Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
Have clinics always been like this? Phoebe shifted on the easy-in, easy-out, fully supportive
lounger-chair. Micro-needles under your skin; osmosis patches on your skin; uniform,
bland, easy-to-get-at-ya garments over your skin.
She rolled her head and stretched a little to eye her bed alcove across the common room. It was a
tidy closet, no more confining than the chamber at home, but there was this ambience, this
feeling of things hidden in the walls and ceilings that made her uneasy.
Then: that picture in her head jostled ... lost color ... inverted ... into a black-and-white
negative ... with an electronic snap! flipped to normal.
Phoebe let her eyes droop closed as a tsunami of confusion swept over her. Even as that settled,
she knew she couldn't just sit here. Work to be done, a combine to supervise, a populace to calm.
She pressed the button that tucked the footrest back and under. Another button eased her gently to
her feet.
"Phoebe?" Weir said. "Don't go anywhere. We need an answer."
Phoebe had forgotten about Weir. Why does he insist on calling me that? She swung her head to
snap out a complaint. Too quick. There was something soft, laggard, sick about her body
today. It fell over too easily.
Weir caught her. "Sorry," he said, propping her up.
"Were you going somewhere in particular?" Kanpa asked from his lounger nearby.
She was glad he shared her common room and no one else, but the strength in his voice irritated
her: it showed that his youth had conquered his gut wound more quickly than she had recovered from
her poisoning; even in her own mind, she downplayed the virulence and suffusion of Jik Dain's
attack on her.
Phoebe glanced toward Kanpa and noticed the holoscreen hovering between them. Then, she realized
what they were doing when she drifted off just now and which pictures had sent her off. She shook
her head slowly. "Just away from that," she said.
The holoscreen still limned its display volume, a stark panel that told only date-time and
geographical coordinates now. Moments before, however, it had shown them Harlan's death and the
escape into the fey-banyan of the chui who'd killed him. There was something too real, yet
unbelievable, about Beobachtung, even that collected by patrolcraft, something that delivered its
message right through the brain to the gut, heart included. Particularly when that patrolcraft
carried Kanpa and her to safety at the cost of Harlan's life.
"I'll turn it off," Kanpa said.
The holoscreen vanished, leaving Phoebe staring at a bank of windows. Night watched her back,
politely remaining outside, but carefully concerned about her recovery. Does the Ganj-Dareh
Collective people that night, or am I imagining somebody else's concern? Who else would it be?
And how are they managing the tension blanketing them once more? She hadn't checked on her
customer base since ... since before she'd confronted Jik Dain. She turned to go do that.
"You sit down," Weir said with a release of his support that actually compelled her to sink back
into the lounger.
Automatically, the headrest cupped the back of her head. It felt good, so tempting to yield to it,
but she couldn't. "Status report," she demanded of Kanpa. "How're things on the paths?"
"No," Kanpa replied. "As I said before, we've more urgent things to talk about."
Before? When? How can I care for Ganj Dareh if I can't even remember a few moments ago? "Like
what?" she said. "Like Harlan?"
"Show her," Kanpa said, strength suddenly gone from his voice. He let himself sink back into his
lounger's cushions.
Weir set his llevar down on a small table at the room's center. Its glistening curves seemed to
vibrate with tension as though holding in immense power. He said something like, "Botfly," and the
walls around them morphed into an opaline background overlaid by brightly colored symbols.
"Remember this?" Weir said. "You saw it in the kiva before you took off after — to meet with —
uh, sorry. Anyway, in the kiva, after you left, we discovered a few things, which is why we came
after you."
Phoebe struggled for breath. Her lungs couldn't seem to lift her ribs. She could barely force the
words out. "Thank you. I ..."
Then: talking failed. Words collapsed with impotence. Thoughts themselves lost cohesion. Her
mind clogged with a slurry of sound-bites, peeks at memories, pokes at emotions, images of reality,
images of virtuality. And mired beneath it all was some fundamental part of her, the part that
held desires, needs, ambitions, dreams, a part that shriveled even as she watched, powerless to
help, to even touch herself there. Of course, she'd never needed coaxing in that part of
life. Her wants had always been energized, a vital, ever-assertive force in her thinking, behind
her actions, ahead of her anxieties. Of course — of course?
