The Long Run Read online

  Jimmy Ramirez said quietly, seriously, enunciating carefully, "I would be sorry to see you stop dancing."

  "Dancing is nice, Jimmy." There was no uncertainty in Denice's voice. "But it's not real, you know. It's just entertainment." Intensity put an edge to her words, and something strange began to happen to Trent as she spoke, the edges of things growing vague and blurry. "I want to do something real. When I'm finally dead, people are going to know I was here. There's not going to be any question. Dancing is nice, but it's just dancing."

  "Then what will you do if you don't dance?"

  "Change the world." She spoke slowly, the words coming from elsewhere, some far place where she and Trent stood together. "It's why we're here, it's why God put us here. To make things better, so that the people who come after us have a better life than the people who came before." She sat up slowly, looking at Jimmy Ramirez. Her eyes, in the dim roof lights, were unfocused and remote, the distant, simple, almost gentle tone touched her voice again, and suddenly Trent's skin tingled as though the air was full of ozone. "They come down out of the mountains, to where the circle of his fire is burning against the night." She was silent for a moment, still and motionless, then went on dreamily. "And, you see the young man he speaks to them then, at the foot of the mountains while the living diamonds hunt them in the darkness, and tells them that the old promises will be fulfilled, the old dreams realized, the old wrongs made right. And then, together," Denice Castanaveras said, speaking directly to Jimmy Ramirez, who sat frozen, transfixed, "together they march back through the Traveling Waters, and go back together to the city on the hill and drive out the enemy."

  Jimmy stared at her.

  They stood together in that empty place. It seemed to Trent that pale blue fire traced itself across the surface of Denice's skin, that a cobalt halo pulsed around her skull. Trent said, his voice echoing wildly in his own ears, "Where are we?"

  "Watching. Watching the fire," she said softly, "burning out. They forgot to bank Tyrel's fire when they all left together. It flickers and then the cold kills it, and all that's left is the --darkness."

  Trent found himself sitting, very much alone, on a rooftop filled with sharp-edged objects, watching Denice come back down from the place she had taken him to.

  She shook herself slightly, glanced at Trent, and then turned back to Jimmy Ramirez. "You see, Jimmy," she said in a normal voice, "that's the sort of thing I want to do. To make a difference."

  "Girl," said Jimmy with perfect sincerity, "you're stoned. Or crazy, I don't know."

  She shook herself slightly, leaned forward. It seemed to Trent that she was oblivious to what had just happened. "Don't you understand?" Denice asked. "It's what we have to do. We have to make things better."

  Jimmy looked at Trent. "Man? She's crazy, right?"

  Trent shook his head slowly, watching Denice Castanaveras. She was the only thing left on the roof that he did not see sharp-edged; she kept shifting, blurring in his vision, the pale blue of her neural system glowing beneath the surface of her skin. "No. No, Jimmy," he whispered, "she's right."

  Jimmy laughed suddenly, an abrupt explosion of real amusement. "Two street kids, a crazy dancer and a thief, gon' to change the world. So that's what you're going to do. Thank you for sharing with me, both of you." He laughed again, looking at the two of them sitting across the roof from him. "How?"

  Once, almost ten years ago, Trent had seen Carl Castanaveras, in the midst of a sudden, amazingly powerful rage, knock a full-grown man halfway across a room simply by looking at him. In that instant, when Denice Castanaveras' features darkened, for the first time she reminded him of her father.

  He said softly, "Denice, don't."

  The nearly full bottle of white wine at the side of her chair exploded. Shards of glassite sprayed across the rooftop. The girl sat trembling in the chair, hands clasped together in her lap, looking down at her white knuckles, tiny pinheads of blood beginning to coalesce on the surface of her skin where the glassite had struck. Jimmy Ramirez came to his feet in a single startled blur of motion, backing away from Trent and Denice swiftly, tense and wild all at once.

  "Denice, I can't stop you," said Trent quietly. "Nobody can."

  "She--she's--"

  "Shut up, Jimmy." Trent did not even look at him.

  They held the tableau, none of them moving, until finally, slowly, the tension went out of Denice Castanaveras, and she looked up and met Jimmy Ramirez's staring brown eyes.

