Socket 3 - The Legend of Socket Greeny (3 page)

“I see. And you weren’t with them?” I peered
over at him, his golden eyes blinking. “That wasn’t you, the red
grimmet out front, sticking your tongue out to get the biggest
laugh? That wasn’t you?”

His eyes darted back and forth. A thought
began to form in my head, in response to what I said, and then he
shot off to join his pack in a chase for the tag.

“You need to do something about the grimmets,
Spindle,” I said. “They were very disruptive this morning.”

“Me?” Spindle put his hand to his chest.
“They will not listen to me, Master Socket. They only listen to
you.”

“Well, then, we’re screwed.”

The kids zoomed around the perimeter and came
up our side. They held out their hands as they passed and I slapped
them. Around the field they went again, a colorful cloud of
grimmets nipping at their butts.

“Has my mother called?” I asked.

“She left a message that she will call in two
days. She is very busy with Congress today and tomorrow.” A
smattering of dark colors blotted Spindle’s faceplate. “The
Commander is not pleased you met with Pike this morning without
prior consent.”

“I figured he wouldn’t be thrilled.”

“He would like to remind you that premonitory
visions are to be immediately reported.”

“He has a full report.”

“He would like to emphasize
immediately.
He also forbids future meetings with Pike
without his foreknowledge. The Commander is very reluctant—”

“I know how the Commander feels, Spindle.
Trust me, there’s no danger. Pike can no longer hurt me anymore
than you.”

Fact is, could anyone? I was the only
telekinetic alive. I was almost seventeen, but I was not a child. I
didn’t like being treated like one.

The kids were coming around, again, this time
with an empty jetter in tow. They pulled Spindle onto the field.
The grimmets hovered over, cheering, casting a dark shadow over us,
blotting out the rising sun. They helped shove Spindle on the empty
jetter. Spindle’s eyelight circled around his head. I nodded. He
was off with the kids, tossing the tag back and forth.

I turned my back on the tagghet field to go
inside Garrison Mountain, back to my office, wishing I had two
lives. That way, I might make a difference.

It was two days before I got back to the
tagghet field. I was in the office the entire time, building mock
scenarios, analyzing programs, having meetings by projection. My
meals were brought to me and I’d experienced forty different
countries through the office’s magical transformations when, in
reality, I never left the room.

The kids were begging me to come watch them;
even Spindle suggested I take some time to come out, they were much
improved. So I got outside and immediately felt the difference
between fresh air and filtered air. Besides, the molding office had
a certain taste, something that was fake and empty that penetrated
every object and hung beneath every fragrance. I watched and
clapped and slapped their hands as they showed off their best
tagghet skills.

I took the long way back to the office,
inside the mountain and down a wide hallway that curved left. Tall,
rectangular windows were along the right spotting the floor with
stretched boxes of sunlight on the floor. All of this stuff was
new, an attempt to transform Garrison Mountain from a dreary tomb
to something open and inviting.

I gazed at the wide boulder-field below that
separated the mountain and the transportation wormhole on the far
side, connecting our remote existence to the rest of the world. It
used to be impossible terrain to cross, unless you had something
that could hover. But now there was a road that dipped and curved
through the giant rubble.

Girls in school uniforms, chattering in
Japanese, came around the hallway bend. Their teachers tried to
keep them together like shepherds. John Tackleton, their tour
guide, was trying to keep up. He was a civilian, recruited a few
months earlier to lead public tours through the Garrison.

Not only did the public have access to the
Paladin facilities, they used the wormhole to transport back and
forth from around the world. In fact, there were discussions about
opening wormholes for public transportation, but that wasn’t easy.
To tear a hole in space-time required an enormous amount of psychic
energy. Much of the Paladins’ efforts went to just maintaining our
own network. It would be decades before something could be done for
the public. But the talks were in the works, and that had never
even been considered before. Much like field trips.

