“Never mind.” Jani picked out another roll. “Besides, I don’t have it anymore.” Technically, that was true. She had stashed it in the women’s locker room next to Interior’s main gymnasium. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“I had my own artfully acquired copy delivered into my hands earlier today. Neatest piece of fiction I’ve read in years. I noted several gaps in the evidence. They seemed to coincide with every point the Court needs to make its case.” Evan sighted Jani with the cobalt stare that had swayed voters for two decades. “Did Anais provide you with your copy of the report, by any chance?”
“Why would she do that?”
“She’ll use you, Jan. She’ll take what she can, then lock you up and throw away the code.”
“And you’re offering me so much more, aren’t you?”
“I can offer you anything you want.” He sat in the chair next to hers, still taking care to keep his distance, not to allow anything he did to seem threatening. “I never stopped caring for you. I never stopped wishing things had worked out differently. My life with you in Rauta Shèràa was the best time of my life. I want that life back.”
“Evan, don’t lie to me. You brought me here to salvage that old bastard’s reputation.”
“I brought you here to take care of you!” His fingers tightened around his glass, the knuckles whitening. “To make it up to you, for everything you went through. I had a house in the city picked out for you. A job, if you wanted to work. I had it all planned.”
“I don’t need anyone to take care of me. I can take care of myself.”
“I’ve seen your idea of taking care of yourself. I’ve seen what it’s done to you. Leave the thinking to someone else.”
But thought is all I have. Planning. Outwitting. The art of seeming to give in when actually giving nothing. She’d read her Service file in the library carrel, through shrewder, more discerning eyes. I’m what I’ve always been, only more so. “I don’t like to be beholden, Evan. I prefer to pay my own way.” Jani stared at him until the arrogant gleam in his eyes degraded to uncertainty. “In my own currency.”
Evan sank back in his chair. The skin on his face was greyed, the hollows beneath his eyes, deepened. “Has Anais identified you? Does she know you’re Jani Kilian?”
“No. She had me scanned. The current pattern doesn’t match my Service ID.”
“Well then, what can she do to you? How can she threaten you? Don’t let her scare you—she has nothing!” He touched her at last, resting his hand on her knee. “Just keep your mouth shut and wait her out. Follow my lead—I’ve brazened my way through more than one full frontal assault in my time.” Taking her silence for agreement, he pressed a touchpad alongside his place setting. Uniformed staffers entered by way of a narrow access door and began serving the first course.
“So what did you do today?” he asked when they were again alone. “Besides getting yourself kidnapped and purloining top secret Cabinet documents.”
“Just mucked about.” Jani fished a mushroom slice out of her soup. Fungi, she had learned over the past few months, were not an option. “Visited the Library.”
“You seem to have made some interesting friends.” Evan filled his wineglass to the brim. “Durian told me you’ve been seen with Steven Forell. Durian has a great deal to say about Mr. Forell, none of it complimentary.”
“Durian wants to wrap his slimy paws around Angevin Wyle. He blames Steve for keeping that from happening. If he knew how Angevin really felt about him, he’d spin in his well-appointed seat for a week.” Jani ate what she could of the soup, then tested the green salad. When she looked up, she found Evan studying her, chin cradled in hand. “What?”
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
He’s so close. He wants me to reach out and touch—Jani felt the heat rise in her face; she looked down at her plate. “Little over a day.” The salad contained chopped apple. She reached for the pepper mill instead.
“So much news acquired in a little over a day. Tell me, are there any other love affairs affecting members of my executive staff that you think I should know about?”
Jani regarded the mill in her hand. It had a decidedly suggestive shape. “Well, the head of your Farms Bureau used to holo himself screwing assorted animal life in his office. He’s not doing it anymore, though. AgMin shut him down.”
Evan’s eyes widened. He sat back and clamped a hand over his mouth.
“I hope we’re not having lamb or chicken tonight,” she added peevishly.
His shoulders shook. Gently, at first, then more and more violently. He’d always been a remarkably quiet laugher. He’d turn red and choke before he’d make a sound.
