The Path of the Four

Ariana, Joe, Yamato, and Brother Chaos stepped into Brantley’s office in Armstrong City, on Earth’s moon.

Brantley was at his desk, and, for the moment, his back was to his visitors.

The room was large, and white. The desk stood in the middle. Ariana estimated that a hundred people could mill around the desk and never come near to touching each other or the desk or the walls or much of anything else. The ceiling was high, and Ariana couldn’t see it. It vanished in distance and darkness.

A keyboard broken into three sections sat on Brantley’s desk. Chunks of white cable connected the three sections of the keyboard and another chunk of white cable ran from the keyboard to what Ariana would have sworn was a miniature version of an American television set, circa 1959. A final white cable ran from this fake TV set into the floor.

It was the Hermes Lattice. Ariana couldn’t see, from where she stood, whether it had a data cube port, but assumed the device did. All the theory behind it said it would have to.

Brantley had a phone up to his head and the phone looked like a black, plastic “L.” The other part of his phone system was a hologram that displayed a close up of bored, generic Carne-Tischler functionary.

“Because I trust you to run things in my absence, that’s why,” Brantley said. “Your lack of interest or confidence isn’t a factor here. Until the crisis has passed, I want to stay where I can--”

He must have either felt his visitors or heard one of them breathing. He stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. He turned back to the hologram. “I’ll call you back.” He touched a button on his desk and in the hologram, the bored, generic face replaced itself with the glowing red words YOU HAVE LINKED WITH THE SECURITY DESK.

“This is Roger Brantley. I want no interruption at all until you hear from me.”

A crisp, efficient-sounding female voice--an artificial intelligence? Ariana couldn’t tell--came out of the hologram.

“Understood, sir.”

Brantley touched another button on his desk and the hologram vanished. He put the black, plastic “L” down.

He swiveled his chair around and faced his visitors.

The grey and white stripe on either side of his thinning hair bookended a regal head that, save for the humanizing touch of the wrinkles around the eyes, could have belonged to a stern, but malevolent, and altogether mythical war lord of an even more mythical fairy tale world. He wore a dark blue suit coat, matching trousers, a light blue shirt, and a yellow tie.

Top to bottom, Joe wore a baseball cap (the bill shading his small blue eyes), a white formal shirt with the collar open and a white undershirt visible, and black jeans, and cowboy boots.

Ariana wore a derby, orange T-shirt and battered black leather jacket, gray sweat pants, and ballet shoes.

Yamato looked like he did when he, at last, appeared to Ariana and Joe on Zah-Gre. His hands were in the pockets of his hooded sweat jacket and his high top sneakers looked brand new.

Brother Chaos looked like a man between five to six tall with the half-black, half white mask and gray hooded robe. The hands were at the side, neutral, and sheathed in long leather gloves, the black for the right, and white for the left.

Brantley broke the long silence.

“So are we all going to just look at each other for a few hours?”

“Four people just showed up in your office, four people who didn’t go through your fifteen security checkpoints.”

“Twenty checkpoints, Mr. Whitney.”

“My apologies, Roger. You surprised me by not pushing a couple of buttons and have security people storm in here and drag us away.”

“Why should I? Was one of you planning on shooting me? I notice, for example, that your hands are in your pockets, Akira.”

“It’s a comfortable stance, Roger.”

“Uh-huh. And if my suspicions are correct, Mr. Whitney, I think your ‘Four people just showed up’ remark is only three-quarters correct.”

“Oh. Our friend here.”

Joe walked over to Brother Chaos, who turned and looked at him, silent.

Ariana walked in the opposite direction, beginning to circle Brantley and his desk.

“Your friend, Mr. Whitney.”

“But you don’t know him, Roger. So don’t say he’s not your friend.”

“He can’t speak for himself?”

“He’ll have something to say. Later.”

“And what have you two, Miss Orlando and yourself, been doing for the past nine days?”

Brantley looked from Joe to Ariana.

“Oh, you know,” Joe said. “Stuff.”

“Let’s get serious, Roger,” Yamato said. “Why aren’t you calling in the troops? Your man Hargrove wanted to kill three-fifths of the occupants of this room.”

