The Far Side (65 page)

“You had to have your tonsils out, and no matter how much I plied you with stories of all the ice cream you could eat after the procedure, all you were fixated on was that they were going to cut part of you out.  The night before you were to go to the hospital, you had an asthma attack -- just like you had yesterday.”

“Asthma?  I don’t have asthma!”

“Well, yes and no.  To be honest, no one really has a good grip on what exactly causes asthma -- even if we can describe what it is.  Your bronchial tubes contract and you can’t breath.  Treatment is a bronchial dilator and, in severe cases, adrenaline.”

“Adrenaline?”

“You bet.  You weren’t awake to see what the injection does.  It’s really cool -- every hair on your body stands on end.”

“You think that’s cool?”

“Even the fine hairs on your arms,” her mother said, chortling.  “It looks really cool.  It’s not good for you, but it’s not that big of a deal.”

“Asthma?”

“Yes, stress induced I think.  Stress is a known risk factor for asthma attacks.”

“Is that girl okay?”

Her mother laughed, which Kris thought just one more bizarre thing.  “What?” she asked her mother.

“Conundrums, my dear, conundrums.  Say you’re the President of the United States.  Say a slave-holding refugee, one who survived white men massacring her family and friends, shows up one day on your doorstep, battered and bleeding.

“Then the doctor on the scene, a cruel vindictive bitch who wants to nail your pecker to the nearest wall, tells you that the refugee needs to be in a hospital.  Just what do you do in this PC world of ours, where absolutely nothing makes sense any more?”

Kris sagged back on what she realized was a gurney.  “Is that doctor anyone I know?”

“Your father chortles at me, reminding me of one of his favorite aphorisms -- a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.  They tortured me, Kris, they tortured me for no reason at all.  I know they had a reason to be upset with Linda, but breaking both of her legs -- I’ll never be a liberal again.  Never.”  She laughed, still bitter.  “Of course, I’m not going to be a Republican either, but that’s another story that can wait for later.  Let me check you over.”

Instead, the other doctor moved forward and did the examination.  From behind the doctor examining Kris, her mother said, “Kris, meet Dr. Billie Reid, here to help us, sent by our friendly government.  The poor dear has had a bad day, not being able to come up with a better diagnosis than asthma.”

“It could have been an allergic reaction,” the doctor said absently, as she listened to Kris’ chest.  “The symptoms are functionally identical.”

“Of course, except she got sick on Earth, in a clean room.  Go figure.  And when we used the standard treatment for asthma, by your own order, she improved.  The adrenaline confirmed the diagnosis.”

“We will wait a while and see,” the other doctor said darkly.

Helen Boyle laughed.  “You know, Kris, Billie here is praying that you break out in suppurating boils and bits and pieces start to fall off.  But, as much as I make fun of her, she’s a good doctor -- and an honest one.  I think she just wants to treat someone with something totally new.”

“Has she looked over the girl?”

“Oh yes; yes, indeed.  We both have.  It was funny to watch Billie.  The President ordered Diyala -- that’s her name, I’m told -- to be taken to Cedar-Sinai, which has adequate facilities -- except he just sent a regular ambulance.  Poor Billie here nearly had apoplexy on her own.  They had to get to fetch a special military vehicle with Cat 5 containment capability for Diyala and transported her in that.  Then they had to wait an hour, trying to figure out how to get her into the hospital, because they hadn’t bothered to put her in a containment suit first.  The Keystone Doctors -- I do believe Billie should have been left in charge.  In the end, they sent Diyala back.”

“They’re idiots,” the other doctor agreed.  She turned to Helen Boyle.  “I know you think I’m an idiot, too.”

“You’re helping them, aren’t you?” Helen said bluntly.  “So, yes.”

“I’ve spent my life training to deal with alien organisms -- and with nary a thing to work on.  Now, all of a sudden, I’m offered the promised land.  Like you’d have said, ‘No,’ yourself.”

“Dr. Mengele used that as a defense and was hanged anyway,” Kris’ mother retorted.

“Mom -- how is Andie?  Ezra?  Kurt and Jake?  The others?”

