Except for the dreams.
The dreams were a constant, the swirl of Martinique growing larger to the point that she now thought the nightmares significant in some way beyond simple remembrance, though remember she did. Sections were opening up—the terrible mud, the triage of the wounded, the sound of the trucks all honking at the same time—though the actual event that caused her memory loss was still hazy. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to remember that part.
“Would you look at the people?” Dan said, driving into the middle of the tent city, no colorful, jammed together tents like Sado. These were all in military olive drab and spaced in rows wide enough to accommodate passing trucks. And there were thousands of them. A projection of an American flag waved against a perpetual electronic wind above the compound.
People were everywhere, being directed by tan uniformed employees of Whetstone, Inc., the billionaire’s gun-for-hire service organization.
Dan pulled up to HQ just as a busload of students from a local boarding school was arriving.
“Tech kids,” he said, climbing out.
Lanie watched as the youngsters, from preschoolers through high-schoolers, got off the bus. They looked frail and frightened.
“Learning” was being reevaluated, and the tech schools represented a new direction in education. Their primary subject was Wristpad 101. It taught children how to manipulate the computer net through their pads, how to access absolutely anything they’d ever need or want to know. The proliferation of voice lines on the pad even precluded the need for reading and writing. The power of the pad was the power of absolute knowledge. But what about discipline? What about memory storage and retrieval? Stealing one last glance at the line of twenty children, Lanie followed Newcombe into HQ. Tech kids—they had a poor ability to synthesize and react to physical demands and emotional situations. They lived in the pad. They thought it gave them everything, all the answers. The problem was, they didn’t know the questions.
Housing block leaders were moving in and out of the tent, bringing requests and questions. Crane was frowning heavily, shaking his head as he talked to Sumi and white-haired Stoney Whetstone, dressed in the same uniform his men wore. Teevs filled the sides of the thirty-foot-square room, showing the same things the clouds were showing.
“You’re a boob, Parkhurst,” Crane said as they approached. He shook his head and tapped the man off.
“Got a busload of tech kids outside who are going to need special handling,” Lame told him. Crane looked at Sumi.
“Would you take care of it?”
“Of course,” Sumi said, immediately moving off.
“What about the E-Bs?” Newcombe asked Crane, who was staring vacantly at the floor.
“No activity,” Stoney said.
Stoney was impressive, Lanie thought. Tall, commanding, and down-to-earth, he had a weathered, still-handsome face. He was enough of a man at sixty-seven to make her wonder what he’d been like at forty.
“Something very strange is going on around here, I think,” Stoney added.
This wasn’t new. Stoney had been frowning more as each day passed, voicing suspicions and questioning everything that was going on with the government and Liang Int. “What do you mean this time?” Lanie asked, somewhat wearily.
“The government is dragging its heels on what aid it’s providing—which is damn little. And wasn’t the whole point of them buying into Crane’s prediction how much hay they could make for the electorate—the publicity they’d get for being good guys? I assumed this place would be a madhouse of pols and newsies, with Li and his buddies trotting every one of their candidates through here, giving each of those clowns a chance to sound off for the electorate. Do you see any of that? In fact, have you seen a single candidate or elected official or Liang Int big shot around here?”
Lanie slowly shook her head.
“No, of course not, because something’s fishy, that’s why.”
“Let’s not add paranoia to our list of problems,” Newcombe said. “We’ve still got a couple of days until Q-day. Maybe something will—”
“My arm isn’t hurting,” Crane said. “This close to a quake my arm should be throbbing.”
The teevs flickered, casting eerie images over all their faces. The pictures died, then the Presidential seal blossomed on every screen. Lanie tapped her pad to the K channel, though it wouldn’t have mattered which fiber she chose. They’d all been pre-empted.
“—ident of the United States,” came the voice through her aural. President Gideon sat at his desk, Mr. Li by his side.
“My fellow Americans, I address you today to right a terrible wrong. With great effort and at enormous cost, your government has undertaken a massive investigation and uncovered an egregious fraud. Lewis Crane is a charlatan. Unprincipled, publicity hungry, he is misleading the country into believing the entire middle and southern area of the United States is on the verge of catastrophe. Thankfully, we have discovered this is not the case, and denounce his prediction of a quake on the 30th of October as fantasy. Further, we are immediately cutting off all federal grant money to the Crane Foundation.”
Crane was standing now in front of the largest screen, shaking his head. “What are they doing?” he whispered. “Why?”
“Couldn’t you smell the screw job in the air?” Stoney asked. “I knew something was up.”
The President continued, “We have proof that the Crane Foundation has continuing contact with Nation of Islam leader, Mohammad Ishmael, since Ishmael proclaimed an Islamic State while in Crane’s company. We, the people, are victims of some kind of conspiracy.”
A viddy came up of a man walking along a city sidewalk, arms swinging, everything from the viewpoint of his coat sleeve. The man stopped at a dorph vendor and bought a bottle. When he swung his arm around to pay the man, the face of Dan Newcombe filled the screen.
“What is this?” Crane whirled on Newcombe. “What the hell are we about to see?” he shrieked.
“Me and Ishmael,” Newcombe said, his face blank as he stared Crane down.
“What else?”
Newcombe nodded at the screen, the tape blipping pictures in rapid succession of him being led down a hallway in what seemed to be a chip parlor. Lanie watched in amazement, her pulse speeding up and a sense of dread making her stomach queasy. Dan had gone to the Zone the Masada night that he’d disappeared … that was perfectly clear now. Betrayal. Personal and professional too, she suspected. She began to tremble. Tense, Dan avoided her gaze, steadfastly looking at the teev. He was being taken into a cubicle, a bed moved to reveal a manhole, Ishmael coming out of the hole to embrace Newcombe like long-lost, beloved kin. Lanie glanced around.
Everyone was rapt—and horrified.
Newcombe and Ishmael were staring intently, malevolently out at the audience through the lens of a camera that must have been in Ishmael’s palm.
“Stoney,” Crane said, a shocked expression on his face, “would you get a couple of your biggest men to guard the tent flap? I don’t want any reporters around until we’re ready for them. And get Sumi back in here.”
Whetstone nodded, then grasped Crane’s shoulder consolingly before leaving the tent.
“Look, Crane,” Newcombe said, “that trip to the Zone had nothing to do with you or the Foundation. It’s personal. It’s about me.”
“And me?” Lanie asked. “It sure as hell has something to do with me. I know how the NOI feels about race … about what they call the ‘purity’ of the races.”