Beneath the Gated Sky Page 12

  A light shone in Trinidad’s eyes, but he said nothing.

  “I think you’re helping your cousin because you want her to succeed. You want the agency to be exposed. That’s one of your goals, and it always has been.”

  Trinidad was wearing expensive cologne; Porsche suddenly noticed the odor.

  “It’s nothing that she’s told me,” Cornell allowed. “At least not directly. But I think that you people feel…how to put this…you feel responsible for certain things…”

  That brought a broad smile and wink from Trinidad. Glancing at Porsche, he said, “You were right. He can cut straight through the bullshit, can’t he?”

  “He can,” she sang out.

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” said Trinidad. “You came to ask permission to tell him the truth.”

  With her eyes, she said yes.

  “Well,” Trinidad allowed, “I guess you might as well.”

  It was a wondrous moment: Her two most devoted men sat flanking her, sharing the table that she intended to purchase for her newest family, and she couldn’t remember ever feeling happy in quite this way.

  “No wonder you love him,” her cousin purred. “I guess I should try and love him, too. What do you think?”

  While Porsche paid with cash, Trinidad slipped away unnoticed.

  She and Cornell laid the antique table in the back of her truck, upside down, six chairs set among the upturned legs and every fragile surface protected with faded and stained old blankets brought for exactly that purpose.

  Her cousin went unmentioned until they were on the road, Cornell at the wheel. With a careful voice, he asked, “When did you see him again? After Yellowstone, I mean.”

  She said nothing.

  “What?” he asked, nonplussed. “Is that a secret, too?”

  With an easy sharpness, she said, “I’m just counting, that’s all.”

  Cornell dipped his head for a moment.

  “Seventeen years,” she reported, almost astonished by that number. “Nearly eighteen years.”

  “Half your life,” he observed.

  “Nearly.”

  After Father’s bout with cancer, the families never found a suitable excuse to meet. As much as anything, it was the bad taste left by the brawl between father and son. Yet that brawl seemed to change the Vortunes. A couple of years later, Porsche learned that Uncle Jack and Trinidad had more than reconciled. The elder Vortune took an early retirement from Boeing, then left the earth on a routine security mission, taking his son with him. It was a healing adventure for them. Porsche both envied her cousin and missed him. But she and her family had their own little adventures, renting cabins in the Canadian wilderness, then walking through the nearby intrusions, visiting an assortment of relatives on a dozen different worlds.

  When Trinidad came home, Porsche was attending college in Austin. He sent an encoded message, making a thin promise to pass through Texas soon and bump elbows with her. Then he congratulated her on her scholarship. “The jarrtees wouldn’t believe it,” he remarked with the usual sarcasm. “Because you can bounce a ball and throw it through a metal ring, people are willing to give you the secrets of the universe!”

  At school she was the big star in a second-tier sport. Male athletes were more popular—or more notorious—yet Porsche managed to win her share of fans. The entire Neal clan would drive down from Dallas to cheer her on, and they’d frequently show at the road games. Her older brother, Leonard, Jr., brought his future wife to the spring tournament. Despite the losing effort and the endless distractions, Porsche realized immediately that the woman’s blood ran thick with Few genes. It was that easy, she realized. That easy, and that sweet, too.

  Porsche was an excellent student who leaped between majors, but after three years she left school without a degree. “Which is dangerous,” her advisor warned. “Without qualifications, what can you possibly do in your future?”

  She turned pro and was drafted early in the second round by the Cleveland Lakers. There was a women’s team in Seattle, but by then Trinidad had left the earth on another extended trip. Aunt Kay and Uncle Jack would attend the occasional game, sitting close to the court, her aunt waving exactly as you’d expect a distant friend to wave, unsure if she was recognized. Uncle Jack, in contrast, preferred to play the grouch. After one game, the two of them met her, and Aunt Kay took it on herself to invite her secret niece out to a late dinner. But the team was flying to Honolulu in an hour, and gratefully, Porsche said that dinner would have to wait.

