Flashback

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Nick floated in green weightlessness.

Nick floated in no-space, no-time. He was coming up from the smell of canvas walls and grass floor of the tent in Texas, away from his son and father-in-law, up into the real world of no-world.

Nick’s eyelids were sutured, but not quite shut. His eardrums were punctured, but not quite without hearing.

Nick floated with his lungs full of oxygen-rich liquid. They had drowned him into this death-life. They had not removed his eyes. They had not removed his optic nerves. It was punishment.

White-coated shapes, distorted in shape and size, moved in the nonliquid spaces outside his tank. Occasionally a greentinted and lens-distorted semihuman face would peer in at him in the intervals when he was up and out of his dreams.

NCAR.

NCAR.

The basement of the floating dead in NCAR.

Nakamura Center for Advanced Research.

And Nick Bottom’s punishment was to have his eyes, to have his shattered eardrums, to be brought up from the Flashback-two dreams from time to time.

Dara was dead. Val was dead, murdered on that Saturday in September. Leonard was dead. Nick wanted to be dead but they would not let him die. This was Nakamura’s punishment, Sato’s punishment, for opposing their Shogunate will.

Nick’s world was dead.

Except for this dream-fantasy happy-ending world into which they submerged and resubmerged him like a kitten being drowned again and again.

Nick floated like a white, bloated dead thing. But he dreamt on. And between the dreams… this…

He felt the feeding tubes and catheters boring into his body like barb-burrowing eels. He felt his muscles gone flaccid and rotting away like white mushrooms in the thick fluid. He stared out through sutures at a green world.

He had dreamt he was a man. The dream, Bottom’s dream, had brought them together briefly. But she was gone. And he was not allowed to follow.

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was—and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, or his heart to report, what my dream was… I shall sing it at her death.

Nick Bottom floated in the NCAR green tank of thick liquid and the drug entered his body and carried him back to his dream.

1.21 San Antonio, Republic of Texas—Saturday, Feb. 26

Nick awoke gasping and sweating from his nightmare.

It was the old nightmare. The recurring nightmare. The NCAR nightmare.

He got out of his barracks bed, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and flung it across the bedroom. He went into the tiny bathroom wearing only his boxer shorts, splashed water on his face and neck, and toweled himself off.

He walked into his kitchen and looked out the window as the sun was rising. Nick was on the tenth floor of the Texas Rangers barracks in San Antonio, formerly the Menger Hotel on East Crockett Street, and he didn’t like it that the Alamo was right across the street in the plaza named after it, the resurrected old mission visible in all its stony reality. He didn’t like it because he’d dreamt about it once—the Camaro dream—and Nick Bottom no longer trusted dreams.

He watched the sun touch the curved-bedstead gray-stone top of the Alamo.

His T-shirt off, Nick looked down at his body. It carried its scars: the wounds in his belly from the knifing in Santa Fe years ago; the scars on his leg from when they’d set the broken bone there five months ago in Texline; the lesser scars on his face and hands and back.

But it was the tiny spiderweb of scars on his deeply tanned left forearm that drew Nick’s attention now.

He went back to the bedroom and came back into the kitchen with the switchblade knife that was part of his Ranger kit. Many of the men carried huge knives—some actual Bowie knives—but Nick carried only this city switchblade, as sharp as a scalpel. He’d brought iodine and rubbing alcohol from the bathroom.

The phone-computer screen was on and winking. There was a new message from Val. Nick set the iodine and alcohol bottles and knife on the counter and tapped open the message.

It was as brief as all Val’s e-mails were. He was coming back from Boston with a southwest-bound convoy in March and would like to see the Old Man if he was still going to be at the San Antonio Rangers Company D barracks. If not, next time through. How was Leonard doing?

Leonard was doing pretty damned good, thought Nick, thanks to an aortic valve surgery that would cost Nick almost thirty thousand dollars. Texas dollars. He was paying the bill a little each month out of his lieutenant- detective Ranger salary. There were a few years of installments still ahead.

It was worth it.

An e-mail from the poet Danny Oz was waiting. Oz was going back to Israel—that radioactive wasteland that used to be Israel—in the Big Push in May. The Japanese and Republic of Texas forces were bringing 1,100,000 Jews—some expatriates, many from America and other countries—back to the Mideast this summer.

The beachhead had been cleared by American and Japanese conventional forces, but the returning Jews would have to hold it. And expand it. Oz wrote that his cancer was in remission and even if it were not, he’d be returning with the Big Push and let cancer and the Caliphate do their worst.

Nick was sure the Caliphate would.

But their worst might not be as bad as it would have been a few months earlier. The new Shogun of Nippon had warned the core Islamic states of the Caliphate that any use of nuclear weapons on the Caliphate’s part would be met by an instantaneous gee-bear and nuclear retaliation, but not, at least initially, on their crowded cities. The Shogun had specified that the seven holiest Islamic shrines would be destroyed—each after twenty-four hours’ evacuation warning—should the jihadist forces ever use weapons of mass destruction against anyone again. To show his new allies’ earnestness in this promise, the Shogun had given twenty-four hours’ warning and used fifty gee-bears to vaporize a minor Shi’ite shrine in Basra as an example.

If Al Jazeera coverage was to be believed, more than a billion citizens of the Caliphate literally went into convulsions and foamed at the mouth at this sacrilege. More than fifty thousand people died in urban riots.

But no weapons of mass destruction had been used by the Global Caliphate against the beachhead near where Haifa used to be.

Next year in Jerusalem! Oz had written at the end of his note. Nick knew that it was a serious invitation.

Well, why not? Professor Emeritus Dr. George Leonard Fox was going. The old man with his new cloned heart valve—friskier than ever, in his own words—would be there on the beachhead with 1,099,999 other Jews.

Dara had never told him that her father was a Jew. It must have slipped her mind.

Nick wouldn’t be going to the New Israel any time soon. Starting today, his Ranger division—12,000 men and