Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  After I hung up, I realized that I knew someone who would understand about the STD problem: Jerry. When I called, I found him at home. Monday nights were too slow to bother working, he told me.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” I said, “especially in this nasty weather. I have a question for you. My aunt’s taken in a runaway girl rescue. This kid ended up working the streets, and she’s never seen a doctor for a blood test or anything.”

  “Oh, shit!” Jerry sounded sincerely horrified. “You can’t talk to the young ones, darling, about AIDS or anything else. They think they’ll live forever. Probably none of her johns would have used a rubber even if she’d wanted to.”

  “Probably not, no. So is there a clinic—”

  “There is. No questions asked. Want me to take her?”

  “That would be great. You know the—uh—ropes.”

  Jerry laughed.

  “And think about working for the Agency,” I said. “You’re not going to live forever, either.”

  “How true that is!” He sighed with great drama. “I’m free Wednesday. Call me around two P.M. The clinic opens late.”

  I got off the phone to find Ari standing nearby, watching me with a piece of paper in his hand.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “From the DMV.” He handed me the paper. “That white sedan you saw near the Cliff House? It’s registered to Caleb Sumner.”

  CHAPTER 12

  WE WOKE TUESDAY MORNING TO POURING RAIN. When I looked out of the bay window in the front room, I saw clouds so thick at the horizon that I couldn’t tell where they ended and the gray sea began. The unusually wet year was continuing to give us water to burn. Northern California could rejoice. I had a different take on the weather.

  “Crud,” I said. “Sarge isn’t going to be outside today. No Reb Zeke, either, if he’s even on our world level.”

  “True.” Ari handed me a mug of coffee.

  “Thanks. I’ll drink this, and then I’ve got to contact Y.”

  Our trance session went fast, because Y was on his way to yet another meeting.

  “Okay,” I said, “in your e-mail, you said something about a courier.”

  “Yes. We’re sending you the documents for your new information source by courier. He’ll arrive tomorrow at SFO with the attaché case attached.” Y grinned at his own joke. “I’m sending the flight information in e-mail, but in a very stripped form. This conversation is the context for the numbers you’ll find there.”

  “An actual courier? Why?”

  “We’ve got funding for special couriers in our budget. If we don’t use it, we’ll lose it. Can’t have that!”

  I supposed I saw the point.

  “When will you be debriefing the new source?” Y said.

  “In a couple of hours,” I said. “I’ll file a report as soon as we’re finished. What’s the code for my courier?”

  “Waukeegan. Ask him if he comes from there. He’ll say, no, I’m from Peoria. His name’s Paul.”

  “Got it. Paul from Peoria. One last thing, any news about those questions I had for Ari Nathan’s mother?”

  “Not yet. My contact in MI5 is handling the matter, but he’s had to bring in the Israelis. I don’t know why.”

  “I do. At one time Reb Ezekiel was suspected of spying for the British government.”

  Y groaned. The image of an enormous jar of blackstrap molasses materialized next to him, then flickered and disappeared. “That means the matter could be very sensitive,” Y said. “You know what that implies.”

  “Yeah. It could take months.”

  “You’re learning the ways of bureaucracy, aren’t you? And speaking of which, I’d better go.”

  Before we left for Aunt Eileen’s, I had time to surf my usual Internet news sources. Two rogue waves had hit the coast south of Pacifica, but no one had been drowned or injured. The first wave had struck around five o’clock, close to the time when Fog Face had appeared at my window, and the second, around ten in the evening. Both waves had dislodged a considerable quantity of earth and rocks from the cliffs near Año Nuevo Beach.

  “I’m beginning to wonder,” I told Ari, “if Caleb’s been doing some excavating with these waves, trying to turn up the treasure.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to use a shovel?” Ari said.

  “Not if Drake buried the treasure so deep that it’s halfway down the cliff face.”

  “He wouldn’t have buried it right at the edge of a cliff. It’s a sodding stupid place to look.”

