Springboard

11

Daytime in the Garden of Perpetual Bliss was usually sunny and seventy-two degrees. It would rain now and again, sometimes a mild drizzle, sometimes a windy storm — but never too windy — and always warm enough to sit in without getting cold. Enough rain fell to keep the lush foliage nourished and vibrant, all the myriad shades of green, all the colorful flowers. Bees buzzed, but never stung. Butterflies danced and flitted by.

Here, a group of Hindus wearing orange robes sat in full lotus, meditating, connecting with the essence of Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva. Next to them, in the shade of a giant baobab tree, a dozen Buddhists kneeled in seiza, counting their breaths and seeking no-mind.

A short way down the path, Christians and Jews and the followers of Mohammed sat in a large circle, exchanging prayers and smiles.

In the Garden, too, were those who thought every rock had a soul, that all wisdom came from their ancestors, that the Sun was the ruler of all it touched. And there were others who had no gods at all, but only their common humanity.

In the Garden, there was no dissent, no jealousy, no hatred. All who came here became one of the family of men, and no man’s hand was ever raised against another in anger. People dressed as they wished, or went nude.

Sometimes music drifted over the Garden, and such was its nature that the sounds each person heard on those occasions were suited to their personal tastes: Here, it was a raga, there a fugue, and past that, delta blues. People sang or danced or sat quietly and listened, and no one resented another’s manner of expression.

Fruit grew on the trees — apples, bananas, pears, coconuts, plums, oranges, every kind a hungry soul might desire was there somewhere. Vegetables, too, and nuts, and all manner of beasts — fish and fowl, even red meat — were available, if that was one’s wont.

One could come to the Garden to do, or just to be. It was all the same, and it was all wonderful.

When the dragon came, red-scaled and breathing fire, swooping down from the clear sky, most in the Garden thought it was some new entertainment.

Until it started cooking and eating people.

The Garden of Perpetual Bliss heard its first screams of terror that day. Smelled the stink of roasted human flesh. Beheld fear in a way that had never happened here before.

The dragon landed and stalked, crushing all before him, pausing to bite off a head here, a leg there, hissing with a sound that stirred neck hairs in atavistic panic. The people had no way to stop it, they had no weapons, and the dragon moved through them unmolested.

Some ran. Some stood their ground and waited for their end.

And in a short time, those who did not flee were consumed…

“Merde!” Seurat said, shaking his head. He removed the headset and sighed, staring at his portable computer. He was in no danger here in his Washington hotel room. As those in the Garden of Bliss VR scenario had not been in any real physical danger, either. But the assault on their psyches must have been a terrible jolt.

Seurat’s anger surged, a hot flush that made him want to scream and hit somebody. CyberNation had created a paradise in that garden, a place where those who wished such a thing could go and bask in an ideal that had never happened in the real world. All men as brothers.

And someone had ruined it. Attacked and destroyed the carefully built scenario, terrifying those tuned to it. Yet another of the hacks that added cracks to the CyberNation’s foundation. Small ones, so far, but left unchecked they could grow and threaten the entire organization.

Seurat could not — he would not allow such a thing to happen. Not on his watch.

The damage to the program had been repaired, of course, quickly and easily. But the damage to the memories of those who had been in it when the incident had taken place? Not so simply fixed. According to his techs, there had been fifteen thousand people worldwide in that scenario when it was attacked. And while that number was but a drop in the bucket compared to the total membership of CyberNation, some of those people would leave and not come back. Like a small stone tossed into a pond, the stories would spread.

CyberNation? Yeah, I used to be a member, but I quit. They don’t have their act together — you wouldn’t believe what happened in one of their shared-scenarios…

Worse, what if the attackers chose one of the giant-scale scenarios next time? The Super Bowl ’cast, or the Pope’s Christmas message? The latest Hollywood blockbuster on demand?

True, those had gotten increased security since the attacks had begun, but since they still did not have a handle on the hacker, who was to say that he couldn’t worm or trojan his way into one of those?

If ten or fifteen million people got a dose of nastiness like that which had happened in the Garden of Perpetual Bliss? That would be… bad.

Very bad, indeed.

Seurat glanced at his watch. Almost time to leave for the meeting with Thorn, at Net Force.

CyberNation’s past with Net Force had been less than happy, and Seurat could not expect them to welcome him with open arms; still, if they could help, he would welcome it. If he had to lie with the Devil to save his child, then that was what he would do. Whatever it took.

None of Locke’s sources at CyberNation in France knew exactly why its leader had traveled to the U.S. Parked in his rented cab near the hotel’s Virginia Avenue entrance — that had been a bit of a trick, but at least this way he would blend in — Locke waited and watched. Even with the occupied sign lit, he’d had to turn away people who wanted a ride. Blind fools.

