“You’re bluffing,” Mayakenska said, though she didn’t believe he was.
“Put on your mask,” Curtis said.“Turn right as you walk out your front door, and walk clear out to the edge of the dome.There’s a phone mounted on the wall there. I’ll ring it in three minutes.” The receiver went dead in her hand.
“Curtis?” Takahashi said politely. Of course he had heard.
She nodded. Her legs felt weak, and she had to perch on the edge of a kitchen stool for a moment before she could walk.“You might as well come along,” she said.
His eyebrows came together and he shook his head slightly, not understanding her.
“You’ll want to see this,” she said.“It’s the beginning of the end.”
It took a little over a minute to find the wall-mounted phone in one of the observation alcoves. It occupied one edge of a panel that included three shielded buttons labeled emergency, abandon, and shutdown.The sight filled her with anger and sadness.That’s the enemy, she thought, looking out at the dimly floodlit Martian night, at the ocean of blowing sand.And yet we persist in doing the enemy’s work.
The directors should have known this would happen, should have foreseen this contingency. It was too much like the way Kennedy had humiliated that peasant Krushchev. Brinksmanship and blackmail, weapons too powerful to be used, vicious circles of terror.Was there no way to break the pattern?
The phone rang and she snatched it up.“Go ahead.”
“Tell me what you see outside the dome,” Curtis said.
“Not much.There’s a lot of dust.There are some good-sized rocks.”
“Okay. Can you see four of them sort of together there?”
“Yes, okay.”
“Pick one.”
I hate this, Mayakenska thought. But what else am I supposed to do? “There’s a low rock shelf about a hundred meters past those four—”
“Fine,” Curtis said, and hung up on her again.
Maybe, she thought, it won’t work. Maybe it will blow up in his face. And maybe Uncle Lenin will come rescue us all.
“We’re going to get a demonstration, then,” Takahashi said.
She turned, startled. He’d been so quiet she’d forgotten he was there. “Yes, I think so.”
“Beating the proverbial plowshare into a sword?”
“Sorry?”
“It’s not important,”Takahashi said.“Will there be a flash? Should I be looking the other way?”
“Gamma rays, I think.This is outside my experience.” She sat down on one of the cast concrete benches, then stood up again.“Maybe it’s not—”
The flash was bright enough that she turned instinctively away, covering her eyes with her hands.The sound followed instantaneously, rising with the shockwave through her feet, pitching her to her knees, a booming peal of thunder so loud she felt something tearing in her ears. She reached out for the bench and felt it shaking too, closed her eyes and bent her head to her knees, still hearing a ghostly feedback whine behind the thudding of rocks and dirt against the dome.
The phone began to ring.
“All right, I hear you,” she said, crawling onto the bench. “Yob tvayu mat, I hear you.” The explosion had torn dirty white chunks out of the dome’s plastic, but had somehow not cracked it. Nothing remained of the shelf of land but a thickening in the cloud of red-brown dust.
She thought of the importniye leather coats in the window of gum; the somber red granite of Lenin’s mausoleum, just across the cobblestone street; the riotous colors of the domes of St. Basil’s at the south end of the square; the contrived Byzantine opulence of the Historical Museum at the north end. In an hour and a half they too would be dust.
The phone kept ringing.
“Are you all right?”Takahashi asked her.A thin line of blood ran from one of his nostrils. She nodded at him, looked past him to the crowd that had come to stare at the dome.
“You,” someone shouted, a woman’s voice, the owner anonymous.“Is that your work?”
Mayakenska could only stare.Takahashi moved in front of her.“No,” he said.“Curtis did that.Your own boy did it. But it’s over now. Everything’s okay.”
“It’s not over,” Mayakensaka said, but no one heard her.When she looked up again the crowd had dissolved into confused, frightened individuals, moving randomly under the artificial twilight.
She stood up.“I’ve got to stop this. I’ll call the ship.”
“I’m going to the cave,” Takahashi said.
“Cave?”
“Where Curtis is.The first settlement.The computer shows a phenomenal amount of usage up there.That’s where they have to be.”
Mayakenska looked at the phone, which had finally stopped ringing. “All right,” she said. She stood up. Her legs were shaky, but she could walk.“I’m going to stop this,” she said.“I promise.”
The house—living module, the Americans called it—at S-23 looked like something out of one of their tv comedies from half a century ago, a “cottage in the suburbs,” if she remembered the vocabulary.The front of the house was weakened by large panes of clear plastic, and the surrounding land was planted with useless, ornamental shrubs.
Lying next to one of the shrubs was a body.
“Blok?” she asked, approaching him cautiously.
“Yes,” he said.“It’s me.” His mask was crooked, and his eyes seemed swollen.“Reese is gone. He’s gone up to the cave.”
“The cave where the transporter is.You didn’t tell me about that, Blok.”
“Just...kids up there. Didn’t want them hurt.”
“Come on inside,” she said.“There’s not much time.”
She helped him into the house and put him in one of the bedrooms. He was bruised and embarrassed, but not critically hurt.
“Valentin?” He had been sitting in the living room watching her, wide-eyed, his right leg jiggling nervously.Amphetamines, Mayakenska thought.“Come with me.You need to hear this.”
She called the orbiter from her bedroom.“Twenty-two hundred hours, code Pamir, repeat Pamir. Give me a relay to Dawn.” Dawn was Mission Control at Kaliningrad, and now that Frontera Base had turned away from the sun she would have to bounce her signal off a worn American comsat orbiting the far side of Mars.
“Okay,” Chaadayev said.“What’s going on down there? We saw some kind of explosion a few minutes ago. Is everything all right?”
“No,” she said.“Everything is wrong...”
Kane pulled free of the giant just as Reese flickered and vanished. He ran toward the glowing doorway, throwing away the infrared helmet as he ran.“No!” he screamed. He tripped over something in the darkness and lunged headlong toward the wall of incandescent particles.
His right hand stretched toward the fiery wall, came close enough for Kane to feel the hairs on the back of it tingle and flutter.Then he found himself sprawled across the spongy durofoam floor of the cave, the metal frame of the doorway arching over him, the power shut down.
Reese was gone.
Kane got onto all fours and looked around. Pockets of light held various crts and scientific instruments; green digital readouts blinked at him from every corner of the room.The illusion of stars and infinite space that he’d seen from the airlock had disappeared, leaving no clue as to whether it had been a hologram or just another product of his implant.
Like the voices, whose high, pure harmony still rang in his skull.
Slowly the children moved out of the darkness, some in rags, some wearing braces on their limbs, some with the glittering eyes of fierce curiosity, some with the slack, moist lips of brain damage. One of them came to within a few feet of him and stopped, her heavy, malformed head turned on its side.
“Welcome to Synchron City,” she said. Kane thought perhaps she was smiling.“Are you Kane?”
“Where’s Reese?” Kane said.“What did you do to him?”
The hideous little girl leaned from side to side, almost dancing with pleasure and excitement.“We transcribed him,” she said.“We transcribed him and then we broadcast him.”