  “Only if the edge of the cliff then was where it is now, and it wasn’t. The whole California coast has been eroding ever since the Ice Age ended. Eight thousand years ago you could have walked to the Farallon Islands, and now they’re twenty-seven miles out to sea.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “There was a ton of information about oceanic erosion on the news back in January. Down in Pacifica, the sea undermined a big apartment complex so badly that the buildings had to be condemned. When they were built, they were something like a hundred yards away from the edge, and that was only about fifty years ago.”

  “So four hundred years ago, Drake might have buried his loot near the shore but not on it. I see what you’re getting at.”

  Over at the Houlihan house, Sophie was waiting for us in the living room. Dressed in new jeans and a lavender blouse with a little collar and pleats down the front, she looked fed, clean, and utterly dazed. She perched on the edge of the brown armchair and clutched a paper notebook with a mottled white-and-black cover.

  “This is for you.” She handed me the notebook. “I wrote down everything I could think of. Michael said you’d want to know about the gates and the weird things people can do and just anything weird.”

  “I sure do.” I took the notebook and realized that the pages were actually sewn and bound rather than glued or threaded on a wire spiral. “Where is Michael, by the way?”

  “In school.” She gave me a quivering smile. “People go to school for a long time, here, huh?”

  “Yeah, they sure do.” I sat down in the blue armchair facing her. “We need to see about getting you some education, too.”

  “I’d like that. I really would.”

  As usual, no one wanted to sit on the orange brocade sofa under the portrait of Father Keith. Ari looked around, found a wooden chair by the window, and brought it over to sit next to me. I opened the notebook and flipped through a few pages, written in pencil. Sophie had big round handwriting, perfectly clear if childlike. She wrote in long gasps of run-on sentences, so the information, while fascinating, lacked any kind of organization that I could see.

  “I’ll study this material later,” I said and laid the notebook in my lap. “Thank you for this.”

  “You’re welcome. I bought it with my own money when Mike said I could come across.”

  “José let you have money of your own?”

  “Oh, yeah, twenty per cent of whatever we earned. He’s really cool, one of the best gang guys. I was lucky.”

  Lucky. Well, in a way she was. She was out of there. Sophie sat on the edge of the chair with her hands clasped together and looked around the room.

  “It’s so weird, y’know?” she said. “I thought, well, when I got here, it was like a dream, but it’s not. It’s solid. Back in the old place, that was like a dream. Nothing really made any sense, y’know? Everyone always said it was the rads or the drugs. We all kinda felt it, but now that I’m here, I really feel it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “Did you write about that?”

  “No, but I will if you want me to. I mean, I owe you so much. Anything you want, I’ll do.”

  I felt like saying, you don’t need to grovel, but on the other hand, I was glad she was grateful. “Look,” I said, “Michael can give you a notebook to write in. Tell me what never made sense in your old place. It doesn’t matter if it sounds dumb. Anything you can think of, why it doesn’t seem solid now. And while you’re at it, tell me what ki
nd of drugs, how easy they were to get or how hard or whatever.”

  “Okay.”

  Ari looked my way and raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t have explained why those details were important, but I knew they were. Ambiguity, again, but I’d learned over the years to minimize the risk of letting valuable information slip away.

  “So,” I said, “you know about the other gates?”

  “Everyone knows about the gates, just not where they are or where they go. The big Dodger gangs keep that all secret, you see, so no one can muscle in.”

  “Right. Did José want Michael to open gates for the BGs?”

  “Yeah. And to work the coyote racket.”

  “Coyote? Illegal immigrants?”

  “Yeah, getting people to Brazzy—Brazil, I mean—or some other clean country. There’s like rads everywhere, but some places it’s not so bad as Merrka. So if Mike could open a road, José figured, to like Strayla or Brazzy or even Fricka, then they could clean up.”

  “Makes sense. But dangerous, I’ll bet.”

  “Oh, yeah. If the cops found out, they’d have shot them both and taken the road over for themselves.”

