by Robert Reed
At least the old man is better than a few days ago, he tells himself. No nonsense about Ghosts in his room and pain in his joints. That Quito doctor was right. Maybe there’s something she can do for him now. Minus wonders. Maybe he should give her a call.
Then something occurs to him. It’s a bit of speculation that comes to him unannounced and not entirely invited, yet he has to pause and consider it for a long minute. What if he went to Pyn again, but not for Dirk? What if he went and explained to that little shit of a man the bones of the story? There’s a Flower walking around Brulé with a fortune. There’s enough money to keep the mantle mines operating for years. And you’ve got resources, he would say. The police. Political friends and allies. And maybe the Farmsteads around Brulé, too. They don’t want trouble, do they? So maybe you can find the girl…I mean the Flower. Find her and keep half the money for yourself and give the rest to me. All right? Me! Not Dirk. He doesn’t know I came. I don’t think it’d do his health any good to know. You see? It’s between us, shit to shit, and I know you’re an honorable man and you can see I’m not…so say yes and don’t even think you can cheat me, not and live a day…you little shit…
He laughs quietly, shaking his head.
Picking up another cube, he licks it and tastes the salt from his upper lip and pushes the delicious thing into his mouth, banging it against his teeth. I could cheat Dirk, he realizes. I’ve got the power and the position and could leave him to starve in Brulé. If it mattered enough. If I cared for the money enough, he tells himself.
But he doesn’t.
He can’t.
All these years Minus has watched over Dirk. He hasn’t done it for the honor or the sense of duty. He’s carried out his job because it pays and it’s interesting and he knows the rules better than most people could. Yet there’s no way to change now. Maybe when people lived fifty or sixty years, he thinks, it was possible for someone to do a turnaround. Guard a man most of your life and then steal from him. But when it’s a matter of centuries, doing the same things day after day, habits become more than habits and your brain has deep grooves that can’t be ignored. Minus has been one thing too long to be anything else. Not ever again. If things had been different and he was trained as a saint in his early life, he supposes he would have been equally good at it. Not to mention thoroughly poor. People would have stopped when they saw him and pointed, envying the pearly glow around him. He feels certain.
The ice in his mouth has melted.
His bowl holds a swallow’s worth of residue, all the ice gone, and he tips it and runs his tongue after a few wayward drops. Then he stands and goes to his bed and sits on the edge, wanting sleep, wanting to lie flat on his back and feel himself borne away by the darkness. He’s getting old, he admits. It’s time to retire. He breathes and looks around the big bedroom—the bed and table and a couple of simple chairs, all foam-stained, nothing on the walls, and the carpeting turning to dust. It occurs to him that he’s lived here for months and yet nothing marks his presence. Not in any way. His home is as bland as his hairy bright body is gaudy, and he wonders why that is and breathes again and then falls asleep.
The second lure is a necklace of Garden pearls. The first lure—a quick giggle—is too soft to gain Dirk’s attention. But the pearls have a familiar look about them. Dirk catches sight of them out of the corner of his eye. Of course he doesn’t think in terms of lures. He thinks to himself, That’s odd! Pearls on Tau Ceti? So he walks to the panel and kneels and takes a closer look. The giggle returns. It’s light and soft and enticing, and he looks up through the alien vegetation and spies something or someone hiding on the other side of an odd alien bush. What’s this? Oh, it isn’t! It couldn’t be! He’s having some wicked hallucination, he decides. That’s the only explanation. But just to make certain he tries to grab the pearls, thinking they will melt away as will the Flower too.
Pain takes hold of his wrists.
