“How long?” she asked him after a few minutes that seemed like an hour.
“Can’t say, ma’am,” the imperturbable marine replied.
It was not a promising answer and a seemingly interminable span of minutes passed while she fidgeted. A few people in the crowd that surged in and out of the bar’s entrance like a viscous tide had started to whisper and some were shaking their heads. Then she heard her name in maybe the thickest colonial accent she’d ever met with and turned to see a man heading straight for her, parting the crowd like Moses.
He was about her height, twice her weight and could have been her marine driver’s father. Or, she thought as he neared, his grandfather. His skin was burned to a dark mahogany and there was a disorderly fringe of white hair around the naked dome of his scalp. His bright blue eyes twinkled from the deep creases of his face, split with a broad smile as he held out a hand the size of soup plate with a great deal of hair over the back of it.
“Ms. Rathor?” he announced through the grin. “I’m Nick.” Then he turned the marine. “You’re relieved, Corporal.”
“Yessir! Thank you, sir!” The marine gave Nick, who was wearing cargo pants bloused over scuffed engineer’s boots and a loud shirt, a perfect parade-ground salute. Mariwen watched the marine go and tried not to despair. Though Nick did seem a cheerful sort . . . She favored him with a pleasant expression and accepted the bear-like hand.
“My car’s round there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at god-knows-where. “Don’t mind, do ya?”
“Certainly not—pleasure.” She twitched the smile. He grinned cavernously and ushered her off without further ado.
Ten minutes later they pulled up in front a smallish two-story dwelling, quite neat, though it lacked any air of permanence. A way station or temporary quarters and meticulously suited to that purpose.
“What is this?” Mariwen asked.
“Trin’s place,” Nick answered, unsealing the doors. “She’ll be along any moment.”
“I’m here now, Nick,” they heard Trin’s unmistakable voice sing out and looking up, Mariwen saw Trin descending from the second story, wearing a light gray suit instead of her uniform. “I hope you’ll forgive the fact that Nick is always late.” She shot him a significant look.
Nick returned fire with that grin. “That depends on your definition of late.”
Mariwen looked from one to the other, digesting the improbable banter. The implications were . . . interesting. She concluded she’d have to rethink some of the initial impressions she’d formed.
“Would you care to come in, Ms. Rathor?” Trin asked, with a nod to her.
“Delighted.” She exited the car with all her usual grace.
“Well, you gals go get acquainted,” Nick called out with a cheery wave. “Holler if you need anything.” Shutting the doors, he gunned the car away from the curb.
Once inside, Trin offered to take Mariwen’s coat and as she gave it to her, Mariwen asked, “Forgive me if I’m being nosy, but who is Nick?”
Trin hung her coat in an inconspicuous autovalet and turned back to her with a richer smile. “That would be Nikolai Taliaferro, former Chief Inspector of the Nedaeman Bureau of Public Safety. He retired about three-and-a-half years ago.”
Mariwen, who’d lived for years on Nedaema with her late wife, Lora Comargo, needed all her well-honed aplomb not to blink foolishly. It never would have occurred to her that the man she’d just met had retired as the top law-enforcement official on her adopted Homeworld.
“Yes,” Trin said, noting the look. “Nick does tend to enjoy people judging a book by its cover.”
Mariwen mentioned the marine’s salute. She’d understood it was against protocol to salute persons not in uniform and she wasn’t aware retired law-enforcement officials merited salutes in any case.
“They don’t,” Trin allowed. “But Nick is also Master Sergeant Taliaferro of the Royal Hesperian Marine Corp, retired. So it’s allowed as a courtesy.” She paused for a significant instant. “And I should probably mention that he personally led your security detail while you were hospitalized on Nedaema.”
“Oh . . .” Mariwen felt a burgeoning sense of disorientation. The corners of her mouth raised in a smile that held an unaccustomed touch of shyness. “I’m . . . happy to know that. That was exceptionally kind of him.”
