Part 27 (1/2)

”You can't,” the woman said in a clipped tone. ”You will simply have to live with the errors you have made, just as all of us must.”

James dropped Annie's hand abruptly and leaped to his feet, facing his erstwhile mistress. His face twisted with anger. ”I cannot accept that,” he said sharply. ”I cannot. Fifty million of my people died because of me. I refuse to accept it as unalterable truth. I will find a way to change history, or die trying.”

Chapter 22.

While James and Gar leaned over a computer screen, intent on the scenes it flashed, Annie sat uncomfortably in her chair, gazing at the lovely view. She was aware of the older woman, staring at her, and at last she turned and gave the woman a cold look.

”Do I look that strange to you'”

The woman blinked, then her mouth turned up in a wry, icy smile.

”Actually, you look precisely like one of us. That is the reason I am surprised.”

”I am just as human as you are,” Annie said irritably.

”I hardly think so. You come from the time of the Plagues, a time when humans died in great numbers,

when humans'” She shuddered. ”Killed each other.”

”The Plagues'” Annie repeated, wondering if the woman thought she was from the Dark Ages.

The woman shrugged. ”So many of you died of various infectious diseases.”

”Like AIDS'”

”AIDS, SARS, various cancers ' So many people died that some of the cities were left virtually

abandoned.”

”Is that when people started living underground'”

The woman shrugged. ”The s.h.i.+ft to underground living happened over many decades. The first country

to move underground was j.a.pan. Living on a tiny island as they did, they were running out of land rapidly. They built underground cities, and within twenty years most of the populace had left the dying above ground cities. The rest of the world began to follow. Within a century virtually everyone lived below ground.”

”Except you'” Annie said.

The woman frowned. ”I don't understand.”

Annie turned her head and waved at the window. ”Obviously you don't' you don't'”

She stammered to a halt as the view out the huge window changed abruptly, showing a pristine ocean, sawgra.s.s waving in the breeze, breakers cras.h.i.+ng against a white, sandy beach. Seagulls whirled, and big brown pelicans flew low across the water, their huge wings flapping in a ponderous rhythm.

Annie immediately felt incredibly stupid. Like a barbarian, in fact. ”It's just a video,” she said. It was a h.e.l.l of a video, perfectly clear and entirely convincing, but it obviously wasn't real.

”It's a real-time holovideo, to be precise,” the woman said. ”People need to see the outdoors. Some few even feel the need to go outdoors, although most of us are happy simply viewing nature from a distance. This way, the Earth stays clean, the wildlife remains undisturbed, but we can still admire our world. It's the perfect solution.”

It sounded horrible to Annie, although she figured it would be tactless to say so. ”You have cameras outside'”

The woman nodded. ”Very small and in.o.btrusive cameras, disguised so they look entirely natural. I doubt there is a place on the surface you can go without surveillance.”

”That's too bad,” Annie said.

The woman's white eyebrows shot up to her hairline. ”You were planning on going outside'”

The shock in her voice made it clear that going outside was considered, if not entirely bizarre, at least extremely peculiar. ”It seems like the best place to go,” Annie admitted.

James glanced back over his shoulder, and Annie realized he'd been listening. She was surprised, having thought he was entirely engrossed in viewing the video on the computer monitor. But then, he was almost certainly capable of doing two things at once.

”The outside here is extremely dangerous,” he said. ”There are a great many predators.”

If the surface had been entirely undisturbed for a century or more, that made a lot of sense. Annie bit her lip, thinking of wolves, cougars, and bears. And that was a.s.suming this was North America. There were even more dangerous predators on other continents. They could easily run into a pride of lions, or a Siberian tiger. ”Wild animals usually avoid humans,” she said at last.

”Most animals on the surface have never seen humans. We cannot a.s.sume they will fear us. They may regard us as a very appetizing dinner. Of course, they would be wrong in my case. But not in yours.”

Annie nodded, realizing he was right. There was another concern as well. For all she knew they were in'or under'Alaska, or someplace equally inhospitable. They could be underneath Antarctica for all she knew. James was right--venturing out on the surface would be very foolhardy. Yet the alternative might be worse. ”But we're not safe here, either. Is there anyplace we can go'”

James shook his head. ”Every underground compartment is connected by the Gates.”

”Those elevator thingies'”

”They are actually spatial distortions,” the older woman said.

Annie looked back at her, remembering the woman was a scientist. ”Spatial distortions'”

The woman sighed, as if she were an idiot. Maybe she was an idiot, here. ”Do you know what a spatial distortion is'”

Annie thought frantically. It sounded like something from Star Trek. Or Einstein. Unfortunately, what she knew about Einstein's theories could be written on a postage stamp with room left to spare. ”Uh, not exactly.”

”s.p.a.ce can be curved by a small, dense ma.s.s, effectively connecting two different places in s.p.a.ce-time,” the other woman said in a pedantic, high-school science teacher sort of voice. ”Once we realized how simple it was to curve s.p.a.ce, it was an easy matter to utilize distortions in order to connect s.p.a.ces.”

Annie swallowed, realizing they were discussing the eerie swirling s.p.a.ce James had convinced her to step into. Despite herself, she was impressed by the knowledge that these people could actually twist s.p.a.ce somehow in order to move quickly across long distances. But the phenomenon still creeped her out. ”Can't you people just use trains'”