“Ezra and Kurt are still on other side of the door, working with the local King and his sidekick.  The bad guys are slowly loading their ship, preparing to depart.  I’m not sure what Jake’s doing, it has something to do with a marathon poker game and taking people’s money away from them.

“Andie and Linda are in a private room in the containment facility here and are getting to know each other better.  Your father is on his way to Sacramento to explain to the governor that California would be far better off with fusor technology than without.

“Otto Schulz is alive and kicking and has figured out a way to be with Andie for his last days -- he’s agreed that his body should be cremated, and he’s going to be brought here later today.  The President has gone to the Supreme Court to enjoin him from doing so -- who knows who will win that battle?

“Outside is chaos.  I mean it, literally.  Linda started this thing of live reporting, and she had someone with a camera near the beach when Andie was negotiating with those Tengri people.  It looked like a scene from a bad movie, Kris -- Andie started killing them.  I mean, she killed more than a dozen of them.  I didn’t understand what they were saying, but she demanded something from them and they didn’t respond.  So she killed them.”

Helen looked at her daughter.  “Kurt and Jake explained to me that you had to do what you did in self defense... but Andie...”

“Mom, Andie is far more peaceful than I am,” Kris told her.  “You say you’ve been mugged.  Mom!  You have no idea what it’s like there.  It is what life was like on Earth before modern times.  Most people then -- and here -- think that might makes right.  In fairy tales you can sit down and talk to people and make it all come out peacefully.  How do you talk to someone who, given half a chance, would put chains on you, and kill you if you didn’t obey their every whim after that?  And Mom, I talked with the slave girl I rescued.  That’s every whim, Mom.  Every last single one.

“That woman’s owner punished her by forbidding her to eat dinner, then he raped her a few times, and he was going to kill her when he woke up.  That’s what they’re like.  Maybe, at some point in time, we can make some sort of peace with them, but that attitude has to go.”

Her mother started to speak and stopped, turning pale.  “I was just going to say, ‘Who is to say which culture is better?’  That’s just stupid, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.  Even the people we made friends with -- they had some bastards too, out for themselves and screw everyone else.  I saw a man kill his king, because that king wanted his army to kill me.  It’s given me a lot to think about.”

“You should try spending some time in jail,” her mother said.

“Well, I did spend a night in chains.”

Her mother grimaced.  “Not..”

“No, prison shackles.”

Her mother sighed.  “Being in a cell with Linda Walsh was educational.  Your father is a nice man, but really -- I’ve factored in his political beliefs ever since we met and I barely pay attention to them -- until recently.

“Linda told me that people like myself, liberals, progressives or whatever we call ourselves, are beguiled by intentions, and that so long as someone assures us, like our current President
has, that his intentions are good, we’re not supposed to be interested in looking further.  We ignore results, because we believe all it will take is an adjustment of the details to get it right.

“She is, she told me, a rocket scientist.  In her world, good intentions don’t build spaceships.  They might get you started, but to actually build a spaceship you need to show reliable results.  I watched them torture her.  Oh, God, Kris, I’ve never been more ashamed in my life
!  Towards the end, I was begging them to take me and not her.  She would laugh at them, and no matter what they did to her, she didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.

“I spent days and days doing nothing but crying.  Crying in frustration, crying in agony for what that young woman was going through.  I still don’t understand how someone could have the courage to do what she did.  The two times they beat me, the questions they asked me were stupid and there was no way to answer them.  Finally I realized that they just wanted to beat me, to humiliate me, and couldn’t care less whether or not I answered or what I said.”

Her mother laughed bitterly.  “After that, I would give them my name, my job title and my social security number and nothing else.”

“It’s been an exciting summer,” Kris told her.

“It has been.  I’m sorry about the house.”

“It was a nice house,” Kris said sadly.  “But you have to remember it was nothing you did, it wasn’t anything I did and for that matter, it wasn’t anything Andie did.  They did it to please themselves and to hurt us.  It was little people doing little things, to paraphrase Ezra.”

“Amen,” Helen replied and turned to the government doctor.  “Well, Doctor, do you think my daughter will survive the rest of the night without medical supervision?”

“I believe that there is a reasonable expectation that she will,” Dr. Reid said with a laugh.  “She can probably sit with the others in quarantine as well.”

