by Robert Reed
Now his voice seems strange to his own ears. Steward sounds nervous. His heart is racing, thud-thudding against his ribs, and the sweat is soaking his chest hair and the sheets below him. She says nothing. She hangs over him, watching him, and he says, “So it wasn’t a secret anymore. No one could have missed the wail of him crying. Terrified! There’s no other word to describe him. And when a warrior is caught at that stage, that far broken, he is useless. There’s no way to repair the will. There is no elixir or training technique to bring it back. Never.”
She makes a small sound and looks out the window.
“And the way I responded was to fight. I did the job of my Shadow. I know for a fact that I’ve never fought so well in my life. Before or since. And we turned back the ambush and turned the enemy’s line and we won the largest victory in the last half century, I suppose. It took a little more than an hour. Then I worked my way back to the ditch where Chaz was hiding.” He pauses. He says, “I expected to hear him sobbing. You know? I even did hear him sobbing, some part of my brain expecting it that much. But he wasn’t making any noise. None. He had used a knife and slashed his wrists and bled to death in a ditch full of old rainwater. Maybe you wondered what happened to my Shadow. That’s it.”
She was listening from the first, taking in his words with the casual ease of someone designed and trained to listen without effort to whatever is said through the course of a sleepless evening. She is a Flower, after all. This is the task that suits her best, serving as an audience while the lover rests up for the next round. She remembers how Dirk would talk about the women and Flowers he had bedded in the past, and she would look at him and flash a big smile, cooing something and sometimes pretending to be aroused by his simple, oftentimes cruel stories, saying to him:
Am I ever lucky to have you. My man! My loving man!
Steward is so very different from Dirk. They are not the same kind of animal. Not nearly. When he is telling about Chaz and the suicide, she starts to do more than listen like a Flower would listen. She looks out the window, trying to concentrate on all the cool dark night air, and she wonders what she should say to Steward. What does he want to hear? That she’s sorry? That she wishes there were some healing trick she knew? She feels as though she is on some strange emotional surface, hands and toes hunting traction, a good deep gash in a vulnerable spot needed so she can stop this sliding motion. But it’s not there. Steward affords no easy handholds.
“Everything came to an end,” he declares. “I was in dishonor. All Yellowknife knew the story, and most of them expected me to do one last honorable thing and die with my Shadow. It’s something of a tradition. They went so far as to build two coffins. But then most Shadows die when they are very, very old. I was young. I was no dusty Elder with two-plus centuries of wear on me, and so I decided on banishment and came here to Brulé for no particular reason. I’ve lived half my life inside these walls, surviving, even thriving, and sometimes I find myself thinking that this half and my first half add up to nothing. Zero. It’s as if I’ve been alive for fifty years—can you imagine such a stretch of time, Chiffon?—and after all that time the ledger reads empty. Zilch.”
She listens, saying nothing but now knowing what she could say. It comes to her suddenly, by surprise, and she has to blink and give a little shiver, opening her mouth as if about to speak. Only her tongue won’t move. She has no voice. She knows the perfect thing to tell this battered sad warrior—“Let me be your Shadow! Please please please let me be your new Chaz!—only she can’t say the words, can’t even clear her throat now, hovering over him and scared to look down at his face. He might read her mind. What if he knew what she was thinking?
Steward would be touched.
He probably doesn’t even know how much it would mean to him. Of course he would refuse. Politely. And he might smile a little bit, too. And in the end she would have him completely and forever. She knows it! Every sign points to it! She could win him now and all it would take is saying a handful of words with feeling.
Yet she is a mute.
Utterly helpless.
A simple lie, she thinks. I can’t even tell a simple lie! How in all hell can I win him if I can’t even control my own self? What’s he doing to me? What has he done?!
16
People ask me how they can get into my job. What kind of skills do they need. I tell them they have to be an artist. First and foremost, a true artist. In what way? they ask. How do you mean? So I tell them that in my business revenge is the key. It must be done perfectly. There is an art to extracting justice from someone who has done you wrong. Only a great artist is capable of accomplishing that end with perfection. And all of my peers, I assure listeners, are stars of the highest magnitude. Including me…
—excerpt from a crime lord’s diary, available through World-Net
Now Toby wakes without having dreamed, without having really slept, lying in the waiting room of the same hospital with light streaming through a series of broad windows and the plush carpeting busily making bright gold and blue blossoms designed to cheer sad spirits and renew tired old faiths. He sits up and wipes his face. He isn’t cheered or renewed. He spent half the night talking with April, trading stories and bile, and he might have slept in her room if the autodoc hadn’t come in with her sedative and chased him away.
He has a calculated fondness for the girl.
He adores her circumstances. Sometimes he thinks that the hard parts of her life could have been his own, and he finds himself believing that everything he has endured during these last couple years will be made right soon enough. April is the key. She makes so very much possible, he tells himself. The Prophet Himself must have sent her.
