Gwendy’s Final Task

He starts to rise, but she takes his arm and pulls him back down. In zero-g, it’s easy. “Help me get my head around this. One hypnotic trance and you just fall into line? I don’t believe it. You’re not that stupid. In fact, you’re not stupid at all.”

Winston probably knows she’s just trying to buy time, but he preens at the compliment anyway. Gwendy gives him her best wide-eyed tell-me-more look. It usually works in Senate committees (at least with men), and it works now.

“I have been back to Genesis many times,” he says. “That’s what I call my world. Nice, eh?”

“Very,” Gwendy says, doing the wide-eyed thing for all she’s worth.

“It’s real enough. Bobby—he says I’d never be able to pronounce his real name—has given me certain instructions for going there. I could go there now, if I liked. My visits are necessarily short, but once I give him—and his controllers—this box of yours, I’ll go there for good.” He gives her a goony smile that makes her doubt his sanity. “It’s going to be great.”

“A hallucination,” Gwendy persists. “Had to’ve been. This Bobby sold you a grander version of the Brooklyn Bridge.” She shakes her head. “I still can’t believe you fell for it.”

He smiles indulgently and reaches inside his shirt. He brings out a pendant on a silver chain. In the gold setting is a huge diamond. “From my mine,” he says. “I have others at my home in the Bahamas, some even bigger. This one is 40 karat. I had one of similar size appraised, first to make sure it was real and second to determine its worth. The Swiss jeweler who looked at it almost had a heart attack on the spot. He offered me a hundred and ninety thousand dollars, which means it’s probably worth twice or three times as much.”

He drops the pendant back inside his shirt. “Genesis is real enough, and when I’m there I’m young and virile. The women …” He wets his fat lips.

“No more panty stealing, I take it,” Gwendy says.

He gives her a glowering look, then actually laughs. “I suppose I deserve that. Don’t know why I told you. No—no more panty stealing.” He looks away from Gwendy, and she thinks that while he’s distracted she might be able to grab something and whack him on the head. Except everything is fastened down, and the idea of clonking someone hard enough to knock them out in zero-g conditions is ridiculous.

When he looks back at her, he’s wearing a rueful smile that’s almost likeable … or would be if he were not threatening her life and planning to steal the button box she’s been charged with guarding and ultimately disposing of.

“When Bobby took me that first time, I remembered something a teacher said in an Ancient History class I took in college. I didn’t want to take the damn thing, cut most of the classes and hired some grind to do my final paper, but that one thing stuck in my head. It was from an old Greek—I think he was a Greek—named Plutarch. Or maybe he was a Roman.”

“Greek,” Gwendy says. “Although he became a Roman.”

Winston looks annoyed at the interruption. “Whatever. This Plutarch wrote something about a conqueror named Alexander. I can’t remember the exact wording, but—”

Gwendy interrupts again. She likes interrupting him, and why not? He has not only interrupted her task, he’s threatening to permanently interrupt her life. “‘When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.’”

Instead of looking pissed off, Winston smiles so widely that the bottom half of his face almost disappears, and Gwendy thinks again that he’s insane. The prospect of having his own world, one where he can rule forever, has driven him over the edge. Maybe it would anybody.

“That’s it! Exactly! And I was like Alexander, Senator Peterson! I had no more worlds to conquer! I had reached my limit! And what did I have to look forward to? Growing older? Watching helplessly as I grew fatter, as my face began to wrinkle, as my body began to deteriorate? And my mind!” The smile becomes a nasty grin. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?”

Gwendy doesn’t take the bait. “For the sake of argument, let’s say that world exists, Gareth. Even if it does, you won’t get it. Not if you give them the button box.”

Winston’s grin fades. What replaces it is a look of narrow distrust. “What do you mean?”

“What I say. Give it to them and the world ends. If this Tower is as powerful as you say it is, all worlds end. Including yours, diamonds and all.”

He gives a scornful laugh. “Why would these people—Bobby’s people—do that? They’d die along with everyone and everything else.”

“I think … because Bobby’s people, those who pull his strings like he pulled yours, are the lords of chaos.” And then, in a voice she doesn’t recognize as her own, Gwendy cries, “Let the Tower fall! Rule, Discordia!”

Winston recoils as if that voice were a hand that had struck him. “Are you insane?”