“And will it reset their quarantine clock?” Helen Boyle asked the other doctor.

The woman shrugged.  “We have enough of a baseline already to know how pointless that would be.”

Not very much later Kris joined eight men in the quarantine area.  There was laughter and exchanges of comments and experiences.

Kris was happy to be at home with such men, far happier than she’d ever been before.

All of the other things she’d done in her life, all of the other things she’d ever contemplated doing in her life didn’t begin to hold a candle to stepping through a blue door with a Far Side someplace else.

It wasn’t going to be an easy life, and it certainly wasn’t going to be something that would suit everyone.

She focused on one thing.  There were people like Ezra and Jake who knew how to deal with things like they were on the other side of the blue doors.  Both of them freely admitted that they were only journeymen, that the masters were officers.  And the officers they respected the most had a special cachet, and many of them had been to a particular school.

She pulled Kurt Sandusky away from the poker game and spoke to him, looking him right in the eye, “What would I need to do to get into West Point?”

Chapter 25 :: Think About This

Kris was reading a book on military tactics when Kurt Sandusky knocked on the door to the women’s quarantine quarters.  She put her book down and got up.  “What do you need, Kurt?” she asked.

“Kris, do you have a minute?” Kurt asked her.

She looked up at him and shrugged.  “I have three days and four hours.”

“I’d like to talk to you,” Kurt told her.

“If you want,” she said dispiritedly.  “Is the day room all right?”  She waved at the door at the other end of the room she was in.  That was the sleeping quarters.  Currently only Andie and Linda were in there, and Kris was fairly certain that they weren’t sleeping.  Her mother and Jo Christensen were up and about doing their various and sundry things.

He nodded and the two of them started down the hall to the public recreation room.

“You said that you were thinking that you might want to attend West Point,” Kurt told her as they walked.

“I’ve been thinking about that, yes,” she replied.

“It’s the middle of September, you know.  They start in the middle of July,” Kurt told her.

“So? I have, if nothing else in the last nearly four months, learned patience.  That’s ten months from now.  If I can do a month of quarantine, I can wait another ten months or so to start college.”

“You’ve gotten steadily quieter and more withdrawn as our time here nears completion,” he observed.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” she told him.  The day room was empty, which brought a raised eyebrow from Kris.  “Where is everyone?”

“They are making themselves busy so that we can talk privately.”

“I’m not sick, Kurt.”

“I never said you were.  But something is bothering you.”

“I keep thinking about this summer, I keep thinking about what I want to do with my life.”  She turned to face him squarely.  “Nothing in my life prepared me for reality, Kurt.  I didn’t play with toy guns when I was growing up -- Andie learned about weapons from her father, but I didn’t.  Movies -- all I’ve seen and heard was in movies, TV, and an occasional book.”

She looked at him.  “I’ve heard my father talk about self-defense all my life.  But for him, it was a theoretical exercise.  My mother is still shocked that I’ve ‘hurt people’ as she describes it, because the reality isn’t something she can believe.

“I was there, Kurt; I do believe it.  I just... the more I think about it, the less I understand it.”

“Americans have always struck our enemies as insane and conflicted,” he told her.  “We beat the living crap out of them, we bomb their cities flat, we slaughter them in droves -- and then we go in and heal the wounded and sick and patch up or rebuild the things we’ve destroyed.  No one, Kris, no one in the entire history of the Earth, has done that sort of thing before.  Before, if you had someone down, you either killed them or stole them blind.

“It really confused the hell out of the Japanese when one second we’d be trying to shove a bayonet into one of their soldiers, and then the medics would come along and try to fix him up.  It was the reverse of what the Japanese would do: if they thought you’d fought well, they’d cut your head off.  Otherwise, they just shot you.”

Kris looked at him.  “I guess that’s it.  I can’t make the mental leap from high school student to high school graduate who had to defend herself by killing others.  And, by the way, rescuing a few stray kittens on the battlefield.”

Kurt nodded.  “We’ve told Melek and Collum a couple of times that we’re looking after Diyala.  They think we’re going to pump her dry and then kill her.”

