“Transcriber?”
“Waiting for us.”
“You send up the flare?”
Tapshaw hesitates.
Wang says, “Do we have to have this discussion every time?”
When Tapshaw is angry his black face grows even darker and now in the night all Wang can see of him are his eyes. “I think it’s better,” Wang hears the tension in the major’s voice, “if one of the men takes you across the lake.”
“I know you do, because we have this discussion every time.”
Tapshaw turns and calls over his shoulder to a soldier who appears as though he’s been waiting. “Send up the flare,” Tapshaw tells him quietly. He turns back to Wang as Wang watches the guerrilla disappear toward the far rampart. “You knew you were going to wind up sending up the flare,” says Wang, “so why do we have to go through this?”
“I suppose I feel the need to keep making the same point.”
Together in the dark they start walking to the listening station. “I think by now I’ve gotten the point.”
“We don’t know anything about this boy. And he’s … slow.”
“We know he knows the lake better than anyone,” Wang answers, “that’s what we know.” The two men mount the steps of the barricade, and Wang barely glances up at the sky above him for the full moon he knows is there.
blindfolded and swaddled in latex, enslaved and cuffed around His wrists and
~ ~ ~
He’s a man who never looks up. Over time, the acrophobia he developed in the last fifteen years has grown only more acute; as much as possible he lives on the latitude of his dreams. He breaks into a sweat just climbing the barricade, less than twenty feet high. This is something he hasn’t told anyone; he can barely bring himself to look at the sky above him when in fact, once, in one of his aimless lives before this, he lived closer to the sky than the ground, as close to the sky as one can live without being on a mountain or in an airplane. “I hope this time,” Wang says, “we’re going to be able to hear something over the shelling.”
“We have a recorder with the transcriber.”
“I know but last time it took the recorder half the night to clean up the disk.”
“This transcriber is better than the last one. Maybe she’ll be able to catch parts of the transmission if the recorder doesn’t.” They reach the rampart where both the recorder and transcriber, waiting with recording equipment and a laptop, come to attention. “As you were,” Tapshaw says; from the station can be seen the distant lights of Baghdadville in the west and the abandoned downtown skyscrapers lit by searchlights to the northeast. The sky above Wang that he can’t bring himself to look at is illuminated by the flare, a star momentarily brighter than the flaming white moon. The entire L.A. bay lights up. As the flare fades and the sky becomes black again, Wang says to the transcriber, “Are we ready?” and she answers, her fingers at her keyboard; the recorder pulls at some cables. “How quickly can you clean this up and get it back to us?” Wang asks.
“Thirty minutes maybe,” the recorder answers. “Turn it on
ankles, red rubber ball-gag in His mouth and awaiting His humiliation, and
now,” Wang says, “so we get it all from the beginning.” They wait. A wind off the lake triggers a memory in Wang and he realizes it reminds him of the gust in his dream, blowing across the Square — and now the whole dream, which he had forgotten, returns to him. He’s thinking of the black water spreading across the Square when suddenly it comes from somewhere out over the lake, out of the night.
~ ~ ~
The shelling actually stops, as though the bombs are listening too. An occasional plane from Occupied Albuquerque flies by overhead.
The broadcast isn’t that loud and doesn’t sound that far away, maybe no more than several miles. It’s over in a few minutes. For about ten seconds everything remains silent, then the shelling begins again. “You get it?” Wang says to the recorder and transcriber.
“As best I could,” the young woman transcribing says, apologetic, “I didn’t understand some of it….”
“It’s all right,” Wang says, “that’s what he’s for,” nodding at the recorder.
“I think I can get you a pretty clean copy,” says the recorder.
“Make an extra one,” Tapshaw tells them. “I want you both in Strategy as soon as you’re ready.”
He and Wang make their way back down the rampart. “Thirty minutes, Major?” Wang says, heading to his quarters; Tapshaw stops in his tracks. “Are we going to argue about the boy again?”
“Something else,” says Tapshaw.
“What?”
“We can talk about it in Strategy too.” Tapshaw has a funny look.
the second vision being of the Chinese man whose love letters to another
“All right. When they bring us the transmission.”
“I’m bringing in our geologist too.”
Our geologist? thinks Wang. “All right,” and he turns and heads back down the tunnel to his quarters. The same guard is at his door and the picture is still there, but Wang is relieved to note as he enters his quarters that the blank square of wall where he had the other picture taken down is still blank. He goes quickly to the desk to the computer and fills in the password, but there’s still no answer to his message; he takes off his coat and lies back down on the cot, determined not to fall asleep. He’s beginning to doze, however, when the computer wakes him. “Message,” the cybervoice calmly announces. Wang sits up and looks at the time on the computer and realizes he’s due in the strategy room; first he checks the message box.
To: FalseMartyr@4june89.net
From: MistressL@aquamail.com
zen-toy,
Come at 1.
your Mistress
Wang looks at his watch. It’s almost 10:30. He’ll need to leave by 11:30 to safely make it across the lake in time, assuming his boatman responds to the flare, and Wang can never be sure about that until he actually appears. He smiles ruefully: If that boy ever doesn’t show, I’ll never live it down with Tapshaw. Wang deletes from the computer mailbox both the new message and his own that he sent earlier, turns off the account and the computer, pulls on his
woman named Kristin I intercepted by chance five years ago, who I then saw
coat and walks from his quarters, guard snapping to attention as he leaves. This time he heads down the tunnel in the other direction, deeper underground.
Wang reaches yet another tunnel that leads to a door where two guards part for him to pass, one of them opening the door for him. Inside, seven men and the female transcriber rise from their seats around the table as he enters. He’s a little surprised; this is at least two more people than he expected. There are a couple of other officers besides Tapshaw plus an unfamiliar face that Wang assumes is the geologist, plus the cryptographer who always attends the post-broadcast sessions. Including the transcriber and the recorder, all of them sit around an egg-shaped table. Wang takes his seat and Tapshaw nods at the recorder who puts a disk on the sound system at the end of the room.
As the disk begins to play, Tapshaw hands another disk to Wang, who slips it in his coat pocket. The sound of the earlier broadcast is reproduced with new clarity; when it’s finished the nine sit around the table pondering. “Do you want to hear it again?” Tapshaw finally asks. “All right,” answers Wang, for no reason at all. The song begins again, very martial and anthemic Blood on the T. V., ten o ’clock news. /Souls are invaded, heart in a groove. / Beatin’ and beatin’ so outta time. / What’s the mad matter with the church chimes? “What’s the matter with the what?” one of the officers says; there’s the same perplexed silence as the song continues. “Church chimes,” the transcriber finally answers, although she seems less than certain.