Jani continued eating. After a minute or so, she reached over and thumped Evan between his shoulder blades. He inhaled with a wheezing gasp.
“I don’t remember—the last time—oh shit, Jan, don’t ever do that to me again.” He wiped his tearing eyes with his napkin, then sat quietly, his hands over his face. “I remember the night—they threw us out—of the Consulate bar—oh hell.” He started up again, though much more weakly. “You’ll stay here, won’t you?” he asked when he’d finally summoned the strength to talk in complete sentences. “If they can’t ID you, why leave?”
Jani examined the spice dispenser. Something called ground habañero had a lightning bolt beside the name. She sprinkled it liberally on her salad. “What if you’re forced to resign?”
“Then I’ll resign. Move back to the house in the Bluffs, play the gentleman of leisure. Answer my question, Jan.”
“Gentleman of leisure. You’ll go crazy.” She coughed. The habañero wasn’t bad.
“I won’t go crazy if I know you’re nearby. I’d sleep easier tonight if I knew I could count on you. Can I?”
“Why would you think you couldn’t?”
Evan pressed a hand to his temple. “You’re deflecting me. One eye on the exit, just like always. I could afford your evasions in Rauta Shèràa. I can’t afford them now. Can I count on your support or not?”
Always the pressure to give and give…in exchange for what? She wasn’t the only one who hadn’t changed with time. “Blind loyalty’s a quality I can’t afford, Evan. Tell me what to expect.”
“These situations tend to follow a pattern. No one will officially acknowledge my existence for about six months, although my real friends will send notes and such, just to make sure I’m keeping body and soul together. Then I’ll start getting visits. Old allies asking for advice. Old adversaries checking my pulse. Within a year to eighteen months, I’ll be ready to make a run at a deputy Cabinet seat. Next thing you know, it’ll be like I never left.”
“Sounds formulaic.”
“It happened to Dad. It’s happened to me before.” Evan stirred his soup, which he’d barely touched. “It’s just politics.” He watched her eat, his brow wrinkling. “You used to tell me how spicy your mother’s cooking was.” He pointed to her salad plate. “I never thought that was what you meant. Lacks subtlety, at least from where I’m sitting. What’s going on?”
Jani looked down at her salad. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“The chef aboard the Arapaho had some interesting things to say concerning your culinary requests.”
“You had crew reporting on me?”
“No. Durian did.”
“Durian did?”
“I’ll admit he may not have had the purest motives, but when I spoke with him a few hours ago, he seemed genuinely concerned.” Evan propped his elbows on the table and tented his hands. “He suggested I ask you a few questions. For example, are you drinking a lot of water—”
Jani set down her refilled glass. The third. No, the fourth—
“—and are foods that you’d once been able to eat with no reaction making you sick now?” Evan jerked his chin in the direction of Jani’s salad. “Have your tastes changed, become what most of us might consider odd? Have you been experiencing body aches, abdominal distress�
�”
“You sound like John Shroud.” Jani tried to laugh. “Interrogations every third day, same hour of the morning, same crummy therapy room.” If she closed her eyes, she could visualize the bare, dark tan walls, the restraint-bedecked myostimulator squatting in one corner like the hulking torture device it was.
Evan disrupted her grim vision. “Jani, one colonist has recently died from a condition which began with the symptoms I described. The symptoms you’re evidencing. I wish you’d see a doctor.”
Jani examined her hands. Her right one shook a bit, but that was only because she was angry. The garage guy’s stomach always hurt. Well, hers did, too. He threw up a lot. Ok. He tried to kill his grandmother with a lazor. Except his grandmother had been dead for twenty years; he exhausted himself annihilating a pillow. Hepatic dementia, the doctors had called it. They had a name for everything.
I have never tried to kill any dead female relatives. Hah—had them there. Besides, everyone in NorthPort knew the garage guy became sick from eating Haárin food. Lots of people on Whalen tried Haárin foodstuffs at least once. Jani had been eating it for years—it wasn’t her problem. She attacked her water again. “Well, I wish you’d do something about your drinking,” she said as she came up for air. “We can’t have everything, can we?”
