Lift, p.25
Lift, page 25
Magnuson ignored the brainwash comment. “You’re looking at it.” Magnuson patted Veced’s shoulder and Veced pushed him off.
“What happened?”
“It’s a long story. Since your time, Canada has become a major—”
Suddenly, the hover was hit and shook and yawed before geeing true. Veced had tumbled and banged into the floor console as the aides and Magnuson released their harnesses and tried to grab him.
Veced fought them off and thought he was fighting for his life. One bloodied aide tried to answer an incoming emergency, but his glasses were yanked off by Lobashevsky. When they had him contained, the hover was hit again. All four occupants were flung starboard and banged into the aerodynamic curvature, as the hover stopped shaking and hawed true.
Magnuson, looking through one eye while covering another, saw Veced below him sprawled on the viewing pane, not moving. He shouted to the aides, and they managed to buckle Veced into his seat. While one aide retrieved his glasses and another got medicines, Magnuson felt for Veced’s pulse. “Thank God,” Magnuson said.
The voice in Magnuson’s ear was so loud, he looked for the hover’s intercom. He tapped his glasses.
“Yes. I’m here, Chair Popov.”
There has been a breach in protocol. The Canadians have ignored the temporary truce and have attacked the Siberians. Come back. Bring back Lobashevsky. I repeat, bring back Lobashevsky at once.
AFTER ALL MEDICAL TESTS ON LOBASHEVSKY HAD BEEN COMPLETED, after Magnuson had convinced Popov the worst had passed—“He’s recovering nicely and on the cusp of discovery”—Magnuson and Petitjean were allowed to deliver the Liftee to his quarters.
“It’s been quite a day,” Magnuson said to Veced.
The bandaged-wrapped head of Veced nodded. He tried to say something and coughed up more phlegm mixed with blood.
“Sleep, Veced. You need to sleep.”
52
“GENERAL, I WANT A COMPLETE EXPLANATION,” POPOV COMMANDED into her headpiece.
Braun wanted to give her the bad news first, but wasn’t going to risk trying to skirt what she thought was the real emergency.
“Russian-Siberia claims Canada cheated on the imposed forty-eight-hour ceasefire of last week, in which the Red Cross evacuated the wounded and delivered medicines.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes, but the time cheated was one hour.”
“Are you telling me, General, because of one hour last week, your truce was ignored today?”
“Yes. Chair Popov, I—”
“Listen to me, General. What happened today was unconscionable. If you cannot impose a suspension of arms and have it followed, I have every right to—”
“Have me relieved. I need to hand you my resignation.”
Her silence spoke to him.
“I have terrible news,” he said. “Another low in our species has been reached.”
He could hear her breaths, and he forced himself to continue. Legs wound around the other, frowns crinkling his forehead, he closed his eyes.
“Chair Popov, I’ve just learned Javina-Three has been nuked and sunk. We will search for survivors, but over 340,000 are presumed dead.”
His glasses lost contact. Can’t blame her, he thought. General Braun felt momentary relief. He hadn’t wanted to give her the details of what he was learning, much less tell her who he believed was responsible.
THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER POPOV REFUSED HIS OFFER TO RESIGN, General Braun was investigating the Javina-Three tragedy. He’d put his glasses to message, and one caller was insistent. Upon retrieving the messages, Braun learned that in response to Siberia’s breaking an imposed truce, the Canadians had bombed over half of Siberia’s vertical-farming greenhouses.
The puzzle in Braun’s head shifted. Javina-Three had nothing to do with the rancor of nations. Braun’s initial thoughts had been correct—Javina-Three was carried out by droogs, and that froze him to the core. Indonesian droogs had initially developed in Indonesia, but at that time the military didn’t take them seriously. Later, it was too late to merely strike in a few locales and wipe them out. When droogs learned to disengage and emerge elsewhere, droog cells proliferated and expanded. Now they were nowhere and everywhere, with established hierarchy and levels of command.
MAGNUSON STEPPED INTO LOBASHEVSKY’S ROOM.
For the second time, a corner of Veced’s mouth turned up to a half-hearted smile. But it looked cockeyed under the bandages wrapped around his head.