“Control, Akira. It’s a question of control. I can call in security personnel into this office, have you hauled away, use coercion to discover how you got in. but then events would be sweeping me along instead of my directing events. Four-fifths of the occupants of this room have managed to threaten the ultimate act of altruistic humanitarianism. I’d like to have some answers before I take any drastic measures.” He paused, and then leaned back in his chair, making his fingers like a steeple. “Would any of you like to give me some answers?”

“Maybe.” Joe was continuing to walk around Brantley’s desk, his path going opposite from Ariana, Brantley static in the middle. “If you ask nice.”

Yamato walked closer to Brantley. “You were saying something about control, Roger?”

“That fool Curry just wanted the war stopped. Both of them, Mr. Whitney! Both wars! Curry and his precious ‘legacy’! In the past, any man aspiring to greatness could expect fame, or demand fame as part of the package. Washington, Lincoln, FDR. By the time anybody Human in this room was born, Humankind numbered thirteen billion individuals, and counting. It was a cornerstone of my design, the Alpha Covenant, to see that the man of vision in a species of thirteen billion should jettison fame as his concerns. Hell, there are now close to one million television networks. Just about everybody, sometime, somewhere, is famous--at least in the antique, late twentieth century sense. It’s like breathing. Fame is longer an accomplishment. We all have it to different degrees. But accomplishment! Real, genuine accomplishment!” Brantley shot out of his chair and turned to Ariana, who had been approaching him--and the Hermes Lattice--from an oblique angle. “And just what are you doing, young lady?”

“Looking at you. Getting a good look at you.”

“And what do you see, Ariana Orlando?”

“Power.”

“Oh, and that’s it for you, is it? Just a gangster, a boss. Me and my stupid, silly ideals, heh?”

“Your ideals are wonderful,” Ariana replied. “Your methods, however --”

“My methods? My methods?” Brantley strode toward Joe. Joe, looking surprised, stopped the orbiting walk. Brantley gestured at the chubby space station manager. “And what do you think of his methods, Miss Orlando? The methods and his friends used, during the war? On the home front?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well,” Brantley continued. “I admire them! Crude, yes, brutal, yes. But the time and the place needed it. Here’s a story. I was at some stupid fundraiser, listening to some blowhard from the U.S. Senate deliver a speech. A little girl, about the age you would have been then, in the audience, in a loud voice, criticized the Pan-Asian War.” He paused. “A police officer there shot the little girl dead. Under the Hannover-Morris Laws, that was a legal act. Not now. You understand, Miss Orlando? Anybody can insult, disagree, and protest the leaders of the world now. We welcome it. We relish it. And this new, better state of affairs Mr. Whitney and his friends created.”

“But if anybody knows about the Paladins, or the Covenant, they have to die,” Yamato interjected. “Right, Roger?”

“A police officer that arrives at a candy store robbery could probably talk the situation to a satisfactory conclusion,” Brantley went on. “If however, he is dealing with people with, say, a nuclear missile, he must take drastic, severe steps. Knowledge of the Paladins and the Covenant, among those who don’t understand, that’s a missile aimed at the foundation of modern Earth civilization.”

“You admire me? What I did with the League?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Whitney.”

“Wish I could return the favor. I think this whole set up, what Hargrove was part of, stinks.”

“So I gathered, Mr. Whitney. I guess I’ll have to live with it, your disapproval.”

“I have a story to tell you, Roger,” Yamato said. He took his hands out of his pockets, and started to tell a story. He and Joe walked to a part of the room that was opposite from the Hermes Lattice, and in moment they held Brantley’s attention.

Brother Chaos watched.

“Let’s start with a ‘Once upon a time,’ Roger,” Yamato said. “Once upon a time, a man lived in a valley with his cousin. His cousin had to go to the big city. Before he left, the cousin said to the man, ‘I will be gone many years. While I am gone, I want you to do something magnificent.’ The cousin left. All during the long years the cousin was away in the big city, the man who stayed in the valley built a great and beautiful tower that reached up past the sky. The valley was a forest and the man, an ingenious, creative sort, used only common material that he found in the forest. On rainy days, the man worked on the tower, and the man would get soaked, and catch a cold--this is before I cured the common cold, Roger--and on hot days, the man would sweat gallons of sweat. Sometimes the man would work for days at a time on his tower, without stopping. Sometimes for days without eating. Finally, the cousin returned from the big city. He looked up at the tower and said, ‘This tower is magnificent! But why did you build it all out of squirrel shit?’”

