The Lotus Eaters Read Free

the lightning likewise lit two eyes. They were strange eyes and, to some, frightening. They watched the lightning, as they watched the struggles of the ships at sea. They watched as if curious but not involved.
    A primitive bird, extinct on its homeworld, landed on the balcony's railing in an effort to get under cover from the lashing rain. Half a moment later another bolt lit sky and eyes. Its light reflected from the eyes, making them seem as if they lit up of their own accord. The bird may have been primitive; it was not stupid. One look at the glowing eyes convinced it, Better to brave the storm than to sit here with those.
    * * *
    Patricio Carrera blinked two or three times against the bright blinding flash. Funny , he thought, for a half second there I thought I saw a trixie. Maybe I'm sicker in the head than I'd realized. Maybe . . .
    Ah, never mind. Not important.
    Little seemed very important to Carrera, of late. Little had, since he'd collapsed the year prior, a result of a combination of overwork and overwhelming guilt at having become at least a candidate for the title of "Greatest Single One Day Mass Murderer in Human History." This wasn't a title he wanted, though he thought it was one he might well deserve.
    Carrera looked down at his hands, thinking, first, Miserable dainty things , and then, How can I defile my wife with the touch of hands so stained with blood?
    Besides that questionable title, Carrera had many others: The Blue Jinn . . . Carnifex —the Butcher. Most still referred to him by his military title: Dux Bellorum , in Latin, or Duque , for short, in Latin's daughter, Spanish. And no one had ever so much as suggested that he resign his title and position as commander of the Legion del Cid.
    Though I should , he thought. That, or find a way to force myself to take up once more the duties that are plainly mine.
    Lightning flashed again, in the distance. It was another shot of ribbon lightning, which again lit from behind the clouds across the sky.
    That's what Hajar looked like . . . almost . . . in the last second before the fireball destroyed the camera I watched by. What did the people see—ninety-nine percent of whom, or more, were utterly innocent, I am sure—in that last second before the fire engulfed them? Poor sorry bastards.
    But did I have a choice, really? A valid one, I mean? The Salafi Ikhwan intended to nuke not one but a dozen cities. Yes, I captured their nukes before they could. But they could have gotten more . . . probably . . . eventually. And they'd have used them if they had them, of that there is no doubt at all.
    Now? Now they've no support. I nuked Hajar but they took the blame. And virtually everyone in the Moslem quarter of this world counts that as Allah's doing, his ultimate statement and command that terrorism is wrong. More practically, not one country in the world is loony enough, now, to give them shelter, on the chance they might bring in a nuke and allow it to detonate. A reputation for incompetence has hurt them more than any reputation for frightfulness.
    I saved tens of millions of people maybe. I killed a million, though, maybe more, for a certainty. And my hands still drip with blood. And I can't bring myself to touch my wife.
    * * *
    She was fairly tall for a woman of any race, but remarkably so for a woman of Balboa. In her stocking feet, Lourdes Nuñez Cordoba de Carrera, wife of Patricio Carrera, stood five feet, nine inches. In heels, which she usually avoided, she towered over her man.
    Like her husband's, Lourdes' eyes, too, were rare. In his case it was the color, and the dark blue circles about the irises that gave them a frighteningly penetrating quality . . . that, and their odd habit of seeming to glow under certain lights at certain angles. In hers, a gentle and beautiful golden-brown, it was the sheer size and shape that excited men and made women cringe with envy.
    Those huge and lovely golden-brown orbs remained open,