Gibbon's Decline and Fall (41 page)

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning Carolyn heard Sophy saying very clearly, “Carolyn. Wake up.”

Carolyn sat up suddenly, all at once aware of the darkness around her, the breathing of the dogs on the floor, the light curtains moving almost imperceptibly in the light of a late moon. It hadn't been a dream that had wakened her; it had been a definite voice saying sensible words. She held her breath, struggling to hear. She couldn't hear anything, but still she knew there was someone moving outside her window. And there'd been someone in the house.

She eased herself over the edge of the bed and sat there, pajama clad, reaching for the drawer pull in the bedside table, feeling for the flat chill of the automatic at the back of it. Hector sensed her motion and groaned, turning over, half opening one eye. She could see the reflected light, a tiny mirror, blinking moonlight at her. “Shhh,” she said.

His eyes opened wide; his head came up, ears up, listening as she was listening. When she got to her feet and moved toward the door, he moved with her, silent, stepping over Fancy and Fandango as though they were inanimate lumps in the path. They didn't move, were not aware.

Her door was shut. She eased it open, laying her hand on Hector's shoulder. He stayed with her as she moved silently through the kitchen, as she tested the outside door, still tightly locked. They went the other way, back down the hall past the bedroom, toward the open door of Hal's study.

They were in the study doorway when all hell broke loose outside: a bay like the Hound of the Baskervilles; growling, yelling, a receding pother of animal and man. Carolyn stumbled toward the door but arrived on the scene of battle too late to see the conflict. Carlos's brothers, bare-chested, holding
up their trousers, sprinted toward the sound that came from outside the new gate: a revving engine, spinning wheels. They were too late. The car sped off when they were only halfway down the drive. When they returned, Leonegro was beside them, carrying a sizable piece of denim, which he shook like a rat, growling.

She said, “What a good dog!” Leonegro had to be part mastiff. One of those Italian mastiffs that end up weighing close to two hundred pounds. He wasn't any taller than a Great Dane, but he was much heavier, with a head like a trip hammer and a loose, heavily furred skin that looked designed for battle.

“Where did you get him?” she asked Fidel, forcing her voice to remain at a sensible level.

“My father in Mesico, he gib him to me. He was onny so big,
como un' chivito.
”

“He got bigger.”

“He is bery espensib to feed,” said Fidel, with a sideways look at her.

She swallowed deeply. “If you'll get that piece of cloth away from him, I'll buy him some dog food. Unless he'd rather have half a dozen live goats.”

“Dog food is good.”

The huge dog looked up at her and grinned a dog grin, tongue flopping out to clean his muzzle. Dog food would be fine, the grin said. In ten- or twenty-pound lots. Fidel managed to get the cloth away from him and gave it to Carolyn. It had blood on it, not a lot. If the prowler hadn't been maimed, he'd at least been punctured.

She gathered her robe around her, feeling the weight of the handgun in the pocket, as she went back into the study.

Hal, from the hallway, asked, “Is this going to be a daily thing?” He took the stained fragment from her, looking at it closely, turning it, sniffing it. “I think we'll send this to Mike. Be nice to have something to do a DNA match on, just in case.”

“Whatever,” she said, depressed. The envelope between the books was still there. She drew it out and opened it, knowing before the flap came up that it was empty. Even Leonegro had missed the incoming, though he'd been in time to pursue the outgoing.

“Fredo talked,” she said.

“Maybe he just mentioned it to his partner.”

“Then his partner talked.”

“Lots of law-enforcement types belong to the Alliance, Carolyn.”

She dropped into the old leather chair and shuddered, unable to stop. This had been no bungling teenager. Some very skillful person had been in here, and how had he managed that?

Hal was asking himself the same question. Two minutes' search turned up a small round hole cut in the glass of one window, near the window latch. “Two days later we'd have had the place wired. Even now, if I hadn't been looking, I'd never have seen it.”

She sighed. “If I hadn't been looking, I wouldn't have known the envelope was empty. I wouldn't have been looking if something hadn't wakened me.”

“What?”

