“Your first task must be your own physical recovery,” Raven-sensei put in, with a look of concern at her sudden distress. “Your normal mental resilience will follow. In two to four weeks, not two to four days—you have to give yourself time.”
“I’ve never had enough time.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “And that appalling creature—!”
Vorlynkin cleared his throat. “I’m not sure the Lord Auditor was thinking it through, when he accepted the animal. Nevertheless, it may be kept in the consulate’s back garden with the rest of Jin’s creatures, for now. They’re doing no harm at all, there. Livens the place up, really. The space was underutilized.”
She sighed, folded her arms, half-laughed, quelling Jin’s growing alarm. “I suppose it just looms so absurdly large because it’s closest.” But her eyes sought Jin and Mina, not the sphinx.
Since they weren’t going back to the consulate tonight after all, Vorlynkin let Jin speak on his wristcom with Lieutenant Johannes, and talk him through how to care for his creatures till Jin returned tomorrow. Johannes didn’t even sound sarcastic at the added chores. So that was all right, for now.
Miles-san and Roic had taken Leiber-sensei off to another room to talk, right after they’d come in. They returned at length, toting, unexpectedly, a big stack of dinner boxes from Ayako’s Cafe. Miles-san let it be known this bounty was courtesy of Miss Kareen, who had somehow found out where to get it, how to have it delivered to the facility, and had paid for it all, too.
They all ended up having a sort of picnic in the recovery room; Raven-sensei even took in a box to Jin’s mother, so that when he pulled back the curtains after his medical check, it was almost as if they were all eating a family meal together again. Jin thought she looked a bit better after she ate, sitting up less wearily, and with more color in her face. But then, Ayako’s curry was always very good.
It was funny to watch big Roic sitting cross-legged on the floor, being instructed on how to use chopsticks by Mina. Miles-san handled his pretty well, for a galactic; he claimed he’d practiced on the ship coming here, and at other times in the past. When he let slip he’d been to Old Earth itself, twice, Mina made him tell stories of his visits, though he mainly told her about his second trip, his wife, and gardens, lots of different gardens. All he said of his first trip was that it was purely business, he’d never got out of one city, and that it was the first time he’d met his brother, which last remark seemed very weird to Jin’s ear. Consul Vorlynkin pulled his lip and looked thoughtful at this, but he didn’t ask any helpful questions, and Miles-san didn’t expand.
With frequent references to the instruction file, Jin fed tidbits to Nefertiti, who apparently could eat some kinds of people food but not others, at least not without messy digestive consequences. Unfortunately, Ako came in just as the sphinx was having an accident in the darkest corner, which was Jin’s fault really because he hadn’t paid enough attention to her little mutters of Poo! Pee! during her restless explorations of the recovery room. Ako was very upset, and made Jin clean it up, which was fair, but then insisted the creature couldn’t spend the night in here. Raven-sensei, at least, seemed undisturbed by biological messes, and stayed out of the debate. Jin finally promised to take Nefertiti back to his rooftop hideout for overnight, which satisfied Ako, but then Mina wanted to tag along and see the place.
Miles-san and Roic had gone off by then to meet with Lord Mark and Suze-san, so Consul Vorlynkin, after a glance through the glass at Jin’s worried-looking mother, volunteered to go along and help lug the sphinx carrier, and make sure that all was well. Jin’s mother smiled gratefully at him, so Jin supposed that was all right, too.
They were filing down the end stairs when they met Bhavya, one of Ako’s friends, panting up.
“Jin! Have you seen Ako? Tanaka-san wants her on the second floor—an emergency cryoprep. Some poor old lady collapsed in the cafeteria, all in a heap, they say.”
“She’s up in the recovery room with my mom.” Jin pointed back up the stairs. “Raven-sensei’s there, too.”
Bhavya nodded and ran on, waving thanks without looking back.
Vorlynkin wheeled to stare after her. “Should we go try to help?”
Jin shook his head. “Naw, this happens all the time. Well, not all the time, but every week or so. Tanaka-san knows what to do.”
Vorlynkin looked doubtful, but followed Jin down to the tunnels.