“Nick is exceptional in any number of ways.” That comment seemed to imply any number of things, but before Mariwen could ponder them, Trin said, “Can I get you something? Tea perhaps? Or something a little stronger? I’ve several bottles of La Salette Rafe dropped by last time he was here. It might be considered appropriate to open one.”
“That would be splendid,” Mariwen said, working to keep the quaver out of her voice. She also had several bottles of that incomparable wine—most of a case, in fact—that Rafe had given her on his most recent visit. It was the flagship offering of one of his family’s wineries, but it was never sold. Not even a head of state could get a bottle if he was deemed unworthy of drinking it. She and Kris had shared a bottle the night before she left . . .
“I’ll fetch it.” Trin gestured around the modest, simply appointed living space. “Please make yourself at home.”
By the time Trin returned by the bottle, an old-fashioned corkscrew and two glasses, Mariwen was almost entirely herself again, sitting easily in a surprisingly comfortable chair of ivory leather straps and bent cyan-colored metal, arranged in that open-work fashion that was popular a year or two ago. She doubted Trin had picked it—the furnishings probably came with the place.
Trin cut the foil and expertly extracted the cork—genuine cork as the Huron family owned the only cork-oak forest left on the planet: thousands of hectares covering most of Altamirano in Nuevo Catalonia. She poured both glasses half-full, handed one to Mariwen and sat in a matching chair with an economical movement. She moved well, Mariwen noted, calibrating the degree of grace she applied with precision.
“Before we go any further, Ms. Rathor,” Trin said as she lifted her glass, “please do accept my apologies for this PM and all the hocus-pocus in bringing you here. I will do my best to make amends.”
That made Mariwen smile. She raised her glass in reply. “Captain, believe me, no apologies are necessary. And even if they were, this is alone”—she dipped a nod to the glass of wine—“would atone for a multitude of worse sins.”
“Most gracious.” Trin gave her a little salute and they sampled the vintage together—it did not disgrace its reputation. After another sip, Trin went on: “But I do feel you are owned as full an explanation as I can make, for there are a great many things that need explaining . . . to say the least.” With those last words, a shadow flitted across her face. “But before we get into that, I’ve been given to understand that you wish to offer some material help to getting our people back. Do I understand correctly?”
“Anything,” Mariwen said. “If I can do anything that will help them, I will.”
Anything. Trin nodded. She knew a handful of people who could be counted on to keep their word literally in that regard and at first blush Mariwen would not appear to be one of their number. But Trin knew much better than most how appearances could be deceiving. She set her glass down.
“Ms. Rathor, when I received Nick’s communication regarding you, I took the liberty of doing a modicum of research to see if anything might be . . . might present itself. It so happens that something may have. However . . .”
“Yes?” Mariwen resisted the urge to scoot closer to the edge of her seat. The chair’s design didn’t make it easy to scoot anyway.
Trin Wesselby sat back in her chair, raising curled fingers under her chin. “I see that you have a graduate degree in biophysics.”
“Yes. From UC.”
“And your thesis was on modes of avian communications?”
“That’s right. Ravens.”
“So you’re familiar memory transference, associative axial Q-coding? Knots-and-Splices Theo
ry? Chalmers’ Hypothesis of Meta-consciousness?”
“Um . . . somewhat. Things are lot simpler in birds—some of those structures don’t exist or are nascent, so we didn’t consider them detail.”
“But you know that memories are stored as Q-coded associative clouds operating according to Knots-and-Splices Theory?”
“Yes.”
“How familiar are you with BAEL?”
“I can’t say highly familiar.” BAEL—the acronym for the Biosemiotic Axio-Emotive Limbic system—was a group of structures and processes that governed human emotions and behavior. It also played a role in long-term memory formation, and was closely associated with behavioral triggers, particularly the olfactory senses. It was also a perennial joke, being the alleged name of a Philistine god to who children were sacrificed by fire (this is what passed for humor among neurophysicists).
“The analog is quite different in birds, and more localized,” Mariwen added in a guarded tone.