Such a location — a busy hotel with several entrances and exits — was a surveillance problem for an operative alone. You couldn’t cover all the ways in and out, and if you picked the wrong one, you would lose your subject.

Not that it was of major concern. Seurat was not much of a threat. And whatever his reasons were for being here, they could hardly affect what Shing was doing to CyberNation, if indeed that was why Seurat had come. Still, Locke prided himself on being thorough, and if you went somewhere to shadow a subject, it was better to stay with him than not.

Fortunately, Locke was experienced enough in these matters to have dealt with such problems more than once. This was one of the easier ones: Seurat wasn’t aware he was being followed, nor did he have reason to suspect that he was. He had rented a car at the airport, and that vehicle was now parked in the hotel’s lot. Under the rear end of Seurat’s car — a high-end Porsche — was quick-glued a powerful, on-demand radio transmitter the size of a match-book. Untriggered, the bug did nothing — anybody looking for it using broadband field-strength meters would not find anything. Even a casual visual inspection would miss it, since it was colored to match a car’s undercarriage and tended to blend in. But if Locke sent a coded signal to it, the device would begin narrowcasting a GPS signal that would pinpoint its location — if you had the proper receiver.

The device was live now, and it told Locke that the car was in the hotel’s parking garage.

It was not foolproof, of course. Seurat could leave by a side or back door on foot, catch a taxi, or be picked up by a limo, and Locke would not know. Still, Seurat liked to drive, and he had not rented a Porsche to let it sit in a parking lot while he took a cab.

It probably wasn’t important to any of Locke’s plans what the French computer guru did while here, but it was better to know than not.

As it happened, Seurat must have left the building via another exit, for the coded sig from the Porsche began emitting a higher-pitched tone, sending an alert that indicated a change in position.

Locke started his car’s engine, and lit the tracker. A map of the city appeared on the screen, and a tiny red light showing the position of Seurat’s car blinked on and began to pulse.

Wu might not like technology, but Locke was certainly happy with this little toy. As long as he stayed within fifteen miles of the transmitter, and as long as the battery held out — at least six hours of continuous ’casting — the map would show Locke exactly where the Porsche went, and give him the best route to get to it.

When John Howard called to confirm lunch, Abe Kent suggested they go where a lot of military business had been conducted over the years: a local bar — or, in this case, a brew pub.

Both were dressed in civilian clothes, with one of the pub’s own beers, made right there on the premises, in frosty mugs on the table in front of them. Kent and Howard were just two old friends relaxing at the pub. They were trying the new house beer, Heavy Lifting, a dark ale fizzed with nitrogen instead of carbon dioxide — the bubbles fell rather than rose. It was mildly bitter, with a chocolaty, smooth finish. Good stuff.

“How’s work going?” John asked.

“Slow,” Colonel Kent replied, taking a sip of his beer. “There’s really nothing for me to do but training at the moment.”

“Something will come up.”

Kent nodded. “I expect so. How about you?”

“It’s a lot different. Money is better, and Nadine is a lot happier, though there are times when I want to smack some of the people I’m trying to educate. You wouldn’t think a man who was head of a major corporation could get there by being stupid, but apparently that’s not the case.”

Kent laughed. “The old joke about the chain of command only being as bright as the dumbest link.”

Howard nodded. “So, how does it feel to be back in harness with the Corps?”

“Honestly? Better than I would have thought. I never really felt as if I had left the Corps as much as it had moved away from where I was standing.”

Howard took a drink of his ale and nodded. “Yeah, politics. You have to play if you want to stay. I guess it’s always been that way. I’ve heard stories worse than yours.”

“Me, too.”

“You think Rog will cover your back?”

“Maybe. But if they boot me out, it won’t be so bad. You can only lose your virginity once.”

Howard chuckled. “You ought to come by the house now and then, Abe. Nadine would love to cook a meal for you. And she’s got a lot of single women friends who wouldn’t mind an old boot like you. Come on a Sunday, you can go to church with us, have roast beef for lunch, hang out.”

Abe looked at his friend. “I might just do that.” He paused a moment. “Can’t say I am much of a churchgoer, though.”

Howard looked at his beer, then at Kent. “Not proselytizing here, Abe, but didn’t you ever feel the need for prayer out there when the bullets were whistling past and calling your name?”

Kent smiled. “Every time. Prayer and pucker-factor go together better than peanut butter and jelly. You know what they say, John: There are no atheists in foxholes.”

“So you are a believer.”

