Authors: Finder
"Am I interrupting anything?" I asked from the doorway.
She scrunched the corners of her mouth, and beckoned me in. When I got within whispering distance, she said, "Are you having fun questing?"
I thought about lying, and rejected it. "No. It's godawful. Are you getting well?"
"I believe I am, my dear. I know I
look
devilish, but it's always worst in the evening. And if I don't recover, I'll will you the bike, and we'll both feel like characters out of a Richard Thompson song."
"That's not funny," I told her, a little more sharply than I'd meant to.
"It will be, eventually."
There wasn't anything much to say, but I didn't want to go yet, and I thought she didn't want me to leave.
Finally she said, "Is Rico bullying you cruelly?"
"No. She's out in the hall, by the way."
"Does that mean you only said 'no' because she might be listening?"
I shook my head. "This isn't much easier for her than it is for me. For about the same reasons."
"How is Linn?" she asked, because she understood what I'd meant.
"Pretty crummy, from the sound of it. I haven't seen him."
"Will he die?"
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There;
she'd said the damn word. "I don't know. Nobody's fi
gured out yet how to tell in advance who
gets the lucky
numbers." My voice sounded harsh in my ears.
She nodded once, her head settling deeper into the pillow. "The influenza epidemic of 1918."
"The who?"
The Ticker smiled, which made her look tired. "It's a piece of the World's history. Ask one of the Daughters. They're the ones who explained it to me—one of them. I can't keep them all straight." She frowned and closed her eyes.
I frowned, too, because not keeping people straight was such an odd thing to hear about Tick-Tick. "I guess I should go. Gotta get some food, and go back to the bloodhound job. Wolfboy's gone to take care of business, but he'll be back tomorrow."
Her eyes flew open, silver and red-rimmed. "Must you go?" Then she made a scornful noise. "Yes, of course you must. Ignore me, my chick, I am in a weakened state. And it's time for my nap. Orient—"
Her hands were outside the blankets; she turned one palm up, and I put my hand in it. Her fingers were hot and dry. "You'll take care?"
I returned the pressure of her grip. "Much as I can."
She studied me gravely. "I am satisfied with that."
Neither of us said good-bye, in so many words, probably because it seemed like bad luck.
Sunny was down the hall, looking out a window. If she'd been eavesdropping, she'd had the grace to move well out of earshot before I came out. One of the Daughters, a small woman with straight brown hair braided halfway down her back, came out of the next room wheeling a cart full of clean sheets.
"Excuse me," I said to her. "Do you think you could answer a history question for me?"
She widened her eyes at me. "I guess I could try."
"What was the influenza epidemic of 1918?"
She looked startled for a moment. Then her expression sharpened and settled. "That's right, you're the friend of the girl in 24. Some people can only be brave if they're ignorant about what's happening to them. She's not one of 'em. Made me explain to her everything we knew about this damn bug."
"How does 1918 come into it?"
"Well, not for scale, at least. Not yet, anyway. But that time, there was no way to tell who would get it, and once they'd got it, there wasn't any sense in who got a light dose and who died of it. Whole families would come down with the influenza, including babies, and the only ones who'd die would be the
parents, who ought to have been strong enough to hold out. This thing is like that. Years from now we're still going to be studying to figure out the population at risk."
"Does that mean that people have recovered from it?" I asked.
Sunny had come up behind the Daughter. Her face was composed, but she seemed a little white around
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the mouth, and
I knew she was waiting for the answer as much as I was.
"Too soon to be sure. If we can get the fever to break, there's a good chance of the person pulling through. We've had a couple of patients already who've gotten over the hump. I think your friend's temp is just about to peak. If we can get her through tonight okay, she may be in the clear."
"If we can get rid of this gene-transforming stuff," I said, "then everybody will be in the clear."
The Daughter looked at me oddly. "The genie ain't going back in the bottle."
No, of course it wasn't. The mutation, if that was what it was, had happened; the virus had crossed the Border, and was doing a fine job of ditching its half-evolved hosts and fastening on the real elves. I'd been careening along with the blinders on, half-convinced that if I did my job, everything would be fixed. But the passport and the virus had never been the same thing, and only one of them was my job.
Sunny was watching me, and from the way she was doing it, she might have known what I was thinking.
But all she said was, "Come on. It's dinner time."
"Taco Hell?" I asked when we got to the car, which twilight was making sleek again.
"I don't think I can face any restaurant south of Ho tonight. Do you mind?"
"I'm easy." I blushed when I heard what I'd said, but Sunny didn't seem to notice.