The children ran to the windows, their shiny
black hair bouncing. They ran around me like I was nothing more
than a pillar. They pointed across the field and shouted about the
wormhole. That was their favorite part of the trip, so far: one
second they were in Tokyo and next they were here. And the weird
feeling in their stomachs when they crossed over was like the
world’s tallest roller coaster ride that lasted all of a second.
Wormhole transportation was never that fun, but we changed that,
too. They said this in Japanese, but I understood. The words may be
different, but thoughts and emotions were universal.

They ran for the steps and out of sight, on
their way to the Preserve where they would forget all about the
wormhole. The tour guide would tell them about all the great
research the Paladin Nation was conducting in the Preserve and all
the species of plants and animals it supported. Those kids wouldn’t
hear a thing once the grimmets arrived.

Word about the grimmets had spread across the
world. The tours came to learn about the inner workings of the
Paladin Nation, but it was the grimmets they came to see. Monkeys
and otters couldn’t compete with grimmets on their best day. In
public, they’d already manufactured stuffed grimmets with wiry
tails that kids hung from their book bags. They came in all
different colors and people lined up to buy the newest release.
Collect them all!

My footsteps dented the pliable floor of my
office and the walls swirled with color, shifting and molding
shapes from the floor and ceiling. A bed developed at my right and
an entertainment center to the left. A large patio formed with
folding doors thrown wide open. A cool, salty breeze blew
inside.

My mother lay on the lounger on the balcony
overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Her snores came in mild waves. I
gently touched the railing. The resort was built right on the
northern California cliffs, overhanging the tide that crashed on
ship-eating rocks.

“Socket.” Mother wiped the corner of her
mouth. “I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

“Nice place.”

She pushed her cropped hair behind her ear
where it didn’t stay. The same haircut she always had, but now with
kinky strands of gray. She took a deep breath and stretched. “The
view is fantastic.”

We remained quiet, listening to the ocean
speak. We did that often, just sit together without speaking.

“I see you’re taking leave in a few days,”
she said.

“Chute’s award ceremony.” I looked over my
shoulder. “She’s Tagghet’s Most Valuable Player, you know.”

“Streeter going to be there?”

“He better be. Chute will skin him if he’s
not.”

“I just thought with his new girlfriend, he
might get… distracted.”

Streeter found new love, a girl just as smart
but twice as pretty. He should just propose now.

“You’re coming back to the Garrison
tomorrow?” I asked.

“No.” She slowly got up and stood next to me
at the railing. She was thousands of miles away, but I sensed her
exhaustion as if she was right next to me. “California is
aggressively pursuing a Paladin-sponsored education/conference
center, but they need funding. It would be a great outreach for our
integration program, but there’s a lot of opposition from the
government. Lots of suspicion.”

“Who can blame them?”

“Yes, well, I need to convince them our
policy of secrecy is a thing of the past and we’re genuinely
interested in sharing our knowledge.”

“They’re not buying it?”

“They haven’t seen what we have to offer. Our
advancements in health care alone will convince them.” She drank
from a water bottle and patted my hand. Her palm was warm and soft.
“By the way, your Orphan program is doing quite well.”

I hated that name, but the
Displaced Youth
Program
wasn’t catching on.

We talked about how many more kids we were
planning to take on, how we could expand the program to the rest of
the training facilities and, of course, get the word to the public
on what a great job we were doing. I hated public relations, that
was Mother’s job. Everything we did, she had to find a way to tell
the public. Television even started carrying the Paladin Network, a
twenty-four hour news station that exclusively covered us. She was
a weekly regular.

“I’m scheduled for my wormhole trip in about
a week.”

“Everyone does it,” she said. “You
nervous?”

“I’m not doing jumping-jacks.” I drummed a
short rhythm on the railing, watching waves crash below.

“I can’t do anything to get you out of it, if
that’s what you’re thinking,” Mother said.

“No, that’s not it at all. I’m just wondering
why I need to go. Clearly there’s a million things here I can be
doing. I can’t imagine why I’d ever be sent off-planet, so what’s
the point?”