Dirk is wheeled, jerked and brought down on his back somehow, the air kicked out of him and him gasping and trying to fight the pain. He can’t scream. He’s been pulled into the panel as far as possible, Tau Ceti gone and a pasty whiteness surrounding him. There’s a terrible harsh stink in the air. Someone has him by the neck, twisting hard enough to roll him over on his belly. Dirk tries swinging at his attacker. Nothing. He manages to breathe, choking on the stench. “Minus!” he moans. Heat builds around his head and arms. His skin is starting to burn. A shiny set of blades come out of the nothingness, hilts of black ivory and a big dark hand on each hilt. The blades cut at him. They go to the bone. The worst pain is in his thigh, below his groin, and he cries out and tries to elude the blades. He turns on his back and kicks, kicks and kicks. More hands grab at his feet. He won’t let them take hold. He screams at them, “Get away! Get off me!” and then Minus finally gets a grip and pulls him out of the panel, out onto the floor and the bright open air.
Dirk lies motionless for a moment, gasping and gingerly touching his injured thigh. Only there is nothing. Not even a redness. He wonders how the Freestater managed that magic, and he breathes and looks back and sees Tau Ceti reemerging inside the long panel.
Coughing into his hands, he tells Minus the details.
Minus nods and rubs his sleepy face and says, “Our boy is paying you back for the pain you caused his lady friend. I bet that’s what he was doing.”
“You think so?”
“I guess he wanted you to know how it feels.”
“I wish she knew how it feels.” Dirk says, “I wish I had done some of this to her early on. You know?” He sits up, then stands, and says, “That asshole is getting me crazy. You know?”
Minus says nothing.
“Have you ever seen me this mad?” he asks.
Minus asks, “What do you think he’ll do next?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Either he’ll make another attack on me or he’ll run with her.” He thinks about Chiffon. What will she want him to do? “We’ve got to be ready. Either way.”
Minus removes a pistol from inside his shirt, turns and levels it at the breathing sweet scene of Tau Ceti. He fires once. The panel is burnt and dead. He puts the pistol away again, turns and says, “I’m going back to bed.”
“We’ve got to get ready.”
And Minus says, “You’re right. I’ve never seen you this mad.” He says, “Rest. Relax. You want to beat this guy? You’ve got to get your head fresh. That’s the first thing.”
17
Let me understand. You’re going to give me a body? A Flower’s body? And then I go to where this crime lord is living, cuddle him and watch everything and steal from him when I get the chance…right? And then afterward you promise to save me somehow. You’ve got magic, right? I won’t have to go back to being any kind of Ghost, will I? Because I won’t. Tell me Ghosting is possible and I’ll tell you I want out. Believe me! Gray-time forever is better than a few months of life, then being Ghosted again. You understand? You’re sure? Good. Good…because I’ve made up my mind…
—excerpt from an interview with Wisp, the Magician’s private file
“Well,” he says, “I got his attention.”
“And?”
“Now we’ll try leading him away.” Steward is calling from a booth in the Old Quarter. He’s using the secure line, his image displayed on the bedroom wall and Chiffon sitting with her legs crossed, on his bed, asking:
“You think we’ll fool him?”
“He’ll have to fool himself. That’s the key.” A floater will be hired. Two passengers and an obscure flight plan will constitute the lures. She looks at him sitting in that tiny booth, the wall behind him painted by someone with time and imagination. The colors are lurid. The patterns are complex. Chiffon thinks of smoke in a tangled forest. He says, “They’ll spot the floater soon enough. Everything’s arranged. They’ll see it vanish toward the west, and if they look hard enough they’ll find a place on the Pacific coast where it touched down for repairs. Two pass
engers. Male and female. No registration. No clear destination.”
“Will they follow?”
He says, “Probably not. I hope not.” He tells Chiffon, “We’ve got to tease them into believing we’ve run. I’m going to be laying down clues for a few days. Then we’ll play quiet for a few days. I’m sorry it can’t happen faster, love.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she claims, toying with the bindings of one heavy book. Now the smoke on the wall resembles insects streaming in the air. Two different illusions, yet in both there is the implication of air and flight.
“What I’m trying to do,” he says, “is pace things. See, if they follow right away they’ll see it’s a phony. But if we can give them just enough to remember, to go back to and take a second look at…well, that’s the way we tease them into hunting us. And by then the trail will lead to Jarvis. Then off the Earth entirely.” He tells Chiffon, “Titan. Would you like to go to Titan? Plastic domes and billions of cubic kilometers terraformed…and crazy old Dirk running circles trying to find you.”