Toby scans the waiting room. There is no one else, excepting a lone whore sitting on a nearby sofa. She is watching him. He hates the way she stares. A long hallway runs past the waiting room, and he starts to watch people busily walking along. The level sunlight splashes into the hallway in distinct window-shaped blocks. Light and shadow and light again and. shadow and light. Toby notices how the people seem more real, more substantial, when they cross into the brightness. He thinks how the air must be relatively clean, this being a hospital, but there are faint white bits of something drifting in the ventilating breeze. The whore continues to watch him, no expression on her face. He ignores her. He concentrates on the coolness of the dirty air. Maybe I should live here, he thinks. I’m halfway comfortable. Imagine!
Out in the hallway is noise, sudden and yet subdued. A team of shiny autodocs and human doctors come into view. They surround a long floating table ridden by an injured man. At least one long knife did the damage, lengths of flesh lifted off the bones with careful deliberation. The whore says, “Too much fun under the moonlight, I think.” She has a dusky little laugh. Her eyes are dark and cool and absolutely amoral. “I’ve seen worse and they live. So he’s lucky.” She laughs again and shifts her slight weight, something about her face tough and wise.
Toby envies those looks.
He watches the patient and attendants vanish, and then he straightens his back until something pops and loosens. Maybe he should sleep some more. Maybe he should check on April first. The whore is looking at him again, making him nervous. Halfway smiling, she asks where he is from. Garden? He says, “Sure. Garden.”
“Shit no,” she says, her voice friendly and yet abrasive too. “So what are you doing down here? Get lost?”
“A neighbor of mine…was injured…”
“You do it?”
“No.” He looks at her face, at the telltale skullcap bright in the sunlight, and he says, “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know.” She gives a disinterested shrug. “Maybe you look like someone who might…I don’t know…injure someone? I don’t know.” And she smiles, the expression oddly girlish. “You want something to eat? We can go get some breakfast maybe.”
“I don’t think so.”
“So where’s the neighbor?” she wonders.
“So maybe you should look in on her. On him.” She pauses, then she tells him, “I’ve never met a real Gardener before.”
He should go check on April. They still have plans to make.
“Does anyone ever get sick on Garden?” She wants to know. “I’ve seen shows on World-Net. There’s no crime, is there? No cancers when you get old? You’re all healthy and kicking until the day you die. Right? That sounds marvelous to me. It does.”
He is thinking about April, talking to her in his head.
“So anyway, let’s go. Get up and go see her. Him. Whatever.” She stands like a little girl, her legs full of a springy tension. “Or if you want,” she offers, “we can sneak into the viewing room. You ever seen a knife wound sewn up?”
He has to say, “Never.”
“So come on.” She waves and prods until he stands, then she urges him into motion. “Come on. I know this place like no one. You’ll see. Just keep on my tail now. Let’s go!”
They walk down the hallway. April’s room is coming, and the whore is skipping along and giggling. Toby stops at April’s door, wishing his guide would leave him. But she won’t. She joins him and looks inside, Toby making sure that nothing has changed. The door recognizes him and tells him with a cool professional voice that her condition is improving and she will be awake and happy in a good hour. Please stop back then.
He is left with no destination. “She’s healing, huh?”
He says, “Yes.”
“Who fucked up her face?”
“Her boyfriend.”
“That you?”
“No.”
“Just asking,” she says.
He says, “They live downstairs from me.” He pauses, then adds, “I’m just a friend. I’m helping.” They are walking together. He’s a little lost and afraid to admit it, following the curling hallway and coming to an elevator. The doors part. They enter. When the whore demands the surgical ward a cool AI voice asks by what right should they be given access.
“It’s that knifing. I know the guy. We both know him.” She motions towards Toby, incapable of being flustered.
“You’re his friends?” asks the AI.
“His clients. He owes us for a little double time.” She smiles and squeezes Toby’s nearest arm. “You ever see a Gardener fuck?” she asks the AI. “You should sometime. It’ll give you horizons.”
The elevator shuts its doors and takes them upstairs.
“They’ll save him. You wait, lover boy.” She is talking to Toby, winking and halfway laughing. “Don’t even worry. We’re going to get paid one way or another.”
He says nothing, not sure why he has come here and intrigued by the vagueness of everything. He gives the whore a quick hard look, wondering her age and history and deciding it would be too much to ask questions. She might think he meant something with them.
“Here we be!” she announces.
They enter another hallway, walk and turn and walk on. Then they are inside a little room and looking down through a clear glass floor. Below them is a long table and autodocs and one lone doctor overseeing the operation. Toby is startled by all the meat and blood and detached skin. It takes him a long moment to see the police officer sitting a couple meters away. The whore pokes him and says, “Would you look at that mess?” Then she turns away. “Do I know you?” she asks the officer, already bored with the show. “What’s your name, sir? Krispin? Officer Krispin?” And she is off and talking, making another quick friend.
Toby listens to them while he stares downward. His heart is racing. His breath stinks.
“You know what I just found out, Officer Krispin? When whores fight? You know what’s the last thing they’ll cut or crush?”
“You don’t know?”
“Hey, I’m new. Young and foolish.” She laughs as if she is ten years old.
Krispin laughs too. “Whores never, never go for the goods,” he says. “The product line. And you know why?”
“Tell me.”
