Gonzales was glad to be asked. He told of the information
audit about to finish, about Grossback's lack of cooperation
told what would happen next: that in just a few days he, Gonzales,
would leave Burma and almost be killed in an air attack by Burmese
guerrillas.
"Well, then, let's be on our way. Your aircraft is waiting
for you nowtime passes very quickly today, it seemsand you
should be going. Would you mind if I joined you?"
"No," Gonzales said. "Not at all. If you don't mind almost
being killed."
"Oh, that's happened to me lately. I don't mind. Besides, I
need to experience these things. Like you, I do wish to exist."
#
Gonzales sat in the plane's near-darkness, beside him the
young person with the shining face, both waiting for
"Kachin attack group, it looks like," the pilot said.
The miniatures on the screen moved toward them.
"Extremely small electronic image," the young person said.
"Very good for air attack against superior technology. Young
warriors ride them; they carry missiles on their own bodies, slung
like babies."
The pilot yelled, "Fuck, they launched!"
The plane began its air show leaps and dives and turns, and
at the instant of his terror, Gonzales felt the young person's
hand on his arm. "They fire too quickly," the young person said.
"Except for that one." The young person pointed to one of the
miniature aircraft on their plane's display and said, "It comes
closest, and I think its pilot will wait until we are at point-
blank range."
"Won't that kill him, too?" Gonzales asked.
"Oh yes," the young person said. "Let's look. Better yet,
let's be."
The pilot was a young woman wearing a night-flying helmet
that enabled her to see in infra-red and carrying beneath her, as
the young person had said, a one-shot heat seeker in a sling.
Gonzales and the young person looked through her eyes at the scene
of battle and thought her thoughts and felt her surge of adrenals.
In her glasses, the plane's image was clear, a white shape
outlined in red; she let her guidance system keep her with it,
closing the distance between them as it maneuvered and avoided the
missiles fired by those around her.
She felt excited, yet calm; she had been in combat before,
and things were going as their briefing had said. Though this
plane could outfly them so easily, could accelerate up or away,
into the night, first it had to evade their missiles; just a few
seconds of straight flight would be all they needed. She would
wait and grow closer; she would wait until the plane was so close
she could not miss, or until the others had failed.
Then all around her the others began to die, in explosions
that made white flowers in her overloaded night-glasses
The plane of her enemies stood before her, perhaps near
enough, perhaps not, but she knew there was no time left, that
there was another player in this game and it was killing them all.
So she was ready, her fingers reaching for the launch trigger,
when she saw an object coming toward her, already too close and
growing closer with impossible quickness, the heat of its exhaust
another flower in her glasses, then it burst and she felt the
smallest imaginable moment of quite incredible pain
Back inside the plane, Gonzales and the young person died
with her, then Gonzales began sobbing, his body hunched over, as
this woman's death and his own survival fought inside him grief
and terror and gratitude and joy and triumph and loss all mixed
and cycling through him. He could also hear the young person next
to him weeping. The light from a Burmese Air Force "Loup Garou"
played over the interior, over the two of them and the shocked
pilot, who looked back at them in amazement.
Time stopped all around them. The pilot's strained face had
frozen, all the instruments on the pilot's panel were locked onto
a single moment, and out the window, the dark river beneath them
had ceased to flow. Gonzales and the young person sat in a cell
of life amid stasis.
"Don't worry," the young person said. "This gives us a place
to talk without being bothered. What do you think just happened?"
"The attack, you mean?" The young person nodded, light from
its face giving off small shimmering waves of red and blue.
"Grossback arranged it," Gonzales said. "He wants to kill me."
"I don't think so. However, assume that what you say is
true. Is it important?"
"Yes, of course."
"Why?"
"Because " Gonzales halted, trying to think of all the ways
in which this was important: to SenTrax, Traynor
"But not to you," the young person said. "The young woman
died, and her comrades died with her: that is important. You and
the pilot lived: that, too, is important. The Burmese politics,
the multinat corporate intriguethese are makyo, tricks, nothing
more. Life and death and their traces in the human heart, these
have meaning to you. This woman's death lives in you, and your
life shows its meaning. Forget Grossback, Traynor, SenTrax; fear,
ambition, greed." The young person looked closely into his face
and said, "I am weaving words around your heart to guide it,
nothing more."
#
Lizzie crawled in darkness through a tunnel in the rock.
Chill water ran down grooves in the floor and soaked her blouse
and pants. She tried to stand but lifted her head only a few
inches when she bumped into the top of the chatire, the small
passage she crawled through. She did not feel at all alarmed or
disoriented. The low tunnel would lead somewhere, and they would
emerge. This was a test of some kind, it seemed.
Light appeared, at first almost a pinpoint coming from some
undefinable distance, then a glow that she moved quickly toward,
following a twist in the passage that brought her to an opening in
the rock.
Framed by the mouth of the tunnel, an impossible scene: a
balloon, its canopy an oblate sphere of green, blew as if in a
strong wind, and its top swung toward her so she could see a great
eye at its apex, wide open and peering up into the infinite sky.
The iris was dark gold set with light gold flecks. Around the
eye, a fringe of lashes flickered in the wind.
Hanging beneath the balloon from a dense nest of shrouds, a
platform held a metallic ball, a kind of bathysphere. Two figures
crouched there, holding to the shrouds and each other, and peered
up into the sky. By some trick of perspective, the distance
etween her and the balloon shrank until she saw Diana and Jerry,
young and fearful. She crawled forward, and the balloon and Diana
and Jerry disappeared.
At one turn of the tunnel, red hand-prints on the wall
phosphoresced in the darkness. At another, she heard the bellow
of a thousand animals, then saw them run toward a cliff and pass
over it, the entire herd of bison running screaming to a mass
death. Below, she knew, men and women waited to butcher the dead
and carry their meat away.
The rock slanted sharply beneath her, and she began to slide
forward, then she rolled sideways and tumbled out of the chatire