“Jill,” says TB. “Come here and show me you are still alive.”
I jump down through the pilot hole, and he hugs and kisses me. He kisses me right on the mouth, and for once I sense that he is not thinking about Alethea at all when he touches me. It feels very, very good.
“Oh your poor back,” says Molly Index. She looks pretty distraught and fairly useless. But at least she warned us. That was a good thing.
“It’s just a scratch,” I say. “And I took care of the poison.”
“You just took out a Met sweep enforcer,” Andre Sud says. “I think that was one of the special sweepers made for riot work, too.”
“What was that thing doing here?”
“Looking for Ben,” says Molly Index. “There’s more where that came from. Amés will send more.”
“I will kill them all if I have to.”
Everybody looks at me, and everyone is quiet for a moment, even Bob.
“I believe you, Jill,” Andre Sud finally says. “But it’s time to go.”
TB is sitting down at the table now. Nobody is piloting the boat, but we are drifting in midcurrent, and it should be all right for now.
“Go?” TB says. “I’m not going anywhere. They will not use me to make war. I’ll kill myself first. And I won’t mess it up this time.”
“If you stay here, they’ll catch you,” Andre Sud says.
“You’ve come to Amés’s attention,” Molly Index says. “I’m sorry, Ben.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“We have to get out of the Met,” Andre Sud says. “We have to get to the outer system.”
“They’ll use me, too. They’re not as bad as Amés, but nobody’s going to turn me into a weapon. I don’t make fortunes for soldiers.”
“If we can get to Triton, we might be okay,” Andre Sud replies. “I have a certain pull on Triton. I know the weatherman there.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Trust me. It’s a good thing. The weatherman is the military commander, and he is very important on Triton. Also, he’s a friend of mine.”
“There is one thing I’d like to know,” says TB. “How in hell would we get to Triton from here?”
Bob stands up abruptly. He’s been rummaging around in TB’s larder while everybody else was talking. I saw him at it, but I knew he wasn’t going to find anything he would want.
“Why didn’t you say you wanted to go Out-ways?” he said. “All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century’s place in the gas swamps.”
“Who’s that?”
“I thought you knew her, TB. She’s that witch that lives in the ditch’s aunt. I guess you’d call her a smuggler. Remember the old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?”
“I remember,” TB says.
“Well, she’s where I got that from,” says Bob. “She’s got a lot of cats, too, if you want one.”
We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can’t help but think about where I am going. I can’t help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There’s a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn’t go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren’t any cables out past Jupiter.
“I thought you understood why I’m here,” TB says. “I can’t go.”
“You can’t go even to save your life, Ben?”
“It wouldn’t matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her.”
“What about the war?”
“I can’t think about that.”
“You have to think about it.”
“Who says? God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood.” TB shakes his head sadly. “That was always my favorite koan in seminary—and the truest one.”
“So it’s all over?” Andre Sud says. “He’s going to catch you.”
“I’ll hide from them.”
“Don’t you understand, Ben? He’s taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won’t be anyplace to hide because Amés will be the Met.”
“I have to try to save her.”
The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don’t see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I’m a lot older than all of them.
You could say that it is the way that TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.
All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.
And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.
“Ah!” I moan. “My wrist hurts. I think it’s broken, TB.”
He looks at me, stricken.
“Oh I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking, and you’re standing there hurt.”
He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.
And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman, and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.
“I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”
“No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.
“TB, don’t you see what I am?”
“Jill, you can’t—”
“I’m you, TB. I’m your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”
He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.
TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.
“He’ll be out for two days,” I say. “That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle.”
I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most to me in all creation.
“He’s going to be really hungry when he wakes up,” I say.
Andre Sud’s hand on my shoulder. “You saved his life, Jill,” he says. “Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he saved yours.”
“I won’t give her up,” I say. “I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope.”
Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off even though he is right next to me. “Destiny’s a brutal old hag,” he says. “I’d rather believe in nothing.”
“It isn’t destiny,” I reply. “It’s love.”