Kris shook her head vehemently.  “Never!  You and I killed her mother, her aunt and uncle and her cousins -- and hundreds of others of her people.”

“I know.  Like I said, the US fights a different kind of war than anyone else.

“Back to the question at hand, Kris.  It would be a slam dunk to get you into West Point next summer.  Now -- well, like I said, they start in July.  We could get you in now, but there would be a lot of resentment because they spent six weeks of physical torment during the summer.”

“And I didn’t?” she said, smiling for the first time in a while.

“Like I said, it could be done, but there would be a fair amount of resentment no matter how you spent your summer.

“Did I mention that after two years at West Point, and I’d should emphasize the ‘two years’ because they don’t take the summers off, you have to make a choice.  Bail or stick it out.  If you stick it out, you owe the Army two more years of college, five years of active duty, and three years in the inactive reserves.  Right now because of Afghanistan, the reserve duty has been frequently extended beyond three years, and it’s been pretty active.  It’s a serious commitment, Kris.  I tell you true -- you can pretty much get out of it by saying that you want to get out of it, but no one from West Point or any military officer after that would have any respect for you at all.  None.

“If you commit, you commit.  You don’t have to commit, so if you do, you don’t quit.”

Kris sighed.  “To be honest, Kurt, I don’t know what I want any more.”

“Well, West Point doesn’t allow married cadets.  I have a feeling that having a dependent would also disqualify you.”

“Diyala is not negotiable,” Kris said angrily.  “If she can’t be a part of it, then nothing else matters.”

“Kris, any sort of military training, even in basic training as a private, will entail long periods away from dependents.”

“If I have to, I have to.  But I won’t give her up.”

“Even if it might be better for her?”

Kris lifted her chin.  “I don’t believe that.  I can’t believe that.  I killed her parents.”

“You and I killed her mother, Kris.  Her father was last seen departing eastwards.  Odds are he’s a hundred miles off the coast now.  Collum is working on an expedition to go check, but they have to have a way of learning from a ship what they discover -- just getting sunk wouldn’t tell them anything.”

“I’ve been thinking about going back,” she admitted.  “I could help.”

“You could,” he agreed.  “But the question is could you learn something here that would make you more valuable there?”

Kris shook her head helplessly.  “I have no idea.  The more I think about it, the more confused I become.”

“I have a modest proposal,” he told her.

“Oh?”

“Yes, quite modest, actually.

“What do you know about me?” Kurt asked her.

“That you were in the Army, and then you acted as an agent or broker for stuntmen who used to be in the military.  Now you’re in charge on the Arvala side of Far Side door.  My father likes you, as do Ezra and Jake.  Andie listens to you.”

“And you?”

Kris grinned thinly.  “You’re my father’s age, Kurt.  If I wasn’t my father’s daughter I’d be calling you ‘Sir’ and walking on eggshells around you.”

“Well, yes, once upon a time I was in the Army.  I joined when I was seventeen, right after I graduated from high school.  On my first enlistment I spent a lot of time working on correspondence courses, and when I re-upped, they asked me what I wanted.  I told them OCS and showed them my BA.

“Recruiters are sick bastards, Kris.  They make drill sergeants look like princes.  The guy got me to sign on the dotted line, and off I went to OCS.  That was 1982, and nothing was on the horizon.  Oh, we still had the Soviet Union to contend with, but it was clear they were ailing.

“Promotions were, not to put too fine a point on it, glacially slow.  A maverick, someone up from the ranks like me, got the shaft nearly every time.  It took me ten years to make major, and the only reason I did was that I had a tank company in Desert Storm, and we killed a lot of Iraqis.  If that war hadn’t have come along, I’d have been forced to retire as a captain.

“Soldiers and dogs -- keep off the grass.  There used to be signs like that.  Nine years after Desert Storm I had my twenty years in, and I was still a major with no prospects, so I retired.  I was thirty-seven years old.

“I was young and fit, so I came out to Hollywood and got a job as a military advisor on a project, and when some guy racked himself up on a stunt, I filled in for him.  The rest is, as they say, history.