“The layout down here is very confusing,” he remarked.
“Yah, the tunnels below are all offset from the buildings above, and run underneath the streets, too. And some go down four levels, and some five or six. You kind of have to memorize them.”
Jin had no trouble finding his own familiar route, even when they passed out of range of the lit section, and Vorlynkin drew a small hand light from his jacket to illuminate the steps. Mina, who had walked on her own thus far, took a prudent grip on his wide coat sleeve in the deepening shadows. They trudged upward five flights to come out at last from the exchanger tower door onto Jin’s roof. Vorlynkin wasn’t wheezing too badly, for a grownup, despite carting the carrier.
Jin had lost track of time in the windowless recovery room, but it seemed to have grown very late. The air was damp and chill, lit by diffuse reflections from the street lights in the area that gave everything a funny brown tinge. The city noises had quieted down the way they usually only did after midnight. But around the side of the tower, Jin found his tarps were all still up and taut, not blown loose by the weather yet. His little refuge was littered with a dreary residue of things not taken away the other day—not needed for his creatures, or too big and awkward to fit in the lift van, or too junky to salvage. He’d taken his own hand light down off its wire and packed it along, so it was now less-than-usefully back at the consulate, but Vorlynkin amiably shone his around while Jin explained his old life up here to Mina, and Mina made admiring and envious noises.
When they let her out of her carrier, Nefertiti did not at once take to her new environment. She stared around warily, crouching, then at last went off in a stiff-legged reconnoiter. Jin followed along, explaining to Vorlynkin about the gruesome fate of the baby chicks who couldn’t fly yet. “I can’t tell, if she went over the edge, if she’d just plummet, or flutter down like the big chickens, or even fly away.” The dense muscles Jin had felt beneath the golden fur didn’t help him decide. “Maybe I’d better tie a line around her leg like Miles-san.”
“Hm?” said Vorlynkin, so Jin explained his first night’s safety procedures, which just made Vorlynkin go “Hm!” and set his teeth to his lower lip. But from the way his eyes crinkled, Jin didn’t think he was mad or anything.
Jin’s old bedding of shredded flimsies was still piled against the wall; if he slept out here, he could keep an eye on his new pet. Would Mom miss him? She’d have Mina—or would Mina try to stay out here with him?
Jin rose on his toes to make a grab when Nefertiti stretched her considerable length, put her front paws on the parapet, and peered over, but she drew back without any effort to launch herself fatally over the side. She visited Jin’s latrine corner, and used it properly—Jin explained about the bucket-flushing to Vorlynkin—and Jin made sure to praise her, after the confusions about the corner of the recovery room. The sphinx did not quite look as if she believed him. She stretched and flapped her wings, but folded them again when she went to look over the parapet on the opposite side, toward the narrow parking lot behind the old complex.
And stiffened, growling, staring down with a predatory intensity like Lucky regarding the rats, back when Lucky had been much younger. The fur went up in a ridge along her back, and her wings spread and quivered, making a sinister rustling-rattling noise. Her tufted tail lashed.
“Foes!” she whined. “Foes!”
“What?” said Vorlynkin, sounding startled. He stepped up to peer along with her; Jin joined him.
Mina, who was not so fond of heights, hung back a few paces and asked, “What d
oes she see?”
Jin wasn’t sure what kind of night vision the sphinx had, but what he saw was a van parked in the shadowiest part of the lot, and some dark-dressed men moving about below. One swung some sort of long hammer or bat, three or four dull thumps, and Jin heard a ground-floor window pop out and fall from its frame, inward, perhaps onto a carpet, he guessed from the muffled clatter.
“Somebody’s breaking in to the building,” he whispered back over his shoulder to Mina, who at this news overcame her nerves and joined him to stare.
“Maybe it’s robbers,” she whispered back.
“What would anybody want to steal out of here?” The building had been stripped of usable furniture and equipment long ago; anything left inside was valueless or non-portable.
Two of the men lugged a big barrel-like thing from the van; they did something to it, then hoisted it through the window and let it fall and roll. A strange pungent aroma seeped up through the night mist, which made Vorlynkin jerk back and swear.
