Starfire (13 page)

Mrs. O'Keefe was leaving. On the way out she stared again into the long dining hall, where my darlings were now squabbling as they compared their purchases from Londonderry.

"Look at them," she said as she headed for the front door. "Like a bunch of magpies they are, chattering and chuntering away. You never complain, but running an orphanage like this has to be harder than anyone knows. I'll say it again, Mr. Baxter. You're a saint."

A saint. Indeed.

Given the suspect hagiography of Ireland, which includes such stalwarts as Saint Terence the Wastrel and Saint Brendan the Fornicator, her statement was not as improbable as it sounded.

Before I went through to coerce the girls to evening studies, I sat for a moment reviewing my efforts of the day. What had I learned, in my attempt to summon up remembrance of things past?

One thing, but an important one. The Sky City murderer and I had no commonality of motive or feeling. The deaths of my darlings had been clean and painless, leaving them as beautiful in death as in life. The notion of stabbing, bludgeoning, and sexual mutilation sickened me.

But that left a mystery. If serial killings represent consequence rather than cause, what driving need was compelling the murderer on Sky City?

It was not, I felt sure, passion as I knew it. Was it, indeed, passion of any kind? And yet there had been mutilation—evidence, surely, of a killing frenzy.

I thought once more of the dates of death, from number one, Myra Skelton, to number twelve, Kate Ulrey.

Almost three weeks had passed since Kate had died, her brains bashed out on a well-traveled and well-lit corridor close to the central axis of Sky City. Another murder was overdue. Would it happen?

If it did not, that would be a clue. A clue as to what, I could not say. But murder, especially murder of this type, keeps its own schedule and imposes on the killer its own imperatives.

8

Celine had been half right. Nick Lopez's staff on the World Protection Federation did not know where he was, but they could certainly exchange messages. Celine's request for an "urgent and highly sensitive" meeting had been forwarded to Nick as soon as it came in. Normally he would have answered at once, but for the moment something more urgent was on his mind.

What was happening to the aircraft?

He was on his way from Washington to a private meeting with Gordy Rolfe, and all their previous sessions had taken place either at the World Protection Federation offices in New Rio or at The Flaunt, the corporate headquarters of the Argos Group. The steel-and-glass splinter of The Flaunt towered four thousand feet above the Palladian architecture of Houston, and Gordy's summit suite overlooked the rebuilt city. Nick had assumed that they would use the same rendezvous site today. That would give him a comfortable and productive flight of at least an hour and a half, during which he could attend to other business. But his craft was beginning its descent less than twenty minutes after takeoff.

He glanced at the telltales and saw that all mechanical and electronic conditions were normal. The weather was clear and fine. Still the vehicle went on descending. He checked the Automatic Vehicle Control. The AVC's destination coordinates had been provided from Gordy Rolfe's office, and Nick had never thought to question them. But instead of the glitter of The Flaunt ahead there was only a peaceful landscape of rural Virginia.

The craft went into a gentle bank, and as it leveled off Nick caught sight of a runway. The black strip was short, and it was narrow, but from the way that the vehicle was behaving, a full electronic landing system was in operation.

Nick could see no sign of any other aircraft. He waited through the gentle touchdown and taxi to the end of the runway. Then he slid open the hatch and allowed the glide stair to carry him from plane to ground.

He found himself standing in a shallow valley, with low grassy hills to the east and more substantial wooded mountains to the west. A solitary building hugged the ground two hundred yards past the end of the runway. Beside it rose strange shapes, red and green and yellow, oddly angular and complex in the late afternoon light. He began to walk toward them.

At the moment when he recognized both the building and its neighboring structures—it was an old school-house, its playground still filled with brightly painted seesaws and monkey bars—a figure emerged from the schoolhouse door.

Gordy Rolfe was easy to identify. He was diminutive, with a head too big for the slender body. A great sculptured upsweep of snow-white hair exaggerated the disproportion. It was styled for effect, as were the big steel-rimmed glasses. A black jumpsuit, Rolfe's standard attire, emphasized rather than disguised the crooked back and uneven shoulders.

