Undertow (9 page)

“My eyes haven’t melted.” Kroc slipped his hands under Cricket’s armpits and pulled her to her feet, then scrubbed palms and fingers on his shorts. He walked to the window, padding over rag rug and plascrete. The red glare of the explosion had faded, but firelight limned Kroc’s cheek and temple as he pressed his face to the window.

“Lighter crash?”

“Looks like a barge exploded on the bay,” Kroc said. “It’s burning to the water.” He put his back to it. “Hell of a thing. You know, there was just one the other night. Getting to be a habit.”

André pushed to a crouch. His back protested. He’d skinned a knee. “Cricket, you all right?”

Her lip curled, but whatever she’d been about to say, she thought better of it and looked down. “Thanks,” she said. “Although if it had been a nuke, it wouldn’t have helped.”

André shrugged around his grin. “You don’t think I’m radiation-proof?” He turned to Kroc, caught a glimpse of the tiny, burning shape a mile or so out on the water. “Shit—”

A thumping sound was rescue craft, their lights playing over the water. There couldn’t have been much warning. André expected fruitless sweeps, perhaps doll-small figures sliding in harness to pluck bodies from the water. But as he watched they dropped rescue harnesses, hauled up kicking women or men.

It was strange, seeing it all through a chunk of clear plastic, barely augmented, unskinned. It was flat, without hyperlinks. He couldn’t zoom. He couldn’t access histories or burn context.

Just what was out there, reality primitive as an oil painting. Even with the augments, he hadn’t seen the world this way since his teens. Since he got out of his mom’s house and started making some real money.

And this was how Kroc lived all the time?

André wet his lips with his tongue. He didn’t know quite what he’d say, but he thought he’d find out when it got out of his mouth.

Whatever it was going to be, he never heard it; there was a thumping at the door and he startled. Kroc brushed past him, one hand steadying André’s shoulder, and strode to the door. “I’m not feeding anybody else,” Cricket called over the noise of the kettle boiling.

The entry was dark. André couldn’t see what security measures Kroc took, but it was a minute before he opened the door. When he did, he jerked it abruptly. What André saw past him was not human, with its teardrop-shaped body, thick indistinguishable neck smoothing to sloped shoulders, and thick-thighed, crooked legs. The ranid steadied itself on the doorframe, the other knobby forelimb akimbo and firelight lending unnaturally green skin a mucilaginous shine. It crouched between its knees, eyes tilted up at Kroc, and darted hand-gestures this way and that. It wore only a woven belt, no slate and no pass-tags. Not an employee of Rim, then. A wild froggie, a savage. André tensed, though he couldn’t make out a weapon.

Kroc stepped back. “André,” he said without turning his head, “go home.”

André glanced over his shoulder at Cricket. She did not look up from her fussing by the cooker. “By water, now?”

The scooter had a shallow draft, and there wouldn’t be that broad of a cordon around the fire. He wanted an excuse to stay and see what happened next.

“I’ll call you,” Kroc said. “Please, go now.” He raised his voice. “Cricket, you, too.”

She came out drying her hands. She sat down on the floor without a word and started pulling on her shoes.

André offered her a lift, and she took it. Took him home with her, too, and what with one thing and another, it was an hour and a half before he remembered to power up and connex, and morning before he checked his messages.

Gourami hunkered, wet, amid waterplant and reed in the brackish water where the delta ran into the bay. Se croaked low in frustration—an anonymous noise in the dark—and dipped under again so only bulging eyes and comma-shaped nostrils would show. Se mottles were not dyed into green anonymity, as the commandos’ had been, but even humen technology would not single se out so hidden.

In the dark nearby, other persons moved, thrummed through swelled throats, quiet reassuring conversation. Gourami filtered water, swallowed plankton and waterweed. As it too often did in the bay now, the food had an acrid tang. Se ate farmed on the job and at home—

Se could not go home. Se had no home. No position now. Reinvention or death.

Because the body had been tangled in the cables, halfway down. And when Gourami had tugged it free, had brought it up, none of the humen had cared. Had honored the dead. Se knew its name; it had been a friend of some of the other persons. And the mate of this one they came to talk to now, because the humen mated like animals, with their pair-bonds and their closed little families.

Se thought somebody should have sung for it. Even if it was an animal. And even if, though se had not yet worked out the logic behind it, it was the dead animal’s fault that Gourami could not go home.

There were footsteps through the marsh. Some humen, booted, and a person’s, too. Ripples in the water stroked Gourami’s skin. The person at se left hand sang low, and a song answered. Tetra had returned. With the human Gourami had heard, and the rest said, could be trusted. The mate of the human who had become the body in the cables.

