The Path of the Four

For her first work period on the space station, Ariana started her part of Carne-Tischler’s two big communications projects, the purpose for Vertex.

Thoughts of them disappeared as soon as she hit her quarters for shuteye.

During her first sleep period on Vertex, in a dream, she talked to a dead man.

Somebody had done violence to the window. That’s the first thing Ariana saw in her dream.

She had to back up, adjust, and figure out where she was and what was going on.

The sky, blue and with white clouds, told her the dream took place on Earth.

She stood next to an office building that was at least thirteen floors high.

The building was six-sided and seemed a tower of glass, although Ariana guessed it was some more modern material, possibly Pickering’s Compound. The building had a modern feel. However, in an effect out of antiquity, there were plaster gargoyles around the upper floors. One gargoyle laughed, one frowned, one had his eyes closed, one had a droopy left horn on its head, and one’s mouth was opened so wide it looked like its face was about to disappear.

And one of those top floors (and it was the type of building with windows that couldn’t open) was a window somebody had shattered.

The damage, after all, did look man-made. In real life, Ariana wouldn’t have been able to tell from this distance, but this was a dream, and Ariana could see the bullet holes.

“Ariana!”

That voice – Impossible!

But why not? This was a dream, after all.

However, seeing him again seemed like more good fortune and happiness then anybody deserved, even in a dream.

Ariana looked off in the distance, looking for him, looking for Michael, looking for her dead brother.

He jogged toward her. Tall, skinny, he wore that same cheap brown and black suit and gray imitation silk tie he always seemed to have just slept in. He still looked like he borrowed his eyes from the world’s friendliest puppy, and the hair still refused to stay in one place, despite his eternal, fruitless effort to go for the Mediterranean male, slicked back look.

In this dream, they hugged, the short woman only able to embrace the tall man’s thin, sunken chest and the tall man draping his lanky arms around her small shoulders. He smelled of that same cheap aftershave he had always worn. It always created a taste on her tongue like very old lemons.

Then they each took a small step away from each other, considered each other, and smiled.

“Michael. Hola.”

“Buon giorno.”

“I’ve wanted to see you again so much, Michael. To hear from you.”

“Better late than never.”

“No. You’re wrong. I was afraid, Michael, I was going to have to wait until I joined you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Is that why you have the job you do? I know it can be dangerous work. Sooner rather than later with me in Heaven, little sister?”

“No. I--”

She paused.

He got rid of the cold silence by breaking out a warm, friendly smile.

“I’m always thinking about you, Ariana.”

“That’s good.”

“And you?”

“I think about you every day, Michael. You kept me sane through my childhood. If I hadn’t had you to talk to, I would have felt like a total freak.”

“Gracias.”

“Prego.”

“News flash, Bella Figura. You were a freak. And me. That’s how Momma and Poppa thought.”

“I wanted to know the whole answers, Michael, about the atom and the soul and all the rest between, and not just be somebody’s happy wife and mother to their children.”

“Benissimo. And I wanted to fight for the poor in court--not be on retainer for some rich creep, ducking and weaving away from the law. You almost disappeared into your room forever, Bella Figura. You almost disappeared into your books.”

“I still do, Michael.”

“That’s good--as long as you don’t stay there. Bella Figura, you haven’t found the right man yet, have you?”

“No--I--Uh--I’ve sort of stopped looking for a while, Michael.”

“You’re spending too much time with the wrong type of people. These ‘space jacks’ stay cooped up in these tiny flying cans. A real man, a man worthy of my sister wouldn’t do that. I’m glad your borracho boss, this Joe Whitney, is just a friend. I have to change the subject and ask you something I’ve been wondering about. This time we have together, you see, will be so short.”

Ariana waited for the conversation to continue. A cloud in the sky of the dream moved past the horizon.

Michael said, “Why did you, one time, become Strega? That drove Momma and Poppa crazy.”

“You mean, most of all, Poppa, I’m sure,” Ariana added. “That was always the way it was between him and me, with many things.”

“It took me a month to explain,” Michael continued. “To explain to them that the way of the Strega has nothing to do with Satana.”

“Momma and Poppa taught me, Michael, to think of the Creator like He was a man. ‘The Heavenly Father.’ Si? And to see my body and nature as a sinful minefield. To become a Strega seemed like Column B: the Creator as female--or female and male--and the body and nature as works of joy.”

“Then why did you, at least, quit the coven?”

“Because, at last, neither the ‘Heavenly Father’ nor ‘the Great Mother’ made any sense to me. And one other reason, Michael.”

“What’s that?”

“The Witches don’t believe in the Devil.”

