Voyagers IV - The Return Page 25

  CHAPTER 8

  Almost as if he could read Angelique’s thoughts, Stoner turned onto the next exit lane and down the ramp that led off the highway. To a seedy-looking motel.

  Her breath caught in her throat. He wants me! Despite all his talk about being more than human, he’s a male animal after all.

  “You must be exhausted,” he said. “A night’s rest will do you good.” Jerking his head toward the sleeping woman in the backseat, he added, “Her, too.”

  Vasquez woke as he parked the car in the motel’s lot, making Stoner doubt that she’d really been asleep. He took her powerchair out of the car’s trunk and unfolded it; then the three of them proceeded into the motel’s shabby lobby.

  Stoner took a pair of adjoining rooms for them, offering the young African-American woman behind the reception desk nothing but empty hands and a winning smile. They had no luggage, but the clerk took no notice of it. At Stoner’s suggestion, she didn’t even enter them in the motel’s computer.

  “We’re ’most empty,” she said, smiling back at Stoner. “Take any rooms y’all want.”

  The rooms were threadbare but clean. In a glance Angelique took in the twin beds, the bureau, the wall-size video screen. While Stoner went to his room, she stepped to the connecting door and unlocked it. The blank face of the other door suddenly swung open and Stoner was standing there, filling the doorway.

  Her breath gushed out of her.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “It’s . . . it’s all right.”

  “This place should be safe enough for the night,” he said.

  “The security cameras in the lobby,” Angelique said. Pointing, she added, “And here in the rooms.”

  Stoner nodded. “They won’t show anything.”

  “How do you . . . ?”

  He broke into a boyish grin. “It’s a gift.”

  From her powerchair Yolanda Vasquez asked irritably, “When do we eat?”

  Stoner laughed and said, “It’s probably best if we eat here in the room, instead of going to a restaurant.”

  Vasquez nodded agreement. “Don’t want to be seen in public if we can avoid it. They didn’t want to help me, but they’ve probably got the state police out looking for me.”

  Angelique suddenly realized, “They could be after us for kidnapping!”

  “Some kid,” Vasquez grumbled.

  “I’ll go to the nearest fast-food place and get us some dinner,” Stoner said.

  “So why are they after you?” Vasquez asked as she reached for another drumstick.

  There’s nothing wrong with her appetite, Angelique thought. For a shriveled old prune of a hundred seven she eats like a teenager.

  The three of them were in the room the two women were sharing. Stoner had pulled in a chair from his own room so they could all sit around the chipped plastic table and share the meal.

  But Stoner hadn’t touched the bucket of fried chicken, nor the coleslaw, buns, or cola. Angelique realized that she had never seen him eat anything at all.

  “The New Morality wants me,” Stoner replied to the old woman’s question.

  Vasquez nodded, as if the answer satisfied her. But then she asked, “What for?”

  Stoner smiled and countered, “Did you notice the Northern Lights the past few nights?”

  “Northern Lights?”

  Slowly, as the two women ate from the plastic containers, Stoner explained who and what he was.

  Vasquez seemed unimpressed. “So they think you’re a nutcase, is that it?”

  Stoner broke into a laugh. “Close enough,” he acquiesced. “Close enough.”

  “What made you come with us?” Angelique asked.

  Vasquez frowned. “My regular doctor had them take me to the hospital. Young pup said my heart was going to go. So they look me over in the hospital and say I’m too old to get a replacement heart. Tree-age, they called it.”

  “Triage,” Angelique murmured.

  “Whatever. All they were going to do was pray over me and wait for me to fold up. Screw that! When I go I want it to be on my own terms.”

  “They allowed you to roam the hospital corridors?” Stoner asked.

  “Sure. They figured an old bat like me can’t get away from them, not with security checkpoints every hundred meters and me stuck in a powerchair.”

  “Then you latched onto us,” said Angelique.

  “You bet. I saw you two waltzing past the security goons, sweet as pie, no badges, no papers, no nothing. So I figured I’d tag along with you.”

  “With your scrapbook,” Stoner said.

  For the first time, Vasquez looked uneasy. She glanced at the big square book where it was resting on one of the beds. She muttered, “With my scrapbook, right.”

  “May we see it?” Stoner asked as he started to get up from his chair.

  “It’s private!” Vasquez snapped. “I’m going to send it to my great-grandniece. She’s on—”

  She gasped. Her eyes went wide. She clutched at her chest and collapsed in her chair. Her skin went gray, sheened with perspiration.

  Stoner went to her side and grasped her frail shoulder.

  “She’s having a heart attack!” Angelique said. “We’ll have to call an emergency team.”

  “No,” said Stoner. “They’d just look up her file and let her die.”

  “But . . .”

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said. He pressed a hand against Vasquez’s scrawny, corded neck. He’s searching for a pulse, Angelique thought.

  Her eyes half-closed, Vasquez breathed in a deep, shuddering sigh. Her eyelids fluttered, then closed altogether. Stoner scooped up her feeble body in his arms and carried her to the bed. He set her down gently beside her scrapbook.

  “Is she . . .”

  “She’s sleeping,” Stoner said. “She’ll be all right.”

