“I suppose not.” The latest one had been nothing but praise, or at least up to the psychologist’s report:
Latent hostility toward men due to early marital trauma and mild inverse-Oedipal effect. Well compensated. Does not affect performance of duties.
I really hope that’s so, thought Godfrey Menninger. Rose Weinenstat looked at him carefully. “You’re not worrying about her, are you? Because there’s no need — wait a minute.” General Weinenstat touched the thing in her ear that looked like, but wasn’t, a hearing aid. Her expression turned somber.
“What is it?”
She turned off the communicator. “Henry Moncas. His shelter took a direct hit. They’re trying to find out who’s President now.”
“Shit!” Godfrey Menninger stared at the remains of his breakfast for a moment and saw none of it. “Oh, shit,” he said again. “It looks bad, Rosie. The worst part is we never had a choice!”
General Weinenstat started to speak, then changed her mind.
“What? What were you going to say, Rosie?”
She shrugged. “No good second-guessing, is it?”
He pounced on her words. “About what? Come on, Rosie!”
“Well — maybe moving into Canada—”
“Yeah. That was a mistake, all right. I’ll give you that. But not ours! The Greasies knew we couldn’t let them move troops into Manitoba. That was Tam Gulsmit’s mistake! Same with the Peeps. Once we were engaged we had to take Lop Nor out — quick, clean, minimum casualties. They should’ve accepted it instead of retaliating—”
But he could hear voices within him denying it, speaking in the tones of Tam Gulsmit and Heir-of-Mao. “We were safe moving troops in to protect the tar sands, because we knew you couldn’t afford to invade.”
“You shouldn’t have bombed Lop Nor. You should have known we would have to retaliate.” The voices within God Menninger’s mind were the only voices they would ever have again. Heir-of-Mao lay with eyes bulging and tongue protruding from his lips, dead in the deep shelter under Peking, and the atoms that had once been Gulsmit’s body were falling out from the column of fire over Clydeside.
The Libyan missile had bypassed Atlanta and Asheville and Johnson City, matching their terrains against the profiles imprinted in its memory. The safety interlocks on its thermonuclear charge were falling away one by one as its tiny, paranoid brain began to recognize its nearness to the thing it was unleashed to destroy.
“It’s bad, Rosie,” said Godfrey Menninger at last, rising to return to his desk. Maybe he should have let Margie’s mother have the raising of her. Then Margie would probably have had a husband and a couple of kids by now. And perhaps — perhaps the world would have been a different place. He wondered if he would ever hear from her again. “Rosie,” he said, “check Houston. See if the communication links with Jem are holding up. With the other colonies, too, of course.”
“Right now, Godfrey? Give me ten minutes; I’ve got a call coming in from the DoD.”
“Ten minutes is fine,” he said; but before the ten minutes was up he was dead.
TWENTY
THE CORACLE first appeared between showers, far out over the water. In the pit beside Ana Dimitrova, Corporal Kristianides — no, Lieutenant Kristianides now, she corrected herself — stood up and turned the field glasses on it.
“Krinpit,” she said. “Son of a bitch. Lay your gun on it, Nan, but don’t fire unless I tell you to.”
Unnecessary order! Not for worlds would she have fired. Not until she saw for herself that there were only Krinpit in the boat, and not Ahmed Dulla. Perhaps not even then, for this insanity of guns and shooting was awful even to play at. She had not yet had to fire at a living being, was far from sure that she could, and had said as much; but no one wanted to hear. But the good thing about her machine gun was that it had a telescopic sight, and she was glad enough to aim it.
The coracle disappeared into a squall, but not before she had seen that there was no human being in it, though it was large enough for several.
When it appeared again it was larger and nearer, and she could see that the single Krinpit was working furiously to keep it bailed and the trapezoidal sail intact, and paddling to bring it straight into the camp. By then everyone had seen, and at least a dozen weapons were pointed at it. Over the PA system Guy Tree’s voice shrilled an order to hold fire. Down on the beach Marge Menninger stood, a GORR under her arm, oblivious of the rain that soaked her. Ana wiped the wet off her sight as carefully as she had been taught and looked again. She had no skill at recognizing individual Krinpit by sight, but this one did not look familiar.
Disappointment of a hope. But what a foolish hope, she scolded herself. How improbable that Ahmed would once again miraculously appear. And even if he had, who was this Ahmed who had taken her and used her and left her again? He was not the person of Sofia, she thought gloomily, and roused herself and tried to think more constructively.
It was a failure. There was so little to think constructively about! The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. What went on in the secret conferences among Marge Menninger and her warrior knights in the headquarters shed she did not know, nor wish to. But it might well be the death of all of them.
The Krinpit was in the shallows now. It raised itself and splashed over the side, and the coracle bobbed away as it lurched ashore. It seemed to be in bad shape. It staggered in a half-circle on the shore and then fell to the ground with a painful crash as Colonel Menninger and half a dozen of her warriors formed a wary perimeter around it.
Perhaps they would kill it, she thought. Well, let them. Everyone else was standing and staring, but Ana’s attention wandered — until one of the riflemen came running toward her.
“Dimitrova, front and center!” he was calling. “It’s the one that speaks Pak! Colonel wants you to come translate!”
When Ana Dimitrova was nineteen years old, precocious senior at the University of Sofia, candidate for the callosectomy that would forever sunder the two halves of her brain and lead to a distinguished career in translation, she had watched a film on the subject. It was not her choice. They would not accept her application without it. The first part was quite tedious, though instructive, as it described the anatomy of that senseless and defenseless kilogram of pinky-gray jelly that mediated and transformed and commanded all the senses and defenses of the body. Before her very eyes a surgeon took a human brain in his hands and peeled away tissue to expose that great suety bridge that connected the two halves and that, in her, she would ask someone to sever. There was a long explanation, quite hard to follow, of how nerves crossed, so that the right half of the brain seemed to take responsibility for the left half of the body, and vice versa: strange quirk of anatomy! She saw how the nerves carrying visual impressions intersected at the optic chiasma, but not completely — as though prankish evolution had tired of the joke and decided not to finish it. All that part of the film was difficult to absorb, as well as unsettling to look at. But then there were some comic parts. Each half of the brain commanded its own network of afferent and efferent nerves. The efferent nerves, the ones that directed action, were spared in the resection or reconnected afterwards, which was why the split-brain people were able to walk without stumbling. Most of the time. The afferent nerves, the ones that accepted sensory impressions from the world, were kept apart. So each half of the brain could receive and process and store its own information, not shared with the other. That was why translation became easy.