Whisper of a Moment

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part V

I’m back at my hotel room at a speed that can’t be topped without rocket assist, and jacked in as fast as my fingers can make the connection. I’m on fire to start chasing down the opening I’ve been given, but my first act is to run a little autonomic subroutine to strip away the tension built up during my lunch with Ethan. I don’t use that one very often (I’m more hands-on by inclination), but if you need to relax and get your head clear, “–Δ3O” will do the trick in quick order. One cycle and I’m back on balance; another minute to let my breathing steady, then I set myself and dive into the data stream.

Ever since the first time I sat down to an optical interface, I’ve been stumped by the same problem: no matter how deep I dug, no matter how wide I cast or how many gigahertz/terabytes I allocated to the task, the search was hopeless. The best I could do was build a shadow-picture around the outline of what wasn’t there, because no amount of power or thoroughness or guile could unearth records that had ceased to exist long before the search began.

Tweaking the options on this mission so it would begin here, and now, was supposed to get me past that roadblock. Technically it had, only to leave me with a problem almost as formidable: finding the traces of something that was only just now in the formative stages. I didn’t have anything to catch hold of, I just had to keep questing in likely directions and hope to spot something that would provide a starting point.

All that has changed now.

Forget obstetricians, counseling services, free clinics, pharmacies, “family planning” centers (in case she checked out other possibilities before deciding to let me live). Forget all the reasonable avenues, even the ones that still apply have already come up dry. Shift the parameters, look for trauma centers and emergency rooms, hospices, oncology wards, diagnostic clinics, long-term care facilities. Sift through powers of attorney, living wills, organ donor registrations; backtrace through police and EMT reports, run a slider through the CDC, watch for any shift from medication A to medication B because A is contraindicated during pregnancy. Court records of cases fighting for or against termination of life support. Grass-roots volunteers gathering donations for poor Lula Sue who’s been plugged into the Vegematic ever since that tragic inadvertent combination of Midol and Everclear …

No good. No good. I keep being led back to the same place, the same person, and that one is a stark impossibility. Oh, everything matches on the surface: timing, contact reports, event histories, even blood type, it’s perfectly plausible. It simply can’t be. There are too many agencies and organizations involved — hell, even prophecies! — there’s just no way this could have happened the way it’s been laid out without someone knowing about it.

It’s a setup. I’m dealing with a layered defense here: delete everything that can be accessed, and then start laying down false trails to deflect an adept and determined searcher from the few facts that might remain. There may even be more below that: viruses, partitional traps, logic bombs … the organic/cybernetic synergy built into my system has been a priceless advantage up to now, but it makes me a lot more vulnerable than the run-of-the-mill hacker to code-level triplines.

Who would do this? Who would have the skill, the motivation, the foresight, the pure paranoia to do such a comprehensive, meticulous, triple-overkill job of concealment on such a mundane matter? My birth is important to me, but I can’t imagine why anyone else would care so much. With the resources at my disposal I should be able to punch past any shields, sniff out any hidey-holes, shuffle through and null off any amount of masking chaff. Someone, somehow, built up a structure capable of stonewalling technology that shouldn’t exist in this century. It’s an impressive achievement: impressive, and mystifying.

Many times I’ve speculated about the mind behind it all. As I told Wesley, this isn’t professional work; there’s artistry here, and even passion, but it doesn’t have the benchmarks of formal preparation. I’m looking at the results of a rare talent, combined with an imaginative, fanatical thoroughness. More than concealment, more than obfuscation; it’s as if the decision was made to obliterate every trace that I had ever come into existence, and all approaches dug out, seeded with mines, paved over, and misleading street signs put up on top of them. The utter totality of it makes me feel lucky that the author of it didn’t feel that wiping me out would make the task even more complete. But, no, steps were taken to shield and protect me … and all the while, the formation, the underlying configuration, makes it clear that my welfare was incidental, the central focus was to protect someone else.

I learned my father’s identity by gene matching, and finding it was a one in eight billion shot. My mother’s DNA profile wasn’t on record anywhere. Result of her being dead before such records became widespread? Another coup by the master eraser? Or just happenstance, a stroke of bad luck to balance the lucky breaks I’ve picked up over the past ten years?

Or, once again, the question I’ve turned over in my head thousands of times: could it be my mother herself who did all this?

I don’t think so. I don’t know why, there’s no reason, just a feeling. The possible explanation of “DNR” makes it seem even less likely; steps were taken to blur the backtrail after I was born and taken away, and it’s improbable that someone under terminal care would be able to carry out something like that.

