Solstice

She winced. The small movement made him realize how effortlessly attractive Helen Wagner was, and he couldn't help but wonder how this must have hindered her career in the Agency. 'They planted some kind of homing bug on the dome. We don't know how. Then they used a toy airplane loaded with VX nerve agent.'

'That's the stuff Saddam was fond of, right?' Wagner gave him a look that was only a touch short of condescension. 'We all have VX, Michael. It's not rocket science. They wanted to penetrate the dome and make it unusable so they had some minor explosive charge in the plane. As it turned out they didn't need it. The local director had the door open anyway and the damn thing went straight inside. He took a direct hit, which has to be one of the worst ways to die. They knew what they were doing. This is a persistent, highly localized nerve agent. It's going to take up to sixteen weeks to clear away the residue from the vicinity, and we won't be able to work efficiently in the dome for a good four to five days.'

'What about breathing apparatus?'

Wagner did give him a condescending look then. 'You think we could run this operation wearing space suits? Do you want to try that right now in your control room?'

'Sorry. I'm dumb in these matters.'

Wagner favoured him with half a smile. 'Think yourself lucky. It's the best way to be.'

'Hell of a weapon for a bunch of ecoterrorists to use.'

'Perhaps…' The thought had occurred to her. 'I don't know. Maybe they were trying to make a point. The cult that attacked the Tokyo subway had much the same view, you may recall. Except they used Sarin, which is around one-twentieth the strength of VX and nowhere near as persistent. They were trying to get their hands on anthrax and the Ebola virus too.'

Lieberman shook his head. 'This is one scary world you inhabit.'

'Same world as yours.'

'Really. If you don't mind my saying, you people didn't do much of a job protecting Kyoto. Are you going to do any better here?'

She looked nervous. 'We're still trying to get our heads around this one. The President said something that really struck me. This is all outside the loop, outside anything we've prepared for. As much outside as having aliens land, except we have at least some contingency plans for that.'

'Really?' he asked, half-agog.

'Of course. It would be irresponsible not to. But the President's point was that these people are as foreign, as incomprehensible to us as aliens. And they're of our own race, of our own making. You want to know the really scary thing? I know how they feel. In some ways I sympathize. We are making a mess of the planet. We are out of control. And…' She went silent.

'And what?' he asked.

'We're all distanced from one another. It doesn't matter to them that they can cause real harm, real hurt. Somehow it's all just a game. No, not a game, they're deadly serious. It's all apart. We've replaced real communities with virtual ones, and some piece of humanity disappeared in the process. I'm thirty-five and single and you know what I do when I happen to have some chunk of free time you might call leisure? Read a Web page about mountain climbing. Instead of damn well going out there and doing it.'

'So this is the insight part of the conversation, huh?'

She laughed. 'Oh dear. Did that sound deliberate? It wasn't. Really.'

She found herself enjoying this conversation, tired as she felt. There was something insidiously likeable about this man.

'Okay,' he continued. 'So let's think about Charley. You know who these people are?'

She shook her head. 'I wish.'

'Let me tell you. Just ordinary people. People like us. They're bright. They're educated. They probably come from nice middle-class parents who gave them everything they ever wanted. A good education, a nice car, the works. They've got no real gripes with society. No one took over their country. No one oppressed them. They have no political philosophy they think can change the world for the better. So why do they do it?'

Helen Wagner closed her eyes and knew exactly what he was going to say.

'Because they have no lives, none to speak of,' he continued. 'And we've all been like that, from the sixties on, searching for something we thought had been promised us. Then usually getting older, getting responsibilities thrown at us so often we forget we ever dreamed things could be different. Except these kids had this new world, of PCs, of the Internet, come up and open its arms, welcome them in, and say: Hey, this can be home. This can provide anything you want. People who agree with you. People who hate you. People who say they love you. Even virtual sex — whatever that might be — if you want it. And suddenly they were a part of this unreal thing. Learning Linux when they should have been sitting watching a baseball game. Hacking Web sites instead of dating. Thinking theirs was the reality and ours was the illusion. And it's such a waste. Because they're wrong. No clever stuff here. They just took a blind turning and it's eating up their lives.'

She watched him fall into silence on the screen and wondered, "Was that Charley?'

'Oh yeah. And more. You want the gory details?' 'Only if you think they're relevant. And then only if you want to.'

He watched the light growing outside the window. One more day to the zenith. And somewhere, maybe inside him, was some key they could use to reach Charley.

'When the scales fell off my eyes over that damn satellite I went a little crazy,' he said, not looking at the screen. 'Charley and I were just colleagues until then. Really. Then that big bombshell struck and I just felt stupid and used and mad. I wanted out. She wanted in. And the crazy thing was that when we both fought like that, we wound up, one way or another, having an affair too. Professionally we went in two different directions. I chased anything that was the opposite of solar satellite design I could find. She picked up her security badge and went in to finish off the job. The new job. This lasted six months.'

He picked up the glass of water on the desk and drank. It was warm and tasted dusty.

'Did that bother you?'

He gazed at her picture on the screen. This woman didn't mind asking the big ones. 'No. Nothing bothered me. I just didn't care after I left the project. Charley did, for sure, and that puzzled me. I couldn't see why she was hanging on. Me, I just let the dice fall wherever they rolled.'

She watched his pale, still outline on the screen. 'And now you'd like to run away again?'

'We'll come to that. The important thing you need to know is that Charley is the one person I met in all my life you attach the word "genius" to. When we met, she knew more about just about everything — solar physics, astronomy, even electrical engineering — than anyone I ever encountered. And she had such insight into things. She could visualize a problem, not just see it as some algorithm waiting to be fixed. I became the person who tried to put a few boundaries around the places she was going to. Not easy. That woman would take on anything, work all the hours she had to see it through.'

She waited; he was struggling for the words.

'You have to remember,' he went on, 'Charley had all this intellectual capacity and it was packed inside this person who looked like an airhead, who looked like she ought to be posing for the front of some fashion magazine. That made it really tough for her to get taken seriously. The funny thing was it made it tough for her to date too. Poor kid got the worst of both possible worlds. People looked down on her work because they thought she was a bimbo. And out in the real world, where real people live, they just looked at this model-type woman and thought: Hey, let's leave this to the rich kids 'cause I can't afford that kind of dinner date.'

'She has some sense of separation. They all have. Do you think she was in love with you? For a while maybe?'