Blue Mars(257)

“Did the Muslim Brotherhood often have internal conflicts this severe?”

“At that time they did. But why on that night, I don’t know. Someone set them on each other. It was as if everyone had suddenly gone crazy.”

Sax felt his stomach tighten. Then he felt chilled, as if the ventilation system had let in the air of the cold morning outside. The little tent town in the vids was Nicosia. They were talking about the night John Boone had been killed. Smadar was watching the vids, asking questions. Zeyk was being recorded. Now he looked at Sax, nodded a greeting. “Russell was there also.”

“Were you,” Smadar said, looking at Sax speculatively.

“Yes.”

It was something Sax had not thought about in years; decades; a century, perhaps. He realized that he had never been back to Nicosia again, not even once since that night. As if he had been avoiding it. Repression, no doubt. He had been very fond of John, who had worked for him for several years before the assassination. They had been friends. “I saw him attacked,” he said, surprising them all.

“Did you!” Smadar exclaimed. Now Zeyk and Nazik and Ursula were staring at him as well, and Marina had joined them.

“What did you see?” Smadar asked him, glancing briefly up at Zeyk’s brain image, flickering away in its silent storm. This was the past, just such a silent flickering electric storm. This was the work they were embarked on.

“There was fighting,” Sax said slowly, uneasily, looking into the hologram image as if into a crystal ball. “In a little plaza, where a side street met the central boulevard. Near the medina.”

“Were they Arab?” the young woman asked.

“Possibly,” Sax said. He closed his eyes, and though he could not see it he could somehow imagine it, a kind of blind sight. “Yes, I think so.”

He opened his eyes again, saw Zeyk staring at him. “Did you know them?” Zeyk croaked. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

Sax shook his head, but this seemed to shake loose an image, black and yet there. The vid showed the dark streets of Nicosia, flickering with light like the thought in Zeyk’s brain. “A tall man with a thin face, a black mustache. They all had black mustaches, but his was longer, and he was shouting at the other men attacking Boone, rather than at Boone himself.”

Zeyk and Nazik were looking at each other. “Yussuf,” Zeyk said. “Yussuf and Nejm. They led the Fetah then, and they were worse about Boone than any of the Ahad. And when Selim appeared at our place later that night, dying, he said Boone killed me, Boone and Chalmers. He didn’t say I killed Boone; he said Boone killed me.” He stared again at Sax: “But what happened then? What did you do?”

Sax shuddered. This was why he had never returned to Nicosia, never thought about it: on that night, at the critical moment, he had hesitated. He had been afraid. “I saw them from across the plaza. I was a distance away, and I didn’t know what to do. They struck John down. They pulled him away. I— I watched. Then— then I was in a group running after them, I don’t know who the rest were. They carried me along. But the attackers were dragging him down those side streets, and in the dark, our group . . . our group lost them.”

“There were probably friends of the assailants in your group,” Zeyk said. “There by plan, to lead you the wrong way in the pursuit.”

“Ah,” Sax said. There had been mustached men among the group. “Possibly.”

He felt sick. He had frozen, he had done nothing. The images on the screen flickered, flashes in darkness, and Zeyk’s cortex was alive with microscopic colored lightning.

“So it was not Selim,” Zeyk said to Nazik. “Not Selim, and so not Frank Chalmers.”

“We should tell Maya,” Nazik said. “We must tell her.”

Zeyk shrugged. “She won’t care. If Frank did set Selim on John, and yet someone else actually did the deed, does that matter?”

“But you think it was someone else?” Smadar said.

“Yes. Yussuf and Nejm. The Fetah. Or whoever it was setting people on each other. Nejm, perhaps. . . .”

“Who is dead.”

“And Yussuf as well,” Zeyk said grimly. “And whoever started the rioting that night. . . .” He shook his head, and the image overhead quivered slightly.

“Tell me what happened next,” Smadar said, looking down at her screen.

“Unsi al-Khan came running into the hajr to tell us Boone had been attacked. Unsi . . . well, anyway, I went with some others to the Syrian Gate, to see if it had been used. The Arab method of execution at that time was to throw you out onto the surface. And we found that the gate had been used once and no one had come back in by it.”