“So you’re aware it’s a systemic function in mammals that involves the entire endocrine system.”
In her first class on neurophysics, they’d briefly covered the history of the discipline, starting with the early primitive beliefs about what was then called the limbic system. That the limbic system was just part of what became known as BAEL (albeit an important part) was discovered much later. It explained some of the more vexing problems in neurophysics, many of which had previously been considered folklore, and for a time it seemed to offer a final solution to curing a whole range of intractable problems, from alcoholism and severe chronic depression to pathological narcissism and psychopathic disorders. These hopes were quickly crushed, however, and Mariwen’s class had included a segment, illustrated with horrific case studies, on the results of attempts to directly manipulate BAEL. There was, naturally, more than a little dark humor expressed over that part of the class.
Mariwen felt her palms grow moist, wondering just why Trin had brought it up. “I’m aware, yes.”
Trin paused. “Then you know that selective memory retrieval is impossible because there’s no such thing as an isolated memory stack. We still don’t have nearly the understanding of BAEL that some people would like you to think we do, but it’s clear that given the strong links between long-term memory formation and emotive processes, that memory precursors and associative anchor keys are stored throughout the system—in ways that are not at clear.”
“Yes . . . certainly.”
“Then you understand what I mean when I tell you that—in this case—anything could mean bringing back everything your doctors spent years suppressing?” Trin had not personally interrogated the apprehended terrorists who’d been involved in Mankho’s plot but she’d seen the data. And despite the fact that the Nedaemans had seriously bungled the only catch worth keeping, there was certainly enough to confirm Trin’s suspicions about what had happened during the weeks Mariwen had been held by Mankho’s people.
“Absolutely.”
Trin examined her carefully manicured fingernails, permanently tinted a tasteful coral-pink. “This is not something to be rushed into. It will almost certainly be quite . . . difficult.”
Mariwen looked across the glass to catch Trin’s eyes. “I’m sure you know much more about General Heydrich than I do. If he was holding someone you loved, how difficult would that be?”
In spite of herself, Trin looked away from what she’d just glimpsed in Mariwen’s expression. But she understood. “In that case, I’d like to ask you some questions. Bring your wine.”
Chapter 5
Denver Heights, Colorado
Western Federal District, Terra, Sol
Trin led Mariwen into a spacious light-filled office with a desktop system in it and a row of cabinets. She rolled a second desk chair over to the console and motioned to it. “I’m afraid that in some ways this will be rather like the initial psychevals we do on the people we recover, though I hope it’s not quite so irritating,” Trin said, taking the other chair. She had her xel out and tapped the codes that unlocked the system. The console came to life and the display elevated. “Do you recall yours at all?”
Mariwen shook her head. Trin made a notation on her xel then took an object like a stylus out of her desk. “This a simple neural scanner. Pretty rudimentary actually—only monitors eleven basic parameters—has a range of about a meter. You probably used something similar when you were working with your ravens?”
It actually sounded quite a bit more sophisticated than what Mariwen had used, but she nodded anyway.
“I don’t need to use it, but it will help things go faster. Do I have your permission?”
“I’m all for doing this a quickly as possible,” and when that answer didn’t seem to fully satisfy Trin, she added, “Yes, you do.”
“Thank you.” Trin set the scanner vertically in a stand and clicked the switch on the barrel. The tip lit up with a red glow. “And I’d also like to record our session on my xel. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes, that’s perfectly fine.”
“Thanks.” Trin turned back to her system’s display. “We’ll start by showing you some images. When I show you an image, what is most important is your initial reaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate or not—just whatever the image triggers. If it’s something you don’t want to talk about, that’s fine too. You can say—or refrain from saying—anything you like.” Setting her glass to one side of the display, Trin fished briefly in the desktop and brought out a file. She opened it and showed Mariwen an image of short-haired woman with an oval face, bright green eyes and an impish grin. “Do you know her?”
The question dropped like a shard of ice into Mariwen’s stomach. “That’s Lora.”