Yamato and Joe hooted, hollered, guffawed, and slapped each other’s open palms.

Brantley’s face reddened. He walked back to his desk with long, angry strides. “I take you out of on orphanage, I give you the chance to build a better world, and you laugh at me? After you lectured me about being a bad man when I shared with you my most precious possession, the secret of the Alpha Covenant?” Out of a drawer, Brantley took two long, silver laser pistols. “To the grave with you! To the grave with both of you!” Firing two handed, Brantley sent offensive, high-intensity laser blasts at Yamato and Joe.

Yamato and Joe vanished and reappeared a few feet away, without an interruption in their mocking laughter.

Brantley blinked with astonishment, but shot at the two men again, who disappeared, and the destructive energy bolts flashed through the huge expanses of space in the office, dissipating before they hit the distant walls.

Yamato and Joe appeared again, just long enough for Brantley to shoot at them again.

While the shooting, the laughing, the disappearing, and reappearing were going on, Ariana strode to the Hermes Lattice. Her fingers were so fast over the keyboard there were a blur to her eyes.

ACCESS.

PASSWORD?

Shit!

She didn’t have time to use the complicated series of connecting questions she had used to crack the Damrosch Helix. She dug down deep, in her intuition, her inner well of memory and dreams and fantasies, and pulled up the phrase she found there and translated it into the movement of her fingers across the keyboard, her understanding of Roger Brantley and what he wanted.

“HEAVENLY UNIVERSE.”

HELLO, ROGER. WHAT ARE WE DOING NOW?

Ariana took the data cube out of her jacket and slipped it into the input-port.

RUN PROGRAM “PARANOID/SCHIZOPHRENIC.”

The device’s screen dimmed for a moment and then changed color, going from green to beige.

WHY? I KNOW YOU’RE AGAINST ME, AND THE SPIDER BIRDS ARE WAITING OUTSIDE THE INVISIBLE WALLS.

“What are you doing? Get away from there!” Brantley, at last, calmed down enough to see his shooting at Joe and Yamato was useless. He ran back to his desk, slammed the laser pistols on his black leather desk pad, and scrambled over to the Hermes Lattice. The distraction lasted less than a minute, but it had been just enough time.

Ariana rushed out of his way. She could have pulled a disappearing act, like Joe and Yamato but now she couldn’t take her eyes off Brantley. She wondered if he were as predictable as her friends thought.

Brantley crouched in front of the Hermes Lattice and worked the keyboard. He studied the screen, frowned, and then popped Ariana’s data cube out of the input-port. He looked at the cube, and scowled at it, and then her. “Very clever. I wish you were still working for me.”

“Yeah-- Well. I’m not.”

“You shouldn’t be so predictable, Roger,” Joe said. “It’s a serious character flaw.”

Brantley plopped down in his desk chair. “This changes nothing substantial. It will take me time to reestablish a communication network with the Paladins, but there are other techniques for giving secret orders. I don’t care how much all of you can pop in and out of hyperspace. Sometime, your luck will run out and we’ll kill you.” He paused. “What, nobody disagrees with me?”

Joe shrugged. “We’re listening, Roger.”

“And it sounds like you have more to say,” Yamato added.

“I guess you want to tell us now how futile it is to expose you,” Ariana said. “Something about how you or your Better World Foundation friends control the media, and even if we got the truth out, nobody would believe it, or want to believe it.”

“Yes,” Brantley said. “Which amounts to the same thing!” He paused. “How?”

Yamato put his hands in his pockets. “Just what is your question, Roger?”

“You know.”

Ariana, Joe, and Yamato looked at each other.

And they took off their hats, revealing their shaved, bald heads and surgical scars that glowed with a familiar yellow-white-orange light.

Brantley put his hands up to his mouth and widened his eyes.

“‘It is all about scale,’” Yamato said, quoting his own note that he had left, before he disappeared from Earth. “Miniature versions of the Yamato Drive, Roger, planted right in the brain. Total freedom of movement, controlled by thought.”