“Sophy, who has quit playing sheep and is now playing guard dog!”

He raised his eyebrows. “A protective phantom? Good for her! You realize it could have been months before we knew anyone had been here.”

“Well, no. I'd have checked the envelope sooner than that.”

“Come on back to the big bed. You don't want to be alone.”

She didn't want to be alone. She went with him, snuggled up against him, heard the dog's claws rattle across the brick floor on their way to the rug, where they turned around and around before settling. Hal's breathing became calm and steady. She lay there, warm and presumably safe, yet unable either to rest or to sleep. Shadowy prowlers edged along her consciousness, making sudden sorties that startled her awake. At six she gave up, eased herself out of the bed, and followed the dogs to the kitchen.

Carlos came in as she was fixing coffee, handed her the daily paper, and said, “You got peoples out there in the road.”

“What kind of people?”

“With signs. Much yelling when I climb over the new gate.” He sounded slightly hurt as he said, “You din gib me a key.”

“You weren't here when they gave me the keys, Carlos. There's one hanging by the kitchen door with your name on it. Put the dogs in the pen, will you, on your way out?”

She fetched binoculars from her bedroom and took a look at the people by the gate. There were about a dozen, wearing flimsy, windblown tabards that identified the Army of God. The signs they carried, obviously prepared for some other contingency, didn't make much sense in their present context. Evidently the demonstration had been hastily assembled. And why?

Hal came in, yawning. While having coffee and breakfast and reading the paper, they looked out at dark clouds, driven by high winds, and counted the cars that passed, only five in the next two hours. People with jobs were already at work, and the neighbors didn't need to use this stretch of road at all. There were a dozen ways to reach the highway without passing this place, and she was sure the grapevine had suggested to everyone that they do precisely that.

Hal remarked, “We could clear them out of there. The new harassment law's specific about that.”

“I know. But why waste our time? What would be the point? You always told me the Army of God is made up of rank-and-file zealots, interchangeable mob-components, spitters, and stone throwers.”

“Even mob-components can be dangerous. It's good the alarm guys will be here to finish wiring the house this afternoon.”

The men showed up about eleven, just as the picketers were departing. With no audience, with rain squalls passing through every few minutes and grit-laden winds gusting up to forty and fifty miles per hour, the Army of God had had enough.

The security men worked through the afternoon. As he was leaving that evening, the foreman commented to Carolyn, “I hate to tell you, or maybe you know. Your phone is bugged.”

“My phone!”

“The one in that office there, and all the extensions. It's got a real good little gadget hooked up where the line comes into the house. You want me to remove it?”

He seemed sympathetic about it, but only slightly curious. For him it was all-routine, she supposed. In his world people spied on people all the time. Carolyn shook her head slowly. “No. Leave it. I'd rather find out who did it, and I can do that best by leaving it in place.”

“You're sure?”

“I believe so. That's not the line I use much, anyhow. Would you check the other phone for me?”

“I only saw one line—”

“I know. The other one was the original house phone fifty years ago, before they put in the new cables. It comes into the back of the house from across the river.”

He checked the phone in the room Carolyn was using and declared it clean, then sold her a little gadget that would tell her if anyone fooled with it. When he left, she sat staring at the needle on the dial, musing for a long time. How long ago had the house phones been bugged? During the visit that Leonegro had almost put an end to? Or before that? When the spotty-faced kid had broken in? He could have installed the gadget, then decided to try a break-in. Possibly. What had she said over that phone during the last few days? Not much. There'd been the call from Jessamine. She'd said what? Libido epidemic, something. Would the mysterious phone bugger be interested in the fact she knew there was such a thing? She'd talked about Sophy's still being around. And she'd had a call from an old friend in Chicago who'd wanted information on the Santa Fe Opera. Did the bugger care about that? And they'd called Mike Winter, at the FBI! Where had Hal called from?

Her throat loosened after a moment. Hal had made the call from her bedroom phone. And why hadn't she herself thought of being bugged? Out of desire not to appear paranoid, perhaps. She'd been aware of danger, but too self-consciously diffident to take strong action!

