Fearful Symmetries

John Samson’s revelation was like accusing the Red Cross of spiking their blood cultures with hepatitis. It didn’t make any sense. The Bensheim Clinics were an international charity that had been around almost as long as moreaus themselves—and they certainly didn’t have a paramilitary force to cover up this kind of discovery.

He spent over an hour grilling the kid about what was on that ramcard. Nohar got the information in minute detail. The kid remembered everything, he rattled off the data as if he was sitting in front of a comm screen reading it.

The ramcard was, at the very least, an explosive set of case studies on the spread of Herpes Rangoon in the United States. John Samson had read several charts listing the spread of the virus from one person through several other partners. In each case study the original vector for the disease was a female moreau impregnated at a Bensheim Clinic. In about half of the cases the fetus spontaneously aborted due to the virus, and in half of the remaining cases the fetus was born infected.

What made the files all the more damaging was the way the data was slanted to highlight those moreaus that infected the widest segment of the population, over the widest area.

What John couldn’t give him was any explicit statement from the data that the Bensheim Clinics were intentionally responsible for the initial infections. It still could be accidental. As the bear in the waiting room told him, it was probably a logistical impossibility to test all of their stock. Though even if that was made public, and the ramcard was just tracking the problem, it was bad enough to probably spell the end of the Clinics.

But John Samson hadn’t read all the data. There were several gigabytes on that card, too much to go through in the one sitting he had with the data. He had just read enough to set the natural paranoia going, and to believe that his and Manuel’s lives had been in danger for being anywhere close to something like it.

“Safe hiding place,” John said. “An old INS detention center on the border. I have my dad’s access codes.”

“The place has been abandoned for years.” John looked up at Maria. “Sometimes, I think I’m the only one who remembers it.”

Nohar freed the kid to take them all down to his vehicle. John Samson wasn’t supposed to be old enough to drive, but he had followed Nohar in a decade-old van that made Nohar think of government institutions.

“There’s a whole graveyard of trucks, vans, and cars abandoned by the Fed,” John told him, as the four of them left Beverly’s apartment building. Nohar believed what the kid said. Years of wind and weather had worn the van to a bone-gray. A thin layer of dust coated every window evenly, except where he had wiped clear the driver’s side. The van still had government ID tags, and Nohar could still see the ghost of the word “Immigration” on the side of the van.

“That’s why it took me over two weeks to get back here. Couldn’t drive Manuel’s car—they’re probably looking for it. I had to work on getting this thing mobile.”

Nohar nodded and walked to the rear and opened the back. The rear of the van was flanked by benches, separated from the driver’s compartment by a wire mesh screen. It had obviously been used for hauling detainees around.

“That’s all right,” Maria said. She grunted a few times as Nohar lifted her out of the chair and set her down on one of the benches. She felt way too light. All the muscle tone was gone. The sense of loss struck him again, the long path of years that could have gone in another direction.

Once Maria was settled, Nohar lifted the chair into the back. There were a few old elastic cords on the floor of the van, mixed with rats’ nests and other debris. Nohar took one and secured the chair to the wire mesh separating the driver’s compartment.

Once he had done that, John Samson started walking toward the front of the van. Nohar stepped out and shook his head. “No.”

The kid looked at him and seemed to be gauging the probability of winning an argument with Nohar, or failing that, outrunning him. The kid had brains enough not to argue. He stepped in back with Maria, and sat down quietly.

When he did, Nohar grabbed another elastic cord and secured his arms behind him to a metal rod that was welded to the side of the van, seemingly just for that purpose.

“You better hope,” Nohar said, “that you gave accurate directions to this place, and my son is all right.”

“That’s my problem now.” Nohar shut the rear door and walked Henderson up to the driver’s side of the van. Henderson looked at him and said, “You’re not driving?”

Nohar opened the door for her, and after she stepped in, he handed her the .45 that John had been waving around. She stared at the gun.

“I’m going to have to come back to town.” He needed to know for sure who the Bad Guys were. Until then, none of them were safe. “You’ll need to keep an eye on him too. If he gives you any trouble, shoot him in the knee.” Nohar shut the driver’s door and got in on the other side of the van.

Nohar watched the abandoned red Python as the decrepit INS van pulled away. Changing vehicles was probably a good thing. He didn’t want to get caught in a car someone else might’ve IDed. And who knew what warrants were out on that Oxford guy.

