Gonna make you my dog.
He released the fin and swam beside the sub, matching speed and direction. Then, he pointed his arms away from the direction of the hotel, at first, only ten degrees, but gradually widening the angle to fifteen. A Homo quantus could have shifted the magnetic field internally, with subcellular structures that rotated their magnetosomes. Stills’ magnetosomes were hard-aligned with the grain of his skeletal muscles. He influenced the magnetic field by moving his arms, like the magnetic booms on the bows of worm hole-capable ships.
The sub shifted direction, slightly.
That’s it, you pig. Sashay that fat ass where daddy tells you.
Stills increased the angle, leading it another three degrees away from the hotel. Then it resisted. Its sonar pinged more often, and shifted back and forth between what its magnetic and sonic sensors told it.
Okay, you dumb ass-licker, I was being all fucking Zen about this, but now you’ve pissed me off.
Stills swam to the bow, just behind the sonar sensing equipment. He placed his hands over it, and released seven hundred volts, most of the stored charge in his electroplaques.
He swore lines of multilingual curses in his mind, shaking his stinging hands. The sub was worse. Fuses clicked halfheartedly within it. Others were obviously burnt out, and the pinging stopped. Stills dropped back to the fin he’d been holding onto, and resumed making the magnetic field. The sub looked like it wanted to follow, but it turned entirely around and started heading upwards.
Fuck.
Probably a damage-repair response. Stills spun around, strengthening the magnetic field he was producing, until he completely masked the ambient field of Oler, substituting it with one that pointed in the opposite direction. Gradually, the sub turned about and headed downward, into deeper water away from the hotel. It wouldn’t be long before it reached its crush depth.
Chapter Forty-One
"COULD YOU STOP looking at me all the time?” William asked impatiently.
He wiped at his forehead. The sweating wasn’t the Trenholm. The Puppets kept the room at twenty-six or twenty-seven centigrade with high humidity. Gates-15 lowered his eyes sheepishly, but still made little sniffing sounds at the air. If William turned away, he’d find the Puppet’s eyes on him again. In the middle of the night, he’d woken to Gates-15 leaning over him, mouth-breathing.
The Puppet had accomplished part of his mission. He’d been able to upload Saint Matthew’s virus into the network. Neither were sure how far the virus would go. Some parts of the Free City were wired out to the periphery and some were not. A general air of decay and complacency weighed on the Free City. Things fell apart and no one fixed them.
“How much longer?” William asked.
“It shouldn’t be long. Simple lab tests, no? Are you worried?”
William leaned in closer. “I’m worried about my daughter,” he whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Gates-15 said, then looked away.
“You don’t have any children?”
Gates-15 shook his head. “I’m not right. I’m not allowed.”
William’s shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing you can do, even living away from the Theocracy? Maybe make a family with someone else with the same condition?”
The Puppet shook his head. “I’m like Stills and Belisarius and Cassandra. We’re all new human sub-species. It’s hard for us to be fertile at all. They’re still working out the biochemical and microbiome problems. I don’t think any of us could be fertile without a lot of medical help.”
William stepped back a bit. “I knew Stills would have trouble. I didn’t know you and Bel would be the same.”
“There are worse fates than being last in your line,” Gates-15 said. The Puppet looked pensive. “You call him Bel. He’s a bit like a son to you, isn’t he?”
William snorted, looked around, and then spoke softly. “I helped him out a while ago and he outgrew me. He’s a good kid, though. He’s as honest as he should be, and he’s got more of a soft spot for Puppets than he should.”
Gates-15 stopped watching him so intently. The momentary absence of that pressure was a relief.
“How did you meet?” Gates-15 asked.
“About eleven or twelve years ago, I was coming off a good con,” William whispered, relieved to not be talking about Puppets and their feelings again. “I was flush for a few months and at the peak of my career. I could read people well. I found this seventeen-year-old in a café who didn’t fit anything I knew. He was out of place and I couldn’t even make close guesses about him. But I could see he was in trouble. Maybe I had a moment of pity. Maybe I thought I could learn something from him. I took him in.”