She could see the psychic morsel now. It looked like a pond, a three-dimensional, translucent,
glowing pocket of fluid ... with things clinging to its side ... and one big one swimming in the
middle. She took her point-of-view closer, right up to the undulating surface, the tough, but
permeable skin around the pool of things that she needed/wanted. She didn't quite know what she
saw, but she recognized them. All their curious shapes, their crinkles and protuberances, their
colors and textures, their depth and their intensity.
So many of them were tacked onto the inside of the pond, displaced, sent there in defeat by the
ones who still swam, who still ruled, who still determined what the rest of her strove for.
Curious, she peered into the middle, through an scum-murky mucus that made study difficult, yet
channeled all those demands into her mind and her actions. She made out a few scurrying little
needs, still secure in their strokes and position: breath, pulse, the other fundamental physical
systems. She saw, off to the side, swimming tentatively, a creature that mixed need and want and
couldn't always exert itself: eating.
Then: the shadow, the ominous hulking desire that swam slowly and authoritatively, dominating her
essence.
"Phoebe!" Weir's word broke through like it was the loudest in a long series.
Phoebe tugged her eyelids open. The Gatogrebok tactician hovered over her, his face a little too
close for focus.
"Phoebe, can you understand me?"
"Yes." She wasn't sure if the word was audible.
"You've got to come out here, at least for a few moments. We need to show you a few things, then
we need you to make a decision."
Other people's needs, always more important than mine. Phoebe stirred her body, lifting shoulders,
twitching arms, shifting legs. A long, deep breath found its way into her. Sensations bloomed as
the connections between her body, brain, and mind flowed with a little more energy and data.
"About what?" she demanded.
Weir studied her for a moment, then apparently abandoned his next words. Instead, he turned and
marched across the room, from one end of a thatch of saffron and ebony to the other. Along the
way, he passed symbols she recognized abruptly, flame = firearms, open folder = unsolved case,
anshin symbology, private anshin symbology.
"Where'd you get those?" she snapped, then answered her own question. Kanpa! She rolled her head
so she could pin him down with a glare. Why can't I avoid yelling when I'd rather caress him?
"You let him into our database, our anshin-only database." The glare did feel good,
though, a vestige of control. Poor Kanpa, my target once more.
"Phoebe," Weir snapped. "Over here, Phoebe."
She slowly diverted her gaze, more a head thing than an eye thing. Weir wagged a scolding finger
at her. A flare of spite about that died before a wash of I-deserve-it.
Weir said, "Entirely appropriate and controlled access, Phoebe, access that saved your life, but
we've got much bigger worries right now."
"Ganj Dareh?" she whispered, her lungs weak again before a sweep of panic. Her heart thudded in
their stead.
"That's right." He tapped a long list of names done in tones of carbon. "The Tlaxtli League. As
you may remember, all Bande Gastarbeiter came from here, but not all of these players tlaxtli took
on that role, not even 3%. We think we know where the other 73,600 have deployed."
"Kanpa," Phoebe said without trying the slow process of turning her head again. "You worked on
this before ... coming after me?"
"No."
"When then?"
"Waiting for you to come around. Weir saw something out on that field that got him worried and
needed my help to explore it. I put off healing-sleep. Ordered the Nurses to minimize yours.
It's a good thing I did. Go on, Weir."
His sacrifice sank within her, out of her mind, into her heart, warm and soft. She wanted to tell
him so, but so many things kept her from moving.
Meanwhile, Weir was passing his hands along three lines drawn in ebony with little cross-bars —
rail-lines — as they wended around Popovich, catching all of a dozen or so direvnya, then coming
together into one line that led toward Ganj Dareh, but ended abruptly somewhere west of that
circle.