Rolfe did not walk toward Nick. He waited, leaning against the schoolhouse wall. When the two were within earshot, he said, "Don't judge this place by appearances, Senator. I learned to read and write in there."

"I guessed as much." Lopez peered in through one of the windows. "Been a while since the school was used, though."

"You knew where we were going to meet?"

"Not until we landed. I thought I was headed for Houston. But I've seen pictures of this place before. I was Senate Majority Leader in Washington when the headquarters of the Legion of Argos was raided and the Eye of God was taken prisoner. The old headquarters is directly beneath us, isn't it? We had pictures of the whole attack plastered all over the place."

"So did we." Rolfe grimaced, increasing his likeness to a sinister elf. "Of course, the Legion members had a rather different view of events."

Nick Lopez nodded. He was round-faced and brown-complexioned, and the hair above his broad brow was set in a high, old-fashioned pompadour. Despite Rolfe's extravagant coiffure, Lopez towered a foot and a half above the other man. "Did you know her well?"

"Pearl Lazenby—the Eye of God?" The gray eyes behind their big lenses glittered, and Gordy laughed harshly. "Fucking right I knew her. From the time I was six until I was seventeen she was more important than my own parents. Of course, for a lot of that time she was serving a sentence in judicial sleep. But there was morning-noon-and-night talk of her, and I was
raised
with her rules."

Raised by the members of the Legion of Argos, Nick thought, with their rigid attitudes. Lots of prayer, lots of dogma, lots of discipline and harsh punishment. But no medical treatment to make Gordy Rolfe of normal height, even though that had been a standard procedure long before the supernova. No simple corrective changes to his vision, to make those anachronistic eyeglasses unnecessary. No protocol to adjust the spinal curvature that threw the right shoulder a little lower than the left. It was no wonder that the head of the Argos Group now had his own rigidity and strangeness.

Nick said only, "I'm surprised that you can stand to come back here, with all those memories."

"
Stand to
come here?" Gordy Rolfe twisted his head to look sideways up at Nick, even though Lopez had stooped slightly to see in through the classroom window. "Senator, you're so-o wrong." He moved into the schoolroom, gesturing to Lopez to follow. "When the Eye of God was recaptured and taken away to be put back into judicial sleep, my mother and father and the other Legion members wailed and moaned and acted like it was the end of the world. Me, I did the same—in public. But in private I danced. Pearl Lazenby scared me shitless. When I heard that she had died after three more months in judicial sleep it was the happiest day of my life."

"Were you still here then, with the Legion?"

"Yeah. But it was already starting to fall apart. See, the Eye had prophesied that she'd wake up at a time of great disaster and lead the Legion members to take over the whole world. The supernova happened, and they hauled her out of judicial sleep. The prophecy was validated. Everyone said, this is it. They were primed and ready to go. Pearl assured them that the great victory of the Legion of Argos was only days away. Then the boys from Washington came in here and grabbed her, and suddenly the holy cleansing was over before it started."

"Not just the boys. Did you know that Tanaka led them here?"

Gordy Rolfe stood in front of a bank of three old elevators, ready to enter the middle one. He swung around sharply at Lopez's question. "President Tanaka? I thought she was off on the Mars expedition when the gamma pulse hit. That's what her bio said when she ran for President."

"She was. She got back just in time to help Special Forces capture Pearl Lazenby."

"Then I owe her one. Hell, if I'd known that, I might have voted for her. Anyway, when Pearl was taken away, nobody in the Legion could believe it. Her prophesy had been wrong, see, and when she prophesied as the Eye of God she was supposed to be infallible. Some of the old-timers tried to weasel round that, but the newer members weren't buying. People started leaving."

"Not you, though." Lopez followed Rolfe into the elevator.

"No." Gordy Rolfe pressed the bottom button, which bore an icon like a flaming torch, and they began to descend. "Once
she
was out of the way, why leave? There were opportunities for a genius at headquarters."

"A genius like you?"

"Who else? I knew I had talent. And I didn't know a damn thing about the world outside. I stayed behind, looked at what the Legion was ready to walk away from, and started work. That was the beginning of the Argos Group. Houston is the official headquarters, but I prefer this. I come here more and more often."

