compassion, not hate or fear; treatment, not destruction. They are not she-devils, but afflicted human beings who, through no fault of their own, are caught up in this emergency along with the rest of us. Terms like 'Xombie,' 'Fury,' and 'Exian' only lead to misunderstanding and needless violence. I think we can all agree that the last thing this nation needs now is more violence. Let us show that we can rise above our fear and approach this desperate situation as a public-health issue, not as a witch hunt. We are not a nation of executioners, but a nation of mourners. We are a nation that will do the right thing. Good-bye, and God bless America.' Then he shot himself in the head. Men jumped to tend him, and the camera remained on just long enough to capture their wild flurry of panic and gunfire as he revived.
In this way, I witnessed it all for the first time, and really understood how strange I had become, because the simple, puerile old world seemed infinitely stranger to me than the dark one it had spawned.
Every day, Sandoval and I had a sumptuous lunch in the plane, and he would tell funny anecdotes about his early, fumbling encounters with great wealth, suggesting that he knew what I was going through. I was not much in the way of company, but he didn't seem to mind. He also told me about how he had founded the Mogul Cooperative.
'Originally, it was meant to be a joke!' he said. 'There was this crazy explosion of wealth during the Reagan years, and it just became obscene to me. Financial firms blatantly touting sleazy tax shelters and 'wealth preservation' at the same time I was exploring ways to redistribute my own dirty money. What was it all for? I wanted to do something to mock all that avarice, so I took it to its logical extreme: You can take it with you! Let me tell you how!
'Since one of my holdings was a reputable biochemical company, it was easy to make a classy prospectus, but all I really wanted to do was make a point. My mistake was letting that professor, Uri Miska, chair the foundation. He wasn't in on the prank and stole the show from day one. What a maniac! At first I thought he was the best snake-oil salesman of all time, and couldn't believe the interest he was drumming up-elderly fat cats were apparently all too happy to throw money at us rather than at their greedy heirs-but then the whole thing began taking on a life of its own. It was paying for itself and getting bigger year after year; I couldn't pull the plug. Eventually, I just left it to Miska, not knowing if I had scored the biggest coup of all time or… done something else. Of course, now we know the answer to that, twenty years too late.'
'So this whole thing is your doing.' I said this with all the animation of a dead fish.
'Indirectly, I suppose. I started the ball rolling. But what did I know? The one who really made it happen was Dr. Miska.'
'What happened to him?'
'He disappeared. When the Maenad contagion started spreading, he trashed the Providence lab and took off with his experimental 'Tonic.' We recovered what we could, some data and a small sample, and transferred it by helicopter to the submarine for safekeeping. This was all in the heat of the Agent X outbreak-you can imagine the difficulties. We lost hundreds of men on the ground. All of them, actually. Only the helicopter pilot and I made it back to the plant.' He said this as if it unnerved him to think about it.
'Lucky you just happened to have a submarine lying around.'
'Hey, what can I tell you? Submarines were my hobby ever since I was a kid. With some guys it's model trains. I just happened to be in a position to own my own submarine factory. If I'd known it would be such a headache, I would've unloaded it long ago.'
'Poor little rich boy.'
'No, but until you're faced with the kinds of choices I've had to make, you can't judge.'
'You mean like choosing SPAM over people?'
That struck a nerve. 'SPAM had nothing to do with it,' he said. 'I had to be sure that the Tonic would reach its destination. We couldn't predict what would happen with a lot of refugees on board-it was too much like letting the inmates run the asylum.'
'But you promised them!'
'It was the only way to keep them on the job. That sub had to be seaworthy and ready to go. There was no other choice. Of course, it was all moot after you and Cowper showed up.'
'We were only trying to survive.'
'I know. I don't blame you for almost getting me killed. That was your only choice. At that moment, you had the leverage and would have been stupid not to use it. Plus, stealing the Tonic ensured that we didn't dare throw you overboard. The most we could do was lock Cowper up and try to get him to talk.'
'But… you were in there with him. You were arrested, too.'
'No I wasn't.' His lips formed into a sly, rueful smile.
He had been pretending to be a prisoner. That whole time. 'You lying creep,' I said.
'It was all I could think of to get Cowper's confidence. It was rough, too. I was stuck in there with a ruptured kneecap, and Fred Cowper is not the most gentle nursemaid a person could ask for. I should have known he was too smart to open up-did you know he was my first choice to command the boat? I was very disappointed when he turned me down. I never liked that Coombs. He tolerates too much hanky-panky.'
'You mean like giving me the run of the ship.'
'No, that was actually deliberate. We thought Cowper might confide something to you through the door. You were slower on the uptake than we expected, though-it took you a week to find him.'
'Thanks.'
'De nada. More tea?'
Each day, when I returned to my tent, it was a little more furnished, more deluxe, though the one amenity I really wanted was a bathroom-I didn't like using a chamber pot, no matter how unobtrusively it was whisked away, and I would have liked to wash more often. I suspected that Sandoval was allowing me only so much comfort, so that visiting him would remain a welcome indulgence.
One thing that surprised me was how free I was to roam around. Valhalla was wide open to me, and I could even leave the bubble altogether via my private balcony if I could stand the cold, though I wouldn't get much farther than that. There was no Inuit taxi service except by Mogul appointment.
My tent was at the northwest side of the main bubble, close to the wall, in a thinly peopled region of giant helium tanks, compressors, and webs of anchor cable. The lines creaked eerily from the force of the wind outside-I gathered that the dome would blow away without these robust moorings, which moaned like the tortured rigging of a great sailing ship. I could see why most people chose to live more toward the center, in the faux- cheery surroundings of the Global Village. But at least I could come and go as I pleased.
What I quickly discovered, however, was that there was nowhere I cared to go. My first act after leaving Sandoval was to try to find someone, anyone, from the sub. This did not require much of a search-I remembered what the boys had told me about being able to locate a person by their implant, and immediately found this monitoring system-the Valhalla Directory, or VD-on Channel 8 of my interactive television. All I had to do was type in a name, and the selected implantee would appear as a numbered dot on a map of the complex.
I could find myself, I could find Dr. Langhorne or Dr. Stevens or Rudy or Colonel Lowenthal or even Miss Riggs, but the people I really wanted to find were not there: all the surviving boys and men from the boat. They were either being detained outside the bubble or they were gone altogether. I prayed it was the former, but either way they were out of reach. I was alone.
What made the situation worse was my isolation within the complex. Except for the doctors, no one would speak to me, no one would come anywhere near me, and when I ventured out of my area, I felt like Typhoid Mary-word got around that I was coming, and people disappeared into their holes like timid rabbits. I could sometimes see stragglers clearing out as I approached, and it made me mad. Obviously, they were following my movements, using the Directory to shun me, but why? I remembered what Dr. Langhorne had told me about sexual competition here, and wondered if that was it-did they hate me because they thought I was an interloper poaching on their territory? Were they scared of me because they thought I could bring Sandoval's might to bear? If that was so, it was worth thinking about. How much power did I wield? What could I get away with?
The more I considered, the more I began to feel a peculiar thrill of a kind I had never experienced before. Look at it objectively, I thought: If Sandoval was king, and he adopted me, that made me a princess. Even in less fanciful terms, he was certainly one of the most powerful men on Earth-and had been even before Agent X- whereas what had I been? A nothing, a nobody… yet it was me he wanted by his side. Furthermore, even at fiftyish, he wasn't exactly a broken-down old coot. Again, looking objectively, he was handsome, charming, even