“You sound nervous.”

I glanced at her. She was serious. Then I
realized, she was right. I was resisting some nervous tension
inside me. Why was I being like this? It was just a trip, get it
over with and be done with it and move on. Stop being a baby. But
even acknowledging that feeling didn’t make it go away.

“Look, I’m not nervous,” I said, laughing
nervously. “Okay, I’m nervous.”

She laughed, too. I told her what I was
feeling and she listened without responding. Maybe there was a good
reason I was hesitant, I just didn’t understand it yet. My gut
feelings were often on the mark.

“I don’t know.” I spit over the railing and
watched it disappear in the swirling wind. “Maybe it’s as simple as
not wanting to go through that wormhole.”

“It’s not comfortable.”

“It feels like your spleen is getting
squeezed out your ass, I’m told.”

She grunted, pushed her short brown hair
behind her ear. She’d never been off-planet, but she’d heard the
stories. No one enjoyed the ride. No one.

A cruise ship moved from the left, the deck
dotted with brightly dressed vacationers. I wondered if the
party-goers were looking back at the shore.

“I read your report about the vision,” she
said. “About Pike.”

“Not a happy ending, huh.”

“What’s your feeling? Does it have
merit?”

I squeezed the railing. The quality of
visions sometimes indicated their likelihood. When they were hazy,
it was suspect, probably due to unforeseen variables. Even the
weather could alter a vision, make someone stay at home instead of
walk across the street and get hit by a truck. But when they were
fully detailed, well, the odds were good.

“The vision was… solid.” I swallowed hard. I
hated to say that.

“Hmm.” She nodded, thinking. “His security
will be re-examined. Relocation may be considered.”

“And maybe that’s when he escapes.”

The future was tricky. Perhaps if I never had
the vision, he sits in his cell until the end of time. But then I
have a vision and there’s a relocation because of it and that’s
when he escapes. Self-fulfilling prophecy. It was much easier when
I didn’t know these things.

“Have you opened to related visions?” she
asked. “Something that might clarify the event?”

Opening to visions meant trying to have one,
but that never worked. They came on their own. I wasn’t controlling
them. But why did I have them at all? Was there some intelligent
force deciding what to show me?

“There’s nothing,” I answered.

“Report any new visions, no matter how
trivial.” She watched the ship head for deeper waters, her thoughts
coming in all directions.

“I better go.”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “I have a
dinner meeting, tonight.”

“A date?”

“No.” She laughed. Anything personal like
that was funny to her. “All business. Work never ends.”

“It could, you know.”

“And then what?”

Work was just a word, she once told me. What
she did was her life. Why would she attend to anything else?

Her eyes were green. She looked at mine, like
she often did. Like she couldn’t believe how big her boy had
gotten, as if she wanted to tell me to buckle my seat belt and make
sure I looked both ways before I crossed the street. That
mother-essence was strong in her, but sometimes it disappeared and
she felt like a stranger staring at me, just an employee of the
Paladin Nation, like she suddenly remembered something that chased
the mother-essence away and I was all alone in this world. A
stranger to everyone. Just like Pike said. Like he knew.

The ship was small on the horizon.

“I’ll call when I get back from my trip,” I
said. “Tell you how they stuffed my spleen back inside me.”

She smiled and patted my hand. Fatigue
bunched in her shoulders, and then it faded. The details of the
room washed away. I dropped my arms. The darkness of my office was
cold. I hurried to the leaper, urged it to take me to the tagghet
field where I could see real sunlight and breathe real air.

The days went by in a blur of commitments,
but it still felt like my day off would never arrive. I was
counting the minutes and there just always seemed to be more. But,
finally, the week ended. Finally, I’d see Chute.

The parking garage was still a dank,
stalactite-riddled cave. The dampness was in stark contrast to the
rest of the Garrison, where the air was filtered and 85-degrees. A
black car was waiting for me with the door open. I started to get
in—