THE FEAR PRINCIPLE

by B. A. Chepaitis

  "Grief?"

  "The dear departed Patricks."

  Neri rolled his eyes. "At the Think Tank we got out our party dresses. Didn't you know the dear deceased governor was talking about taxing the pyrite, and the Think Tank folks were sputtering like old ladies, screaming they voted for him because he said no taxation, and so on."

  Alex leaned back and chewed on another bite of pie, which took longer to digest than the news. The Governor hadn't behaved himself, apparently. Perhaps the Lieutenant Governor was more amenable to tax breaks. He wondered if Jaguar knew of this bit of information. He hadn't seen it in Rachel's reports, so he assumed it was local knowledge that hadn't traveled abroad yet.

  "Like anything else?" he asked, when Neri had scraped his plates clean with the side of his fork.

  "Many things," Neri said. "Whatnots."

  Alex laughed, and waved to the waitress. "You don't give up, do you?"

  "You said you'd pay dearly." Neri pouted.

  "I meant the check," Alex said. "Knowing how you eat, I thought it might cost me dear. Are you up for a walk? You could show me where the mine will be sited."

  "What makes you think I or anyone else knows that?" Neri asked.

  "Anyone else, I'm not sure about. You seem to make it a point to know just about everything."

  "Flattery," he said, "will get you everywhere."

  The waitress brought them the check, and Alex handed her his cash card. Then they rose and left together, Neri linking his arm in Alex's and chatting full speed, admiring the earring Alex wore in his left ear, and the thin braid that extended down the back of his hair.

  They hit the sunlight, thin and brittle as an old lady's fingers, and Neri pulled away from Alex to draw his arms around himself.

  "It gets so cold way up here," Neri said. "I think I'll just duck into my vehicle for a jacket."

  Alex watched his lanky figure lope toward the street where his airrunner was parked, in front of the Church of the Most Sacred Heart. He watched him bend over near the door and retrieve a piece of metal, hold it up to the brittle sun, and examine it. He watched the sun glint off of it. He watched him shrug and drop it.

  He watched him reach over and open the door, and then the world exploded around him in a bright, inexplicable flash of light.

  No sound. Just a flash of light, and Alex was tossed back by heat, his body slammed into the sidewall of the diner, and the diner shook, and as he looked up and all around, bits of light and bits of Neri fell from the sky, spraying down across the Sacred Heart with its circle of discompassionate thorns.

  He watched without believing that it was really Neri, without feeling it to be anything real. What he did feel was an instinct to survive this, to get away from it under cover of smoke and flame. While the white heat of it still kept anyone else who might be watching blinded, he walked swiftly away, his head ducked low, watching his back as he went.

  He edged around the building and then headed down a side street and aimed toward a thick patch of trees across the lot. Beyond it was a cemetery. Beyond that were the ruins of mines. The Little Johnny, the closed grave of twenty men. The Frances Duffey, named after a little girl who had been passed through the narrow opening of a cave in order to bring food to trapped men, keeping them alive until they could be dug out.

  He thought maybe it would be best to spend the night somewhere in there, knee-deep in the dead, than in a place where death walked alive all around. He could walk toward a different town in the morning and rent another air runner.

  He wasn't about to open the door on the one he'd arrived in.

  10

  "Can't you kill her? it's a simple enough job, and she's mortal after all, subject to the laws of life and death like the rest of us."

  The Looker was nervous.

  At his hotel-room desk, he shuffled hard, and he slapped the cards down in front of him even harder. Terence wondered if something was going on besides Clare to make him lose his cool this way.

  "I never hired on to kill anyone," he reminded him, "much less trying to get Addams. You don't know what she's like. Some kind of cat with too many lives."

  "She's human," he said. "And you're all nervous old men, afraid to get your hands dirty. Are you aware that her supervisor is in Leadville?"

  So that was it. Dzarny was getting too close to home base. Terence felt himself beginning to sweat. "I knew he was away, but I didn't know where."