  "So," she said, "now you know."

  They went dancing together at Trent's favorite dance club, The Emerald Illusion, in the basement of the Red Line Hotel; all of Trent's friends and many of hers.

  * * *

  Don't ask me do I love you

  Always or just today

  I love you now, my love

  Tomorrow who can say

  * * *

  Her friends danced better than his. One night Orinda Gleygavass herself came, danced once with Jimmy and twice with Boris the Bear; Johnny Johnny whispered sweet nothings to her through the bear's inskin.

  "I never saw such a thing," she was heard to say before she left.

  "I think I've got it." Trent blasted the vault's surface with FreezIt again, glanced down at the thermometer; the surface of the vault was down to -10C, and the vault's diagnostics were reporting nothing wrong. The vault was a three-meter high Kellerman Model 880 Trent had purchased for just shy of twenty thousand CU. It was, down to the climate control, the same model as the temporary storage vault now in use at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The vault's surface was webbed with superconductor; theoretically a cutting torch, even an X-ray laser, should warm the vault evenly rather than allowing any single spot to become hot enough to melt.

  At thirty-eight degrees Centigrade the vault's diagnostics would set off an alarm--but it did not seem to care about the cold.

  Trent moved a stationary cutting laser in front of the vault, pulled on a pair of goggles, and hit the cutting laser for two seconds.

  He took the goggles off. A tiny, cherry-red spot glowed on the surface of the vault where the laser had touched. It faded as he watched.

  The vault's temperature had jumped to positive twelve degrees.

  "Johnny, stopwatch?"

  Johnny Johnny read off data from the sensors plastered across the surface of the vault. "Boss, at the point of contact the vault's surface reached a temperature of two thousand degrees, and did not drop below one thousand until seventy-seven seconds after the laser ceased. We need to triple the temperature at the point of contact and boost the duration to 1.2 seconds or better. Judging from the length of time it took for the temperature to drop below a thousand degrees at the point of contact, the superconductor strips inside the casing can't be closer than two centimeters together."

  "Liquid nitrogen?"

  "Should work, Boss. The point of contact should hit seven thousand degrees; the temp sensors inside won't go higher than minus five."

  "Jimmy! Hear that, Jimmy?" Trent stripped off his goggles, turned around to look at Jimmy. "We've got the vault!"

  Jimmy Ramirez did not answer.

  Trent cocked his head slightly, the goggles hanging loosely in one hand, looking at Jimmy standing almost motionless at the other end of the room. "You okay, Jimmy?"

  "Yeah. Sure."

  "Your mind hasn't been on the work, Jimmy."

  Jimmy sighed, clicked off the light pen he held and turned away from the display of the blueprints for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, away from Trent. The holo that usually showed the South Seas beach had been turned off, and in the space it had covered Jimmy was constructing a three-dimensional representation of the Museum's layout and security devices. Jimmy was silent for a moment before responding; Trent saw the muscles in his shoulders tensing. His reply, when it came, was almost a relief. Trent had seen the argument coming these last two weeks, had known it inevitable the day the wine bottle had shattered on the roof.

  Jimmy said softly, "How can
you tell?"

  "I can't, not the way you mean."

  "All this time we been friends ..." Jimmy shook his head, turned to Trent and saw Trent gazing at him. Trent saw the anger gathering. His voice grew almost gentle. "How come you never told me, man?"

  Trent said, "At first I didn't trust you, Jimmy. Remember? I was twelve and I was afraid of everything." He grinned suddenly. "Including you."

  The light pen in Jimmy's hand was bending. "At first?"

  "Later I found out about how you lost your mother in the Troubles, and then there was another reason not to trust you." Trent was silent for a moment. "Eventually I did trust you, and by then--we'd been together two or three years, it didn't seem so important any more what we'd been doing before we met." He shrugged. "We had something that was working, Jimmy. I didn't want to mess it up. I know you're prejudiced against genies; don't try to tell me you're not."

  Jimmy nodded jerkily. "I know, I know all the things I've said. But I didn't mean them about you."