“I have questions,” Lobashevsky rasped.
“I’ll answer whatever I can.”
“Are Russian guards behind all this?”
“No!”
“Who is behind this?”
Magnuson explained everything all over again, like he and Petitjean had done before, and moved on to the ET signals.
“Nobody in this so-called present-age can figure them out?” Veced asked.
“As I say, we’ve made progress with M-L-M. We haven’t gotten to square one in trying to decipher the alien signals, which we are convinced were prompted when we transmitted M-L-M to outer space.”
It was Veced who got up and looked at the window screen. He tried putting his hands on the sill as he stared at the ocean. “I admit this prison is a palace compared to where I’ve been. But these contraptions”—he pointed at the screen—“will never fool me.”
Magnuson said nothing.
“Okay. I’ll look at what you have, under two conditions. One, I work here at this location, alone. I don’t care if you bring Petitjean with you from time to time, but no one else. Two, I need polar-coordinate graph paper, in abundance, two gross of eraser pencils along with a pencil sharpener, a compass, and an engineer’s ruler.”
“Consider it done.”
Magnuson came back later with several bags. He’d had to hover into a hamlet in United Viet Nam to gather everything Lobashevsky wanted. He heard deep snoring as he entered and saw from a peek into the bedroom that Lobashevsky was asleep on the bed. He was on his back, one arm covering his eyes. The overhead was dimmed, and Magnuson shut it down. He pulled the door and saw the note taped to it. Please do not disturb. Come back in two days.
TWO DAYS LATER, MAGNUSON ARRIVED WITH PETITJEAN, WHO’D brought another bottle of vodka. Magnuson carried what looked like an old-time Etch-a-Sketch. Lobashevsky had said he didn’t trust any type of computer, but Magnuson had a hunch he’d accept a memory-enhanced Qubetch-a-Sketch. Magnuson knocked and no one answered. He knocked again and walked in.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Lobashevsky said. “Come in if you must, but give me a minute.”
Magnuson put the bags into the kitchen and peeked around the corner. Veced was in underpants overlapped with a T-shirt. Magnuson watched as Veced measured something on polar graph paper using a compass, and then referred to some scribbled notes, after which he penciled a point.
“Step in, gentlemen.”
“How did you know I brought Armando?” Magnuson asked.
Without looking up, Veced pointed the index finger of his other hand to the half-covered window screen. “Saw the reflection.”
Magnuson and Petitjean walked to where there were taped graphs on a side wall. Some of the graphs had pencil markings throughout, while other graphs were blank. The opposite side wall contained 8-by-11 sheets of unlined paper full of equations and strange-looking mathematics. On either side of them, blank unlined sheets were taped.
Magnuson and Petitjean walked back toward Veced, anxious but eager to ask their main question.
“I can hear your minds, gentlemen. Please sit down.”
Lobashevsky put down his compass, blew on some erasures, and held the graphed paper up in front of him to examine it closely. He stood still for a moment, looking at the paper, and then went to the graph wall and taped it with the others.
“Your question is, what have I found?”
Magnuson and Petitjean waited.
“First, I must tell you, Mr. Magnuson, when I said I’d expected more of a challenge, I didn’t think you would take it so personally.” And for the first time, both corners of Veced’s mouth turned upward.
Magnuson slapped his knee and let out a long belly laugh. He looked at Petitjean, whose grin went from ear to ear.
“Veced, how about a shot of vodka?” Petitjean said.
“Indeed. I’m putting my implements in their right place.” He adjusted work papers and his notebook from the original box. He laid his compass, ruler, and pencil aside. “I have a compulsive-obsessive methodology with my papers and instruments, driving even me batty, which is why I’d asked to be left here, to work alone.” He shifted everything to one side, making sure the items were aligned with each other and with the table-side in front of him. He’d been working at the low coffee table while sitting on the floor.
“How come you work on the table from the floor?” Petitjean asked, stepping up with vodkas.
“Funny, I’d meant to use the card table, but once I started thinking, one thought led to another, and I’d forgotten all about it. Why, excuse me, gentlemen.” He looked down at his briefs.