“Because she might get stuck paying for the healing. Rehabilitation and prosthetics and natural grafts.” He tells her, “If I catch you with the guilty knife, young lady, then you’ll be using your wages to make repairs. And you don’t want to paying your competition to build bigger dongs, say. Or a sweeter box.” Krispin is an ageless older man. He has seen everything and nothing will ever be new again. Not for him. “You didn’t know?”
“Like I said, I’m young.”
He has a smiling voice. “I’m going to have to watch you.”
“Do.”
“I will.”
“Great!”
Toby studies the ways the autodoc arms cut at the dead tissues, the other arms sprouting laser light to mend the tears. Degradable glue is used for the largest wounds. The patient lies on his back, his face composed and his eyes mostly closed and his breathing slow and regular. Toby can’t say why he’s so fascinated by the sight of an operation. He could access the same scenes through World-Net. Maybe it’s the surprise of it all. Maybe it’s because he didn’t expect to come here, and that’s why it’s so damned interesting.
“Seen many fights, little girl?” Krispin asks.
“I don’t know. I saw one a few nights back.”
“Yeah?”
“Saw a bunch of whores get their snot knocked loose.” She laughs and tells him how it happened, and Krispin says:
“I know. I got called in afterward. Did some interviews. Filed my report and forgot it.”
“Did we meet? We didn’t, did we?”
“No,” he says with confidence. “I don’t remember you. And I would.”
She asks, “So. Was that a real Flower? Or not?”
“I doubt it. I don’t see how.”
“That guy sure saved her ass, Flower or not.”
“I guessed as much. Most people weren’t too eager to talk about it.”
“I would have talked to you,” she says. “You know, I ended up alone that damned night. Me!”
“Poor little girl,” says Krispin.
She pokes Toby in the side. “Where are you going?” she asks him.
He doesn’t know. He was watching the operation and something suddenly occurred to him. An idea. He doesn’t want to hear this dribble about whores in some Old Quarter bar. He doesn’t care. What he needs is to go somewhere and think it through and decide if it is possible. He hopes so. It seems so damned perfect in his head.
“I’ve got to go look in on my friend,” he lies. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” She shrugs and turns away. Krispin gives Toby a quick cutting look, professional and thorough, and when Toby is out the door and walking down the hallway, happy enough to sing, Krispin asks:
“So that’s a Gardener, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone you know?”
“Just met him. I don’t know him.”
“What’s his story?”
She says, “He smacked his girlfriend pretty good. With a club or something.”
“He tell you?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“He seems like the type, I guess.” She says, “He’s hanging around the girl for some reason. It’s either guilt or he’s not quite done doing damage.”
And Krispin says, “If he’s a Gardener, he’s innocent.”
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely.” He assures her, “No one is as peaceful as a Gardener. They’re the sweetest people in the System.”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t know that yet?”
“I guess not.”
“It’s true,” he says. “I admire those people. I do.”
And she tells him, “I don’t know. I don’t think you got a good look at those eyes.”
So this is how he’s going to play it, thinks Minus. Pyn’s going to keep us at a distance now. I ask
a favor for Dirk. I ask for some names. But the little shit wants to act like he’s found courage, dicking us around. Having his police chief call to tell me that the names are classified and sorry. Sorry. What’s the little shit done? Figured us out on his own? He can’t have done it. Every uniform in Brulé would be hunting the Flower if he knew everything. Good God in Heaven, he thinks, do I ever need to relax. He feels like a crazy man this morning. He’s letting too much get under his skin, all right.
Minus is sitting in his bedroom, a bowl of spiked ice on the living table beside him. The table and all the furnishings were stained by the cushioning foam. The carpeting itself was killed, turning colorless and crumbling away now. Minus smells must in the air. He uses his hands to pick up the spiked cubes one at a time, sucking them to nothing and thinking hard about everything. They’re not finding Chiffon. The AIs have produced plenty of leads—a face seen in a crowd, a curious question asked World-Net and so on—but Minus and the Quito men have run themselves in circles trying to find anything worthwhile. There’s nothing. This is some crazy situation, he thinks. A tiny town like Brulé swallows up the damned Flower. It’s almost as if she’s died and been buried or sunk and forgotten. Possible? He hopes not. He wants to think of the Freestater and the Flower/Ghost hiding together in some little room, plotting and wishing and filling in the empty time with the oldest kind of fun.
That Freestater, he thinks, I’m not done with you. One way or another.
The sun is halfway toward noon. Minus has been up all night. He blinks and looks outside, watching the scattered towers and the eastern reaches of the city. Sometimes a bird or two, or ten, soar past the long window. He thinks about the tailored hawks he has chasing Chiffon. They haven’t seen anything, and he’s halfway thankful. He doesn’t need more false leads. Last night was a crush of false leads. He needs to sleep and be done with things for a couple of hours. He sighs and turns away from the window. Dirk is out in the front room. He can hear the old man pacing, muttering to himself, and he can see Dirk without having to use his eyes—the willowy figure wearing an old robe, his hair unkempt and his long hands moving nervously in and out of the robe’s stretched pockets.