  “How do you know?”

  He hesitated, his face set in an irritated frown. But then his expression eased and he almost smiled at Angelique.

  “You won’t like my answer,” he said softly.

  “Why? What is it?”

  “I’m helping her heart to rebuild itself. With a form of nanotechnology.”

  “Nanotechnology?” Angelique gasped. “That’s against the law! It’s forbidden!”

  Patiently Stoner replied, “They use nanotechnology on the Moon. Out in the Asteroid Belt. People couldn’t survive off-Earth without nanomachines.”

  “But it’s evil!” Angelique insisted. “It’s been outlawed everywhere on Earth.”

  “I know,” he said. “But outlawed or not, it can be very helpful. It’s saving this old woman’s life.”

  Angelique looked from Stoner’s hard, uncompromising face to Yolanda Vasquez, curled into a fetal position on the bed, sleeping peacefully.

  Stoner bent down and picked up the scrapbook.

  “She doesn’t want us to look at it,” Angelique reminded him.

  “That’s what makes me curious about it,” he said.

  RICK

  Half a world away, General Carlos O’Hara awoke languidly. His bedroom was dark; only the digital display of his bedside clock glowed in the shadows. It read 4:14 A.M. He turned over and pulled the deep, warm blanket over him. I can get in another hour’s sleep before the sun comes up, he told himself.

  O’Hara had been the commanding officer of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force for almost two years. In another four months his tour of duty would be over and he could retire with honor to his home in Buenos Aires, respected and wealthy enough to live in comfort for the rest of his life. Leave the job to someone else, he told himself. Let the Americans search for terrorists in these miserable little villages; they create more terrorists than they kill. Let the Peacekeepers continue to monitor the drug trade; keep the narcotics industry under control and everyone is happy, even the news media.

  He closed his eyes for another hour of pleasant sleep.

  But something wa
s wrong. For some strange reason, O’Hara got the feeling that he was not alone in his bedroom. Nonsense, he told himself. Go to sleep.

  All the lights in the bedroom suddenly switched on. O’Hara opened his eyes and saw that a young man in the pale blue uniform of the Peacekeepers was standing at the foot of his bed, his hair dark, his eyes steel gray, his expression grave.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” O’Hara demanded, his voice squeaking with shocked surprise. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

  “My name is Rick Stoner. I’m one of the star voyagers.”

  Sitting up in bed, O’Hara stared at his unexpected visitor. “Star voyager?” Inadvertently, he clutched at his dark green pajama blouse.

  “You don’t know about us?” Rick asked mildly. “They haven’t told you?”

  O’Hara turned to the phone console on his night table and shouted, “Phone! Security! Emergency!”

  Rick shook his head a few centimeters. “The phone won’t work. And I’m not going to harm you. I simply want some information.”

  Despite being a general, Carlos O’Hara had never been very proficient with firearms. He kept an automatic pistol in the closet across the room, but it was unloaded. He’d had a dread of causing an accident ever since he’d become a new father, back when he was only a lowly lieutenant in the Argentinian army. Both his sons were in the Peacekeepers now, and O’Hara had seen to it that they would continue to be promoted smoothly up the chain of command even after he’d retired.

  Stoner didn’t move toward him by so much as a millimeter, but O’Hara felt the consternation in his mind ease away. In its place he saw the star voyagers’ ship, a glowing sphere of energy orbiting above the Earth. He learned that this strange visitor’s father had seen the President of the United States and even Archbishop Overmire, head of the New Morality in North America.

  And he understood what Rick Stoner wanted of him.

  For more than an hour Rick Stoner stood unmoving at the foot of his bed as Carlos O’Hara explained how the Peacekeepers worked. And why.

  “So you see,” he was saying, his voice hoarse from speaking, his throat parched, “originally the Peacekeepers were founded on the best of principles, the highest of moral reasons.”

  “To prevent wars,” Rick murmured. He glanced at the enameled water pitcher on the night table, and O’Hara gratefully poured himself a glass.

  “To prevent”—O’Hara took a swallow of the cooling water—“small wars. Wars between minor nations. Wars that the United Nations could agree to stopping.”

  “And to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction,” Rick added.

  “Yes, that, too,” said the general. “Only wealthy nations could afford to try to build nuclear weapons. But biological weapons, nanotechnology weapons, digital programs that attack a nation’s computer networks—these are easier to develop and more difficult to root out.”

  “So the Peacekeepers try to find such developments and stop them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the narcotics trade?”

  O’Hara felt his insides jump. Yet he couldn’t lie about it. Somehow this grim-faced young man was forcing him to admit the truth.

  “We have reached an . . . an accommodation with the drug cartel,” he admitted.

  “An accommodation?”

  “We are not allowed to stop the narcotics trade. Our mission is to keep it under control, to prevent it from harming the rich and powerful. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged.

  “So the poor and hopeless can get the drugs that keep them poor and hopeless,” Rick said.

  “People will get narcotics one way or another,” O’Hara temporized. “They invent new ones in college chemistry laboratories.”

  “And you profit from this accommodation. You’ve gotten rich from it.”