“It’s okay,” Magnuson said.
Petitjean smiled. “Don’t bother.”
Veced left them and went to his bedroom. Magnuson and Petitjean turned to each other big-eyed, not saying a word.
“Hello-like. Peace-like. Music,” Lobashevsky said, as he walked around the corner in pants.
Magnuson and Petitjean stared.
Veced took a sip of vodka. “Those are the two expressions and the one word I’ve decoded thus far: ‘Hello-like. Peace-like. Music.’ But those three—and you can take it to the bank—appear in all but one of the alien transmissions. Thirty out of thirty-one.”
“Which one doesn’t contain them?”
“The transmission outside of our galaxy.”
They listened to a group of gulls soaring by the window. Satisfied at last that no one was spying on him, Veced walked over and unfurled the curtain, and, digitally, a heady mix of salt air wafted into the room.
“Here’s my first piece of advice,” Veced said. “Drop all investigation of the out-of-galaxy signal. And I’ll tell you why.” He took another sip and set the glass down. “That signal, let me refer to it from here on as ‘the devil,’ is comprised of a different set of mathematics that is unique. And trying to decipher it—forget about π—will destabilize your mind.”
Magnuson glanced at Petitjean.
“As you know,” Lobashevsky continued, “in language, the probability of the next word or characters depends on prior data.” Lobashevsky peered at a polar-coordinate blank on his wall. “Except for that extragalactic,” he shouted and pointed. “Do not fear, I pulled back in time. I didn’t realize how it was luring me in and twisting me, until it was almost too late. It is ‘the devil,’” he shouted. “I will not entertain it further under any circumstances.” He went to the polar-coordinate chart, which was unmarked, and removed it from the wall. “Here, take it,” he said, handing it to Magnuson.
“But, Veced, is this the right chart? It’s blank.”
Veced took it back and looked at it. In a burst of rage, he tore the unmarked polar graph paper in half and into quarters and threw the pieces “out” the window. “See what I mean?” he said.
TWO HOURS LATER, LOBASHEVSKY WAS STILL EXPLAINING TO MAGNUSON and Petitjean the mathematics behind the other charts, and they followed about half of what he said. They were elementary-school pupils who’d learned their number tables and were listening to a PhD explain higher mathematics.
“Veced, take me through your charts again,” Petitjean said.
“I thought we’d covered that.”
“I need another review too,” Magnuson said.
“It will become clear when I build to prime.”
It hit Petitjean like a thunderbolt. “You mean Mersenne prime?”
“Of course. What did you think I meant?”
Now Magnuson’s comprehension leaped to about 80 percent. He looked sideways to Petitjean. “We’ve got to take this to Popov.” He turned to Lobashevsky. “Primes are her specialty. Popov is going to love this.”
“Yes,” Petitjean said. “But look, Veced, in all of this high-end discussion, I’ve missed something else: How do we account for the near-instantaneous response from civilizations light-years away?”
“Ah,” Lobashevsky said, “that’s connected to an indescribable beauty I’m finding in these patterns.” Lobashevsky drained his glass. “You see, these aliens have known about us for a long time, and the advancements in their communications and in their mathematics point to a signal that reveals itself when we properly wrap around it.”
“Do you imply,” Petitjean asked, “while their signals have been in our midst, it’s only now that we could wrap around them?”
“Yes. And we three know why. I like your man Pauperito; how did he say it?”
“Pauperito said ‘It all comes back to dissonance,’” Magnuson said.
“Exactly.”
“Okay,” Petitjean said, “we have wrapped. Have they heard us come back to them?”
“Oh, they’ve heard us; and I suspect, based on their advancement, and from all I see here,” Lobashevsky motioned to his charts on the walls, “they have comprehended us, or will soon. The aliens control the wraps.” Lobashevsky smiled as a professor who has grounded his class. “We’ll know the answer to comprehension as soon as their patterns change.”