Kent nodded. “Oh, yes. I believe in God. And I’ve got no arguments with Jesus being the Son and prophet. I don’t even have problems with Allah or Mohammed or Harry Rama, if it comes to that. Everybody has to be someplace. Not my job to tell ’em where.”

“I hear a ‘but’ there.”

Kent looked at his old friend, debating whether or not to tell him the story. It didn’t come up too often these days, but it wasn’t as if it was a big secret — he had told a few people along the way. And here they were, drinking good beer, shooting the bull. Why not?

He paused for another sip, then said, “Well. It goes back a long way. My maternal grandmother used to live down in Lafayette, Louisiana. Every other summer when my brother and I were kids — he was eight years older than I — my folks would ship us to Grandma’s for a few weeks to visit. After my brother turned into a teenager, he stopped going, but I still went. And he did wind up going to college down that way later.”

He sipped again, then pushed his glass a little ways away from him. “The summer I was ten, I stayed with Grandma. She lived on the bank of a bayou. I think it was the Vermilion River. Water came almost up to her back fence when it rained hard. She had a little dog, a Pomeranian named Dolly, and a parakeet named Pancho. I used to take my BB gun down to the banks of the muddy bayou and shoot at snakes and snapping turtles. For a while, my great-grandfather lived there. He was ninety-something, and he used to sit on the bank with me, fishing with a cane pole. We caught catfish, bream, even a gar, now and then. Had to throw them back. Grandma wouldn’t scale and cook them and she wouldn’t let me and Great-Grampa in her kitchen to try.”

Kent grinned, remembering those days. Great-Grampa Johnson smoked a pack of unfiltered Camels a day, and took nips from a bottle of Old Crow he kept hidden under the bathroom sink. He was a small man, compact, and had served in France in the Great War.

The cigarettes and liquor never did kill him — he died from pneumonia he picked up in the hospital after he fell and broke his hip, at age ninety-three.

Kent pulled his memories back to the present. “Grandma was a bridge player and a churchgoer. Grampa worked on the oil rigs out in the Gulf, he was an engineer, and mostly gone. They were Methodists, which is about as benign a Christian group as ever there was. The main difference between them and the Baptists, my grandfather used to say, was that the Methodists sprinkled, but the Baptists had to dunk, since their congregations needed more water to keep cool during the hellfire and brimstone preaching.”

Howard smiled.

“I went to Sunday school at home, and when I visited Grandma Ruth, I also stayed for the church service with her.”

Kent paused again, spinning his glass slowly on the table. “This was back in the early sixties, around ’61 or ’62. The civil rights movement was going on, and it was… turbulent… down South.”

Howard nodded. “My folks told me the stories of uncles who went down to Mississippi and Alabama to march. Terrible times.”

Kent said, “I was a kid, I didn’t have much of a clue about what all that meant. The schools were segregated, the bus stations had separate waiting areas for whites and ‘coloreds.’ I remember seeing bathrooms at a gas station on one of my visits once that had three doors on the side: Men, Women, and Colored. The churches were also segregated. Grandma’s church, Magnolia Methodist, was only a few blocks away from her house, in an upscale, all-white neighborhood. Grandma was well off — she drove a powder-blue Cadillac and had a mink stole.” Kent frowned and took another sip. “There had been some talk about demonstrations. Supposedly, some of the local black folks — called either ‘coloreds’ or ‘nigrahs,’ if you were polite. If you weren’t polite…”

Howard’s jaw muscles flexed. “I believe I know the impolite term.”

Kent nodded. “So, apparently, the story was, these agitators were planning on integrating some of the local churches on an upcoming Sunday. Nobody seemed to know exactly when, only that it would be soon.” He shrugged and went on. “I was probably a typical kid when it came to religion. I believed what my folks told me, I earned my own Bible by reading and memorizing chapter and verse. I wasn’t devout, but I liked the stories, and I felt comfortable knowing that the blue-eyed-blond-haired Jesus was up there watching over me.”

Howard shook his head but didn’t interrupt.

“So on this particular Sunday, the minister stood in front of the congregation and said, ‘You all have heard about the possibility that we might have a visit from our Negro brothers and sisters in the next week or two. I think it would be appropriate for us to discuss how we might deal with such a situation.’ ”

Abe paused again, his eyes staring over Howard’s shoulder, but he wasn’t seeing the sparse pub crowd. He was seeing that day long ago. “Now I was just a kid, John, but I knew what Christ’s message had been. Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, and all that, and I expected that the congregation would hold to those principles. That they would, even if they were a little uncomfortable, welcome anybody who came in — even if they had to sit in the back — to worship in God’s house. I was young and unlearned in the ways of the world.”

“Let me guess,” Howard said. “It didn’t go down like that?”