  "Now you do. And are you aware that this woman you seem incapable of controlling has been researching the Division in a determined way?"

  "No. I didn't know that. She must've covered her research, because nothing's come through the files on it or I would've known."

  "We are paying you to know," the Looker said, emphasizing each word with the slap of a card. "We are paying you to know everything. I shouldn't have to go further than you to learn any of this. And I shouldn't be wasting so much time here, on a job that could be cleared up like that."

  He took his hand and swept the cards off the desk, sent them skittering and floating to the floor, across the rug, onto Terence's feet. Terence sucked in a breath, and held it. The Looker turned to him.

  "Do you have any idea how easy it is to kill someone?" he asked.

  Terence didn't move one molecule.

  "You do know," the Looker continued, "because you know how easy it would be for me to kill you. Right here. Right now."

  He swallowed hard, asked his lungs to start working again, and spoke. "That's right," he said. "Killing someone's easy. It's the not-getting-caught part that's tough. Especially here."

  The Looker narrowed his eye, pulled his glasses down his nose, and peered over them.

  "You don't know the Planetoids like I do," Terence said. "They've got their own system. Sometimes it's loose, because you gotta give a lot of leeway to get these jobs done, but people like Dzarny and Addams, they're playing for keeps, and they know it. They can be careful, and they know how to work outside the system to keep a cover. You don't know how good they are."

  A clucking noise emerged from the back of the Looker's throat, and he pushed his glasses back up his nose, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a new pack of cards. Shuffled. Terence waited until his breathing and heart returned to normal, and then he spoke again.

  "I—look, I'm sorry, but this case is way out of my league. You may be used to this sort of thing, but I'm just a record keeper, and I didn't sign on for this kind of trouble."

  The Looker wrinkled his nose in distaste. "Nervous old men. Never mind. We have to act quickly. If you can't dispose of her, who can?"

  "I still think Nick's the likeliest candidate."

  "I don't like him, but I can think of only one other alternative, and I don't want to take it yet. Stay close to him, though. If he fails, you take care of him and don't worry about it getting messy. We'll clean up after you. Are you set to begin immediately?"

  "I got her files all filled in nice with stuff the Board'll eat like candy," Terence said. "Nick's probably crazy wondering why he's not dead yet, so he'll do anything you ask."

  "Then let's not delay. The sooner we start, the sooner we'll know if it's going to work."

  "Okay. What're you gonna do about Dzarny?"

  The Looker peered over the rim of his glasses, examining his cards. Too many low cards. A difficult layout. "Dzarny," he said, "has dealt himself an interesting hand. I don't think I'll have any trouble playing it."

  In the bright sunlight of the days that followed his final attempt to get at Jaguar, Nick kept himself to himself, kept his gun handy, and waited for whatever would come next.

  He often broke into a cold sweat for no reason and he spent a lot of time in his apartment with the shades drawn down tight. He carried an image in his mind of a man in a blue suit with a long, thin nose and a set of very sophisticated ways to kill someone who had failed in an assignment.

  As if that wasn't bad enough, the implant was making him feel sick. He was queasy all the time, and the shadows und
er his eyes kept growing darker and darker. Jaguar would say that was the shadow sickness coming out. Maybe she'd say it was good that it was coming out, instead of festering deep inside him.

  And maybe she was full of shit, too.

  That didn't matter, though. Even if she was full of shit, he wanted her. He couldn't seem to get rid of that wanting, and he couldn't explain it. She'd explain it. His fear. The shadow sickness. Whatever it was. Bullshit, he thought. Bullshit. He wanted her off the Planetoids, dead, anything but in his face all the time. She owed him, and she wasn't coming through with the payment. In fact, he wondered if she'd been doing some mind bending of her own, probably just for fun.

  Shadow sickness wouldn't explain the stabbing pains in his chest. If she was messing around with him, he'd kill her—slowly and with great care, but he'd kill her so she stayed dead. Maybe she'd done something to him during the contact. Empathic contact should be like normal contact. She said it wasn't. She said it reached more directly into your neurons, the messages ingrained along pathways that ran deep within your body and—she'd say—your soul.