  Ari made a noise somewhere between a cough and a screech of outrage. Sophie flinched and shrank back into her chair.

  “Sorry,” Ari said. “I take it that the police in your world have very low standards of conduct.”

  Sophie stared, utterly bewildered.

  “In our world,” Ari said, “the police obey the laws.”

  “No kidding?” Sophie said. “Wow, that’s really something, huh?”

  Ari muttered a few Hebrew words. I got back to the subject in hand.

  “Sophie,” I said, “what about immigration between worlds? Are there trans-world coyotes?”

  “You hear about that,” Sophie said, “but I don’t know if it’s true. I wrote down all the rumors. It’d be real dangerous. I mean, you might end up somewhere worse.”

  “Hard to imagine,” Ari said.

  “But there’s one rumor I think is true,” Sophie went on. “’Cause I saw it happen one night when I was working downtown. Cops from somewhere else bring prisoners through. I don’t know where from, but I heard about it, and then this one night, real late, I was standing down on Ellis Street near Market—” She stopped. “Is there an Ellis Street here?”

  “There sure is.” I was thinking of Jerry. “I don’t suppose it’s much different than the one in your old level.”

  “Okay. So I saw these guys come out of a bar, two guys in uniform, I mean, and I thought, ‘Oh, shit, cops!’ So I got a twenty out of my pocket to give them so they’d leave me alone, you know? But they didn’t even look at me. They were hauling along some guy in handcuffs. There was a streetlight, and you could see the weird color of their uniforms and the patches on them and stuff. They weren’t our cops. So they shoved the guy into a squad car and drove off. And I was bored so I watched, and halfway down the block, poof! they just disappeared. They must have had a world-walker in the front seat.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Ari said.

  “Real sure,” Sophie said. “I hadn’t smoked anything, either.”

  “What was the color of those uniforms?” I had one of my CDS insights. I knew the color had meaning, not that I knew what it was at that moment.

  “Green, kind of, but the streetlight was like yellow, you know? Our cops’ uniforms look black in streetlight light, but they’re really dark blue.”

  “Green under yellow light, huh?” I contemplated this for a moment. “Peacock blue, then, in sunlight.”

  “So your police,” Ari said, “would have let this other force operate in their jurisdiction?”

  For a second time Sophie radiated bewilderment. Ari tried again.

  “Your cops would have let these other guys arrest someone?”

  “For enough baksheesh, sure.” Sophie smiled and rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “That’s all it takes.”

  Ari glowered at an innocent wall as if he were thinking of punching it.

  “Fascinating,” I said. “This clears up so many things!”

  “Does it?” Ari said. “Explain.”

  “Later. I need to get my thoughts in order. Sophie, I’d like to talk with you again tomorrow, after I’ve read the stuff in the notebook. That okay?”

  “Sure. Any time.”

  “Okay, tomorrow your papers will be here, so we’ll bring them by and—”

  I stopped because she started to leak tears. “My papers?” she whispered between sniffs. “You got me the papers? Mike said you could, but I didn’t like believe him, because it was too good to be true.” She covered her face with both hands and sobbed aloud.

  I got up from my chair to attempt to comfort her just as Aunt Eileen came rushing in. She could hear a member of her family weeping from a mile away, I swear it. Eileen pulled a folded wad of clean tissues out of her skirt pocket and handed them to Sophie, then fixed me with the gimlet eye. “What have you been asking her?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Sophie stammered. “I’m just so happy.” She began to unwad the tissues, carefully pulling them free one layer at a time. “Nola, hey, I don’t know how to thank you.”

  What I wanted to say was, just don’t ever break my brother’s heart. What I said aloud was, “Keep thinking about those gates, and if you remember something new, write it down.”

  “I will, for sure.” She wiped her cheeks with one ply of a tissue, then folded it up as if she were planning on using it again.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said to Aunt Eileen. “We’ll be bringing by her papers. And a friend of mine will take her to a free clinic, just for a quick checkup. All that radiation, you know.”