“Fifty-odd years ago, and I still remember it vividly.”

The minister, a thirty-something balding man in a dark suit, standing up front, listening to his congregation.

“No way!” a tall, white-hair man in a blue suit had said. “If they want to worship, they have their own little church down the road!”

“I say we lock the door,” said a red-faced fat man. “We got enough men here to take care of anybody who tries to force their way in!”

“God doesn’t want the races to mix,” said a gray-haired woman in a black dress, wearing a little hat with a black veil.

Abe drew in a deep, ragged breath. “It went on like this for what seemed like a long time. Violent action was the predominant voice. If the coloreds came, they’d, by God, be sorry. Even at that age, I knew that this was where the minister was supposed to step up and deliver the lesson. What Christ would do in these circumstances. How a Christian should behave. He was supposed to be the sheriff with only a double-barreled shotgun standing against a lynch mob, do or die. But he didn’t. He just stood there, pale, listening, and let the congregation work itself up.”

Kent paused again, then gave a little half smile. “As it turned out, our little church wasn’t on the list. Nobody ever showed up, so it was all moot. But that’s when I stopped going to church. When my grandmother and my parents tried to make me, I refused. I was punished for it — they grounded me, my father took his belt to me, but I wouldn’t go. I didn’t know jack about integration, but I knew what was right, and this wasn’t. I didn’t want to belong to that group.”

Howard shook his head sadly. “That’s a terrible thing for a child to see and hear. But you know, there’s a difference between the message and the messenger. Sometimes the man carrying the Word misinterprets it. That doesn’t mean the Word itself is wrong.”

Kent nodded, frowning. “I know that, John. But look around. There are a lot of bad messengers. More people have been killed in holy wars, in God’s name, than for ambition or territory. Christianity against Islam; Islam against Hindu; even Catholics against Protestants. Yes, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, but he didn’t start a war with the Romans. He never killed anybody.”

He paused and sipped at his beer again. “It’s just that I don’t need somebody explaining things to me that I can read for myself, and I sure don’t need somebody getting it wrong. I think the churches have screwed up what was a fairly simple message. ‘Churchianity’ is a different thing, it has a life of its own. God isn’t about buildings and Sunday-go-to-meeting Christians.”

Howard started to speak, but Kent cut him off. “I expect you are about to say that it isn’t that way at your church. I believe you. But at my age, my connection to God is personal. I believe He hears my prayers just as well on the battlefield as he does in church, and I’m too old to put up with the other bullshit.”

Now it was Howard who paused and sipped at his beer, an uncomfortable look on his face. “Abe,” he said after a moment, “I appreciate you telling me that. I have the feeling it wasn’t easy for you, and that it’s a story few have heard.”

Kent nodded.

Howard tipped his glass at his friend in a small salute. “Which makes it my turn, I guess. I’m only ever going to say this to you once. What you do with it is up to you. The thing is, Abe, I’m very comfortable in my own faith, and I’m comfortable sharing that faith, but I’m not comfortable preaching it, if you know what I mean.”

Abe smiled and nodded but didn’t say anything.

“You say that you believe, my friend, and it makes me happy to hear that. But belief alone is not enough.”

Kent frowned at that. “But the Bible says—”

“I know,” Howard said. “John 3:16, ‘… whosoever believeth in him shall have eternal life.’ ” He grinned. “I’ve always been partial to King James.”

Kent didn’t smile in return. “It also says that ‘not through acts shall a man enter the kingdom of heaven, but through faith alone,’ or words to that effect.”

Howard nodded again. “Yes, but the question is, what do those words, ‘believe’ and ‘faith,’ mean? You see, if that’s all it is, a belief alone, then it’s sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card, isn’t it? And that’s the way, I’m sorry to say, that a lot of Christians view it: ‘I believe in Jesus, I’m going to Heaven, so it doesn’t matter what I do here on earth,’ and that’s both true and false. You’re right that our acts here don’t earn us any points with God. On the other hand, if we do truly believe in him, if we truly believe in his Son and his Word, then we are compelled to do certain things, to live our life a certain way. We are compelled to acts of mercy and kindness. We are compelled to charity and to a Christian love for our fellow man, to ‘love one another as ourselves.’ And we are compelled to join others in worship, for as the Bible also says, ‘Whenever two or more gather in my name, I am with them.’ ”

Howard paused for a sip, draining his beer. “I won’t preach at you, my friend, and I won’t pressure you to come to church. But I will ask you to think about it. And while you’re thinking about it, you can still eat lunch with us, can’t you?”

Abe smiled and drained his own glass. “Oh, yeah, John. No problem there. As long as Nadine doesn’t sneak some widow in on me.”

The two smiled.