"Nineteen days ago, the players tlaxtli quit the league and dispersed by routes various to these
direvnya." Weir waved his hands in a scattering motion, and Phoebe noticed that the scarlet
circles were flocked with squares of ivory, meaning unknown.
"From there," Weir continued, "some caught Gastarbeiter Expresses to Ganj Dareh where they
collected into Bande. We know what eventually happened to them."
"Blue naps," Kanpa murmured.
That hulking desire, that obsession, deep within Phoebe, slashed its powerful tail, at once pleased
with completion and sorrowed over its delay. Eyes closed against the pain, she gestured for Weir
to go on.
"The rest of them, 73,600, as I said, caught one of three trains." He tapped panels drawn in
carbon by the starts of the lines. "Very long trains not on the regular schedule, trains run by
transportation combines, but not paid for by Collectives, so they're not carrying normal travelers,
or Gastarbeiter for that matter. We still don't know who did pay for them, though, even
with access anshinkan. Data-spoors grew too faint even for the botfly, er, my agent. We didn't
have time to pursue it further."
He resisted a digression of some sort there. Instead, he mimed gathering up the rail-lines, then
following their union to its end. "The trains stopped here, in the middle of public land,
fey-banyan, owned by the continental Collective."
Interest stirred within Phoebe, a powerful thrust from her obsession diverting energy from healing
to thinking. "Are they still there?" she asked, her voice normal again.
"We know they haven't gone anyplace else." He reached back and tapped that ivory fleece around one
of the direvnya's scarlet circle. "No transactions in the Em-Deh since they left home. No
appearances in Beobachtung, at least up till ten kilo-seconds ago."
More than interest pricked Phoebe now. Fear unfurled, filling her torso with its scratchy wings.
"What happened then?"
Weir wriggled with chagrin. "We lost the Em-Deh." He glanced over at Kanpa. "We think Dain
knocked out my macready during his escape."
"No Em-Deh again." Her whisper had come back.
Kanpa spoke up, "We restored the direvnya right away. Alaxxchia sent your jury-rigged network back
into the air. It's the world we can't get to — again."
That settled her some. Good work re-used always did. But the ambiguous threat choked her insides
again. Are we really surrounded by seventy-thousand Gastarbeiterbande? The old name didn't
reassure her. She grappled after relief from this cascade of data.
"Any way your agent could have missed transactions on another continent?" she asked.
Weir shook his head. "No. Probably not, anyway."
"A glitch in accessing Popovich's trade database?"
"It's public, Phoebe. It's Mirnaya Direvnya. What could get in the way?"
Phoebe just raised an eyebrow above a wry smile.
Weir had the grace to blush. "In that case," he said, "the agent would flag its blind spots. Like
this." He pointed next to his knee. A flashing note in lemon warned about aging data. "We can't
do any better than that, and we have to act on what we've got."
Kanpa cleared his throat. "Fighters and monks go into seclusion. Any chance we've got several
thousand monks here?" With a weak wave of his hand, he dismissed his own joke. "If
Gastarbeiterbande came into town to stir up trouble, I'll bet their fellow players are
getting ready for something worse."
"Worse?" Phoebe asked around her growing fear.
"Sure, as in escalation." Weir faced her. "Either they were held in reserve, which means they're
without a mission now, or they're the next step in the plan."
"Like what?"
"If we only knew where they went after they got off the train. Even walking, they could've gone
pretty far in 10 days. All we know is they've never returned to civilization."
Phoebe stared at the blank opaline space that surrounded Ganj Dareh. She envisioned the fey-banyan
that actually filled that area with a rolling sea of honey-locust green. She remembered walks
under the surface of that sea, air filtered and tinted by the yellow-green, the ground largely
uncluttered, a soothing, remote feeling, as though she had been detached completely from the
demands of her Collective and her job. I haven't done that in a long time, she mused.