No, I’m a guilty secret … and, since something that more than one person knows sooner or later turns into something that everyone knows, the fact that it stayed secret for so long means that probably it never got past the person who put on the lid.

In all likelihood, my father himself doesn’t know of my existence.

I pull back, disappointed and frustrated and angry. I thought I had it this time, I was sure I was finally going to learn … Squash that. Let it go, back away, find something else to hold my attention until I can deal with this. Focus on the mission, the reason I was able to come here in the first place.

Five seconds’ worth of local sweep provides plenty to distract me.

The Pig Posse shows up in numerous complaints, but none serious enough to prompt official action. Two signatures at a motel a couple of stars below mine match to DMV photos under the name of “Thorson”, and they’re the brunette/redhead pair I saw at FLN, on a trip for the family business. Two other names at higher-level establishments trip a pattern match, and a third name on the appointment list at a biotech outlet rounds it out: “Evelyse Haarwold”, “Shaley Woldevare”, and “Veresa Day Howell” are all anagrams of each other — or of something else — and I’ll bet solid cash this is the pale woman who tripped my alarms and then vanished.

Then there are the unrelated reports of just plain strangeness. A couple of citizens in a rough neighborhood get into an argument, exchange shots, and all their bullets collide with each other. Three women from three different cities are stranded together in a department store elevator, and in the passing-the-time chatter that follows they discover they’re all married to the same man. A cat coughs up a hairball containing an emerald ring; an eel wriggles out of the vent system of a teenager’s Miata; a mom-and-pop restaurant closes in the middle of the day and then calls the police to tell them that all of its salt shakers seem somehow to have gotten filled with high-grade Colombian flake.

Random chaos generator? Damn sure looks like it.

Everything else is routine. Vandalism, traffic accidents, truancy, the occasional missing person. Overall violent crime is down a hair, but that’s long-term and statistically null; auto theft, which had trended drastically up for several weeks, has dropped back to its pre-spike levels, and what little numbers racket there was has faded to nothing. Peace and contentment and mounting oddness settle over Oxnard …

My first alert kicks in, one of an escalating series of protective programs to keep the cyberlinked expansion of awareness and acceleration of thought from turning into an addiction. I could override it easily (I did, night before last), or even go in and rewrite the source code, I’ve exceeded specs in ways the techies would never have dreamed when they were designing their go-to girl. I don’t, though. This is a safeguard I welcome even while I resent it; as long as I can walk away whenever the prompt comes, I’m still in charge. Besides, staying jacked in too long puts a drain on my physical shell that I can’t afford as long as I still want to operate in the solid world.

I’m out, reality is flat and slow and drab, and I go through the standard routine to work the pins and needles from my extremities. It doesn’t help to have bitter disappointment augmenting the washed-out feeling that comes from transitioning out of total connection to every point of awareness; I shouldn’t have let myself get my hopes up, it’s never been easy and it never will be. Life is pain, and you get used to it fast because there’s always more where that came from.

Room service could provide me with a selection of liquors, and I give it serious consideration, but ultimately I don’t feel like waiting and I want to mix some cathartic action with self-anesthesia. I grab the little handbag and head for the door, maybe my mind will change before I find trouble and maybe not, I really don’t give a —

There’s someone there when I yank the door open, and control slides back over me like a coolsuit skin as I recognize the pale woman from FLN. She stands calmly in the hallway, seeming not at all startled by the explosiveness of my appearance. “Good afternoon,” she says. “I believe it’s time we talked.”

“Really?” I look her over, not bothering to make it a polite inspection. “Can’t say I remember meeting you. You selling something?”

“You’ve been quite active the last several days,” she says, ignoring the question exactly as I would. “Among other things, you’ve taken an interest in my own movements and identity. I wouldn’t mind knowing why.” She nods at the open door. “May I come in?”

Seen close, she’s even more pale than she appeared under club lights two nights ago, and there’s a bloodlessness to that pallor that I’ve never seen but have heard described. “ ‘May you’?” I repeat. “I’d say a better question is, can you?”

Nothing shows in her face. “Would you be reassured if I were standing in sunlight?” she asks without surprise or annoyance.

“Maybe,” I shoot back. “But you’re not, so I’m not.”

She steps forward, and I move back to give her room to cross the threshold. “That should settle your first concern,” she tells me. “You have yet to satisfy any of mine.”

