“Tower directory lists no Victor Vole.”
“I didn’t think so,” Zoranna said. “Call up the houseputer log and display it
on the mirror.”
The consumer page of Nancy’s houseputer appeared in the mirror. Zoranna
poked through its various menus and found nothing unusual. She did find a
record of her own half-dozen calls to Nancy that were viewed but not
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returned. “Bug, can you see anything wrong with this log?”
“This is not a standard user log,” said Bug. “The standard log has been
disabled. All house lines circumvent the built-in houseputer to terminate in
a mock houseputer.”
“A mock houseputer?” said Zoranna. “Now that’s interesting.” There were
no cables trailing from the service panel and no obvious optical relays. “Can
you locate the processor?”
“It’s located one half-meter to our right at thigh level.”
It was mounted under the sink, a cheap-looking, saucer-sized piece of
hardware.
“I think you have the soul of an electronic engineer,” she said. “I could
never program Hounder to do what you’ve just done. So, tell me about the
holo transmissions in the other rooms.”
“A private network entitled ‘The Hospicers of Camillus de Lellis’ resides in
the mock houseputer and piggybacks over TSN channel 203.”
The 24-hour soccer channel. Zoranna was impressed. For the price of one
commercial line, Victor—she assumed it was Victor—was managing to gypsy
his own network. The trickle meters that she’d noticed were not recording
how much money her sister was spending but rather how much Victor was
charging his dying subscribers. “Bug, can you extrapolate how much the
Hospicers of Camillus de—whatever—earn in an average day?”
“Affirmative, Œ45 per day.”
That wasn’t much. About twice what a hairdresser—or dance instructor—
might expect to make, and hardly worth the punishment if caught. “Where
do the proceeds go?”
“Bug lacks the subroutine to trace credit transactions.”
Damn, Zoranna thought and wished she’d brought Hounder. “Can you tell
me who the hospicer organization is registered to?”
“Affirmative. Ms. Nancy Brim.”
“Figures,” said Zoranna as she removed her UDIN from the panel. If
anything went wrong, her sister would take the rap. At first Zoranna decided
to confront Victor, but she changed her mind when she left the bathroom
and heard him innocently singing show tunes in the kitchen. She looked at
Nancy’s bed and wondered what it must be like to share such a narrow bed
with such a big man. She decided to wait and investigate further before
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exposing him. “Bug, see if you can integrate Hounder’s tracing and tracking
subroutines from my applications library.”
Victor stood at the sink washing dishes. In the living room Nancy snored
lightly. It wasn’t a snore, exactly, but the raspy bronchial wheeze of congested lungs. Her lips were bluish, anoxic. She reminded Zoranna of their mother
the day before she died. Their mother had suffered a massive brain
hemorrhage—weak arterial walls were the true family heirloom—and lived
out her final days propped up on the parlor couch, disoriented, enfeebled,
and pathetic. Her mother had had a short, split bamboo stick with a curled
end. She used the curled end to scratch her back and legs, the straight end
to dial the old rotary phone, and the whole stick to rail incoherently against
her fate. Nancy, the baby of the family, had been away at teacher’s college at
the time, but took a semester off to nurse the old woman. Zoranna, first born,
was already working on the West Coast and managed to stay away until her
mother had slipped into a coma. After all these years, she still felt guilty for doing so.
Someone on the ceiling coughed fitfully. Zoranna noticed that most of the
patients who were conscious at the moment were watching her with
expressions that ranged from annoyance to hostility. They apparently
regarded her as competition for Nancy’s attention.
Nancy’s breathing changed; she opened her eyes, and the two sisters
regarded each other silently. Victor stood at the kitchen counter, wiping his
hands on a dish towel, and watched them.
“I’m booking a suite at the Stronmeyer Clinic in Cozumel,” Zoranna said at
last, “and you’re coming with me.”
“Victor,” Nancy said, ignoring her, “go next door, dear, and borrow a folding
bed from the Jeffersons.” She grasped the walker and pulled herself to her
feet. “Please excuse me, Zoe, but I need to sleep now.” She ambulated to the
bedroom and shut the door.
Victor hung up the dish towel and said he’d be right back with the cot.
“Don’t bother,” Zoranna said. It was still early, she was on West Coast time,
and she had no intention of bedding down among the dying. “I’ll just use the
houseputer to reserve a hotel room upstairs.”
“Allow me,” he said and addressed the houseputer. Then he escorted her
up to the Holiday Inn on the 400th floor. They made three elevator transfers
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to get there, and walked in silence along carpeted halls. Outside her door he
took her hand. As before she was both alarmed and aroused. “Zoe,” he said,
“join us for a special breakfast tomorrow. Do you like Belgian waffles?”
“Oh, don’t go to any trouble. In fact, I’d like to invite the two of you up to
the restaurant here.”
