Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

are almost…transparent. As if we’re not really there. And you know how far we have to go.” He looked down at his plate, his mutilated food. Frowned. “I think I know someone in Starbright,” he said. “A drive jockey. Let me think a minute. Maybe she can help you get in on an apprentice program.” He shook his head. “I’ll have to make some calls.”
    “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
    Griffith waved a hand. “Don’t thank me yet. I don’t know if I can do anything.”
    “Griffith.” Steward felt an adrenaline touch on his nerves. Griffith looked up at his tone.
    “I want to know what happened on Sheol.”
    Griffith looked down at his hands. He shook his head. “It wouldn’t mean anything to you, buck.” His voice was low, his voice absorbed by the table, his crossed arms. “It’s something you’d have had to live through. I’m sorry, but—”
    “It’s important.”
    Griffith wiped his forehead with the back of an arm. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s not…possible.”
    Steward felt his breath going out of him. “That’s all right, man,” he said. Knowing it wasn’t. “If you can’t, you can’t.”
    Griffith shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I’ve got a sales meeting coming up. It’s gonna run all day.”
    “Want to get together tonight? Have some drinks?”
    “Can’t. I’m going to have to dine with a client tonight. Probably have to get him laid, too, the asshole.” He looked up, took a drag from his cigarette, and stubbed it out. There was an uncertainty in his watery eyes, and Steward found it odd—it was as if Griffith was about to say something against his will. He wondered if Griffith, too, was a clone, if the Alpha Griffith had died on Sheol and the Beta refused to talk about the war because he hadn’t been there.
    “Breakfast tomorrow?” Griffith asked.
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    “Here? Nine o’clock?”
    “Good.”
    Griffith slid out of the booth and gave a wave that looked almost like a salute. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and walked away. Steward glanced after him, looking carefully at the back of Griffith’s receding head.
    At the base of Griffith’s skull Steward could see the implant socket under the short hair, and he felt satisfaction at the certainty that this was the original Griffith, not a clone. The implant socket was an Icehawk thing, enabling a soldier to interface with his weapons, transport, and environment suit. A lot of people carried them, but a salesman for a software company wouldn’t need one: He’d be able to demonstrate his wares with a headset, not needing the extra fraction of a second the socket would provide. So Griffith still had the interface socket, that and the implant threads that jacked his reflexes and programmed them with martial arts and small-unit tactics.
    Steward watched Griffith as the man left. He could feel a high, his nerves stirring, connections being made in his head. Griffith was a pathway to something else, something he wanted.
    Griffith was going to lead him to his Alpha.

    However long he thought about it, things kept coming back to the Powers. They’d inhabited the planets where the Artifact War was fought; their return had ended the war. In the pictures Steward had seen, they hadn’t seemed at all attractive. Yet Griffith loved them; perhaps there was a reason for it. Steward accessed the library and read everything he could find. Though there was more than there had been in the hospital library, there still wasn’t much that wasn’t speculation. It was as if people who had met them preferred not to say anything concrete.
    “Powers” was a translation of the aliens’ name for themselves. Their own language was a combination of clicks and singsong mutterings that often dipped into the subsonic range: No human had ever come close to translating it in anything approaching its full idiom.
    The Powers had inhabited Sheol and a number of other planets that humanity had