On cosmic cue, two staffers entered. They cleared and carved silently, but with many covert glances toward the table.
“Here’s a deal for you,” Evan said after they left. “I’ll face my little problem when you face yours.” He cut into his roast beef. A smile flickered. “Not lamb or chicken,” he said.
“I’m not sick.” Jani drove the point home by adding habañero to her meat as well. “I’m sorry if my colonial taste offends your Earthbound sensibilities, but don’t compound your prejudice by calling it a disease.”
“Have it your own way, Jan,” Evan replied. “For now.” They finished eating in silence, then adjourned to the adjacent sitting room for dessert and coffee. He carried his cup to the bar and, with a pointed look at Jani, added a generous splash of brandy. “Do you want to talk about Lyssa? I’m sure, since you read the report, you have questions.”
Jani swallowed a belch. It felt as though a hot coal had lodged beneath her sternum. “I had already guessed she was augmented. The Court report research confirmed it. I think she had it done in order to feel what Martin had gone through. But she didn’t have the right brain chemistry to withstand the stress. It was all pretty easy to figure, if you knew what to look for.” She explained about the gossip magazine’s crisis timeline. “Someone saw their chance and took advantage. It didn’t take much to make her death look like an accident.”
Evan leaned against the bar. “You’d think it would have helped her, don’t you?” he said, his voice dead. “The Service uses it to build better soldiers—you’d think it would’ve helped her cope.”
“Lyssa should never have been augied. Her mental state was already precarious, and it only got worse. Even frequent take-downs weren’t leveling her out—she was headed for augie psychosis. If she’d been Service, she’d never have made it past the initials. She’d have been typed as a likely burnout and kicked out of the program.”
Evan smiled grimly. “Augie burnout. I used to hear that phrase in meetings.” He looked at Jani. “Burnouts hallucinate to a greater degree than regular augies. Borderlines, too. Like you?”
“Depends what you mean by hallucinate. My problems are with smell, mostly. I catch a noseful of berries whenever I get aggravated. Never heard voices, thank God. Never saw spiders crawling out of the walls.”
Evan approached her with the slow step and unfocused eye of a man on the way to his own execution. As he lowered himself into the chair next to her, he exuded the same beaten-down wariness she had felt toward the myostimulator. This needs to be worked through. This needs to be done. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
“A year after the children died, I visited Lyssa’s suite without calling first. We had reached the point where we called first. She was sitting alone on her bed. She looked so happy—I thought she’d drugged herself. Being a doctor, she had access to the staff infirmary.” His spiked coffee rested on his knee, its surface rippling.
“She was talking. To them. She saw me eventually, or at least sensed me. Didn’t Martin look nice in his school uniform, she asked? He’d just told her he wanted to be a doctor like his mum. I slipped out as quickly as I could.” He hoisted his cup. “My drinking, to that point, hadn’t been too bad, but it did pick up from then on.”
Jani sipped her coffee. “You didn’t know?”
“About the augment?” He shook his head. “Not until I read the report today. Like I said, I thought she’d been drugging.”
“You’d been exposed to it so much in your day-to-day, I’m surprised nothing clicked.”
Evan leaned back in his chair. “I blocked it out, I guess. Didn’t feel I had the right to inquire. I figured by that time, Lyssa and I were each entitled to the pit of our choosing. I didn’t even ok an autopsy—that’s what set Cao on the warpath. But I felt she deserved that…privacy. A last kind gesture from me, to make up for all the others.” He looked at Jani, his eyes reflecting the depths of his own abyss. “This may sound horrible, but I think whoever killed her did her a favor. Every once in a while, I wish they’d show me the same consideration.” He refilled his cup from the ewer.
Jani shifted in her chair. She was angry. Her back ached. Her stomach had begun to rumble ominously. She didn’t think she could deal with a drunken Evan as well.
“Don’t worry,” he said, reading her mind. “Just coffee, until you leave. I promise.” He shook a finger at her. “But I must insist you allow me my pit. I’ve earned it. These past few months, it’s become a second home.” He gestured toward the curtained wall opposite them. “Here’s something you might like.” He pressed a touchpad near the tray. The drapes swept aside. “Isn’t it pretty?”