“It sounds delightful,” said Victor, “but your sister refuses to leave the flat.”
“I find that hard to believe. Nancy was never a stay-at-home.”
“People change, I suppose,” Victor said. “She tells me the last time she left
the tower, for instance, was to attend your brother Michael’s funeral.”
“But that was seven years ago!”
“As you can see, she’s severely depressed, so it’s good that you’ve come.”
He squeezed her hand and let it go. “Until the morning, then,” he said and
turned to walk down the hall, whistling as he went. She watched until he
turned a corner.
Entering her freshly scented, marble-tiled, cathedral-vaulted hotel room
was like returning to the real world. The view from the 400th floor was
godlike: The moon seemed to hang right outside her window, and the rolling
landscape stretched out below like a luminous quilt on a giant’s bed.
“Welcome, Ms. Alblaitor,” said the room. “On behalf of the staff of the
Holiday Inn, I thank you for staying with us. Do let me know if there’s
anything we can do to make you more comfortable.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“By the way,” the room continued, “the tower has informed me there’s a
parcel addressed to you. I’m having someone fetch it.”
In a few moments, a gangly steve with the package from General Genius
tapped on her door. “Bug,” she said, “tip the man.” The steve bowed and
exited. Inside the package was the complimentary Diplomat Deluxe valet.
Ted had outdone himself, for not only had he sent the vale
t system—itself
worth a month’s income—but he had included a slim Gucci leather belt to
house it.
“Well, I guess this is good-bye,” Zoranna said, walking to the shipping chute
and unbuckling her own belt. “Too bad, Bug, you were just getting interesting.”
She searched the belt for the storage grommet that held the memory wafer.
She had to destroy it; Bug knew too much about her. Ted would be more
interested in the processors anyway. “I was hoping you’d convert by now. I’m
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dying to know what kind of a big, bad wolf you’re supposed to become.” As
she unscrewed the grommet, she heard the sound of running water in the
bathroom. “What’s that?” she said.
“A belt valet named Bug has asked me to draw your bath,” said the room.
She went to the spacious bathroom and saw the tub filling with cranberry-
colored aqueous gel. The towels were cranberry, too, and the robe a kind of
salmon. “Well, well,” she said. “Bug makes a play for longevity.” She undressed and eased herself into the warm solution where she floated in darkness for an
hour and let her mind drift aimlessly. She felt like talking to someone,
discussing this whole thing about her sister. Victor she could handle—he was
at worst a lovable louse, and she could crush him anytime she decided. But
Nancy’s problems were beyond her ken. Feelings were never her strong suit.
And depression, if that’s what it was, well—she wished there were someone
she could consult. But though she scrolled down a mental list of everyone she
knew, there was no one she cared—or dared—to call.
In the morning Zoranna tried again to ship Bug to GG, but discovered that
during the night Bug had rewritten Hounder’s subroutines to fit its own
architecture (a handy talent for a valet to possess) and had run credit traces.
But it had come back empty-handed. The proceeds of the Hospicers of Camillus
de Lellis went to a coded account in Liberia that not even Hounder would be
able to crack. And the name Victor Vole—Zoranna wasn’t surprised to learn—
was a relatively common alias. Thus she would require prints and specimens,
and she needed Bug’s help to obtain them. So she sent Ted a message saying
she wanted to keep Bug another day or so pending an ongoing investigation.
Zoranna hired a pricey, private elevator for a quick ride to the subfloors.
“Bug,” she said as she threaded her way through the Sub40 corridors, “I want
you to integrate Hounder’s subroutines keyed ‘forensics.’”
“Bug has already integrated all of the applications in all of your libraries.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
Something was different in Nancy’s apartment. The gentleman through
whose bed she had been forced to walk was gone, replaced by a skeletal
woman with glassy, pink-rimmed eyes. Zoranna supposed that high client
turnover was normal in a business like this.
Breakfast was superlative but strained. She sat at the counter, Nancy was
set up in the recliner, and Victor served them both. Although the coffee and
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most of the food was derived from soybimi, Victor’s preparation was so
skillful, Zoranna could easily imagine she was eating real wheat cakes, maple
syrup, and whipped dairy butter. But Nancy didn’t touch her food, and Victor
fussed too much. Zoranna, meanwhile, instructed Bug to capture as complete
a set of fingerprints as possible from the cups and plates Victor handed her, as well as a 360-degree holograph of him, a voice print, and retinal prints.
There are Jacob’s mirrors within Victor’s eyes, Bug reported, that defeat accurate retinal scanning.
This was not unexpected. Victor probably also grew epipads on his fingers
to alter his prints. Technology had reduced the cost of anonymity to fit the
means of even petty criminals. Zoranna excused herself and went to the
bathroom where she plucked a few strands of silver curls from his hairbrush
and placed them in a specimen bag, figuring he was too vain to reseed his
follicles with someone else’s hair. Emerging from the bathroom, she overheard
them in a loud discussion.