“Hmm.” He fingered the pentagram, dangling next to the cross, and both of them hanging around her neck. For the first time, Ariana realized that, in the dream, she wore a long, white nightgown.

“But you still wear this, I see. Despite what you say now about the Witches.”

“Why are you here, Michael?”

“There are two reasons, Bella Figura. The first is that I wanted to warn you that you are entering a period of great danger. Entre la espada y la pared.”

Between the sword and the wall. It was an old saying from one of the languages of their childhood. He told her once that he whispered it to himself just before he walked into a courtroom each time.

“Why am I in this danger, Michael?”

“That’s hard to explain.”

“I find that hard to believe, Michael, from you. You were always most important to me, because nothing was hard to explain, for you. I grew to understand what my place would be in ‘the New Universal Age’ that Akira Yamato, and the Better World Foundation, gave us, through you.”

Michael shrugged.

“I was a big brother. And now, Ariana, holy one, Miss Pleases, silver girl, my precious little sister, the real reason for my visit. A gift. A promise. An imminent event.”

He paused.

“Some friends will deliver my killer to you and this man will be at your mercy,” Michael Orlando said in the dream.

A few days later, Ariana had to find Joe and talk to him. She thought he either would be in the TV studio in Vertex under construction, or where the Y-Beam Projectors were set up, on the other side of the station. (The Y-Beam Projectors could, one day, prove to be as important as the Yamato Drive, the glowing, football-size device that made travel from Earth to Zah-Gre possible.)

In a hallway leading up to Joe’s office, Ariana found an entertainment cartridge someone had left lying around. She picked it up and looked at it.

It was a virtual reality version of Revenge of the Zombies, a 1943 film starring John Carradine.

She stared at the word “revenge” for a long minute.

Ariana couldn’t have revenge for Michael’s death. The petty street criminal who had killed her big brother had died himself years ago. So what did that leave? Kicking God in the ankles?

Besides, it made her feel the total hypocrite, even considering revenge as an abstraction. I mean, thought Ariana, so much for all my grand ideas about faith and religious fellowship if I even have something like revenge kicking around in my head.

What would the Zah-Gre Inner Clan, the four-member Zah-Gre social group that made up the planet’s priesthood and papacy, think of a reverie about revenge? Ariana had read all the English, Italian, and Spanish translations of the Garb Ock, the Zah-Gre oral tradition holy “book.” (Not much quantity to it; Markle-Boyer Publishing put out a collector’s edition reviving the twentieth century format of the paperback book and a friend back on Earth had lent a copy to her; it ran less than two hundred pages.) The Garb Ock had lots to say about fate, destiny, duty, and the nature of reality--and was silent on Earth ideas like punishment, and vengeance.

She put the entertainment cartridge in one of the front pockets of the baggy black slacks she wore.

Besides her sneakers, she also wore a T-shirt displaying the face of “the Father of the New Universal Age,” Dr. Akira Yamato: a round, smiling, and dimpled face with disordered, but short, hair. Tiny ears stuck out, like handles on a coffee mug. The shirt was an “Animation Weave,” so Yamato’s face kept changing expressions, just a little bit, or so anyone would see who looked at Ariana’s shirt for several minutes.

A notepad tucked under her arm, Ariana walked into Joe’s office. He had his feet on his desk and was sipping a mug of coffee. Seeing her, he held up a chubby finger, gesturing for her to wait a moment.

The way the chemical light from the room paint illuminated his face, from the angle Ariana saw it, Joe reminded her of a monkey. When she was five years old, Poppa, Momma, big brother Michael, and she had gone to a zoo. A cage full of howler monkeys fascinated her. One of the primates, a male, sat in a tree by himself, for the entire length of the Orlando family visit. Ariana told her family she thought the monkey in the tree by himself was cute, and asked about the possibility of marrying him one day.

Joe Whitney wore a plaid work shirt, the top few buttons undone, and some of his bushy, gray chest hair showing. He also wore blue jeans and cowboy boots.

Both he and Ariana wore Carne-Tischler i.d. tags, with the “C.T.” logo, and an eleven-digit identification number. The numbers were for the benefit of the station’s artificial intelligence program. Tied into TV cameras all around the station, it allowed the A.I. to log everybody’s activity.

From the window in Joe’s office, Ariana could see Golden Horizon, Carne-Tischler’s commercial traffic space station, come into view over the planet. And there again were the five lonely islands. As Ariana watched, another Yamato Corridor opened just long enough for a tourist ship to come through, and start to ease down toward Golden Horizon.

Joe’s desk pad reproduced an old newspaper headline: “HANNOVER-MORRIS LAWS REPEALED AND U.S. TROOPS WITHDRAWN FROM ASIA.”