“Who’s Lora?” Trin asked casually, retrieving her glass and sipping.
Mariwen’s hand was shaking and she put her other hand around it to make it stop. “We were married—she was my agent.”
Trin jotted another note. Lora Comargo had been killed by Mankho’s people when they kidnapped Mariwen on Hestia. “What was she like?”
“Umm . . .” Mariwen took a slow breath and her gaze slid off the image. “Fun . . . driven. Picky. She had a temper.”
“Did you fight?”
Mariwen shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “We—fought.”
“About what?” Trin slid back, deliberately opening the space between them and nursing her wine.
“Money. My career. Her pushing . . .”
The day Lora found out she’d modeled nude for a friend she’d met back in grad school. He wasn’t famous and never had much money, though he insisted on paying her what he could. His prints hardly ever sold but she liked him and she liked his work. The images he captured felt more like her than anyone else’s. He was funny and sweet and she could be so free when she worked with him . . . “You can’t just give it away anymore!” Lora had yelled, waving the pics. “Why can’t you understand that?” They’d just landed her second big contract—they’d just gotten engaged . . . “I’m not your fucking slave!” she’d screamed back. “I’ll work with whoever I like!”
“Was she the jealous type?”
“Lora?” Mariwen looked up and blinked. “No! She’d . . .” Bring girls home . . . and toys. Cruise the Strips for the short rounder girls she was keen on. She liked attitude—glitter girls with a mouth. It was fun. For a while. But when Mariwen saw someone she wanted . . .
Trin tapped on her xel. “Did you love her?”
“I . . . yes. She was—fun. Sweet.”
“What did you love about her?”
“She made me want to try harder. She wasn’t always pushy.”
Lora sitting on their bed, head in her hands, her voice a low mumble, stumbling through her fingers: “I’m sorry . . . I know I push too much. It’s just—just . . . so tough out there. You gotta—gotta be on it every second or . . .” Mariwen had gently pulled her fingers away and kissed them. “Or what? We’ll lose what? This?”
She gestured around the richly furnished Nemeton penthouse they’d just leased. “Us?” She kissed the tears off Lora’s cheeks. “C’mon. Can’t we just let it be enough for a little while? Can’t we take a little break?” Lora linked her arms around Mariwen’s neck and pulled her closer. “Sure. Okay. A vacation would be nice. Maybe . . . maybe they’ll even start to miss you some. That could be a good—” Mariwen pressed her fingers to Lora’s lips and then kissed her. “You’re so silly . . .”
Mariwen exhaled to pull herself back the present. “She was honest. She really did care . . .”
Trin waited as Mariwen touched the corner of her eye and took a mouthful of wine. “Did you love her as much as you love Loralynn Kennakris?”
“I, ah . . .” Kris? Kris and Lora? How could— Mariwen made an odd distracted gesture. “No.”
Trin consulted her xel. “Odd coincidence about the names, don’t you think?”
“Their names?” Lora’s full name was Lora Evelyn Comargo. Lora Evelyn. Loralynn. Why’d I never notice that? “I suppose.”
Trin blanked Lora’s image and brought up another. “How about her?”
Mariwen leaned closer. The girl was a stunning platinum blonde with pure Nordic features: a chiseled nose, firm jaw and precisely shaped lips. She wore her long hair parted in the middle and perfectly straight. But it was the eyes that held your attention: wide and a deep violet, almost amethyst. “I—I don’t know.”
“What about this one?” A full-body shot, caught at an awkward angle, of the same girl with a much younger Mariwen grinning vampishly over her shoulder and squeezing the enhanced breasts that were crowding out of a tight-fitted jacket. A tiny waist too, flaring gracefully into round hips. Nice legs but a touch short—she was trying to compensate with those 13-cm heels . . .
First semester of grad school . . . They’d been at this party to celebrate the end of finals. Was it that night? What had happened after? That image . . . “Kat?”
“Kat. Do you recall her full name?”
“I, um . . . no. She was from—Ascalon? I think.”
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