“And I should apologize?” I give her the sneering grin that will rattle or enrage anyone with the least smidge of self-doubt. “You can walk in without being invited, but that doesn’t change the fact that you weren’t invited. Why should I tell you anything?”

“You want something,” she replies. “If I know what it is, we might be able to act to mutual advantage. At the least, we’ll learn whether our goals conflict.”

Her hands have been in view all the time we’ve been speaking: empty, and no weapons I can see, but I’ll be on her the instant she makes a move I don’t like. “You might have a point,” I admit. I gesture to the armchair. “Take a seat, and tell me about yourself.”

She sits with the same unhurried smoothness she demonstrated at FLN, and begins to speak. Her outfit today is a bit more modern but still carries that same impression of antique class; her eyes are hidden by silver-rimmed spectacles with mirrored blue lenses, and around her neck is a cord strung through an oval pendant of flat, featureless jade.

No, not featureless, the surface shifts and shimmers with the vibrations of her smallest motion, and as I watch, the changes settle into a pattern. Ripples, moving inward, ever inward to an endless center. I’m not really following the words, but her voice too has steadied into something soothing, almost musical, rising and falling in soft counterpoint to the captivating rhythm of that jade pulse. Together the two are felt at a level below direct consciousness, taking hold of the roots of awareness and enfolding them in a gentle, enthralling blanket of sensation.

She’s moving, but the pendant is fixed, somehow she’s placed it in front of me so I don’t have to turn to follow it. There’s a brief flare from a cigarette lighter, and a rich odor drifts to me from incense sticks; a sharp unimportant jab at my elbow, then she’s taping something to the inside of my arm. In another moment a whispery chime sounds, so high and faint that it might be insect dreams or imagination, and she’s speaking again.

She asks my name, and I tell her. She has me repeat that, then spell it, before moving on. She asks my age, and I tell her. (I give it in years, some absent smug part of me distantly amused at the thought of her reaction if she’d wanted to know my birth date.) She asks me who’s President, and what’s the name of the Disney mouse, and what address is this hotel, and I answer it all without resistance, wonder or anxiety.

She asks me who I work for, and finally a little corner of who I am takes alarm.

You see it all the time in action stories: hero fights mind dominance, pitting will power and core humanity against telepathy or conditioning or drugs. Take it from me, will power doesn’t figure into it, can you will yourself not to fall when you step off a tower? Some things are under our control, and I have more control than most, but the pale woman has laid out a mosaic of visual, auditory, olfactory and pharmaceutical captivation that’s sidestepped and subverted all normal choice.

On the other hand, waves too big to be resisted can still be ridden.

Here is where my cyberlink experience gives me an edge; I’m accustomed to multilevel processing, to lateral thinking and response, to going with the flow while still choosing my own course. I’ve been locked solid, I have to tell the truth whether I want to or not … but the truth has layers and angles, and enough of me is back now to choose my answers.

All of this slides through my mind in a fraction of the time it takes to express it, but even so she’s about to repeat the question before I settle on an answer. “I don’t have any bosses right now,” I tell her with floating serenity. “I’m on my own.” Truth.

“Why are you here, then?”

“Central location. Digital cable. Good rates.” Taking ‘here’ to mean the hotel.

She’s right back at me, not to be denied. “You came to this city, at this time, for a purpose. What is your purpose?”

I’m getting my tempo now, settling into the balance that will carry me. “I’m tracking a demon.”

She asks for particulars. I supply them. This takes some time, and it’s all safe area. At the end, she says, “Why is this demon important to you?”

It’s not would be a truthful reply, but would raise the question of why I was doing this if it didn’t matter to me. “He could cause trouble,” I say. “If so, I want advance warning.”

“Trouble for whom?”

“For anybody around him.” Truth. “He’s a potential problem, not an actual. If he crosses to actual status, someone will have to stop him.”

“Someone? Who? You?”

“Maybe.” That truth surprises me; why should I care? But I do, if the Skira’ad’s calamity index climbs too high I might feel that I have to take action. “Or I might pass the word to other people, let them do the actual work.”

Oops, careless, that opens up avenues that could lead to uncomfortable places. Instead of following it out, though, she switches track. “Why did you meet with Ethan Rayne?”