The rest. The rest were revolutionaries. The persons who had come to rescue se were rebels. They had destroyed the humen ship. And Caetei was one of them.

Gourami sank into calming mud and water, nostrils sealing as se submerged. The human needed a light to walk in the dark. It bobbed, reed-cut, reflecting splinters off the water. Gourami let a thin stream of silver slip from se nostrils. Handfingers brushed a still-sore shoulder; se leaned into Caetei’s touch, allowed Caetei to lead. The light clicked off as they came forward, as if the human knew it would hurt a person’s dark-adapted eyes.

Se slipped up the bank beside Caetei. Tetra’s palms luminesced faintly, enough to guide them. The human stank in the dark, of poison—which the humen drank as if they breathed it—and of fire-charred humen food and chemicals. It—he, it was a he, by the flat chest and the bristles on its face—did not reach out for Gourami, who folded se hurt hand to chest and waited.

Instead, he hunkered on his heels in the dark, a humen approximation of a person’s rest-pose, and extended the back of one arm. Something glimmered there. Gourami crouched, too, knees higher than the half-seated human’s head, and bent to see what he offered.

A slate. There was a slate on his wrist, and it made words when he made those burbling humen noises.

—I am Jean,
the machine wrote.
—Tetra says they call you Gourami. Can you tell me what you’ve seen?

Gourami was not a very good storyteller. But a not-very-good storyteller by a person’s standards was an exceptional one, as humen went. And se was an experienced liaison.

With a ripping sound, se tugged the gripping fabric loose and pulled the waterproof slate from the human’s arm. With the tips of se handfingers, ignoring the hurt in the one, se keyed: —
the body was tangled in the cables, halfway down.

5

CLOSS’S VIEW OF THE EXPLOSION WAS BETTER THAN HE
would have preferred. His office had real windows, shatterproof laminate rated to blast level seven with a reality-skin interleaf that he habitually shut down. Closs wasn’t a Naturalist; he wore a headset and augments like any sensible man. But he found no wisdom in relying too heavily on technological crutches.

Better to get the benefit when you needed it, and deal with reality the rest of the time. Not useful to forget that others were skinning their reality tunnels, that their perceptions were modified to suit their preferences.

Even if it would have been soothing, once in a while, to skin Jefferson Greene with a pink-and-black-spotted pig.
Oink.

So he watched the real fire burn, across the water, while windowpanes alongside his primary view overlaid close-up, replay, feeds from the rescue choppers and the divers’ masks. The barge’s own connex had not dropped when the explosion hit, which told Closs—and his Rim security agents, who would not be sleeping tonight—that any feed they’d gotten off the ship itself was useless, a patch-loop.

They’d been hacked.

Closs dragged his fingertips down the image of the burning vessel. “Connect,” he said, command-pitch. “Rim Corporation, Paris head office, code one four seven H.”

It would be just after ten in the morning in Paris. He’d been waiting until
she
would be there, leisurely breakfast seen to, a second cup of coffee cooling on her desk. It did not do to hurry the vice president.

She was stirring cream into a china cup when her image resolved. Her hair fell across her forehead, razor-cut, brushing the architectural precision of one dark eyebrow. When she looked up, setting her chased silver spoon down on the saucer with a delicate click, he was caught by the flecks of darker color in her eyes. She was fashionably thin, the line of her jaw sharp as the detail on a porcelain horse, the tendons in her throat vanishing under the ivory silk collar of her suit. “M~ Morrow…” Closs began.

“Major,” she replied. “I’ve seen the feed. I hope you’re not calling to justify yourself to me.”

“I’m afraid the error is beyond justification.”

She lifted her cup and sipped, steam caressing her cheek. She took her time about it, which was more a statement of her willingness to waste Closs’s time than of any unconcern about the cost of the call. The Slide was cheap—instantaneous transmission of matter or data over any distance.

Matter, or data. As long as it wasn’t alive. Transportation of
personnel
between worlds was complex and costly, and travelers must contend with relativistic effects. But transportation of
goods
only required a matter transfer. This was the same technology at its base as the specialty of the Exigency Corps: probability manipulation. But a much safer manifestation, at that, without the risk of unforeseen coincidental fallout.

Unfortunately, this process could not be used on living creatures. You could certainly put a person in one side of a matter transmitter, but you did not get a living person back out the other end. Any organism complex enough—conscious enough—to have a concept of
I
could not Slide alive.

This was because—Closs did not entirely understand the science—the Slide was a quantum device, relying on the uncertainty principle to work. But a self-aware cargo counted as an observer.