“You taught him,” Gates-15 smiled. “Was he a natural?”
“A natural?” William laughed. “He was happier analyzing chaotic systems and electron energy levels than being around people. His only friend was a crazy AI.”
“Saint Matthew.”
“Yeah.”
“You trust him for all of this?”
“I wouldn’t trust any other con man more.”
“Faint praise?”
“The opposite. If this can be done, he can do it. He has to. My daughter needs basic medicines like any child. She has oxygen bills, water bills, power bills. My ex-wife can’t do it. I’ve got to make this right. Kate deserves better than what I had. But I can’t do that from in here. We have to get to Port Stubbs.”
Gates-15 shrugged, and William felt like a jackass. Speaking with the Puppets confused him. On the surface they could be reasonable. Sometimes. But no one could ever forget they had it worse. Despite growing up in a work house, going to jail, living from con to con his whole life, William was at least human. He wasn’t born carrying the inherited crimes and tragedies of the Puppets as well as their biological debt bondage. He understood a bit of Bel’s fascination with them.
Someone knocked at the door. William eyed it uncertainly and then backed up to the cot and sat down, knees high. He waved his hand. Gates-15 hopped to the door and pulled it open.
Bishop Grassie-6 entered, followed by Doctor Teller-5. The bishop kept his composure. Doctor Teller-5 might have tried, but William couldn’t tell over the dreamy elation that came over her as she inhaled deeply. The bishop looked at William with intense politeness as he put a hand on the doctor’s forearm.
“Sit!” he hissed low. She sat, right there on the floor. Even Gates-15 slowly sat, cross-legged, staring at William like Teller-5 did.
“I’m delighted to see you, Mister Kaltwasser,” Grassie-6 said.
“Thank you, Your Grace.”
Grassie-6 stepped forward tentatively.
“You’re clear of the quarantine now,” he said.
“So we can go to Port Stubbs?”
Doctor Teller-5, eyes half-lidded, began crawling forward. The bishop watched her, then continued speaking.
“Your grandparents and great-grandparents, if they visited Port Stubbs today, would not recognize it,” the bishop said. “The places where the Numen once lived have become shrines or pilgrimage sites or movie sets. But everything else has grown around them.”
William’s attention drifted, attracted magnetically by the miniature woman crawling around him.
“I don’t have long to live, Your Grace,” William said, adding an edge to his voice. “I came to die someplace meaningful.”
The bishop remained calm, but both Doctor Teller-5 and Gates-15 caught their breaths slightly as William had put more authority into his voice. Teller-5 slinked behind him over his cot, and rose. She stood with lips parted, looking down on him. She began rubbing his shoulders, massaging. He tried pulling away, but she was surprisingly strong. Her fingers worked at the fear that had crept into his muscles.
“That is the most tragic thing, Mister Kaltwasser,” Grassie-6 said. “You are dying. You are the first genuine Numen who has been brought to us in a decade—an unspoiled, feral religious figure—and yet, you are dying.”
<
br /> Grassie-6 stepped slowly forward, as if approaching a dog who might bolt. Teller-5’s hands rubbed down William’s shoulders and to his biceps, working at tight knots, but he became uncomfortably aware of her breasts pressing against his back.
“We spent quite a bit of money contacting Plutocracy doctors to find out that there is no treatment.”
Teller-5’s hands came back to his shoulders and she no longer pressed her body against him. Just her hands—strong and soothing.
William cleared his throat. “I could have told you that.”
The doctor’s thumbs worked at the tiny tight muscles in his neck, sending shivers down his spine. Her hands stroked the sides of his neck with flat palms, an intimate gesture, affectionate, and he felt himself responding. He focused on Grassie-6.