“Not robbers,” he said through his teeth. “Arsonists!” He grabbed Mina’s hand and looked frantically around.
Below, one of the men threw something through the window, and they all ran for their vehicle. They’d evidently left a driver waiting, because they shot out of the lot, past where the chain-link gate had been broken open, in a spray of gravel before the van doors were even all the way shut.
A flash of orange light; below Jin’s feet, the building quaked as a boom echoed out across the lot and broke into mumbling thunder against the buildings across the street. A greasy boil of flame belched from the window, a licking tongue two meters long.
“Fire!” screamed the sphinx, all her fur on end, and her eyes like gilded saucers. “Fire! Foes! Fire!”
“We have to get out of this building, right now!” said Vorlynkin; Mina yelped as his hand tightened on hers. Vorlynkin lurched toward the towers. “Which stairs are farther from the fire?”
“Not that way!” said Jin. “There’s an outside ladder drops down to the alley on the other side.”
Vorlynkin nodded and ran, jerking Mina along with him; Jin grabbed up Nefertiti and ran after him. The sphinx struggled and hissed in his arms. Was there time to stuff her back into her carrier? Maybe not. Vorlynkin reached the opposite edge of the roof and found the steel staples.
“I have to go first, to let down the extension!” Jin yelled to Vorlynkin.
“Mina next,” said Vorlynkin.
“I can’t reach that far!” Mina sounded like she wanted to cry.
“I’ll lower you over, and hold you till you get your grip,” said Vorlynkin. “Go, Jin!”
“Who’ll carry Nefertiti?”
Vorlynkin choked back something short, and said, “I will.”
Jin dropped Nefertiti, hoping she wouldn’t bolt away, vaulted over the parapet, and slapped down the rungs faster than he’d ever gone in his life. Unlatched the ladder, thumped at it, prayed it wouldn’t stick or hang up. It rattled, then reached its full extension with a clang. “All right!” he called up.
Mina’s kicking legs dangled over his head, then she found her footing and started down with no more than one scared meep. The rungs really were too far apart for her to reach comfortably. Above, Jin heard Vorlynkin swearing, and the scrunch of his footsteps, and the sphinx screaming, “Fire! Foes! Fire!” and, apparently confused in her vocabulary by the commotion, “Food!”
Vorlynkin yelped in pain, seemingly from some greater distance, and swore some more. Jin reached the ground and stretched up to catch Mina, whose sport shoes wavered in the air when she ran out of rungs before she ran out of space. “You’re all right! Just let go!” She fell into him, knocking him to the ground; they both rolled, then scrambled to their feet and stared upward. At that point, Jin found out how well sphinxes could fly, when Nefertiti sailed over the parapet, wings flapping madly, and descended. She neither plummeted nor soared, but she did land right-side-up on all four paws like a cat, hard enough to grunt when her belly hit the ground, but not hard enough to break anything.
Vorlynkin’s big dark shape finally swung out over the edge; he dropped the last two meters, hit with knees bending like the sphinx’s, staggered, but didn’t fall. Blood was running down his face from a deep triple scratch below his left eye.
“Jin!” Vorlynkin’s voice was sharp and hard, brooking no debate. “Take Mina straight to your mother, and do what Dr. Durona tells you to. If this fire spreads, they may have to evacuate all the buildings in the complex.” He raised his wristcom to his lips and began snapping connect-codes into it.
Jin dove for Nefertiti, who flapped away screeching.
“Leave the bloody animal!” Vorlynkin snarled over his shoulder, already starting away down the alley. “Both of you, run!”
Chapter Eighteen
Ted Fuwa, the old cryofacility’s putative owner, turned out to be more or less what Miles had expected—a big, harried man in his late forties who looked as if he’d be more at home on a construction site than in a conference chamber, even one so strange as Madame Suze’s quarters at midnight.
A less-expected presence was the consulate’s local lawyer, an alert, composed, compact woman, with wiry salt-and-pepper hair, who stood barely taller than Miles himself. Kareen, Miles was unsurprised to learn, had persuaded her to come here after hours. Madame Xia stared back at him with at least as much covert interest, as the source of the increasingly bizarre stream of legal questions she’d been fielding for the past week or so from her formerly staid and routine client. Miles trusted she was having her accumulated curiosity satisfied tonight.