I manage to skate through several dozen questions about Ethan without exposing any sensitive aspects of myself or my mission. It’s ticklish work; she clearly doesn’t like the man, and is suspicious about every aspect of my dealings with him. Here, though, the truth is a protection, because my reasons for meeting Ethan were straightforward and don’t need to be hidden. The more personal sidelines somehow never come up, and pulling that off takes all the concentration she doesn’t know I can assemble.

The set of her mouth relaxes almost imperceptibly, and I’m ready to congratulate myself when she says, “What’s your interest in Xander Harris?”

Danger, danger, danger! This is a minefield, there are no safe areas, and the phrasing of the question rules out all the dodges I can think of. Or maybe it’s the guy himself, apparently I lose my bearings just as badly in discussing him as in dealing with him. I’ve got no ideas, and if I hesitate she may realize she’s onto something, it’s a matter of minimizing damage instead of avoiding it and, “He’s a freak,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean freak. Things happen around him, he does stuff that should be impossible. He’s a key player, even though he doesn’t seem to know it, and I wanted to see for myself.”

“Why?” She’s finding her own rhythm now, moving me along the avenues I open up. “Why did you want to see?”

“Because I can’t figure it out.” This isn’t just truth now, it’s real mystification and frustration speaking here. “I’ve heard the main theory on how he can keep pulling off the things he does, and it’s not enough. There has to be more.”

She mulls on that for a moment; I’m in deep now, no question. “What is the main theory?”

“Kleinfelter’s Syndrome.”

She has me say it again; when repetition brings no improvement, she says, “What does that mean?”

“It’s a chromosomal abnormality. A normal male has one X chromosome, from the mother, and one Y, from the father. Somehow, I didn’t really learn all the specifics, a Kleinfelter’s case is XXY instead of just XY.”

I still can’t see her eyes, but her forehead creases with a trace of frown. “I’ve heard of something like that. I think you must be wrong; men with that kind of genetic scramble have physical deficiencies, subnormal sexual function. There’s no evidence of that with Xander.”

A sly pleasure begins to work through me; it’s oddly refreshing to slap someone else with the contradictions I’ve had to handle. “Sure, it would work that way for most guys. But with Harris, the X that got twinned was special. You see women with these enhanced X, they’re usually hard chargers: physical, tough, aggressive, the best example I know is a Chicago homicide cop in the Eighties, she was so extreme a lot of her colleagues called her Dirty Harriet. Attach that double-X to a man, and the result is something like Harris.”

She thinks on that for a bit. “Are you sure he has this … enhanced double-X, as you put it?”

“I’ve seen his genetic profile. He’s got it.” And it’s still not enough to explain —

Uh-oh, losing focus, this is suddenly more like a conversation than an interrogation. She’s starting another question and I’m trying to gather my equilibrium for the next round, when there’s a knock at the door. She glances that way, back at me. “Are you expecting visitors?”

“No.” Truth, again, without any shading or swerves; a second caller would make two that I wasn’t watching for. “Housekeeping, maybe.”

“Perhaps.” She raises something — an oyster shell, polished to translucent fragility — and strokes the inner surface with a little whisk of feathery wire. I hear another of those insect chimes, and she says, “Wait here.”

Not much doubt of that, what small internal independence I called up doesn’t extend to muscle or volition. I sit, musing on my situation, happily abuzz, while she goes to the door.

She’s back a lot faster than she went; she’s already at the limit of pale, and her eyes are still hidden, but her mouth is stretched in something like terror, and panic shrieks from every line and motion. “No, no,” she moans, and I don’t for a second believe she’s talking to me. “Goddess, no!” She snatches up the pendant and the chiming shell and stuffs them into a knit bag, then yanks the IV needle from my arm — wow, that would hurt if I was here to feel it — and slaps a round bandage over the puncture at the crook of my elbow. She starts to chant then, too fast and frantic for me to follow even if I did speak bastard Romanian. Some little bubble pops inside my head, and she runs, runs into the bathroom and pulls the door shut.

So. That was interesting. I stand up, feeling the shakiness of my legs and the tenuous quality of my consciousness; the spell is gone, but it left a residue, along with whatever drug she used to help the process along. I consider going after her, but I’m in no shape for a confrontation, and there’s another knock at the door and that settles it. I drift that way, pull it open without thinking to check through the peephole.

Harris.