“Please go with her, my darling,” Victor pleaded. “Go and take the cure.
What am I to do without you?”
“Drop it, Victor. Just drop it!”
“You are behaving insanely. I will not drop it. I will not permit you to die.”
Zoranna decided it was time to remove the network from Nancy’s apartment
and Victor from her life. So she stepped into the living room and said, “I
know what he’ll do without you. He’ll go out and find some other old biddy
to rob.”
Nancy seemed not at all surprised at this statement. She appeared pleased,
in fact, that the subject had finally been broached. “You should talk!” she
said with such fierceness that the hospice patients all turned to her. “This is my sister,” she told them, “my sister with the creamy skin and pearly teeth
and rich clothes.” Nancy choked with emotion. “My sister who begrudges me
the tenderness of a dear man. And begrudges him the crumbs— the crumbs—
that AP tosses to its subfloors.”
The patients now looked at Zoranna, who blushed with embarrassment.
They waited for her to speak, and she had to wonder how many of them
possessed the clarity of mind to know that this was not some holovid soap
opera they were watching. Then she decided that she, too, could play to this
audience and said, “In her toxic condition, my sister hallucinates. I am not
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the issue here. That man is.” She pointed a finger at Victor. “Insinuating himself into her apartment is bad enough,” she said. “But who do you suppose
AP will kick out when they discover it? My sister, that’s who.” Zoranna
walked around the room and addressed individual patients as a prosecutor
might a jury. “And what about the money? Yes, there’s money involved. Two
years ago I sent my sister Œ15,000 to have her kidneys restored. That’s
fifteen thousand protectorate credits. How many of you, if you had a sister kind enough to send you Œ15,000, even now as you lie on your public dole
beds, how many of you would refuse it?” There was the sound of rustling as
the dying shifted in their sheets. “Did my sister use the money I sent her?”
Theatrically she pointed at Nancy in the recliner. “Apparently not. So where
did all that money go? I’ll tell you where it went. It went into his foreign account.”
The dying now turned their attention to Victor.
“So what?” Nancy said. “You gave me that money. It was mine to spend. I spent it on him. End of discussion.”
“I see,” said Zoranna, stopping at a bed whose occupant had possibly just
departed. “So my sister’s an equal partner in Victor’s hospicer scam.”
“Scam? What scam? Now you’re the one hallucinating,” said Nancy. “I
work for a hospicer society.”
“Yes, I know,” Zoranna said and pointed to the shrine and picture of the
saint. “The Hospicers of Camillus de Lellis. I looked it up. But do you know
who owns the good Hospicers?” She turned to include the whole room. “Does
anyone know? Why, Nancy dear, you
do.” She paused to let these facts sink in. “Which means that when the National Police come, they’ll be coming for
you, sister. Meanwhile, do any of you know where your subscription fees go?”
She stepped in front of Victor. “You guessed it.”
The audience coughed and wheezed. Nancy glared at Victor who crouched
next to her recliner and tried to take her hand. She pushed him away, but he
rested his head on her lap. She peered at it as though it were some strange
cat, and after a while stroked it with a comforting hand. “I’m sure there were
expenses,” she said at last. “Getting things set up and all. In any case, he did it for me. Because he loves me. It gave me something important to do. It kept
me alive. Let them put me in prison. I won’t be staying there long.” This was
Victor’s cue to begin sobbing in her lap.
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Zoranna was disappointed and, frankly, a little disgusted. Now she would
be forced to rescue her sister against her sister’s will. She tongued, Bug, route an emergency phone call to Nancy through my houseputer at home. Disable the caller ID. She watched as Victor showered Nancy’s hand with kisses. In a moment, his head bobbed up—he had an ear implant as she had expected—
and he hurried to the bedroom.
Bug is being asked to leave a message, said Bug.
“I’m going to the hotel,” Zoranna told Nancy and headed for the door.
“We’ll talk later.” She let herself out.
When the apartment door slid shut, she said, “Bug, you’ve integrated all
my software, right? Including holoediting?”
“Affirmative.”
She looked both ways. No one was in sight. She would have preferred a
more private studio than a Sub40 corridor. “This is what I want you to do.
Cast a real-time alias of me. Use that jerry we met in the elevator yesterday
as a model. Morph my appearance and voice accordingly. Clothe me in
National Police regalia, provide a suitably officious backdrop, and map my
every expression. Got it?”
“Affirmative.”
“On the count of five, four, three—” She crossed her arms and spread her
legs in a surly pose, smiled condescendingly, and said, “Nancy B. Smolenska
Brim, I am Sgt. Manley of the National Police, badge ID 30-31-6725. By the
authority vested in me, I hereby place you under arrest for violation of
Protectorate Statutes PS 12-135-A, the piracy of telecommunication
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