Miles missed Vorlynkin, told off to stay with Sato and her children, and Suze wasn’t happy that Tanaka had been called away to deal with some medical crisis, so he supposed the shifting sides, however you counted them, were still evenly matched. Suze and Tenbury versus Mark and Kareen, Miles as unruly witness with Roic his silent partner, the attorney throwing in comments and questions now and then that gave everyone pause, and Fuwa versus everyone, although Miles wasted little sympathy on him.
Madame Suze folded her arms and stared hard at Mark. “You still have given me no guarantees whatsoever about future provisions for the poor.”
“I’m not running a charity, you know,” Mark returned, irritably.
“I am,” snapped Suze.
“Yes, but for how much longer?” asked Mark. “Sooner or later, and more sooner than later, I think, it would be your turn to go downstairs. And you would lose control of this place in any case. Tenbury and Tanaka might hold things together for a while, but after that—what?”
“It’s what I was waiting for,” put in Fuwa, a bit mournfully. Suze shot him a scornful look and sat up straighter in her big chair, as if to imply he’d be waiting for a while yet. Miles was less sure. Suze’s skin bore more than a little of that pallid slackness that was the harbinger of decline. One couldn’t say she glowed with health, not even in her irate stress.
“If the Durona Group doesn’t step in,” said Mark, “the inevitable end game is that this place will go to the city or the Prefecture, or to Fuwa. And in either case, patron intake stops. The life of one person isn’t long enough to see this venture out.”
“Although that might change in the future,” Kareen observed.
“Or cryofreezing will become obsolete technology, and this whole demographic mess Kibou has created for itself will be naturally swept away,” said Mark.
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Miles thoughtfully. “If people start getting frozen at eight hundred instead of eighty, the game will still go on, just set to a new equilibrium. Although at eight hundred, it’s hard to guess how people will think. At twenty, I could not have imagined myself at almost-forty. I can’t imagine eighty even now.”
Suze snorted.
Mark shrugged. “That will be for them to decide, however many decades or centuries from now. I expect death will still be cheap and always available, doesn’t take high tech.”
&n
bsp; “During the initial transition period,” Kareen said, wrenching things back from this flight of speculation to the practical present, “treatment actually will be free, if the subject is willing to sign up for the experimental protocols and give the legal releases. And anyone coming in can give their own permissions.” Not needing, this implied, any cooperation from Madame Suze and company. “I expect the Group will prefer to have a few more healthy live subjects to start on, before tackling the more difficult complications from death trauma and cryorevival. Although they’ll certainly want data on those as well.”
Suze growled. Tenbury scratched his beard.
Kareen regarded her fingernails, looked up, smiled. Miles wasn’t sure if anyone else caught Mark’s small gesture, two fingers held out and then curled once more atop his stomach. The pair had the good-cop-bad-cop routine down to an art, Miles thought with admiration, and it would be a naïve observer who concluded that all the bad-cop ideas came from Mark—or the good-cop ones from his partner, for that matter. Kareen continued serenely, “The Durona Group will be doing a lot of local hiring, if this goes through. For example, if you, Madame Suzuki, were to sign up for the first round of protocols, and they proved to work as well as we hope, the position of Director of Community Relations could be made open for you. Which would put you in place to work on these problems on an on-going basis, right from here. This is all too complex to be solved in a night, but that doesn’t mean it’s too complex to be solved ever.”
“Buy me off with an empty title? Oh, as if I haven’t seen how that works before!”
“What you make of it could be largely up to you,” said Mark, sounding as if he didn’t care one way or another. “But in three years, when all those chambers below stairs are emptied out, it may be a whole new situation, here. Employment would keep you in the center of things, with real input.”
It wasn’t the future Suze had set her mind to; Miles fancied he could hear her imagination creaking with the strain of change, like a gate almost rusted shut. Almost. She said querulously, “What about the rest of us?”
Cryoburn b-17 Page 28