A miniature, toy version of the ’30 Andromeda from Gutenschwager Motors parked near the desk pad. Three framed photographs of a younger version of Joe and what looked like his brothers and sisters stood near the toy car. A souvenir football from the year the Moscow Lions won the Superbowl rested near the photographs.

Joe scowled after each sip of his coffee. He talked to Babe. The artificial intelligence program spoke back with a male, bland, neutral voice. Somewhere, with very little volume, some odd music played. The only thing that Ariana noticed was that the singer had an English accent.

Joe said, “What else?”

“There’s a programming window, forty-eight hours from now,” Babe said. “Sixty minutes after News from Earth.”

“An hour? We can put in that new commercial from Glinka Energy. Now I’m going to talk to the Chief Engineer for a while, OK? What’s on your mind, Ariana?” He pointed at her shirt. “You know, a few years ago, back on Earth, I spent an hour not using something invented by Yamato. I was so shocked I had to go lie down for a while.”

Ariana laughed, and noticed Joe smiling at the sound of her laughter.

She looked at the photographs on the desk.

“You and your brothers?”

“Yeah. ‘The Whitney Gang’ as we called ourselves. What about you? Brothers? Sisters?”

“An older brother. A mugger shot him dead eight years ago.” That’s what the police told me, Ariana thought. I’ve always believed them.

“Damn. Guy who did it get caught?”

“Not by the police. The mugger was a drug addict. He overdosed and died before the cops caught up with him.”

“That’s a bitch. I guess the so-called ‘New Universal Age’ isn’t perfect yet, huh?” He paused. “Two developments with this ‘Brother Chaos’ business. Babe, let’s have a look at Public Safety Surveillance Frame one zero niner six eight four eight three seven six nine four.”

A hologram of Human Security Headquarters, in the Old City, down on Zah-Gre, appeared in Joe’s office. The whole front of the building had these words on it, in what looked like white chalk:

WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? SIGNED, BROTHER CHAOS.

“Human Security sent this up to us. That was there at dawn in the Old City. No evidence of how it got there. The street surveillance recordings picked up nothing. Once Jafari found about H.S. Headquarters, he informed Captain Roselle of everything he knows about Brother Chaos.”

“Does Jafari know anything new?”

“OK, Babe,” Joe said. “Lose the hologram.” It faded away.

Then Joe picked up off his desk what looked like an ordinary, blank sheet of white paper.

“Babe, Jafari’s latest report, please.”

Words faded into existence on the paper.

“Security’s report on the shuttle sabotage.”

Joe handed the report to Ariana.

She studied the report for a moment.

“If I hadn’t ‘rescued’ us the sabotage would have corrected itself?”

“That’s what it looks like.” Joe put out his hand for the report. Ariana gave it back to him. Joe looked at the report again, “Hell of a way to just get somebody’s attention.” He laid the report on his desk.

“What is that music?”

“Oh that?” Joe put the mug on his desk, and then put his feet on the floor. He put a hand on a knob on his desk and turned it. The music filled the office.

“Like it?”

“I don’t know,” Ariana said. “What is it?”

Ariana caught a whiff of beer but didn’t see any cans, drinking glasses, etc.

“‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones.” Joe turned the volume back down. “What do you need?”

“I keep checking the logs and the readout data from the UV panels. Every time I do, my estimate of how much we’re shy of the UV filtering units we’re going to need goes up.”

“Well, what’s the latest version of the bad news?”

“Forty-five percent.”

“Damn. Babe--?”

Babe spoke again. Ariana thought maybe there were hidden speakers in the ceiling, one in the walls, and one on Joe’s desk.

“Yes, Joe?”

Ariana walked over to the window and looked out and down, at the planet. She fingered her ponytail.

“Put in a priority double-A message about our UV filters in our next communications package back to Earth,” Joe said. “We’re going to need--uh--eighty percent more than we usually get.”

“There’s no way we’ll need more than forty-five percent,” Ariana murmured, still looking out the window.

“I’m having a feud with the Director of Supplies. Anyway, we need forty-five, I ask for eighty, and they’ll only send us seventy.”

“That’s weird.”

Joe got up and ambled over to the window to join her.

“That’s management, which is an art, not a science.” He paused, and then looked at her. “You haven’t been down there yet, have you?”

Ariana looked at him.

“Haven’t had time.”

“You should go for a few hours. Relax, have fun, and don’t get into trouble. Take the Number Three shuttle. The maintenance logs say it’s the one that’s been giving us the less trouble.”

“Thanks, Joe.”