  “Not me alone! The others, too. In the United Nations. The U.S.A., elsewhere. Plenty of others.”

  “All making money from the drug cartel.”

  “And why not? People want drugs,” General O’Hara said. “You can’t stop them.”

  Strangely, Rick smiled. But it was not a pleasant smile. There was not a trace of humor in it. “Can’t I?” he replied, almost in a whisper. “Watch and see.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In the motel outside Atlanta, Stoner brought Yolanda Vasquez’s oversized square book to the table. Angelique pushed the plastic food cartons to one side as he opened the big crinkled pages.

  “Photographs,” she murmured as he leafed through the pages. “Old-fashioned photos, printed on plastic microsheets.”

  “And menus from restaurants,” said Stoner. “And these look like reports of some kind.”

  “Evaluation reports,” Angelique recognized. “She must have been a schoolteacher. Look at how yellowed they are! Look, this one’s dated from more than forty years ago.”

  “It’s her pension form, from the date when she retired.”

  Angelique glanced at the woman sleeping on the narrow bed. “I wonder if she retired voluntarily or if it was mandatory.”

  They thumbed carefully, respectfully, through the big, brittle pages.

  “Why was she so upset about our looking at this?” Stoner wondered.

  “It’s her life,” said Angelique. “Her private life.”

  He shook his head. “There must be more to it. She got so upset she went into cardiac arrest.”

  Angelique looked up sharply at him, reminded that he was somehow using forbidden nanotechnology on the old woman. He must have nanomachines in his own body! she realized with a shudder. He transferred nanomachines into her when he touched her neck.

  Then she saw he was smiling tightly at her. “I’m not a monster,” he said mildly. “I’m not going to unleash a tidal wave of nanomachines that will devour everything in their path.”

  Angelique nodded and tried to keep her fear from showing. There were good reasons why nanotechnology was banned. Nanomachines were evil. They’d been used as weapons, used to kill people. They were the devil’s invention.

  But as she watched Stoner’s handsome, aristocratic face, she thought that perhaps in his hands, under his control, even nanomachines could be used for purposes of good. The tools aren’t evil, she told herself. The people who use them are. But he’s beyond evil; he’s practically a god.

  Stoner, meanwhile, kept leafing through the scrapbook. “Some of these mementos aren’t pasted down very securely,” he muttered. He worked a fingernail under the corner of a photo of a group of children posing in a schoolyard.

  “There’s writing on the back of it,” Angelique saw.

  “Yes,” said Stoner. Within a few minutes they had pulled off most of the pieces that had been lightly glued onto the scrapbook pages.

  “It’s a message,” Angelique said, scanning the handwritten notes on the backs of the pieces. “A sort of diary.”

  “Yes,” said Stoner. “A sort of diary.”

  It was nearly midnight before Angelique and Stoner finished reading the bits and scraps of Yolanda Vasquez’s Apologia.

  Stoner turned over the last slip of yellowed, crumbly paper—a greeting card for her “Big 30” birthday. Vasquez had covered its back with her tight, urgent handwriting.

  “No wonder she wanted to keep this secret,” he said, looking over at Vasquez, still curled on the bed, sleeping soundly.

  “It’s a history of how the New Morality took over the country,” said Angelique, her voice low, almost fearful.

  Stoner shook his head. “They didn’t take over the country. The people handed it to them. Willingly.”

  “They didn’t realize what they were doing. They didn’t understand.”

  “That doesn’t change the situation,” Stoner said, getting to his feet. “The United States is being run by an ultraconservative religious dictatorship.”

  “It’s not a dictatorship!” Angelique snapped.

  “No,” Stoner replied softly. “And Rome was still technically a republic even when Nero was s
ending Christians to the lions.”

  Angelique started to object, but suddenly she felt utterly weary, totally drained. Too much had happened, was happening. She tried to stand up, but her legs went weak and she sagged against Stoner.

  “You saved my life,” she murmured.

  “I don’t think they meant to kill you,” he said matter-of-factly. But his arms wrapped around her, held her protectively. “They were using you as bait to trap me.”

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked, breathless.

  “That’s up to you.”

  Angelique slid her arms around his neck and lifted her face to his. “I owe you my life.”

  Stoner picked her up off her feet and carried her to the empty bed. He deposited her gently and sat beside her on the sagging mattress. She stared up into those steel gray eyes, her heart pounding.

  “Take me to your room,” she whispered.

  “Get a good night’s sleep,” he said softly. “We’ll make some decisions in the morning.”

  Angelique clutched at him. “Don’t go! Don’t leave me alone.”

  Stoner looked down at her, his expression strange, unreadable. “I’m human enough to see that you’re a very lovely woman, and very desirable. But you’re also very frightened and vulnerable.” Then he smiled and added, “Besides, you have your vows to keep.”

  “I don’t care about that!” she said, a flood of seething emotions blazing through her. “I want you! I love you!”

  But Stoner slowly shook his head. “I can understand that you want me, and you instinctively feel that the best way to bind me to you is through sex. That’s a very normal primate reaction.”

  “You’re a primate ape, too, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way for me. Not anymore.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m enough of an ape to be tempted, Angelique. But there’s more to it than that. So much more.”