“Your T-cell counts are almost zero,” the bishop said. “Your B-cells and antibodies are vanishing too. You’re severely immunocompromised and the anti-virals and antibiotics you came with won’t last long. The Free City has several hospitals working at building a synthetic immune system to replace the one you don’t have. Port Stubbs’ single hospital isn’t as equipped.”
“Hospitals aren’t going to help me,” William said. “There’s nothing to be done about Trenholm. I’m just a man on a pilgrimage of his own, seeking peace before the end.”
The bishop betrayed a bit of surprise. Bel had told him that Puppet awe could be triggered by Numen resolve, a quality sapped from the modern Numen by captivity.
“You’re so wonderful, Mister Kaltwasser,” Grassie-6 said.
“Pardon?”
“Some of the Numen we have now are angry and resentful,” the bishop said. “Most are pleading, begging. But all are intensely concerned with the Puppets. As their protectors and worshippers, we are their central concern, the axis around which their world revolves. Before the Fall, the Numen had a broader range of concerns, and relationships with the Puppets, including disinterest. We’ve lost that.”
“I’m sorry,” William said. “I didn’t mean to convey anything of the sort.”
“You misunderstand me, Mister Kaltwasser. It’s refreshing, like a visit from a lost past. Spoiled as we are now with the unobstructed presence of the protected Numen, it is very easy for us to forget our religious and moral place. The fact that we’re only a side-note to your concerns is theologically grounding.”
The bishop took a hesitant step forward, close enough to touch. Gates-15 and the doctor held their breaths. Teller-5’s hands had stopped moving.
“We Puppets live in a world of miracles, Mister Kaltwasser, a world where the divine walk among us, revealing meaning through the code of their actions, creating a theology we must interpret. I don’t know why you’ve been sent to us, or what message we will learn from you, but your pilgrimage is deeply meaningful to you, and that may make your message of incalculable value to us.”
“I don’t see myself in those terms,” William said.
“That is one of the central paradoxes of the Numen.” The bishop smiled. “The Numen reject their own divinity, while quite obviously being divine. The cosmos has conspired to make them incapable of seeing certain truths. That doesn’t make you less divine, but more.”
Chapter Forty-Two
BELISARIUS HAD BEEN poring over the holographic displays in the cockpit of the Boyacá for over an hour, having replaced the navigational and telescopic displays with financial tracking algorithms and information from the illicit economy of the Puppet Free City. Cassandra spotted many patterns and correlations, but without controls, she didn’t know how many false positives she might be getting.
“What are you going to do?” Cassandra asked.
“The Congregate’s spies in the Free City are looking for plots and secret movements,” Belisarius said. “I’m going to give them one.”
“They’re good enough to separate false signals from real ones,” Iekanjika said.
“This will be real enough. There is a particular official in the consulate of the First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy. I sold him a lot of illegal Puppet art. I’m going to deposit a large sum of money in his account, from an account of the Puppet Episcopal Conclave.”
“You’re framing him?” Saint Matthew said.
“I’m not framing an innocent man. I’ve seen his tastes in Puppet art and I know why he angled for a diplomatic posting in the Free City.”
“But this won’t fool the Congregate,” Iekanjika said.
“They’ll be smelling for a plot by the Anglo-Spanish Banks. They won’t be able to check on this, and the confusion among the Puppet bishops and the Bank’s consulate will obscure what we’re doing.”
“You have access to their bank accounts?” Cassandra asked with an edge of judgement in her tone.
Belisarius shrugged. “With an embargo on, even when people were buying legal art, they rarely paid me from reputable accounts. It was a normal cost of business for me to make sure I knew where my money was coming from and going.”
“It feels dirty,” Cassandra said with finality.
She couldn’t deal with Bel’s... shadiness right now. She retreated to the small kitchen down from the cockpit. Her mind felt like it was suffocating. The absence of mathematics, of patterns, of testable models had her almost twitchy. She strapped herself to one of the seats and toyed with the idea of going into savant and doing some calculations. Belisarius floated in and closed the door. He strapped himself to a seat across from her, but didn’t meet her eyes.