She is thinking of Titan. She knows a place—
“What do you think?” he asks.
“How soon will you come home?” She says, “Darling?” and sets the book to one side.
“Not long. Late tonight.” He says, “This isn’t my normal line of work,” and halfway laughs. “My hired experts are having to walk me through the process.”
“But it will work?”
He says, “Yes.”
He isn’t so sure, she knows. She looks at his face and knows. “How did it go with him today?”
He squints at nothing. It is as though he’s trying to remember the salient details for himself. His mouth is closed. His hands are hidden on his lap, probably holding one another while he hunches his shoulder and tells her, “It went fine.”
She waits.
“Neat and simple,” he tells her.
She would have killed Dirk. She doesn’t know if it’s possible—tapping into a Tau Ceti panel, twisting its functions to fit needs—but if it were possible she would have killed him. Gladly. She can imagine Dirk’s old bones breaking in her hands.
“Anyway,” says Steward.
“It’s all working,” she says, feigning confidence.
“It seems to be.” Chiffon is wearing Steward’s trousers, cut to fit badly, and a simple pullover shirt that will never fit. “And I’m looking forward to some rest. For both of us.”
“So am I.”
“I should go.” Now the painted wall resembles faces instead of smoke or insects. Steward is lying back against the wall, his face part of them, and she blinks and wonders what to do. What to think. She won’t tell him the things that would really win him. She had her chance last night, and did she take it? Not at all. Nothing is turning out as she intended. She seems to be forgetting what’s at stake…her life, for God’s sake! How many months does she have left? How many options does she have open to her? She won’t be Ghosted. Not again. Not ever! Nothing else is so certain in her mind.
“Hurry back to me,” she volunteers.
He promises to try, nodding and reaching and now gone.
She picks up the same thick book, thinking. Options, options. She opens to the page where she had been reading, the story one of hundreds collected by some past-century anthropologist. Freestater tales. She has been skimming through them and reading random paragraphs and thinking of Steward, seeing him on every page, in every battle and in every moment of glory. He must have read the book himself. At least once, she thinks. He has written in the margins, drawing parallels to stories he must have been told as a boy. “Sounds like ‘The Coward In the Tree’ story,” he records. “Like ‘The Warrior and the Cougar’ story.” Nothing is from Yellowknife. There are how many Freestates? she wonders. Hundreds, aren’t there? Eleven hundred claims the author. What has surprised Chiffon while she reads in her chaotic fashion, bouncing from moral to moral, is an odd sameness over which is laid a definite variety. Each Freestate is unique. There’s an atlas in the back pages, plus some final observations. The author states that each Freestate draws at least part of its character from the land. How mountainous? How forested? How many people in how much area? She looks up Yellowknife and studies the sketchy details. “Low ridges and mostly young timber make travel hard…even among Freestates, these people are isolated…strip mines in past millennia have left rugged terrain, gouged and laced with canyons, near Yellowknife’s center…”
Chiffon pauses. She shuts the book and thinks. Ridges and rugged terrain? It all sounds something like Brulé! “Huh?” she says to herself. “How about that?” There is a strange sensibility at work here. The Old Quarter at the center, the long low buildings stretching outward…she nods and feels good in some elusive way. Brulé is Yellowknife. There is a thread of logic inside Steward’s head. She feels she knows him in some rare way…and she tries to shrug off the feeling. She thinks of last night again…and feels what? What?
Options, options.
She can’t simply remember things from her former lives. The Magician suppressed them at the outset. For always, he claimed, proud for his skills. Zebulina and Wisp are like characters in two sprawling books that she has read many times, knowing them as if they were friends, good friends, and feeling an honest involvement in their sad lives. But they are not Chiffon. It was Wisp who suffered Gray-time, and it’s Wisp who now whispers in her ear, “Fear Death. Flee Death. Do what you need and think about it tomorrow!” Pretty Zebulina was the one who lived well and had all the goodness of life stripped away prematurely, and she is the one who sometimes sings to Chiffon, telling her, “Take what you can. All you can take. There’s no telling tomorrow’s treachery!”