No more, she promised herself, blood hammering painfully in her temples. No more.

Stace told Luce about the epidemic when he got home from work Tuesday night.

After a long silence he licked his lips. “How long has it been going on?”

“Mom said maybe for two or three years. But only recently everywhere. Like that curve, you know, the one that starts out shallow and all of a sudden goes through the top of the graph.”

“An asymptote,” he murmured. “Once you're halfway, you're as good as there.” He shook his head in disbelief.

She said, “Somebody'd better be figuring out what's happened before it's too late to make babies anymore.”

He laughed, a hacking gasp, without humor. “It's like hard science fiction.” He gestured upward, at his tightly packed bookshelves. “You got a problem? Somebody better figure it out, maybe build a machine to solve it. You got a situation? Somebody'll invent something to handle it. That's the plot of a thousand stories. Like the Manhattan Project, back during World War Two. Or NASA, putting a man on the moon.”

“Luce.…”

“You know, Stace. I'm part of a generation of kids, boys mostly, that was raised to believe there's no problem we can't solve; that somebody—some elite—will always come up with something. Population's outgrowing food supply? Someone will think of something. Got an epidemic? Someone will find a way to cure it. We don't need to change
people
so long as
somebody
can come up with a technical fix!”

Her lips twisted, almost a sneer. “Of course you mean someone
else?
”

“Oh, yeah, sure. It's got to be somebody else, some elite. The people who create the problem won't solve it. Maybe they could, but they won't. Miners and manufacturers and lumbermen believe destroying the earth is acceptable because it means jobs. Every mommy and daddy thinks it's other people who are overpopulating the world, not their third and fourth and fifth kids. Half the world's species are extinct; the rest soon will be. Not their worry. Someone else has to solve things.”

“But, my God, Luce. It does have to be somebody else. I can't solve problems like that. We can't.”

“I know,” he whispered. “I knew in my gut it was something like this! I knew! All of us, we've got ourselves into a mess, so we're expecting somebody else to get us out. But what if it's like AIDS? What if they can't?”

So far, at least, they couldn't. Luce was quite right. Around the world a thousand labs went on the equivalent of a wartime footing, around-the-clock shifts doing genetic analysis, attempting to determine what had happened to mankind. Tight-lipped people everywhere were asking the same questions. Pathologists were doing exhaustive studies of every dead body they could lay hands on, looking for difference. There were some obvious changes. Women's breasts had shrunk, leaving only gentle curves to indicate femininity. External genitalia,
both male and female, were much smaller. Women's hips and thighs had become less fleshy. Though neither ovaries nor testes showed any signs of atrophy, neither were they making reproductive cells, and erectile tissue no longer functioned. Men previously bald were now growing hair. If there were brain changes, they were too small to be easily detected in persons living or dead. Was it a virus? A retrovirus? Was it a genetic change? A spontaneous mutation? In response to what? Had individuals changed hormonally, biologically, chemically? To find genetic changes, current men would have to be compared to their former selves, but full genetic inventories did not exist for their former selves. There were, however, lots of men and a few women in tanks. Some of them were biopsied, then wakened, then assayed again a few weeks later, but answers could not be expected to come quickly. With all those allelic variations, one's genome might be quite eccentric and still be within the range of normalcy. Even with computers, comparing total genomes could take one hell of a long time and then yield only equivocal results.

Hormone replacement was tried, without success. Recipients had serious, life-threatening allergic reactions to testosterone or estrogen. Whoever, whatever, was playing with humanity was at least one move ahead.

While the laboratory staffs sweated and cursed, most of the world's people either didn't know or pretended not to. Those who suspected were tiptoeing through their days, hoping they were wrong. Some, the less noticing among humankind, those for whom sex had always been a sometime thing, thought they might be suffering from a touch of flu or a lack of sleep, a little indigestion, a fit of depression, each believing himself alone in that regard. Some, for whom sex had been a duty, felt relieved that the duty was no longer expected. One stand-up comic skated perilously close to mentioning it on nationwide TV, only to be shackled and led off by federal marshals, off camera.