In Schrödinger’s famous thought-experiment, the
cat
knows whether it’s alive or it is dead.

M~ Morrow swallowed twice, her larynx making shadows under the pale skin of her throat. “This won’t affect your delivery schedule?”

“For petroleum?”

She set her cup down, dabbed her lip, and shrugged. “Greene’s World is not the only source of base materials for manufacturing. It’s the omelite I’m concerned with.”

Closs considered his answer. Tanglestone’s existence and its sole source were closely held. And unlike the Slide, whose inexpensive operation it made possible, it was
not
cheap. Just cheaper than
manufacturing
entangled pairs. Whether it was a natural substance, or some relic of a prior advanced civilization, no one had determined. Teams of Corpsmen were at work on it, but unless somebody higher than Closs had sealed the results, the god-botherers had nothing.

“You understand, Vice President, that we are still having issues with native uprisings and with human abolitionists who think we’re interfering with the ranid culture. Such as it is.”

She waited, stroking the gold-painted thumb rest atop the handle of her cup.

Closs folded his hands behind his back. “We also have labor unions that are unhappy with the use of ranids in any job that could be handled by human divers.”

M~ Morrow nodded. “I appreciate the challenges, Major. However—”

“The quota,” he said, “will be met.”

She let her fretting hand slide to the desk. “I need you to exceed it.”

“Vice President?”

Her head turned slightly, as if she lifted her eyes to a wall screen or a skin. Her fingers moved across the desktop; Closs recognized the gesture as a pass through a virtual three-dimensional interface. “What I am about to tell you, Major, is not to leave your office.”

“What about Greene?”

“No one,” she said. A fine arrogant dodge of the chain of command, ignoring the fact that Greene was the CEO of Charter Trade, the titular head of Rim on-planet. She slid her cup aside and leaned forward on her elbows. “Major, what do you know about artificial intelligence and the Slide?”

He closed his teeth on a snide comment and counted three. Backward. “Practically?”

“Theoretically.”

“Theoretically,” he said, “an intelligence that was neither organic nor self-aware might be Slid. But it’s practically irrelevant because—”

“—strong A.I. is still fifteen years in the future, just as it has been for the last three hundred years.” She wet her lips, a gesture of nervousness he had not seen her make before. Her fingertips blanched as she steepled her hands.

“But?”

“But we may have run up against somebody who
has
found it. Or something that looks a hell of a lot like it. Unless they’re running their ships by remote control, which is ofcourse possible. And whatever they are, they’re aggressive, Timothy.”

He could have asked,
What did we lose?
He could have asked,
Where did they hit us? How far from Earth? How close to the Core?
But it wasn’t his need to know, anymore. It wasn’t his war to fight. And of course it didn’t matter where they were now, or how far from Earth, if they could Slide.

“If they’re not…conscious,” he said, quietly, “then they can’t conjure, can they?”

Her nose wrinkled at the crude term for probability manipulation, but she nodded. “Omelite,” she said. And then answered a question he would not have chosen to ask, her little pat on the head to keep him well behaved. “They attacked shipping near Greene’s World, Timothy. Once is not much of a sample, but I think it’s you they’re gunning for.”

He swallowed. “I’ll get you everything I can.”

André’s executary had tagged the message from Timothy Closs as highest priority, but he didn’t answer it immediately. Instead he cleaned his teeth and used Cricket’s elutrior. She was out of bed when he emerged, the covers shaking themselves tidy as she unsnarled her hair. The static wand first made it writhe, then stand straight out, crackling. Another tap and a touch to the control and strands drifted over her shoulders, briefly silken. It would cord into locks again by lunchtime, he thought, fondly.

He stored the image of her fixing her hair in hard memory, so he could take the file out and replay it later, and kissed her on the head. “Tonight, where are you?”

“Working,” she answered. She touched her headset access port—a nervous gesture, the controls were all neuroelectrochemical—and smiled with one corner of her mouth. André’s reactivated skin put a warmth in her complexion. Pretty girl. “I’ve seven hours of data mining to get through, more if I’m not lucky enough to hit the information in the usual lodes.”

“Blink me,” he said, and showed himself out.

On the gently pitching deck, he leaned against the rail and watched a pump glide up and down atop a distant mining platform. His skins adapted to the glare off the water, the weave of his fogjacket opening to catch the breeze as sun warmed his shoulders. He paled the jacket’s color to ivory and watched ripples break against the barge’s hull.

He preferred his messages transcribed; he could read more quickly and with greater retention than he could listen.

M~ Deschênes:

Please contact me regarding a possible extension of our previous contract, if you are interested. Something of an unusual case. It might prove a challenge.

