and he meant it. The image of Erin is his horse, and hidden inside its seemingly harmless code-as deadly as any Greek army-is whatever program he designed to destroy Brahma.
A raucous buzzing suddenly fills the office. I drop into a crouch, trying frantically to locate the source of the sound.
My alarm clock. In the past year I might have set it twice, so its sound is now as unfamiliar as an air raid siren.
The clock reads 8:59.
Miles obviously set it so that Brahma’s next log-on wouldn’t pass unnoticed. As if impelled by Miles’s will, I shut off the alarm, then move to the EROS computer and stare at its screen saver, the bust of Nefertiti turning hypnotically in the field of black. The urge to touch the keyboard, to move forward on the path to knowledge, no matter how dangerous, is nearly irresistible.
“Damn you, Miles.”
Flexing my fingers like a violinist warming up for a concert, I tap a few keys, killing the screen saver and logging onto EROS as SYSOP. From my bird’s-eye view of the system, I scan the block of private rooms that contains the Blue Room.
Brahma is there.
MAXWELL› Erin? The dry earth awaits the rain.
The nerves in my arms dance needle points on my skin. I feel like I just opened my bathroom door and found a stranger waiting behind the shower curtain. With a quick click of the mouse I log off and sit staring at the black screen.
Nefertiti soon reappears. She is beautiful but cold. Somehow, across the ages, she whispers to me how trivial is all this, my concern with who lives and who dies. She is another face of the man who awaits me in the Blue Room, and a reckless humour in my blood stirs me to challenge. I stand and walk to the Gateway, pick up Miles’s Trojan Horse disk, set it beside the EROS keyboard, and sit back down.
“Okay, shithead,” I whisper, pulling on the headset. “Come to papa.”
With savage pleasure I stab the keys that transform me into “Erin” and take me to the Blue Room, where “Maxwell” ’s prompt still glows softly. I feel a sudden consciousness of the conditioned chill in the house, the dead heat outside, the burning cotton in the fields and Miles crashing through its leaves somewhere, the violated bodies of women lying headless in dry crypts beneath the ground, and Lenz’s pathetic shell of a wife, also dead now, and Rosalind May, who might still be alive and worse off for it. With all this and more coursing through me, I activate the voice-recognition program, speak softly into the microphone, and watch my words appear on-screen:
ERIN› I am the rain.
CHAPTER 32
MAXWELL› I’m so glad you came back.
Brahma’s digital voice floats from the speakers with chilling familiarity. His previous communications have imprinted it in my memory as indelibly as that of Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s
MAXWELL› But it’s you who are the dry earth, Erin. _I_ am the rain.
ERIN› I think the opposite. But I’m not ashamed of need. You may be right.
MAXWELL› Perhaps I am. Ashamed of need, I mean. I have been lonely for so long. Not alone, but lonely.
ERIN› The lot of most people, I’m afraid.
MAXWELL› I am not like most people.
ERIN› No one ever thinks they are.
MAXWELL› Soon you will know that I am not.
ERIN› How?
MAXWELL› Today I’m going to do something I have never done.
ERIN› What?
MAXWELL› Tell my story. And then you will know.
ERIN› Why do you want to tell me? Because I told you I was beautiful and you believed me?
MAXWELL› Beauty is important, but it is not enough. Look at the actors and actresses on EROS. Their pathetic fantasies are encyclopedias of insecurity. You said things yesterday that intrigued me. The way you spoke of sin and fate. To find beauty married with character and intelligence is very rare. I possess all these, so I know. Many seek to know me, but I reveal nothing. I live within myself. I believe you do the same. Thus I long to know you. I sense something deep in you. But I shall not ask you to reveal it without also revealing myself. I ask only one favor of you. If the things I tell you shock you too much, tell me. In this way shall we know we were meant to go no further.
ERIN› All right.
MAXWELL› And please forgive me if I take liberties with specifics such as places or names.
ERIN› Lie about the little things, but tell the truth about the big things?
MAXWELL› Just so. I must start in a time before you were born. For my destiny began then.
ERIN› I’m ready.
MAXWELL› In the latter years of the last century, my paternal grandfather was born into a prominent family in Germany. Call him Rudolf. Rudolf was given a first-class education, and became a distinguished surgeon in Berlin. When he was twenty-five, his parents died in a fire. His elder brother Karl, also a surgeon, was his only surviving relation. Rudolf was a bull of a man, Prussian to his boots, but he married a small, frail woman. She was porcelain pale, with fine features and sea-blue eyes.
When the kaiser began rattling his saber, my grandfather decided to emigrate to America. Karl begged him to remain during what he called “the Fatherland’s hour of need,” but Rudolf took his inheritance and settled his wife in…
Here the speakers fall silent, but after a brief delay Brahma picks up again.
…a large American city and quickly established himself as surgeon to an upper-class clientele. Their first child was a son. We’ll call him Richard.
Richard was something of a Byronic figure, even as an infant. He’d inherited his mother’s slight bones, pale skin, and blue eyes, but his father’s dark hair, intellect, and relentless will. A year later a daughter was born. Catherine. At that time it was discovered that Richard suffered from hemophilia. His condition was controllable, so long as he was protected from traumatic injury, but his “handicap” completed his Byronic persona.
Early on, Richard showed signs of genius. He was given a peerless education by private tutors, while Catherine received instruction in music and ballet from the age of four. The family led an idyllic existence until 1929. When the stock market crashed, Rudolf lost his fortune overnight. He could still practice medicine, but suddenly it was a means of survival rather than a lucrative hobby. When several friends committed suicide, he fell into severe depression. His behavior became erratic, he practically imprisoned himself and his family in…
The speakers are silent again. Unsure of what to do, I finally type:
ERIN› What’s the matter? Are you all right?
MAXWELL› Yes. It’s proving harder than I thought to tell the story without giving away too much.
ERIN› What are you afraid of?