  "I know."

  "All those years," Jimmy half whispered, "I never understood. You were always so good at everything. Man, I'm a good boxer, but the coach, he don't want me, he wants you, twenty kilos lighter and he wants you. You punch harder than I do, you're smarter than I am, and my man, I never saw anybody could move as fast as you. I work out two hours a day, you hardly ever work out and you're--"

  "Perfect."

  The word brought Jimmy up short.

  Trent said softly, "I'm a genie. Suzanne Montignet, the best genegineer the world has ever seen, designed me from the ground up, gene by gene until she had a design she was pleased with. I wasn't one of the experimental designs, not like the de Nostri; none of the telepaths were. All Doctor Montignet was doing was designing telepaths without genetic flaws. She made one mistake, in me. My seventeenth gene complex is different than Denice's; not flawed, or so I was told by Doctor Montignet before she died, just different. It's why Denice is a telepath and I'm not."

  Jimmy looked at Trent pleadingly. "You remember how it was? Jesus, the Temple Dragons were gon' to kill you until I talked them into adopting you. Do you remember?"

  "Jimmy?"

  "Yes?"

  "I am genetically perfect." Jimmy actually flinched and Trent continued with barely a pause, "And it's not my fault." A brief startled look flashed across Ramirez's countenance, and Trent smiled rather lopsidedly. "Really, it's not. Nobody asked me how I wanted to be born. Nobody asked Denice either, or her parents, or any of the kids I grew up with."

  "God damn you!" Jimmy whirled, hit the wall bare-handed so hard the plastisteel lining took a dent. He turned back and moved toward Trent. "What am I supposed to do? My mama went crazy because of you people!"

  "So did half of the Fringe. Jimmy, the people who did that are dead. They died defending themselves. Denice wasn't a telepath yet when it happened, and I'm not." Trent spread his hands. "What am I supposed to do? I tell you the truth and I'm one of the people you hate so bad you can taste it. I lie to you and it means I don't trust you." He said the words honestly, as simply and directly as he was able. "Come on, Jimmy, you tell me. What am I supposed to do?"

  Jimmy Ramirez's answer was flat challenge, even and unmistakable. "Tell me. Tell me everything, always." He took two steps closer to Trent, and his voice was suddenly almost pleading. "Always."

  The crooked grin touched Trent's features again. "Okay. Jimmy?"

  "Yeah?"

  "What do you want to drink? GoodBeer, Bud, what?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "This is going to take an awful damn long time."

  They talked all night and into the morning. Trent showed him the recordings of the destruction of the Chandler Complex, taken from the hundreds of spyeyes that had floated above the building in the days prior to its destruction. "Here. This clip has been censored so thoroughly most people aren't even aware it exists; I stole it out of an Electronic Times archive. In this clip, at the edge of the holofield, you can see the Lamborghini coming up out of the park; Denice says that was Carl. The Troubles had already begun at this point; the telepaths were fighting back."

  "He died?"

  "Denice says so. About forty-five minutes after this clip I've just shown you--" The holofield darkened for an instant, returned with the image of the Chandler Complex. The image held steady, a foreground view of the Complex from about two meters up, a shining two-story structure of white monocrystal. Then the field went completely white, a blazing brilliant glare that made Jimmy cry out in surprise and turn his eyes away.

  Trent stood, staring unblinking into the awful brightness, watching without expression as it faded into the shape of a mushroom cloud, climbing up into the dark night sky. "The Boards said at first that a Peaceforcer Elite named Mohammed Vance ordered this. Then they said he had not, that it was Space Force's decision to target the Compound. I'd give a lot to know."

  Jimmy had turned back, was watching the mushroom cloud with plain fascination. "The frog with the Arab name. You've mentioned him before."

  "I know. And that's essentially where things have stood ever since, Jimmy. The PKF thinks--or thought--that I was dead, that I'd drowned in the Hudson River. But they know David and Denice were not at the Complex when it was destroyed; they know that somebody left the Complex before it was destroyed, in the Lamborghini. It's been seven years and they've never found me, they've never found Denice." Trent was silent for a moment. "They may have found David. The Bureau of Biotech has memos that mention a boy with the Gift, but the memos themselves are so carefully worded there's not much I can get out of them. Biotech--we were raised by the Bureau of Biotech and the Peaceforcers, all of us were--Biotech is one of the lowest profile, best protected Bureaus in the Unification. They don't even depend on DataWatch for data integrity; they have replicant AIs in their Boards."