—Closs

André cleared the message and used a subroutine to overwrite the sectors, a precaution he never skimped on. Especially for innocuous messages. He knew how Cricket earned her bread, and she knew what he did as well and they had a tacit agreement not to ask. But not all the synthesists, archinformists, or net miners on the Rim were his lovers. And though he trusted Cricket Earl Murphy as much as he trusted anyone, only a fool baited temptation.

Any business Closs had to offer wasn’t the sort of thing best discussed on a broadcast channel. Especially when André wasn’t certain he’d be able to avoid a conflict of interest. He inspected his scoot, wincing in self-consciousness when he located not so much as a loose wire, and dropped into the saddle. He could have walked; Cricket’s float hooked up to a sidewalk, and there was a bridge across the canal that would lead him downtown, through the maze of barges and waterways that made up the floating city of Novo Haven. But he’d have to come back for his scoot then.

Meanwhile, the major would be expecting him.

Later, sitting on Jean Gris’s crude wicker couch, Cricket Earl Murphy reviewed her few remaining articles of faith. For example, she believed that if one must keep secrets, it was best if they happened to be incredible. Melodrama was good, especially when it involved spies, forgotten royalty, or the downfall of governments. Outrageous scandals were more survivable than petty ones; a truly lurid tale could only improve one’s reputation, unless it involved allegations of rape (squalid), insider trading (pathetic), or cannibalism (still beyond the pale).

Petty moral failures led to disgrace only because they had no scope. It was too easy for the opprobrious to condemn their own small criminal hypocrisies when they recognized them in another. An adultery, a financial manipulation, the poisoning of a spouse: anybody could compass such crimes. And because they could imagine them, they could defend against them.

A truly outrageous crime provoked disbelief—
such things only happen in melodramas
—and then, after, awe.

If you must steal, swipe a planet.

As a consequence of this philosophy, Cricket very rarely lied. Her secrets, while plentiful, were the sort that people did not inquire after. She was safe—safe here, especially, here on the Rim, on Greene’s World, a corner of the settled galaxy that could not be less interesting to the Core, to anybody with money, to the woman she had been.

The Core never thought about the Rim if it could help it, except to set pulp holodrama there. As far as civilization was concerned, the Rim had nothing to offer except wilderness, Iron Age aliens—the ones that had advanced that far—and a romantic but generally nasty and unsafe frontier. And, of course, the bounty of limitless natural resources to exploit and fortunes to be made. With the added benefit that any personal problems one left behind on Earth would very probably be dead by the time one landed on Greene’s World, Xanadu, or Yap.

And she kept telling herself that, right up to the moment Jean Gris steepled his gnawed fingertips and said, “It’d be the biggest scandal since Moon Morrow resigned.”

Cricket’s shoulders tautened. She kept her eyes wide and innocent, and did not even allow the name to echo in her mind. Superstitiously, as if Jean were the wizard the ignorant painted him. As if he could read her thoughts.

She wondered, even should she say it outright, if he would ever believe her. “Moon who?”

The crease deepened over his broken nose, shadows rough along his bristled jaw. His eyes caught the light as his head tilted. “Morrow. She was the Earth Unified government’s minister of colonization during the first Downham administration. She resigned under a cloud about fifteen Standard ago. Took the fall for an antimatter test station failure at Patience. Do you recall
that
?”

Of course she did. The destroyed space station, the devastated biosphere of the planet below, the frozen corpses floating in orbit—where there
was
anything to recover. The disaster had been caused by a failed Exigency Corps engineering operation. Morrow, it came out later, had pushed the god-botherers to augment the chance of success for the experimental power station beyond any margin of safety.

There was still debate as to whether the plant’s design was flawed, or whether the Corps interference caused a localized probability storm.

Twenty thousand, two hundred and thirteen dead. Unsurprisingly, almost no surviving wounded.

Oh, yes. Cricket recalled.

She could close her eyes and see the corona of wreckage around the devastated station. She could close her eyes, and imagine she felt the thirty seconds of hard vacuum that was all you got to feel before you died. Eyeballs freezing, capillaries bursting. Thirty seconds was a long, long time.

“Oh,
her
. I’d forgotten her name.”

Jean watched her carefully, long enough to make her worry, and then licked his lips and said, “Went to work for Core, I think, after the jail sentence, and hasn’t been heard from since. She dropped out of sight completely.”

“And you think she has something to do with Lucienne’s being killed?” Sidetrack, play dumb. Look confused. “Was it something the ranid said?”

Not too confused, however. More’s the pity; Jean knew she wasn’t stupid.