Suddenly, a ghost darted through her reverie, not a pale, diaphonous ghost, but a shadowy, dense
one. In an instant, it replicated, a staggered unfolding of images, blip, blip, blip, in all
directions. The ghosts eyed her, stark, white stares set in dark faces, then someone somewhere
shouted a command. The ghosts wheeled smartly and marched away from her, leaving her trapped
behind their lines, isolated, helpless. Unable to move, she watched as they surrounded Ganj Dareh,
then engulfed it, like an unstoppable tide of evil.
"Phoebe!" Weir was calling her again. "Time for a decision."
Phoebe clambered after physical reality, up out of that that dream-like substitute. She wasn't
really helpless, not like that, nor was her combine, nor was her direvnya. They could and would
fight. "We've still got tanglefog," she said. "And enough network to launch it. Our dreamsticks
just might come back on-line soon. We could mobilize the Collective, devise tactics for the
untrained and unarmed. We can barricade most of the paths, force the invaders into others, ambush
them there. They're pretty rough, I know, like Gastarbeiterbande, but they're just people.
Right?"
"No, Phoebe," Weir said. "You have to ask the Yojin Suru for help. I'm told they exist for just
these situations."
Phoebe snapped, "You haven't won yet! You're not anshin, never have been and if I can help it,
never will be, at least not here in my direvnya."
Weir took a step back, his mouth open to protest her assault, but empty of words.
Kanpa spoke up with a grin in his voice. "Anshin secret, Weir, tacticians only." Phoebe leaned
her gaze in his direction and caught his sidelong glance. He winked back.
"Then how do you know?" Weir said. "You're staff."
"Budget discussions while preparing our proposal. An empty slot, I'm afraid. Byukan-Hamil hasn't
paid dues for Yojin Suru in years."
"So they won't help here?"
Kanpa's eyes lost their twinkle. "They still might. How'd you hear of them?"
"An advisor."
Still angry, Phoebe demanded, "A chief of anshin? Broke his vow of secrecy over a consultant's
fee?"
"Over concern for Ganj Dareh." That seemed excuse enough for him. Maybe it was. Phoebe was no
longer sure. Weir continued, "Who are the 'Yojin Suru' anyway? The line went down before I could
ask."
"Border guards," Kanpa said.
Puzzled, Weir said, "Say again?"
"Border, boundary. Just a play on words. As I understand it, the Planetary Collective, in the
form of anshin chiefs, contracts with a combine to be ready for boundary conditions, those
circumstances that occur when society has reached a crisis in its adaptive abilities. The Yojin
Suru stop us from running off the edge."
"I understand!" Weir crowed. "I've always wondered about that. I mean, you take Yeibichai's
Pattern Language and apply it across the planet, with nestings of additions, subtractions, and
modifications, but all, more or less, leading society in the same direction. Logically, they
produce a society prepared to change. Every job on the planet comes open at least once a year.
Every contract lapses and restarts again only after a competitive cycle. Every person works or
doesn't according to his or her talents, interests, and inclinations. Work with this dan-wei for a
while and pay for a house and personal stuff. Then quit or lose a contract. Then you live in
gong-she while you find another combine — or the same one — or go back to school ... or just take
it easy for a while. It's like a carnival."
"Right!" Kanpa chorused, probably more eagerly than he should have.
"Kanpa!" Phoebe scolded.
"Really!" The Gatogrebok tactician pumped his hands insistently. "Life is like a midway at a
carnival. Everything comes from those booths along the midway. If you don't find what you want,
you can start your own. Or if you don't like the way someone runs his booth, you can wait till his
contract expires and take the job away from him. So you can be in a booth or not. Either way,
it's rough-and-tumble, a system that's always changing so it can always change. Yeibichai is one
big midway for combines."
"And the Yojin Suru—" Weir stared at Kanpa, then apparently encouraged, went on. "They're ...
border guards. Like you said! They handle those conditions that fall between the cracks, that
stir in the boundaries between patterns we ordinary folks know how to handle, like—" Sobering
suddenly, he waved at the map behind him, meaning the impending threat.
"Phoebe." Weir turned to her. "You must call them!"