  “Wonderful!” Aunt Eileen said. “When you get back, will you stay for dinner?”

  Ari came to attention like a dog scenting steak.

  “Thanks, we will,” I said. “What do you have planned for today?”

  “More shopping,” Aunt Eileen said. “And then we’re going to turn her into a blonde.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “A real good idea, in fact. Make sure the beautician does her eyebrows, too.”

  Since the rain had slacked off to a drizzle, we drove home the long way round, via Fifth and Market. Sarge’s territory, the entrance to the Flood Building, imitated a slice of a Roman bath with a two-story-high coffered ceiling and, at the back, huge bronze-trimmed doors leading into the building itself. In wet weather it would provide plenty of shelter for a panhandler. Yet, even though I cruised by in slow traffic, I saw no sign of him. At a stoplight, I ran a quick SM:P and caught a glimpse of him sitting half asleep in a church pew. Which church it was I couldn’t see.

  “He must have found a place where they leave the heat on,” I said.

  “Good,” Ari said. “I can’t believe the weather here. It’s almost spring. Why is it so sodding cold?”

  “And wet. Don’t forget the wet. Usually things are drying out and warming up by now, yeah. I don’t know why. It’s weather. Weather does what it wants.”

  Ari growled. The first thing he did when we reached our flat was to turn on the heat.

  I spent the rest of that day going over Sophie’s notebook. I separated out the tangled strands of information and organized them by category, then sent the Agency a comprehensive report. I included the perceptions of the deviant level beyond the gate that I’d made on the day we bargained for Sophie. I also retrieved and reread all the information NumbersGrrl had sent me on deviant world levels.

  During all this, Ari was sitting on the couch, channel surfing with the sound off. I swiveled my chair around and caught his attention.

  “When we were fetching Sophie,” I said, “you took your rad alarm out of your pocket. You said something was odd, the mix of radiation or something?”

  “Just that, yes. There was a very high concentration of X-rays and ultraviolet light.”

  “And?”

  “That much ultraviolet makes me think someth
ing stripped off part of the ozone layer.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Do you know what that is?”

  “The thing the aerosols were destroying?”

  “That will do to get on with. But the main point is, that type of radiation damage isn’t typical of nuclear explosions. With fallout, what lingers is the secondary radiation, such as gamma rays. The percentage of gamma radiation was too low to indicate normal fallout conditions, if you can call a nuclear war normal, at any rate.”

  “Huh. That is odd, but you know, I’m not surprised. There’s something real strange about that deviant level. Let me do a little more reading in Agency files.”

  When I finished, I was ready to float a few theories. The San Francisco of that level struck me as being a little less than real. People there talked about Africa, Brazil—countries in the southern hemisphere. Neither Michael nor Sophie had ever mentioned Canada, Europe, Japan, any of the countries of the north. And all that radiation, the purported traces of a series of nuclear wars, had turned out to be the wrong kind. What’s more, neither Michael nor Sophie had ever mentioned a picture of a place destroyed by bombing. I called Mike to confirm these thoughts.

  “Do you remember telling me,” I began, “that the Germans had nukes ready to deliver in the 1930s?”

  “That’s what I was told, yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t think that’s actually possible. Way too early.”

  “Y’know, I kind of wondered about those bombs, too. Everyone said there was nothing left of LA to see. But I don’t remember why—maybe Sophie will—but I got this weird feeling like maybe it never had been there, but everyone thought it should have been there, and so they made up stuff about it being bombed. The Dodgers were in Sackamenna for the ’37 Coast League championships. Isn’t that kind of early, too? I mean, they would have been called the Hollywood Stars back then.”

  “Real true, bro. Way too early for the actual Dodgers.”

  “And if they were in LA, how come they weren’t blown up, too, when the bomb dropped?”

  “Look, Mike, the Agency will be asking the same questions. Can you talk with Sophie some more? Write down any answers or data you guys can remember or put together.”