She remembers Zebulina in Quito, in the good neighborhoods with all the best people. She remembers a prince from Kross—a proud and vain simple man with more money than sense, a good-looking man accustomed to winning women and then losing them with predictable regularity. The prince spotted Zebulina at some overstuffed party. The next day he sent her some small gift, expensive and forgotten, and inquired about a dinner engagement. An evening out? Or perhaps a boat ride out on the Pacific? No, said Zebulina. I don’t think so. Why? he asked. What is the matter? I am involved, she lied. I don’t want to see you, she told him. And that made him want her all the more. Which, of course, was Zebulina’s plan. The prince sent more gifts worth larger and larger sums, and she kept what she liked and sold the rest for the money they brought. After several months of this kind of enrichment, sensing that the prince was losing interest, Zebulina relented to one night of carefully orchestrated pleasure. I love you! she declared in the morning. But I can’t see you again. Never!
The prince asked why. Was there someone else?
She said there was no one. She wept and told him to leave now, go back to Kross and forget her.
Of course he wouldn’t. New gifts arrived. Zebulina, amused beyond measure, counted her earnings and calculated shuttle rates and hotel rates and decided that an extended journey would suit a woman in some mysterious despair. So she went to Luna, and of course her dear prince followed. She made it easy. He wasn’t too bright, after all, so too much subtlety might ruin the game. Then she went to Cradle, to the purple pastures, and Chiffon can remember one of his gifts—a tailored butterfly as large as a person and breathtakingly beautiful, requiring special foods and special air and worth enough to buy passage to the Belt. She had never been to the Belt. Don’t you understand? she asked him. I love you. I’m desperately in love. But we can’t see one another. So go home. Please!
She hopped around the Belt for months, the prince always nearby.
She led him to Cetacea, to a floating city set over one of the world’s sunken suns.
Then there was Titan with its plastic caverns…Chiffon can remember how someone on the run might evade a crime lord for months, even years…and then it was out to the cold fringe of Oort’s Cloud, to that massive comet once known as Pluto and now called Ear-To-Heaven. Tha
t was where the prince finally lost interest. Chiffon can’t recall the circumstances, not that they matter, but she knows the moneys Zebulina had won by then. A small fortune, at least to her mind. A trip through the System and she was coming home richer. Imagine! She booked passage on a fast shuttle for Quito. Maybe it was the first time in her life that she felt a measure of contentment, coming home. Chiffon can summon images out of that remote past. She sees Zebulina’s cabin. She sees nameless suitors among the shuttle’s richest patrons. She sees a flash of light and smoke, torn bits of one wall exploding into her tiny cabin. That night’s lover was killed. It was sudden and painless, his body taking the brunt of the force. Some one-in-a-trillion accident had caused a little-used vent to detonate. Very sad. But Zebulina halfway lived. Her beautiful figure was so much shredded meat, but the basics of her mind persisted. And to the credit of the crew and the shuttle’s owners, Zebulina’s mind was saved long enough to be Ghosted. “Free of charge,” whispers Wisp. A sad, sad accident. A terrible conclusion to enormous promise. Chiffon sighs and then shivers, thinking about so very many things. She is not Zebulina. She is not Wisp. Yet they are so much a part of her even still, and she has no choice but to listen to their advice.
Options, options.
She must do something to help herself, but she can’t let Steward know or even suspect. She tells herself to act and act soon. She tells herself that she must have some other avenue through which to escape. In case. I bet Steward would understand, she reasons. She decides on what she will do, telling herself that it isn’t even out of character. Not for a lonely, sweet Flower, surely. And now she wipes her forehead dry with both hands, then wipes her hands on the sheets. She is shaking at the fingertips. Why? “You’re doing right,” say Wisp and Zebulina together. “Don’t worry!” But then why does she sense that she too is being seduced…