  For the first time in her life, Porsche wasn’t the best player on the court, or even on the team. Other women were closer to a human’s limits than she was. Her fame-claim was her marketable name, in part, and because she played with speed and power. She had an official fan club; her presence meant ticket sales. Promotions and bonuses meant that she could tuck away enough money for the rest of her human life, and in a twist of irony, she was hired by a dying company to model with their sports cars, her image adorning a variety of men’s magazines inside truck stops everywhere.

  Porsche stuck with the sport until she stopped improving, her abilities polished by training and by experience until she could feel the first gnawings of age.

  She retired without fanfare, in the off-season, at exactly the moment when it would garner the least attention.

  Porsche went home to Dallas, briefly. Her baby brother, Donald, was marrying a talented, all-human woman named Linda—a perfect soul to usher into the Few. And of course she wanted to meet her older brother’s twin sons, bouncing the chubby drool machines on her knees as she talked obliquely about her immediate future.

  Bringing to bear an expertise polished on countless worlds, Porsche Neal soon vanished from public view.

  The shrinking ranks of fans heard that she was traveling. An assortment of electronic footprints left the impression of a woman who was somewhere close but living in seclusion. Tax forms were signed and filed. E-mail was answered, but not quickly. There was even a face and voice that called old friends and teammates, looking and sounding exactly like Porsche yet never able to meet them in person, some excuse at the ready, and each excuse greased with a charm that left no lasting resentments.

  By any measure, the genuine Porsche was far from the earth.

  Long ago, she had promised herself that she would wander, and now she was keeping her word: She saw worlds famous to the Few, and uneverted wild worlds, and eventually she came to places that Trinidad had visited—with his father, or alone.

  He was gone long before Porsche arrived, but people remembered her cousin, and they gave her the reheated compliments that he had enjoyed. She had a flexible soul, they said. She was durable and skeptical and as smart as smart helped a person, then she could stand on her courage. All good qualities, particularly for souls living on the brink of the Few.

  “In other words,” she admitted to Cornell, “they were patronizing me.” She was riding beside him, her legs stretched out to keep the basketball knees happy. “The poor little pioneer girl from the wilderness…that’s how they looked at me.”

  “The brink of the Few?” Cornell muttered.

  He was driving slower than necessary, eyes focused straight ahead and both hands holding the steering wheel.

  “The farthest I got was a minor administrative world.” She paused, then added, “That’s as far as Trinidad went, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s where I saw a map,” she allowed. “It was a three-dimensional model of the many-dimensional universe. I couldn’t comprehend most of what I was seeing, of course. But my host graciously tried to explain what he-she could understand at a glance—”

  “He-she?”

  “Some other time,” she promised. Then she glanced back at her table and chairs, saying, “Trinidad had seen the same map. The same host had brought him there, which was a real privilege, and we were shown the same tiny feature. It was a whiff of colored smoke, at least to my eyes—just a tiny finger jutt
ing out of a map that was bigger than most buildings—and he-she explained that the finger represented the earth and Jarrtee, plus almost every other world that I’d crossed on my very small travels.”

  “A damned big universe,” Cornell ventured.

  “Exactly.”

  She didn’t mention that her host was also her lover, or that he-she had been Trinidad’s lover, too. That second detail was a secret that she’d always kept from her cousin. Not out of guilt, she hoped. Certainly not out of remorse. But when it came to Trinidad, she felt an instinctive desire to keep a distance, to dilute down that relentless sense of familial intimacy.

  “And you came back up the finger,” Cornell prompted. Then laughing, he added, “To our little wilderness.”

  She’d returned to the earth at a prearranged time, using an intrusion in Kashmir. A passport and money had been hidden nearby, along with a small wardrobe and some Few-made tools. After walking to the nearest village, she rode an ancient diesel-powered train to New Delhi, then took a scramjet to Dallas, skimming high enough above the atmosphere to tease the sky into uneverting, then everting again, most of the passengers too hardened to the miracle to even pretend interest.