“I didn’t expect you would make me ashamed of myself,” he said after a time.
She didn’t know where to put her hands. Or where to look. She was angry, but she didn’t know how to be angry out here, with Bel. Everything was upside down. “I don’t know how you can swim in all this deception,” she whispered finally. She chose not to look at him. She shook her head. “I don’t know how you can live among them.”
“What lies?”
“All of them, even in front of me. You told the Puppets we have brain damage. You didn’t need to. That didn’t do anything. Or had I done something so wrong that you needed to tell someone I had a brain injury to get me out of it?”
“I tell a lot of lies, Cassie. Big ones. Small ones. It’s part of living in the wide world. And it’s a part of being a con man.”
“You don’t do anything for no reason, Bel,” she said. “I don’t know why you lied to the Puppet, but...” Then she stopped. She backtracked through her memories of the exact wording of the conversation. She met his eyes. “You did have a reason. You were testing me.”
Bel smiled broadly. “You passed.”
She wanted to strangle him. “What?”
“Of course I was!” he whispered back. “Why didn’t you already go to someone else with this? Saint Matthew? Or Iekanjika?”
“Because I didn’t know why you’ve been saying all these things!” she said, struggling to keep her voice down. “I don’t know what lies are for fun and what lies will get you killed if you’re found out.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Why didn’t you trust me, Bel?”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
“I don’t know that. Half of your lies are so tiny they make no difference. Why even bother?”
“I am testing people, Cassie. This is really dangerous, and I have to know where everyone’s head is. And for the record, half the lies I tell are the truth.”
“Who else are you lying to, Bel? Who else don’t you trust?” she asked.
“Trust is a funny word. Do I trust people not to betray me? Not exactly. Do I trust that I’ve correctly sized up everyone on the team? I think so.”
“William?” she asked, sensing that she might be close to a weak spot in Bel.
He looked away. Then nodded without looking back at her.
“You’ve sized him up?”
Bel met her eyes defiantly. “A long time ago. We stopped working together because I walked away.”
“He seem
s to be the nicest person here. The most gentle.”
“He can get angry, like if you break off a partnership because he wasn’t able to pull off his part of a con.”
“That happened? And you put him on this team?”
“He’s probably the best con artist I’ve ever met, but I was a different person ten years ago and so was he. He was drifting. Uncertain. And his head wasn’t in the game. His mistakes could have cost us both everything.”
“And now you trust him with all this weight?” she asked. The thought of entering the Puppet Free City as a Numen still wasn’t something she wanted to think about, if even a fraction of the stories were true.
“Ten years ago, he didn’t have a daughter. And ten years ago he wasn’t dying. And ten years ago he thought he was better than he was.”
“And you sent him to his death,” she said in a low voice.
“He’s walked into a death sentence, knowing what it will mean to his daughter. She’s the center of everything that’s important to him, and that’s why he’ll make this work.”
Bel’s face had a mixture of signals she found hard to read. Resolve. Grief. Guilt.
“Did you lie to William?” she asked.
“Only when I had to.”
She threw up her hands and then sank her forehead into them.
“All this manipulation makes me sick, Bel! Your life is so empty. Everyone’s life outside the Garret is so empty,” she said. “Nothing is true out here, Bel. Nothing has enduring value. They’re struggling for who’s in charge and who has the most money when questions of how the cosmos works are all around them, unanswered. It’s been only a little while and I’m itching inside. How did you survive twelve years without going crazy?”
“You’re right, Cassie. My brain didn’t stop needing. I didn’t know if I could survive away from the Garret. The wide world is intellectually cold. A void. So I traded the study of one complex system for another. I replaced scientific and mathematical stimulation with the intellectual challenge of human behavior and confidence schemes.”
The Quantum Magician Page 22
