"Like evacuation freaks?"
One of the poker players burst into laughter. "Hey! That's a good one! That's dead on. Evacuation freaks. You mean those weird poseurs with no ID who just haunt the camps, right? That's good, that's very good. That's us right to a T."
"Leo, what have you done that's so horrible? Why do you have to do anything this weird and elaborate?" She looked into his eyes. They were not cruel eyes. They were like Jerry's eyes. They only looked very troubled. "Leo, why don't you just come to the Troupe camp? We have our own people there, we have resources and ways to get people out of trouble. I can talk to Jerry about it, maybe we can straighten all this out."
"That's very sweet of you, Jane. It's very good of you. I'm sorry I never had a chance to know you better." He lifted his voice to the others. "Did you hear that? What she just offered? I was right to do what I did." He looked into her face. "It doesn't matter. In any case, after this meeting you'll never see me again."
"Why not?"
He gestured at the ceiling-at the storm outside their bank vault. "Because we are far beneath the disaster now. We're all just empty names now, in the long roll call of the dead and missing from the F-6. Everyone you see here-we all died inside the F-6. We vanished, we were consumed. You'll never see me again; Jerry will never see me again ever. We're cutting all ties, annihilating our identities, and Jane, we're the kind of people who know how to do that, and are good at doing it. And that's the way it has to be. There's no way out of what I've become, except to stop being what I am. Forever."
"What on earth have you done?"
"It's impossible to say, really," one of the women remarked. "That's the beauty of the scheme."
"Maybe you'll understand it best this way," Leo told her. "When your friend and colleague April Logan was asking the Troupers about when the human race lost all power over its own destiny-"
"Leo, how do you know about that? You weren't there."
"Oh," said Leo, surprised. He smiled. "I'm inside the system in camp. I've always been inside the Troupe's system. No one knows, but, well, there I am. Sorry."
"My brother's an academic, academics never pay any real attention to security updates."
"I'll say," said another of the shelter people, speaking up for the first time. He was big and dark, and he was wearing a charcoal-gray tailored suit, and Jane noticed for the first time that he was very young. Younger than twenty. Maybe no older than seventeen. How had this boy...
And then she looked at him. He was very young, but his eyes were like two dead things. He had the skin-creeping look of a professional poisoner.
"You see," said Leo, "the human race still has a great deal of control over our destiny. Things are by no means so chaotically hopeless as people like to pretend. The governments can't do anything, and our lives are very anarchic, but all that means is that the work that the governments ought to do is shrugged onto vigilantes. There are certain things, certain activities, that transparently require doing. What's more, there are people who recognize the necessity to do them, and who can do them, and are even willing to do those things. The only challenge in the situation is that these necessary things are unbearably horrible and repugnant things to do."
"Leo," said the first chess player, in weary exasperation, "why on earth are you dropping our pants to this woman?"
One of the women spoke up. "Oh, go ahead and tell her, Leo. I'm enjoying this. It doesn't matter. We're free now. We're inside the big silence. We can talk."
"That's you all over, Rosina," said the first chess player in disgust. "I hate this bullshit! I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like some teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals. for Christ's sake, and she's just some prole. Don't you have any pride?"
"She's not just anyone," Leo protested. "She's family.
She's my sister-in-law."
"No, I'm not," Jane said. "I didn't marry him, Leo."
"Details." Leo shrugged, irritably. "Jerry will marry you. I suppose you don't realize that yet, but he'll do it, all right. He'll never let you go, because he's pulled too much of you inside of him now; and besides, you're too useful to him, and he needs you too much. But that's fine, that's fine, I like that idea; you'd never do anything to hurt Jerry, would you? No, I can see that. Of course not. It's all right it's all just fine."
"You are being a complete moral idiot," said the chess player.
"Look," Leo snapped at him, "if I wanted to stay in the Great Game, do you think I'd have gone this far? Do you know anybody else who could get that danm cuff off you? Then shut up and listen. It's the last time you'll ever have to hear me out."
"Have it your way," the chess player interrupted, with a calm and deadly look. "Jane Unger, listen to me. I can see that you're a very observant person. Stop watching me so very observantly. I don't like it, and I won't have it. It's boring and clumsy to threaten people, but I'm threatening you, so listen." He pulled his manicured hands from the chessboard and steepled his fingertips. "I can commit an act in three seconds that will make you a clinical schizophrenic for eighteen months. You'll hear voices in your head, you'll rave about conspiracies and plots and enemies, you'll paint yourself with your own shit, and that can all be done in three seconds with less than three hundred micrograms. Dead men actually do tell tales sometimes but madwomen tell nothing but pathetic lies, and no one believes what madwomen say, about anything, ever. Am I clear? Yes? Good." He moved a bishop.
Jane sat, weak-kneed, on one of the cowhide hassocks.
"Leo, what are you doing? What have you gotten into?"
"It wasn't for us. It was never for ourselves. It was for the future."
The woman spoke up again. "The delightful part about the Great Game-I mean, the genuinely clever and innovative part-is that we don't even know what we've done! It all takes place through electronic blinds, and cells, and fail-safes, and need-to-know, and digital anonymity and encryption. One cell, for instance, will think up five potential direct actions. Then another cell will choose just one candidate action from that list of five, and break the action up into independent pieces. And then, yet other cells will distribute that work into small independent actions, so fragmented as to be meaningless. It's just the way engravers used to design money. When money was on engraved paper and money still meant something."
"Right," said the second chess player, nodding. "So that one year, some theorist predicts how useful it would be to have Bengali cholera decimate some overcrowded hellhole of a city. And eight months later, someone watches some little paper sailboats melting in a reservoir."
Jane stared. "Why would anyone do that?"
"The best of reasons," Leo said. "Survival. Survival of humanity, and of millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work its way out of heavy weather into real sunlight an& blue skies again. We had a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blew them all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid and shortsighted, and we threw all our chances away. Not you personally, not me personally, not any of us personally, just our ancestors, of course. No one convenient to blame. But you, and me, and the people here, we are all the children of heavy weather, and we have to live under consequences, we have to deal with them. And the only real way to them is ugly, just unbearably ugly."