferring with Meher Baba in 1931. Dr. King conferring with Bobby Kennedy in 1962.…

"If you want me," he told her, "you're going to have to carry me."

"Don't!" she yelled. "Please! We must leave this place, Nicholas!"

"No," he affirmed. He was done now. Through.

Cesya staggered back and suddenly looked dizzy.

A number of the golden soldiers who had been waiting and watching several yards away were now standing like statues.

"No," Cesya breathed. "I've come so far to have you. I love you! Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"No," he responded.

The golden women—beautiful to the last—were losing their identities. They had actually become statues.

Cesya began yanking on him, trying to get him to stand up. "Get up!" she screamed. She was strong, but not strong enough. "You must do as I say! Nicholas!"

He fought. He loved her. He did not love her. Fire stirred in his loins. He doused it with the ice of indifference. His heart yearned for her. He calmed it with contempt. She fought for him in all the ways she could think of—and all he had left was his will.

Fight her!
the voices repeated.

"Stop it!" she yelled. "Stop it!"

Her world was coming undone. Whatever they were doing to Mnemos Nine back in the hidden vaults of Foresee, it had to be working. Cesya herself still seemed tangible enough, but everything else was beginning to dissolve.

"Nicholas!" she began weeping. "Honey, please!"

"No," he told her impassively.

Then a voice thundered across the dawn meadow.

"Violation!" it bellowed. "You are in Violation!"

Cesya jerked around. The two of them suddenly saw an enormous Keeper rise up over the ridge where the Bore rested. The Keeper was twice the size of the other one Nicholas had encountered. It looked as Keepers must have looked when they were first implanted in their Warrens in that imaginary world. Towering and shiny, it came at them, brand-new and powerful.

"Oh, no," Cesya whimpered. "No, no! Please!"

Nicholas rolled away from her as she got up. The panic that had bloomed on her face was as real as anything he had yet seen in her.

"Violation!"
the Keeper roared as it strode over the plain on well-oiled legs forty feet long.

Cesya got up and ran toward the robot, its nuclear bomb behind its spider's eyes. As she did, the ally bracelet which Nicholas still wore rang out with a voice of heroic alarm.

"Stand by!" Qui's allies called so that Cesya could hear. "The sun has been triggered!"

"Please, no!" the golden woman cried.

The Clantrams were vanishing even as the Amazon warriors faded from sight. The volcano behind them slowly became incorporeal, now that Alejandra could no longer sustain the world. She was being besieged from too many sides.

Cesya fell to the ground, weeping. "Please, don't! Please!" She screamed horribly as the Keeper bore down upon her, and Nicholas knew then what must have happened back at Foresee.

They couldn't get them both out alive. Alejandra had proven herself too selfish, too possessive.

A vision came to him: the Engineers sending a bolt of terribly concentrated energy into the sun's fragile helium bubble. It was the Final Day.

"Nicholas," Cesya chanted from the grass. "Nicholas, Nicholas.…"

The Keeper reached down, the numbers on its metallic chest indicating that time had finally run out. The sun's photosphere erupted.

Alejandra screamed. Then was gone in a blistering rush of white light.

The Last Variation

AT THE TABLE OF the open-air café, Nicholas watched Rhoanna Martin sip her Bloody Mary. He swirled his glass of Perrier with a half-moon of lime inside.

Beyond the café, the Catalina Mountains that flanked Tucson to the north languished in the noonday sun. It was spring, and the scent of orange blossoms drifted about them.

Over her drink, Rhoanna smiled almost shyly.

Nicholas asked, "How's your drink?"

"Good," she said. Her cigarette burned lazily in an ashtray of blue glass in the center of the table.

"I'm glad you decided to meet me this way," he told her.

"You went through a lot to help me out. I wanted to let you know just how much I appreciate that."

She seemed somewhat awkward.

"I was glad I could help, Nick. You never told me what you did for a living. I never thought it could be so dangerous."

A slight wind had picked up on the desert and now drifted to them in the café. It fluffed Rhoanna's hair in the sunlight.

"Normally it's not," he told her wryly.

He watched her small gestures—the way she held her cigarette, the way she fingered her swizzle stick:
the gestures that kept the world together.…
He chatted, trying to put her at ease.