  Her older brother met her at DFW, and even though he acted pleasant, he seemed even more laconic than usual, saying maybe a dozen words before they reached their parents’ house.

  It was December; Christmas lights sparkled against the gray brick, and every house light was burning. Suddenly Porsche felt nervous, as if some animal sense told her that a trap was waiting. In a sense, there was. Leon couldn’t stay. He and Donald and everyone else would come visit tomorrow, he promised. Then he promptly abandoned her at the curb, sealing his fate.

  The great traveler—the durable strong soul that had embraced a hundred varied worlds—discovered that her legs were shaking from anticipation and nerves. It was a long walk, and exhausting, and while taking her last little step, the front door sprang open, a stranger standing behind the storm door, smiling and calling her name.

  No, she realized, he wasn’t a stranger. It had just been a lot of years, and who would have expected to see him here?

  Mama-ma appeared, grayer but not gray. “You remember Mr. Vortune,” she said brightly, her voice only a little forced. “We met him and his family up in Yellowstone…how long ago was that?”

  No one answered the question.

  “You know my wife, Kay,” said Uncle Jack. “And Trinidad.”

  Aunt Kay was wearing an elegant dress, and the Vortune men were dressed in conservative business suits.

  Everyone was trying hard to smile over cocktails.

  Then almost as an afterthought, Mama-ma embraced her and squealed, “Oh, it’s good to see you, darling. Home safe. We’re all so glad!”

  The Few had spent endless generations feigning calm in the vortex of surprise. But for an instant, for whatever reason, heredity and training failed Porsche. She said aloud, “Uncle.” With the world watching, she said, “Cousin?” Then her uncle did exactly what he loved to do: He took charge. “The Asian air did you wonders, Miss Neal. Don’t you think so, son?”

  “I’ve seen her look better,” was Trinidad’s response.

  Porsche stepped inside as Mama-ma tried to explain. The Vortunes were in town for a business convention, and wasn’t it a wonderful coincidence? “Your father’s in the kitchen,” she reported. And as if to prove the assertion, Father stepped into the dining room, looking heavier than she remembered, wearing the same striped apron that he’d worn for nearly twenty years and waving a spatula as he shouted:

  “Come give an old man a young hug!”

  Aunt Kay waited nearby. She was still pretty, except she looked worn around her eyes, but the charm was unchanged. Taking Porsche’s hand with her tiny hands, she squeezed hard and told her niece, “Dinner’s still an hour away.”

  What did it matter?

  “Maybe now?” she said. “What do you think, Jack?”

  “Good time as any,” her uncle allowed. “What’s happening?”

  No one was watching them. Yet everyone felt obligated to read their lines, faithful to the very elaborate game.

  “We’ve started a sporting goods store,” her uncle confessed. “We’re in town on business, and we thought this would be the perfect time to talk business with you. If you have a few minutes, that is.”

  She said nothing.

  “If you’re not too tired from traveling,” Aunt Kay added.

  Porsche guessed her lines. “I’m fine,” she said. Then, “Where would be good?”

  “The theater room,” Mama-ma offered.

  Uncle Jack ushered Porsche into the back of the house, Trinidad bringing up the rear. Once the door was closed, Uncle Jack instructed her to get comfortable. She sat at her own pace. The man who rightly blamed her for their family’s hardships sat opposite her, and without warning, he conjured an unnatural smile, the eyes acquiring a cold, keen edge.

  “We can talk,” he promised.

  The room was secure.

  Trinidad sat on Uncle Jack’s right, conspicuously saying nothing. The years had transformed him, creating the dutiful son.

  “Let me just say it,” her uncle began. “We’re here to make a substantial and very important request.”

  “A request?”

  “Humans,” he said, with emphasis. He seemed to expect the word to explain everything. Then he took a breath, waiting a half-moment before saying, “They know about the intrusions.”

  “Since when?”