53
WHEN GENERAL OSTEEN LEFT RINGSIDE AND RETURNED TO HER quarters, she switched from battle fatigues to her karate gi. She tightened the belt as she walked into her private dojo, removed her slippers before stepping onto the mat, which she kneeled on with bowed head, and repeated aloud her promise:
In the way of Karate-do, I will destroy any man who touches me with lascivious intent. I will not be violated again. Ever.
She stood and stretched in front of the mirrored wall. Ever so slowly, Osteen widened the distance between her legs and gradually slid down to a split. From there, she arched her feet and flexed her toes. She arched her back and threw her neck back as she looked straight up at the ceiling. She raised her arms to the ceiling, extending her fingers and stretching body ligaments, while still in the split. She then repeated her personal promise aloud one more time.
Osteen practiced her moves. She curled into a ball on the mat and exploded like shrapnel. Each time she burst forth, her body leaped above the mat. She did this a dozen times. Next, without resting, Osteen twisted, arched, angled, bounded, and leaped about the mat. She became an uncontrollable force, a deadly weapon, a promise of annihilation.
Fifty minutes later, Osteen sat in her private sauna and thought about her identical twin, Olivia, who eight years ago had been raped and murdered in front of her. The two beasts holding Osteen made her watch while a third mounted her screaming sister. One of the hooligans, not worth the powder to blow him up, had whispered in Osteen’s ear, “Watch, cunt-face, you’re next.”
Osteen adjusted the temperature and laid her head back on the sauna’s inside cedar wall. She remembered how the smelly, obese excuse of a human lay on top of poor Olivia, smothering her. She remembered hearing sirens and the three thugs running away. She rushed to Olivia, who wasn’t moving and was no longer breathing. Osteen did everything she could, but when medics got there, Olivia was dead.
Both sweat and tears blurred the eyes of Osteen as she sat in her sauna. They never found the thugs, who could still be in Australia, but Osteen had taken action and redressed her vulnerability. She’d been promoted to colonel; and, because of the tragedy and her own escape, she had asked for, and received, a six-month leave. She vowed that she would become a martial-arts expert, a fighter. All her inquiries, all her readings on the subject pointed to Okinawa, which after hundreds of years was still considered the best place on Earth to learn, practice, and fight in the martial arts.
After six months’ leave with pay, she asked for a six-month extension without pay and was surprised when it was granted. Osteen had the chance to learn from established masters who, when not competing, taught the best and most promising students. Almost all these advanced students were men. The fact that she was the one female in her class warmed her. She’d arrived.
Osteen had honed her body and mind to precision. She had placed first in her class and became the incarnation of the female warrior. She’d earned a seventh-degree black belt and bowed to her sensei. After the brief graduation ceremony, she’d been approached by the reigning karate champion and sensei who sometimes taught but often came to watch advanced students. She was invited to his home. No one refused the master anything, and she was delighted to go, for it was a special honor. No one else had been asked.
UPON ARRIVAL, OSTEEN HAD REMOVED HER SHOES AND STEPPED into the champion’s modest home, which afforded a panoramic view of the ocean. He offered her tea, and a young boy brought it to her. She noticed the champion was dressed in a traditional karate gi, which meant he’d been practicing or was about to participate in a match somewhere. He appeared relaxed as he asked her questions about her homeland, her religion—she had none, not since … she didn’t tell him. At the conclusion of tea, the sensei stood.
“You did not know this, for it’s our custom to reveal it only to first-place students of karate, but I have a last kata for you to learn.” The champion said this in a forthright manner and directed Osteen to a mat in an inner room.
Osteen, with trepidation, stepped before the mat and looked at the master.
“Karate-ga, go to my bath and cleanse your hands. Choose karate gi from the closet. I’ll wait for you here.”
Osteen looked at him. She’d been led to believe her training was finished at the conclusion of ceremonies that afternoon.
“Do not be alarmed. You will not fight me. I am here to teach you.”
Osteen, realizing she was on her way to advancing to an eighth-degree black belt, reappeared and stepped before the mat. The master stood on the mat as a statue. She stepped to the mat and bowed to the sensei. She had no sooner raised her head and was reopening her eyes when the champion dove for her legs, pinned her to the mat, and chopped a blow to her forehead, paralyzing her.