  He didn't believe in souls. If humans had ever had any such things, they'd lost them during the Serials and they weren't coming back. He thought even Jaguar lost hers then. Her family dead, her childhood shattered. She'd walked the streets and watched the murders growing more frequent. Seen the shift from frequent to commonplace occurrence, lived through the nerve gas and biobombs that followed. She couldn't be any different than the rest of the human race. Than him. Of course it killed her soul.

  It had killed his.

  And empathic contact was just another kind of telecom as far as he was concerned. A different technology, using the human instrument instead of electronically devised ones. He always thought it would be a good idea, because he trusted himself more than he trusted the tools other people invented. Like that damn implant the Looker gave him.

  Shit, if they were gonna shoot him; he might as well get rid of it. Maybe he'd feel better.

  He went into his bathroom, avoiding looking at his face, and craned his neck so that he could just see the back of it out of his peripheral vision.

  The subcutaneous slit, with its silicone seal, was visible. He scraped at the silicone, knowing he should use the gel to remove it and not his fingers, but not caring. He scraped until the skin around it was rubbed red and raw, and the slit opened. He pried under it with a tweezers, and pulled the implant.

  Immediately, he was attacked by a wave of dizziness, queasiness. He leaned over the sink and retched, cursing himself because now he'd have to clean that up, too.

  When his stomach had emptied itself of lunch and breakfast, he wiped his face with a towel, looked at the mess, and walked out of the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

  He'd deal with it later.

  And already, he felt better. Not normal, but a little lighter.

  "Lighter." He laughed at himself. "Sure, lighter."

  He went to his desk to retrieve a pack of cigarettes he kept there, and the telecom buzzed him.

  His hand stopped, hovering over the receive button.

  Because he carried the image of a man in a blue suit, with a long thin nose and a variety of weapons. A man he'd failed.

  If it was him, it would be better to know what they planned next.

  He flipped the telecom to receive, and saw blankness, but heard a disembodied voice.

  "I've blanked the screen," the man's voice said, "but you'll easily guess who this is."

  "Gotcha," Nick said.

  "Your last attempt failed," the voice continued, sounding neutral. As if it was just a slight delay in plans. Nick waited, deciding it was best not to explain or apologize. They wouldn't care, anyway.

  "We've decided to try an alternate."

  "Okay. What?"

  "You've been attempting to bring up charges against her with the Board, correct?"

  "Yeah, but Dzarny's got that all locked up. I suppose I could—"

  The voice interrupted him. "You are to gain access to her files. The coded files for Supervisors."

  "Yeah," Nick said, "and then what?"

  "Continue in your charges." A pause. "Use the files. Take the opportunity to complete your assignment."

  Nick was about to ask what the hell that all meant when he heard the click and the buzz that indicated the other party had signed off.

  A clap of thunder woke her, and she sat bolt upright in her bed to see flashes of lightning through her bedroom window.

  "Hecate," she heard herself say, and then realized she was waking from a dream.

  Thunder rumbled. She ran a hand over her face, down her neck, her breasts, to her belly, where she pressed her palm into herself.

  "Bad dream," she said, wondering if this was all a bad dream.

  She'd been on the streets of Manhattan again, the stench of rotting bodies filling her nostrils. She had reached for the mint in her pocket, and a hand stopped her.

  Looking up the arm, she saw a watch, ticking time away, hands running fast around the hours.

  Looking up from the watch, she'd seen the face of a man who wore glasses, which shifted to Nick's face, which shifted to Alex's face.

  He looked at her and said, "Trouble, Jaguar. Get her out of there."

  Get her out of there.

  Who? Clare?

  She pulled herself out of bed and went to stand at the window. She had too much to think about. Too many pieces of her flying everywhere.