  “Not long,” he replied. “But the CEA has already managed to pry open several non-Few intrusions, and it’s throwing resources and an insane amount of hope into the work—”

  “How could they find even one?”

  “Simple dumb luck.” Her uncle’s expression was grave, his voice holding no hope. “Officially, that’s our position. In the past, on rare occasions, serendipity has given some amazingly primitive worlds the keys to the universe.”

  Porsche waited a half-moment, then said, “But you don’t believe that—?”

  Uncle Jack glanced at Trinidad, nodding.

  His son leaned forward, with urgency. “There are some ominous coincidences at play here, Po-lee-een.”

  “Such as?”

  “One of us may be involved.”

  “Involved?”

  “One of us happened to vanish,” Trinidad reported. “Just before the agency made its breakthrough.”

  “Who?”

  “You don’t know her,” Uncle Jack assured her. Or warned her.

  Trinidad showed a big grim smile, then explained, “A woman matching her description was killed in a hit-and-run accident. In California, not twenty miles from one of the agency’s main labs. The body was cremated before it could be claimed, but the physical evidence says the victim was one of ours.”

  Ours.

  Porsche thought for a moment, then asked, “What else?”

  “She was a run-of-the-mill courier,” Trinidad reported. “When she vanished, she was transporting an assortment of machines, including a dozen basic keys.”

  Since the Few couldn’t bring machinery across the intrusions, they had to build their keys and eavesdroppers and the rest of their paraphernalia on each of their worlds. The elaborate manufacturing centers—nano-factories usually no bigger than this room—were among their most important, deeply held secrets; Porsche had no idea where her own tools had been built, or by whom, or the technical specifics behind any of them.

  A good courier would be just as ignorant, and precautions were always taken, insuring that precious ignorance.

  “Is the agency using her keys?” she inquired.

  Expecting that question, Trinidad said, “No,” immediately. “From what we can tell, they’re using their own big machines to pry open the intrusions.”

  “Wild intrusions,” she repeated.

  “Exactly,” said Uncle Jack. “They’ve experimented with our glass disks, but of course basic keys don’t help wi
th them.”

  Sophisticated, encoded keys were required for them.

  Trinidad said, “It is possible that there was a genuine accident, but the courier was injured. Not killed. A very specific head injury would have made her talkative, and if she’d had an alert audience—”

  “It’s happened before,” Uncle Jack offered. “On a world or two.”

  “Or,” Trinidad continued, “the answer is a lot simpler.”

  A stew of emotions welled up inside Porsche. Then a rational piece of her spoke. “If I wanted to abandon the Few, for whatever reasons, I’d probably stage my own death.”

  How many people actually betrayed the Few? She didn’t know enough to make even a lousy guess.

  For a long moment, no one spoke.

  Then Uncle Jack said, “Whatever the reasons, the damage has been done. What matters now are the consequences.”

  Trinidad leaned even closer, telling her, “Human beings shouldn’t be poking their sticks down strange holes.”

  “Exactly,” said her uncle. “The social models are unanimous. If this technology comes too soon, human societies are in for chaotic disruptions. And if that technology is in the hands of just a few humans, then greed and desperation will make everything even worse.”

  “Every color of misery,” Trinidad promised.

  Porsche shook her head for a moment, then inquired, “So what’s your request?”

  “We need someone,” said her cousin. “Someone to infiltrate the agency. Which isn’t exactly a difficult trick, since the agency is carrying out a desperate search now for anyone with half an ounce of talent.”

  In an instant, she understood her Mama-ma’s nervousness and Leon’s chilly silence.

  Softly, with a flat dry voice, she asked, “Why me?”

  “Very few children immigrated to the earth,” Uncle Jack reported. “You and your cousins are my two best candidates, as it happens. The right ages, and U.S. citizens, too. Though, frankly, you aren’t my first choice, Porsche.”

  Trinidad winked at her, saying nothing.

  “The problem with my son,” her uncle continued, “is that the missing courier has had contact with me. On occasion.”