It wasn't that I'd forgotten I had an embarrassing fascination with Sunny Rico; but since that morning it had been pushed a little to one side by the press of Tick-Tick's health, Tiamat's news, and the hunt for the passport and its victims. I'd been riding around in a little sports car with nothing but the sliver of air between the bucket seats to separate me from her, and hadn't been bothered. Suddenly I was reminded, and if I could have perched on the edge of the upholstery and still fastened the safety harness around me, I probably would have. It was a lot shorter drive than it seemed.
We ended up in what I recognized as her neighborhood. I took a mental sighting on her apartment
building, in fact, and found it in the middle of the next block. For a moment, I thought we were going there, and suffered a ridiculous little inner twitch. But Sunny led me instead to a brown brick building on the corner where yellow light slipped out around the curtains in a first-floor window, and where a completely unintelligible sign (well, to me, anyway) suggested that it might be a place of business.
It was a restaurant of some Central European flavorùor maybe all of them. The oil lamps gave it a nice homey glow and a not-so-nice suffocating heat. If I'd been in charge, I'd have pulled the curtains and opened the windows, and atmosphere be damned. But the people in charge didn't seem bothered, and
that was the only thing I could have complained about. The cash register stood next to a big glass case full of breads and pastries, most of which seemed to have something to do with walnuts, apples,
poppyseeds, or all of the above.
"Is this a reminder to save room for dessert, or do they expect you to just go ahead and
eat
it first?" I muttered to Sunny, as we passed it on the way to a table in the back.
"They expect you to not have room for dessert, and to get it to take home and eat three weeks later when you're hungry again." She handed me a typed menu on which I recognized maybe a dozen words. "Get the
gulyßs
. Unless you want vegetarian, in which case get the eggplant, peppers, and noodle stuff."
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I would have balked at this high
-handed style, but I didn't know anything about any of this food. I
decided I
'd have a better dinner if I was humble.
We were served by a round, stern, red-faced man with hair that nature had made black and white over the course of time. "Guly s" turned out to be what it was pronounced as; in other words, goulash.
Around here, that translated as a really good beef stew made with paprika and served over homemade noodles. It wasn't anything like my mother's goulash, thank God.
Sunny's table manners were excellent, even when she ate fast and didn't seem to be paying attention to what was on the plate.
"If you eat like that at Taco Hell, Mingus gives you the bum's rush," I said.
She looked up blankly. "What?"
"This is very good food."
"Oh. Yeah. I come here a lot."
"I figured that. It being right down the street from your apartment."
"That's right, you've been there."
I was a little disappointed that she could have forgotten. I wasn't likely to. "Slow down. Anything I've found once, I can find again, and nobody can know that we're out combing the town for this stuff. You have time to eat your dinner." I shrugged. "Besides, I'm having dessert."
She stared at her plate and took a deep breath, very slow in, very slow out. Her hands lay clasped at the edge of the table. Then she looked up at me, not quite smiling. "But if I eat slow I'll have to talk between bites. And the only things I can think of to talk about are bad for my appetite."
"No small talk? Here, have some bread. It's great."
"I know that, remember? Small talk is for wimps. Where I come from, we talk big manly talk."
"Heard any good music lately?"
Sunny smiled and shood her head. "I never hear any music. I have a job."
"Yeah, well, so do 1.1 find having a life helps me to tell when I'm working." Involuntarily, I thought about the last couple of days, when I'd been working and when I hadn't, and how hard it was, in that case, to tell. In other words, I found myself standing at the edge of a conversational pit.
All right
, I thought,
to hell with small talk
. "Would you have extradited me?"
She met my eyes, and looked away, and met them again. "I don't know."
"It would have been the good cop thing to do, wouldn't it?"
"No. Good cops don't use threats to force people to help them."
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"The
y did on all the cop shows
I
ever watched."
"Then you're probably qualified to join the force." She smiled, a little lopsided. "That's the Police Academy around here, you know. Cop shows and mystery novels, and even some firsthand experience
of being busted, out in the World. The police here do what they do because they watched a whole season of "Steeltown Beat," and think that's how being a cop works. Or because they watched it and think that being a cop should be anything
but
that. We're all making it up as we go along. Maybe we should go back to the old Renaissance model of rich people's neighborhood bodyguards."
"Then who looks out for the poor people?"
"Who looks out for 'em now?" she said with a snort.
"People like you."
"Who says we have to be cops to do it?"
That stopped me for a second. Then I answered, "You did."