  Alex had paid her tuition. He'd paid her tuition, and kept her from being fired. He'd done that, and not once had he ever used it against her. Not once had he ever thrown it at her to get her to cooperate, behave, do what he wanted out of obligation or guilt. Not once.

  And now he was in Leadville, because she said pyrite. And if DIE tried to kill her, what would they do to him?

  He was in Leadville, and he'd paid her tuition, and seen to it that she didn't get fired. She wondered how many times since then he'd done that, without her knowing about it. She wondered why he did it. She wondered why she was having such difficulty fitting the idea into a place that made sense within her worldview. It just hung there, disassociated from the rest of her understanding, a bit of cognitive dissonance to disturb her dreams.

  Knowing that someone was trying to kill her made more sense. That was a problem she could grapple with. It had happened before, and would probably happen again. All she had to do was figure out why, or who. Or both. Certainly knowing one would tell her the other.

  It could have been Nick, she supposed, but this didn't seem like his way. It was too impersonal. His satisfaction in her death would be watching her go down, feeling his own power grow as hers waned. He'd want to see it happen, want his hands inside her. Know who she was through knowing her pain. Know her darkness, her fear.

  She ran her hand across the window, wiping away drops of moisture that had accumulated. It was muggy tonight.

  Maybe the rain would clear the air. The mass generator that had given the Planetoid gravity and an atmosphere approximating Earth's also had a tendency toward the middle of the road in weather. This was the first real thunderstorm of the year, and might be the last. Summers and winters were more consistently mild. She was glad of the storm. It matched her mood.

  Or maybe she was just getting melodramatic about the whole thing. Something going on with her, and something about this case, pulling her back into a time nobody wanted to remember, but everyone had to. She couldn't quite pin down what it was about these assignments that dragged her into the time of the Serials. Almost every prisoner she dealt with had been through them, and carried scars. More often than not, it was something from that time that led to their crime. None of them had moved her into her own memories before. Why should it be happening with Clare? With Adrian?

  She was being pushed, and she didn't know by whom. Nick, maybe?

  If it wasn't Nick, the only other logical assumption she could make was that whoever hired Clare wanted her off the case,
which meant she was close to being right. Too close. Pyrite, and DIE. This had to be about DIE wanting pyrite for psi work. And Alex was in Leadville.

  Dangerous. And she'd put him in that danger.

  But it didn't matter if she knew that DIE was involved. It wouldn't have mattered even if she knew for sure that they'd hired Clare. There were too many gaping holes in that thing called proof, and they were so good at hiding that by the time she gathered enough to fill in the holes, she'd be a very knowing corpse, her dust floating with the stars.

  She'd either have to back way off and await developments, or she'd have to find a way to push it forward at her own pace, in her own way. If you can't make it better, make it worse.

  The question of who hired Clare aside, she wanted to move her program along faster. She understood, at least, why she was such a good killer. Nobody ever really saw her. They would look at her and see only the reflection of their own fears, their own desires. The gift of reflection.

  Jaguar wanted to figure out some way to get past the mirror she used and into the place where she really existed, as herself. Sheer force wouldn't work. Trickery might, but it would have to be the right trickery or she could lose all the progress they'd made so far. In spite of her coolness, her strange reflexive soul, Jaguar was moved by her. There was a lostness, and a sorrowing quality that touched some corresponding part in her own psyche, though she wasn't sure why, since Clare was about the most cold-blooded killer she'd ever had the pleasure to work with.

  Melodramatic again. Clare had walked with her in a place where she'd let no one else in. Not all the way in, because she kept one day, one set of events locked away safe. But Clare had gone far enough in to find an old wound and open it. Jaguar was grieving her own, and confusing it with her prisoner's, as she was intended to do. Clare, the reflexive killer.

  Perhaps. Or perhaps Clare, surviving the Serials without a scratch, had been through a war of the same kind, on different turf. In her own home, and the attacker her own father. At least, Jaguar thought, she felt no more resentment for Clare's apparent good fortune. She'd had no more good fortune than Jaguar.