Once they headed out onto the highway, Nohar was lost in his thoughts, and he felt his gut twist.

The ride took a few hours over the freeways of LA. Eventually, the traffic peeled away as they headed due east, toward Arizona. Buildings seemed to disappear into the desert as they left the fringes of civilization. The sun sank, and soon the old van drove along a tiny strip of the world carved out by its one working headlamp.

At that age, Nohar had just stopped running with a local street gang and had started working for himself. He had started looking for people, a lot of folks got lost in Moreytown, and other folks would pay to find them. It eventually got to be a regular job. . . .

Nohar tried to reconstruct what it was like for him at seventeen. He had been physically adult for nearly ten years by then, and his brain was just growing into the body. He remembered his own isolation, a bequest from his father. He lived in an era that saw Datia as a hero, and he could never reconcile his own image of him with what the rest of the morey world saw. In the end, he was as surely isolated as Manuel was.

He hoped to God that he wasn’t about to do to his son what Datia did to him. Though, in retrospect, it was hard to picture what Datia could have said to the young Nohar that would have fulfilled Nohar’s expectations. How could anyone surmount the space of years that separated them?

The camp was unlit, so it was a complete surprise to Nohar when the gate sprang up in front of the van, caught in its headlight. It came at the end of a dirt track they’d followed off of the main road.

The van stopped and Nohar got out, twisting the kinks out of his neck which he’d been straining, looking back at the Necron Avenger every few minutes during the ride here. Henderson walked up next to him, staring through the sliding chain-link fence, into the darkness beyond.

The headlamp threw their shadows through the gate and across an empty field. At the other end of the field, Nohar could see the abstract shadows of a guard tower blocking out the stars. At its base was another fence, which seemed more substantial than the chain-link in front of him.

He pulled open the doors and John Samson looked at him. “Thanks for remembering me. I can’t feel my hands anymore.”

“Fine,” she said, but her posture showed differently. The ride hadn’t been easy on her, and the pain showed on her face.

Nohar turned and untied John, feeling the same undirected anger he’d been feeling every time he realized how deeply Maria’s genetics had betrayed her.

“Hey, watch it,” John said, pulling his hands away when he was finally untied. He began rubbing his overlong fingers together. “They’re sensitive.”

Necron nodded and walked up to one side of the gate. He looked at Henderson and said, “You should get back in the van, and drive it through to the main gate.”

Henderson looked at Nohar as if looking for confirmation. Nohar nodded. She got in the van and closed the door.

John walked up to the side of the gate, the light from the van’s headlamp exaggerating his frank features. With the shadows cast by the light, his head looked grotesquely swollen, and his fingers seemed to stretch impossibly toward the ground.

He stopped by a small metal box mounted on a pole. It had a recessed cover that swung open when he pressed it. Beneath it, an alphanumeric keypad lit up.

He looked across at Nohar. “The access code, ‘01082034.’ ” He spoke the numbers as he typed them on the keypad. “Remember it, it gets you through the perimeter.” He grinned and shook his head as the gate started rolling aside. “Someone in the INS must be from Frisco.”

Nohar didn’t know exactly what John meant. He followed the van through the gate, and it didn’t strike him until he, Necron, and the van were all through and the gate was closing behind them.

“01082034,” January 8, 2034—the date of the Frisco Quake. It was 9.5 and did a lot of damage to LA even though it was centered around San Francisco.

The complex was a mass of dull cinder-block buildings surrounding an even bleaker central section enclosed by barbed wire. Nohar only saw glimpses of what had been the holding facility, barracks lined up with less than two meters between buildings. Even with the barracks, in the flashes of light Nohar could see the remnants of plastic sheets that had sheltered people who hadn’t fit inside the buildings. The plastic was torn and fluttered weakly in the wind.

Nohar and John had boarded the rear of the van, and Henderson followed the Necron Avenger’s directions, driving to the north end of the complex, where the main administration building was.

The van’s headlight swept across the front of the building, and Nohar saw that the door was opening.

A tall feline stepped out of the door, blinking in the light. His coloring was mostly black, with hints of russet stripes that faded to near-invisibility.

Nohar forgot Necron, opened the rear door, and jumped out. Looking at Manuel, his words were frozen in his mouth. Somehow, he had thought he’d know what to say. Now, every rehearsed opening seemed to fail him.