Tres shrugged. “Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.”
“That’s fine.” Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. “It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels—the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.”
Tres nodded, already moving. “I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.”
She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.
“Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.”
I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.
“You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?”
Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.
“Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.”
“Yeah, I think we should.”
I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher-ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.
The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“You know where I’m going.”
“No.” She tightened up on me. “No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.”
“It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.”
I tried to move toward the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far-from-reliable option. I swung back toward her, exasperated.
“Virginia, let me
go.
”
“What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—”
“It isn’t
going
to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—”
I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own, and our eyes were only about a handbreadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.
“That’s it,” she said. “Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.”
“What is there to talk about?”
She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember—it’s a good few years younger, for one thing—but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair. Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.
Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.
“Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.”
“I am happy.” She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated. It’s a tiny spark of the woman I used to know. “I mean, wouldn’t you be? Sentence commuted for cash equivalence. And the money’s still flooding in, there’ll be biocoding work for the next decade. Until the ocean settles down again, we’ve got whole new levels of flow to domesticate, and that’s just locally. Someone’s still got to model the impact where the Mikuni current hits the warm water coming up from Kossuth, and then do something about it. We’ll be tendering as soon as the government funding clears. Josef says the rate we’re going, I’ll have paid off the whole sentence in another ten years.”
“Josef?”
“Oh yeah, I should have said.” The smile comes out again, wider this time. More open. “He’s really great, Tak. You should meet him. He’s running the project up there, he’s one of the reasons I got out in the first wave. He was doing the virtual hearings, he was my project liaison when I got out and then we just, ah, you know.”
She looked down at her lap, still smiling.
“You’re blushing, Sarah.”
“I am not.”
“Yeah, you are.” I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. “So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?”
She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. “We’re both playing for keeps, Tak. He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.”
So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?
“That’s great,” I say.
“And what about you?” she asks with arch concern. “Are you happy?”
I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.
“Well, happy.” I pull another face. “That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.”
“Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?”
“For a while.”
“And what about now?”
I gesture vaguely. “Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.”
“Is it legal?”
“Are you kidding?”
Her face falls. “You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the resleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with . . .”
She shakes her head.
“Criminals?” I ask.
“Don’t laugh at me, Tak.”
I sigh. “I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.”
She smiles again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it’s edged with pain.
“People can change,” she says. “You should try it.”
There’s an awkward pause.
“Maybe I will.”
And another.
“Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—”
“No, come on.” I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the tabletop with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes. “Have you no self-respect, woman? Stay for one more.”
So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.
And I never see her again.
“Sachilowska?” Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. “Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai Street.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again, what, to spite her?”
Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.
“It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d gotten out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.”
“So were you.”
“Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.”
“Okay.” Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. “So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.”
Behind the sound of the waves, I heard Japaridze again.
There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.
“Yeah, that’s right. It happens all the time.” I turned back to face her across the filtered cool of the screen-shaded table. “But I didn’t lose her in the differential, Virginia. I let her go. I let her go with that piece of shit, Josef, and I just walked away.”
Understanding dawned across her face. “Oh,
okay.
So
that’s
how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction Four. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I lied.
“All right.” Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway. “So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?”
“North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?”
“They converted?”
“
He
fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.”
“Really? Was she that much of a victim?”
“Virginia, she was
fucking indentured
!” I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable. Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. “Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New antiengineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing
but
the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.”
“She could have left.”
“They had a fucking child, all right?”
Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. “They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.”
Vidaura nodded. “And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.”
“Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.”
“So what happened? She upset some venerable male?”
“No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable.” The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. “Except of course it’s not
fucking
permitted.”
The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earth-bound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, prehuman, interstellar civilization cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels: God’s first, winged creations, and
no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us.
To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Resleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.
I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. “She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the center of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.”
I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicolored idiot tide it was.
“Afterward, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometers out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.”