"I guess you were there when they warmed up the vat of liquid helium that housed Mnemos Nine."

She nodded. "Melissa said the only option they had left was to slow down her thinking. I don't understand it, but I guess it worked."

Nicholas nodded. "Then it was a question of overloading her. She couldn't think fast enough or react fast enough in the end. Unfortunately, it gave Mnemos Nine the equivalent of brain damage."

A silence settled between them.

Toying with her cigarette, Rhoanna spoke first. "I heard that Nelson Reitinger found some real-world Blossoms the other day."

Nicholas smiled. "All that mysterious construction going on off the coast of Coatzacoalcos in the Gulf of Mexico turned out to be a huge underwater dome full of seeds and spores. If there is a nuclear war, then the ice age that follows will raise the seabed of the Gulf. I guess our brothers and sisters in Mexico want a future to look forward to."

"Don't we all," Rhoanna said.

The wind, full of the smell of oranges, wafted about them. Rhoanna said, "I heard that you're moving to Colorado."

"Yes," he nodded. "I thought I'd stay close to my real home—Foresee." He thought it wise not to mention Sally Diaz.

"That's funny," Rhoanna said, looking at him. "I've been thinking about moving too."

"Back to San Diego?"

"No," she told him. "Los Angeles. I'm tired of the military life. Sierra Vista is the pits."

He nodded. "I heard about you and Vince. I'm sorry."

She crushed out her cigarette. "Even before the Scare, I saw it coming. And Vince didn't like it when I quit my job on the base along with the rest of the wives. The Scare's given a lot of people time to think about the important things in life. Going to Foresee also helped."

They were silent again. He knew now that there would always be some link between them, some bond that had survived the crucible of a self-destructive love.

Rhoanna grinned hugely all of a sudden. "It's sort of funny," she said.

"What?"

"Being a celebrity."

Nicholas grinned in return. "How are you taking it? Well, I hope."

She put her cigarettes back into her purse. "I just wish that damn computer hadn't taken on my middle name."

"Alejandra is a fine name."

A little boy came running up to them through the tables at the rear of the café. He was five years old and full of energy. He dove into Rhoanna's lap.

"Mommy, mommy!" he chanted.

Rhoanna scooped him up into her arms. "Baby, what are you doing here?"

"Melissa said!"

Nicholas smiled at the child.

Rhoanna held the boy and pointed to Nick. "Darry, this is Nicholas." She smiled. "He's a friend of mine."

"Hi," the little boy said.

"Hi, Darry," Nicholas waved.

Nicholas took a final sip of his Perrier and rose from the table. He pointed to the frisky little boy. "I take it this is a hint that I have to get going. Sal isn't very good at giving hints."

Rhoanna put the boy down. She stood up. "Stay in touch, Nick. It was good to see you again."

He looked down at Darry. "Hey, Darry. Look at this!"

He held out his arms as millions of wondrous globes of flashing lights came out of nowhere and surrounded his body, engulfing him in a rainbow of dazzling color.

"Wow!" the little boy gasped, wide-eyed.

Nicholas slowly rose into the air, being careful of the chairs and table, and smiled happily at them. "I hope this venture into the system has been better than the last one."

"Much better," she told him. She smiled and waved. "Good-bye, Nick."

"¡Adios!" 
he called as he ascended into the sky.

Mother and child faded away from the café, back into the real world, as Nicholas took off for the heavens. From his wrist, where his ally bracelet gleamed in the sunlight, a voice sparkled.

"All set for today, Nick?"

"Sure thing," he told the computer. They were careful now. Perhaps too careful. Mnemos Ten was friendly and obedient, but sometimes he got a little lonely.

But they were all learning.

"What's up?" Nicholas asked.

"Some data coming in about a religious uprising. People were seeing visions of the Avatar near Ahmednagar, India. Melissa thinks it's part of the Scare, but she wants you to look into it."

He rose into the azure sky, heading southwest toward the waters of the distant and dreamy Pacific Ocean. It was the purest freedom he'd known in quite some time. The sun was bright, the earth below was still with him—for all his wars of the heart were behind him now, vanished like a glimmer of light off a pewter plate.

The End

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