  "That's illegal."

  Trent simply laughed. "Yeah. Tell it to the Peaceforcers. At any rate, Biotech either has David, or they've gone back to the well again with the same gene template that created us."

  Jimmy nodded slowly, the dark Latin features a study in concentration. He was clearly not thinking about David. "Okay. So this Garon, from DataWatch, that's why the problem with the boost at Calley's."

  "I think so."

  Jimmy Ramirez said slowly, "Makes no sense, man. Why would they set you up so tight and then just walk away?"

  "That," said Trent, "is a really good question."

  Trent watched Denice perform during a full-dress rehearsal for a production of Leviathan, a critical and controversial work about the early life of Jules Moreau, the man who had, with Sarah Almundsen, founded the Unification.

  She was not the female lead; that, the role of Evsita, was danced by Orinda Gleygavass' protege, Tarin Schuyler.

  Denice was better. Trent knew nothing of dance, but it was not merely prejudice on his part. She danced the supporting role of Evsita Bunuel's younger sister Marina, whom Moreau had married after Evsita's suicide, danced it with a passion and single-mindedness that brought admiring whistles and occasional applause from the stage hands as they prepared for opening night. Tarin Schuyler, a thin, willowy young woman with whipcord muscles and no softness to her, danced the lead with precision and fierceness and great talent, and the stage hands ignored her.

  They worked.

  In late June they completed the contract to boost an old painting with an odd history from its display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a red monochrome in oils. Je Suis Le Fleuve, the painting was titled, and it showed a river of blood flowing through a darker red jungle. After that boost there were others, large and small; the most important of the lot was a fairly safe job for a low-level executive with Chandler Industries, acquiring complete blueprints from an engineer with Peugeot-AeroFlot that showed the layout of Peugeot's next generation of semiballistic capsules.

  The relative danger of the assignment rarely had anything to do with how well it paid; the aborted boost of Calley's, at the beginning of s
ummer, had been dangerous, and had promised to pay acceptably. The boost of the painting was less dangerous, and paid well; the Chandler job had been lengthy and tedious, and gave them enough Credit to relax for three or four months.

  Trent was more cautious than usual that summer, following the failed Peaceforcer sting at CalleyTronics. As time wore by, without word, without sign of the PKF, he allowed himself to hope that it had been coincidence, that Garon had not identified him, that his safe and reasonably secure life had not suddenly turned into a tightrope walk.

  He allowed himself to hope; but he did not allow himself to believe. He did not believe it, not for an instant.

  It was a difficult time, the troubled end to a troubled decade. Trent lived in the InfoNet, danced in the Crystal Wind for ten and fifteen hours at a time. He tried desperately to make sense of what was happening to his world.

  That was the summer that the first images came back from the probe to Tau Ceti, when humanity knew finally, without question, that it was not alone. The Big Scope, out in the Belt, had not lied; there were two Earthlike planets circling Tau Ceti at distances of approximately 150 and 180 million kilometers. There was, the probe showed clearly, a monstrous orbital facility, a solid oval mass some five times the size of Halfway, circling the inner planet. The probe's attempts at communication with the orbital facility were not answered, and then the probe's thin laser pulse, attenuated by 11.9 lightyears distance, simply stopped.

  In the Belt, St. Peter's CityState announced that it had begun preparations to place a second colony on Ganymede. The PR company responsible for their downside media relations, Lustbader, Capri and Doutrè, made no reference to the destroyed first Ganymean colony in their news release. Elsewhere in the Belt the SpaceFarers' Collective had signed trade treaties with the White Russian CityStates, bringing an end to over twenty years of hostilities between the two groups. The Mormon colony on Mars was said to be thriving, and on good terms with the SpaceFarer colony some two hundred kilometers north of it.