He opens his mouth to say something. I close it for him, and neither of us speaks for a minute or so. I can see now why every so often some woman loses all her sanity over him, the offbeat charisma he carries is subtle but deceptively compelling. I sink into it, lost and falling and not caring, a dreamy floating abandonment that’s almost a continuation of the pale woman’s bewitchery …

… and then my mind snaps back on, and I shove him away and hit him, hard. It’s an open-handed slap, but powered clear from the hips, and he absolutely staggers. Then I’m leaning back against the door frame, legs braced, scrubbing at my mouth with my forearm, and he recovers himself and looks to me with injured eyes, but his voice is light and dry and ironic. “Ah, yes. The pattern continues.”

I want to kill him, I want to run, I want to vomit. Ethan was right about me, I’m an outlaw even against my own will. I knew I was angry, and I was beginning to realize that I had problems, but this is just bent. “What are you doing here?” I manage to get out.

He rubs at his face, the side that’s turning the red of a gene-hyped tomato. “You mean besides getting attacked, right after I was … attacked?” He shakes his head. “I left messages but you didn’t call back, and I needed to talk to you.”

My stomach flips over at the words, but no, I’m projecting, he couldn’t mean it like that. I steady myself and say, with all the control I can bring to bear, “This is not the best time.”

“Yeah, I kinda twigged to that.” He’s serious now, not using that consummate humor either for defense or advantage. “But I’ve got a feeling this may be one of those cases where the time kinda chooses you, y’know?”

I lift my head in a movement that really isn’t anything, just registering that I heard (God, I can still taste him!), then I turn back into the room. I leave the door open, and after a couple of seconds he steps in behind me. “Are you okay?”

“Rough afternoon.” I’m at the bathroom; when I push that door open, the room is empty. Pretty much what I expected, even though I can’t see any way the pale woman could have gotten out. “Really rough afternoon.”

“Can I help?”

I look to him. “Can you drive?”

After our little misadventure with the Pig Posse I dumped the motorcycle (they’d be watching for it now) and got another vehicle: something called a Hyundai, with a white polyfabric top that folds back into the rear when you work the right combination of switches and catches. Harris perches nervously behind the wheel, eyeing any nearby traffic with what seems to be genuine apprehension, but his driving is surprisingly competent. The bright sun and crisp moving breeze help finish brushing the fuzz out of my brain, and after I soak it up for a couple of blocks I say, “So. What was it you wanted from me?”

“Ah, right. Well, you know that deal where you touch things and do the old ‘eenie, meanie, cheery beany’?” I stare at him, completely blank, and he amends, “I mean, where you pull up a psychic impression? ’Cause I was hoping you could do that for me.”

It wouldn’t take a psychic to read the danger steaming off me right now. “I’m nobody’s party entertainment.”

“I know. And I’m not hitting you up for the laugh value, that’s usually my department.” Quick grin, gone as he continues. “Look, there are some funny things going on right now, and I don’t mean Jackie Chan funny or even Carrot-Top funny, I mean off the wall of the variety that turns into squirmy bad nastiness. I’m getting a creepy feeling about all this, but I don’t know if I really need to call in the cavalry or just turn down the thermostat on my imagination. I thought maybe you could help me with that.”

I wasn’t expecting anything like this, even though on the whole it matches his record. “You in the habit of dashing to the rescue?”

“I’m more one to pass the ammo and bar the back doors while the natural-born warrior types do the heavy lifting.” No restraint in the grin this time. “Safer for everybody that way.”

I’m not in the mood to let him skim on anything. “And what if you can’t farm out the rough stuff to someone else?”

“Then I think of the bravest person I know and ask myself, what would She do?” There’s no trace of shame or embarrassment about him as he goes on, “Better if it doesn’t come to that, though. Either way, I’ve got to know. If this is a shootin’ match of the major calibers, I need to be on the phone to Sunnydale as fast as I can. If not, they’ve probably got enough crisises … crisee … enough emergencies of their own already.”

There are a dozen different ways I could beg out of this, not even counting a flat refusal. Every time he and I cross paths it’s a disaster, and I swore I’d do whatever I could to stay clear of him. But I’m starting to recognize that there’s no point. Ever since the first time I saw him on that stage, our lives have kept intersecting despite all my resolve; if the Skira’ad is a chaos generator, Harris is some weird engine of destiny, and right now my destiny isn’t about to turn me loose. Once again it’s ride the wave or go under.

Was any of this in the atypical lifeline Ethan said he saw? If we meet again I’ll have to ask him, assuming I don’t throttle him first.

“I’m thirsty,” I tell Harris. What the hell, head-on into the whirlwind. “Find a place where I can get a keg of beer and a straw, and I’ll hear you out.”
 

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