A spun-sugar world filled the window. Lit by rainbow lights, with the night as a backdrop, two banked tiers of snow-frosted hybrid shrubs glittered. Some of the dwarf evergreens had been clipped into spires and coils, while others had been shaped into stylized buildings. In the center, a line of graceful, needled shrubs had been trimmed into a suspension bridge, joining the two tiers. “It’s pretty,” Jani said, but all it looked was cold. She rubbed her aching gut and shivered. She didn’t feel very art-appreciative just then.
Evan picked through the dessert tray. “I had it made for Nema; we were supposed to have a reception in the main ballroom after his welcoming ceremony. A bridge for the chief bridge-builder. Obvious, perhaps, but I felt it appropriate.” He chewed reflectively. “Cao and Ulanova blocked me, of course. They felt he’d be insulted. As if they’d fucking know. So I had it moved here. Next time those two come for dinner, if there ever is a next time, it’ll be waiting. Hell, if the weather’s good, maybe I’ll have the tables set up under the damned bridge.” He touched her arm to get her attention.
“How did you manage? After the children…I almost cashed in. How did you keep going?” His hand lingered. It was Jani’s left arm. All she felt was the pressure. “What went through your mind? After Knevçet Shèràa. During your recovery. When, you knew you’d lost it all. How did you live?”
Jani pressed down on her aching stomach. “I told myself—” She stalled. That was the point, wasn’t it? She’d told herself, never anyone else. “I told myself that I was the last one. If I died, there wouldn’t be anyone left to remember Knevçet Shèràa.” This time she pronounced it properly, adding the right-handed gesture that mimicked the sweep of the sand dunes.
Evan’s hand tightened on her arm. “You’re remembered, Jan, if it’s any consolation. I’ve seen the files. They fill a two-meter-long shelf in the Judge Advocate’s office.”
“That’s not the remembrance I mean.” Jani grew still; even her stomach quieted. “I remember the heat. The blowing sand. The sense of dread when I walked into Eva
Yatni’s room.” She had been the first patient to die. She’d plucked out her eyes and plunged her thumbs into her brain. Neumann called it suicide.
“I remember another patient named Simyan Baru. I watched him peel the skin from his cheek like it was a piece of fruit. I couldn’t get in the room to stop him—it was locked. So I went to see Neumann to get the code. He wouldn’t give it to me. We had a talk. You know what happened next.”
“I remember when Baru and two other patients escaped. We tried to treat them as best we could, but they were too far gone. Hallucinating. They thought we were Laum, come to kill them. They jumped Felicio and Stanleigh and stole our people mover. The only transport we had. We had nothing to knock it down with, no way to repair it if we did. I watched it disappear over the rise. I saw the flash after the Laum chased it down.
“I remember the whine of the shatterboxes. My corporal’s death. The last night, ordering Sergeant Burgoyne to take everyone into the basement. I said it was because of the threat of further bombing, but I looked at him and he looked at me and I needed that look he gave me.” That last flame lick of hope, driving her forward.
“Jani?” Evan’s voice rasped. “You don’t have to tell me this if you don’t want.”
What does want have to do with it? “I left them behind, and I went outside. I checked my shooter. I said a prayer. à Yestha raùn. Preserve my soul. I cut my left arm from wrist to elbow, sopped up the blood with a rag, staked the rag near the front door of the hospital. Chäusen tha sè rau. Shelter my soul—keep it safe.” The stiff red braid rested in her duffel now—somehow, it had found its way onto the transport, surviving both the explosion and the crash. John Shroud had recovered it from the wreckage and returned it to her. “It was so still. So quiet. I knew Knevçet Shèràa was important to the Laumrau. They needed to take it back from us, reclaim it from humanish contamination. That meant it was a Night of Conjunction—sacrament and prayer before a decisive battle. Even the guards were sequestered in their tents. I remember the silence as I walked over the rise and into their camp.”
Code of Conduct Page 21