The elevator was descending, slowly and noisily. Nick wondered what would happen if it broke and they became stuck a thousand feet underground. He decided that anyone able to design and build robots as complex and capable as the rolfes would certainly have allowed for elevator maintenance. Gordy was just doing what Nick had so often done, choosing a meeting place where he had the psychological advantage. Probably there were other surprises ahead.

But not, perhaps, at once. The elevator creaked to a stop and the door opened on a long chamber painted in gunmetal gray. Every few feet along the walls, Nick saw a lurid and unvarying design: the scarlet talons of a bird enclosing a green globe.

He stopped by one of the painted symbols. "The original symbol of the Eye of God."

"Yeah. I didn't change the paintings down here; they're all over most of the walls. Don't you think it makes a nice official emblem for the Argos Group?"

Rolfe's voice burned with a nervous energy that Nick Lopez encountered only in his meetings with Gordy. Even with the aid of telomod therapy, how long could a man operate at that level of intensity? Rolfe was forty-three years old and he looked over sixty.

Nick made his own reply deliberately casual. "It all seems pretty run-down. I assume we'll have a shielded environment where we can talk?"

"Right here. We can start anytime. I doubt there's another human within five miles, and we'll be under a thousand feet of rock and earth. That's good against most taps—unless one of us is recording."

Which, as it happens, I'm not. But we would both deny it if we were.
Nick ignored the patronizing tone and the implied question and ducked his head to follow Gordy Rolfe up a tight spiral staircase of gray metal designed for someone a foot shorter than Nick Lopez. At the top Rolfe paused to operate a circular hatch, locked from below. Nick wondered about that. Wouldn't a private hideaway be more logically locked from the other side? He had seen nothing to stop anyone from wandering into the old schoolroom and taking the elevator down.

Nick followed Gordy through the hatch, straightened, and glanced around him. "I don't remember talk of anything like this when the Legion of Argos was in the media. Is it new?"

"Depends what you mean by 'new.' " Gordy Rolfe closed the hatch. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched Nick's examination of their surroundings. For a change, he seemed genuinely pleased. "None of this was here in Pearl Lazenby's time. I've been developing it for twenty years."

The spiral staircase and entry hatch led to the center of an enormous room that was at first glance a conventional combination of living space, engineering laboratory, and office. A compact kitchen, complete with generous storage cabinets, sat behind a waist-high partition on the left. On the other side of the partition was a bedroom and a small closed-off area that Nick assumed must be a bathroom. The office was well equipped with desks, chairs, files, communications equipment, and three-dimensional display volumes. Next to it sat the work area, its long lab bench covered with tools and a mass of electronic test equipment. Half a dozen rolfes in various stages of disassembly stood along the wall.

That wall was the most unusual feature of the room. It formed one continuous circular barrier about twenty meters across, rising vertically to a white ceiling far above their heads. A single bulbous door, set in the wall close to ground level, provided an entrance big enough for a man to walk through. The door, like the wall, was transparent. Beyond lay a jungle of dense vegetation, stretching away for an indeterminate distance.

Nick Lopez craned his head back, seeking the source of light. It came from the ceiling, not as a discrete source but as a continuous glow.

"Matches the solar spectrum," Gordy Rolfe said, "and it follows the surface diurnal rhythm. It's late afternoon there, so it's late afternoon here. If we want light later we'll have to turn on separate units in my office. I don't often do that, because I want the habitat to mimic natural conditions."

"You mean out there, where the plants are?" Nick had walked forward to take a closer look at the wall and door. Beyond the barrier the plants grew dense and to shoulder height. The vegetation had an odd blue tinge to it. Nick rubbed the smooth wall, then rapped on it with his fist.

"Not just plants. Animals too." Gordy Rolfe came to his side. "Go ahead, hit as hard as you like. You won't make a dent in it. It's hardened plastic, half an inch thick and stronger than steel. It runs all the way to the ceiling. The door has mechanical as well as electronic locks, and it can only be opened from this side."