"Surely it's not that bad," Phoebe equivocated. "Like I said before. We've got tangle—"
Weir snapped his head to challenge Kanpa. "Are you going to tell her or should I?"
"What?" Phoebe turned to Kanpa as well. Her head swam from the move.
Kanpa's face stirred as one emotion chased another away. "They've got guns, Phoebe, firearms, lots
of firearms. We don't stand a chance."
She drowned then, dragged under hot, salty water by her obsession. It thrashed its heavy tail
against her and demanded that she act. It took charge of her body, pouring energy into her
muscles, twitching them toward movement. It insisted that she rise and go forth to save
Ganj Dareh.
I cannot, she protested weakly. I am finished. I barely caught Gastarbeiterbande, and now zhuhndí
sends a much greater force against me. I'll fail, and in failing, I'll kill what I vowed to
protect. I can only serve by standing aside.
Go, her obsession commanded.
Phoebe made a fist, imagined a spear of facts. She twitched a wrist, envisioned slipping that
sharp reality up into the obsession's fat gut. She staggered back, visualized it jerk itself to
death, fighting that reality, but nevertheless succumbing to it — as she just had. She stared for
just a moment as her meaning of life shriveled down to a husk.
With a slight push, she surfaced and said, "Get my llevar."
Weir practically slapped the thing into her lap. It weighed more than anything she'd ever known.
She fumbled it open, then remembered. "No Em-Deh again," she protested to Weir's hovering face.
Anger twisted his brow and scorched his words. "I booked bandwidth on satellite Gatogrebok. It
expires in 300 seconds. Don't make me go back for more!"
Phoebe heard the words, knew what drove them. Budget, she thought almost wistfully. Never to
worry about budget again. A taste of relief enabled her to calmly say, "Emergency request for
meeting/can-be-seen with Yojin Suru."
In its typical nasal voice, Central responded, "Insufficient authority."
Phoebe rubbed her palm across the llevar's agent-for-identity. "Doyle Phoebe Heejanus, Chief of
Anshin, Ganj Dareh, Popovich. Refresh fiducia."
Central chimed compliance. Phoebe repeated her meeting request. Central repeated its refusal.
"Why not?" Phoebe demanded in her confusion.
"Imprimatur for all tacticians of anshin combines was modified to remove authority to contact Yojin
Suru."
"When?"
Central gave her a date five days earlier.
"By whom?"
"Jik Dain Bedlip!" Weir and Kanpa chorused along with Central. They grimly congratulated each
other with a look, then turned back to Phoebe.
"I'll stand down," Phoebe tried a different scenario. "Alaxxchia takes over. Simulate authority
then."
"Insufficient. Imprimatur inherent in tactician role remains insufficient."
Stymied, Phoebe looked around for help.
Weir demanded, "Hire me as your assistant, then resign."
Phoebe told Central to simulate that process — with the same result.
Kanpa had retreated into silence. She slid her gaze in his direction. His eyes glistened as he
gazed back. He didn't seem to know that she'd already given up everything in life; he only guessed
at her agony, wrenched himself with empathy. She tried to smile his tears away, but it didn't
work.
"Get fired," Weir said, less demanding now, more earnest, as though luck, as well as time, was
running through their fingers.
"Me?"
"Your combine. You're in default anyway. Do something to make it final. Call the Collective's
Chairman, curse him out, proposition him, anything so he'll cancel your contract in his
policyware. Then suggest that Ganj Dareh hire me, also officially."
"Hire you?" She fumbled after his meaning.
"Temporarily, until the selection process is complete. Tell him I'll just take over your
structure, but under Gatogrebok auspices, Gatogrebok policyware. Flush Byukan-Hamil completely.
Do it now! We have to give Yojin Suru time to react, and dawn will be here none too soon, and with
it, an invasion unlike anything this planet has ever seen. I just hope they're good enough to
handle it."
When you think that you've lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more. Phoebe
didn't have to visualize her pool of motivations. It sagged emptily within her. After this call,
her last one as Chief of Anshin, her life would also be completely empty, if it not completely
over.
She did it anyway.