“I made a lot of friends while I was in the army, Kris.  One of them was Tom Briggs, my brigade commander in Iraq during Storm One.  I impressed him, Kris.  In any other war we’d have gotten a chance to know each better and who knows?  But ground combat in that war lasted only a hundred hours -- four days.  We crushed them.

“I was out on the pointy end of the stick when the orders came down for one more push.

“We went up a hill, and there was half the surviving Iraqi army spread out along a road at the base of the other side of that hill.  We cut loose and started killing them.  Kris, I tell you true, for an hour, all I cared about was racking up kills.  Then it dawned on me -- those stupid fuckers had given up.  They didn’t want to fight, they no longer had the will to fight, and what we were doing was murder, not war.  I called on my company to stop firing and promptly got screamed at by higher headquarters to keep banging away at men whose only desire was to survive.

“I told that
damn general to go fuck himself.  On an open mike on an open circuit that everyone from captains on up could hear.  They didn’t cashier me, but there was nothing Tom could do for me.  Worse, in five minutes, everyone on that fucking ridge had stopped shooting and we let the survivors go.

“You’ll read it in the history books that it was some asshole in Washington that ordered the halt -- but it was me.”

“I’d like to think I’d do the same thing,” Kris told him.

“I’ve heard that a hundred times from people I respect the hell out of Kris.  At the time what happened to me was a bitter pill, but over the years the respect of those people has meant a lot... that and I make a hell of a lot more money in Hollywood than I ever would have in the Army!”

Kris smiled.

“So, Tom called me the other day.  He and I keep in touch, and he was fascinated by what we’d done.  I told him about your wanting to go to West Point, and he told me, ‘Why would she want to do that?  Have her come see me.  I’ll give her some more stars, Kurt.’”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Tom Briggs is the President of Norwich University, which is perhaps the best military school outside of West Point.  He is convinced that the future is going to have a lot of blue doors to the Far Side, and he wants to prepare his people for that.  You, Andie, and Ezra are the only people I know of who have been there and done that.  Andie wouldn’t like this, I’m pretty sure.  I know Ezra would hate it.

“What Tom is looking for is someone who could guide the beginnings of such a program, someone with experience and know-how.  Someone not afraid to get their hands dirty.”

“And an eighteen-year-old high school graduate would directly work for him?” Kris asked skeptically.

“Kris, OJT is OJT.  You’ve actually done this.  You’ve talked with alien kings, generals, and military officers... you name it.  You’ve negotiated with them, you’ve made agreements; you’ve done the whole nine yards.”

“I had no idea what I was doing.”

“He knows that,” Kurt said with a laugh.  “But the proof is in the pudding.  You came away with solid agreements, fast friends, and while the State Department is still having the shits, your father is quietly lobbying for a ‘Department of External Affairs’ that would have authority over off-world activities.”

“I’m not sure that three months experience is going to cut it,” she told him.

“At first it will.  And I’m here to tell you that Tom Briggs isn’t a man who sits on his ass.  He says they are working on a program now at Norwich. They’re building a complex that will house a number of fusors, plus the required quarantine and medical facilities.  It’s currently under construction, but he’s expecting that it’ll be ready to go by the first of the year.  He’s going all out on this, Kris.

“He told me that Diyala is not a problem.  He’s told me that he will sign you to year-to-year contracts if you wish.  A six figure salary.  All you have to do is give some lectures and consult.”

“Six figures?  Can we tell that to Kit?  I want the fucking asshole to squirm.”

“We can do that.  Andie has requested that we stop shooting near him every day.  Her lawyers have sued him for the clothes he’s wearing -- but the fact is that he has confessed to kidnapping, although there are still pending charges of attempted murder that he tried to kill you, Andie, and Ezra.  He might be able to beat the attempted murder raps, but the kidnappings are a slam dunk.  He’s going away for twenty years, at a minimum, and most likely, the rest of his life.  Andie wants him to live a long, long time, reflecting on what could have been.”

“Has he said why he did it?”

“Oh, sure... Art talked to his uncle, who was a big wheel at Chevron.  The uncle advised him to steal the work, and if Art helped suppress it, he’d get a huge payoff.  Art was willing to cut Kit in on it as well.  Kit says Art was planning on stiffing his uncle as soon as he got the money in the bank.