“There are moments when freedom and determinism are the same thing. There are people who are both at the same time . . .” Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he’s seeing a new me standing where I am standing. “It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be somewhere in the Met. I think Ben knows that. He would know if she were truly dead. She needs to forgive him, or not
forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing . . . but we can’t think about it that way.”
“I care about TB. The war can go to hell.”
“Yes,” Andre Sud says, “The war can go to hell.”
After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn’t tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.
“I could see all the way around the sun,” Molly Index says. “I don’t know if I want to live now that I’ve lost that. I don’t know how I can live as just a person again.”
“Even when you are less than a person,” I tell her, “you still want to live.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him.”
“Yes,” Molly Index says. “So can I.”
“Will you let him?”
“When the time comes.”
“What is it like?” I say.
“You mean with Andre?”
“What is it like?”
Molly Index touches me. I feel the grist of her pellicle against mine, and for a moment I draw back, but then I let it in, let it speak.
Her grist shows me what it is like to make love.
It is like being able to see all the way around the sun.
The next day, Molly Index is the last to say good-bye to me as Makepeace Century’s ship gets ready to go. Makepeace Century looks like Gladys if Gladys didn’t live in a ditch. She’s been trying for years to get Bob to come aboard as ship musician, and that is the price for taking them to Triton—a year of his service. I get the feeling she’s sort of sweet on Bob. For a moment, I wonder just who he is that a ship’s captain should be so concerned with him. But Bob agrees to go. He does it for TB.
TB is so deep asleep he is not even dreaming. I don’t dare touch him for fear of breaking my spell. I don’t dare tell him good-bye.
There is a thin place in the Carbuncle here, and they will travel down through it to where the ship is moored on the outer skin.
I only watch as they carry him away. I only cry until I can’t see him anymore.
Then they are gone. I wipe the tears off my nose. I never have had time for much of that kind of thing.
So what will I do now? I will take the Bendy River all the way around the Carbuncle. I’ll find a likely place to sink the hoy. I will set the ferrets free. Bob made me promise to look after his dumb ferret, Bomi, and show her how to stay alive without him.
And after that?
I’ll start looking for Alethea. Like Andre Sud said, she must be here somewhere. And if she is not in the Carbuncle, then I will leave this place and search for her in the Met. If anybody can find her there, I can. I will find her.
There is a lot I have to do, and now I’ve been thinking that I need help. Pretty soon Amés is going to be running all the grist, and all the code will answer to him. But there’s some code he can’t get to. Maybe some of those ferrets will want to stick around. Also, I think it’s time I went back to the mulmyard.
It’s time I made peace with those rats.
Then Amés had better watch out if he tries to stop me from finding her.
We will bite him.
PART ONE
FIGHT AND FLIGHT
* * *
One
Business was tanking down. The Positions Room was afire with key economic indicators—and the color was red, red, red. Kelly Graytor’s suit was gray and tan, with black-and-green management palps at the shoulders denoting his rank—junior partner. The palps were a sheer irony in upper management, since the hierarchy shifted with the portfolio strength of each j.p. Nevertheless, the old man insisted that palps be worn just as they had in days of yore when Teleman Milt was as important to Mercury as the planet’s proximity to the sun. Kelly tweaked his palps and called up a glass of cold water from the wall grist. He drank it while he looked at the tickers.
Production sectors were getting killed—bio down, gristplant and chemistry suffering mightily, quantum jumping around crazily like it always did, but continually banging its head against a price ceiling that was falling at a stately, Newtonian rate. Hard-product liquidation had reach a critical mass, and all the money was flowing into energy like a virtual nuclear explosion. On the retail side, the news was even worse.
“Ah hell,” Kelly said. “And where does the goddamn time go?”
The time stocks, a subset of quantum, were his specialty and made up the bulk of the portfolio he managed for the firm. And, since they were also linked inexorably to the grist, they, too, were taking a beating.
Rapid conversion flux throughout the time sector. Options to time equities to grist to energy sinks and potentiality wells, Danis, his portfolio, said. Every bit of it flowing downhill, Kelly. As always, the whisper of his portfolio along his aural neurons was arousing, even when she was talking data and pain. She was also his wife, after all. But time was running out.
All in all, it was a massive economic downturn and a meltdown of the markets.
“A war panic,” the old man said when he entered. The other portfolio managers trailed into the room behind him. “What are the merci boards saying?”
“Three billion five hundred thousand eight hundred forty-two million seven hundred and fifty thousand inquiries to sell,” the Position Room said, then gave its customary three half-second update follow-throughs. “Up ten thousand. Down a thousand. Up eleven. We are approaching stage-one liquidity limits.”
“Shit,” the old man said. “Lock us in.”
The room’s door became a wall.
“Minimize the count.”
The quotes ceased to migrate through the surroundings, and the walls darkened down to mahogany grain under a pale green light.
The junior partners all stood about the center of the room, some of them leaning on wooden pillars that had, a moment before, been readout consoles. Hed Ash, one of the youngest of the j.p.s, hoisted himself onto one of these and sat with his legs dangling. Kelly contented himself to lean against a big piece of mahogany as tall as he was and set his cup of water down on the top of another one nearby that was about chest high. The old man stood in the middle of a circle of j.p.s poised like a wolf pack among rocks.
“Okay,” the old man said. “Let’s get out of free fall and make this into a controlled dive.”
“Sell off Pop Chart, first,” Ash said from his perch. The old man gave him a withering glance. The personality popularity futures and options would be the first hit by a downturn. Those speculative highfliers should be somewhere in the millileafs per share by now, with calls everywhere going unhonored. It was far too late for a little trimming.
Ash had never actually seen a really bad bear market, Kelly reflected. E-Street had been on a ten-year growth spurt, fueled by rapid Met expansion and the first returns on some of the huge potential of the outer system. Kelly, on the other hand, remembered the languid years before Amés had consolidated his commission-based government. And he had been a neophyte trader at the turn of the century when the old Republic had fallen apart in the polls and been replaced by the Interim Committee for twenty years.
Hazen Huntly, the j.p. the others considered most likely to make partner next, spoke up. “My team has just run two thousand scenarios parallel through the Abacus. The results indicate that we need to withdraw geographically, rather than by manufacturing process or commercial sector,” she said. Hazen had a strong voice, but not a harsh one, and she always spoke with complete conviction. Kelly felt his spirits buoyed up for a moment just from the tone of it. But it was a false cheer, and he knew it. “We have to concentrate on the inner system and let Europa handle their own marke
ts,” Hazen continued. “And I suggest liquidating Mars.”
This brought a gasp from those gathered. But even Mars isn’t going to be enough, Kelly thought. You don’t need two thousand possible economic worlds to tell you what’s as plain as day on the sun. This is a panic over war with the outer system. The uncertainty element is precisely the real estate, especially at first. Geographic trade strategy was the obvious method to apply. But what was obvious to Hazen and her bunch of interlinked technicals was also obvious to anyone with common sense. Hazen’s team was never going to beat the market when it was in ruthlessly efficient mode. They could only reflect it.
“Do you have your actions queued up?” the old man asked Hazen.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then feed them to the Teller and get us off Mars. And get me a sequence ready for withdrawing our interests all the way down the Diaphany. We may end up owning nothing but a piece of Mercury before this is over.”
We’re going to end up owning less than that, Kelly thought. There is no way Amés won’t move in on the big financials, now that he has them in this weakened state.
“Does anybody have anything else?” said the old man. “Anything?”
“I do,” said Kelly.
The old man looked at him impatiently, then saw the smile on his face and shook his head. “All right, Kelly, out with it.”
“I shorted all but the cash position in my portfolio five e-days ago.”
“You did what?”
“I sold everything I owned and bought nearly the exact same holdings short.”
“What do you mean, the exact same holdings?”
“They are falling nearly as fast as everything else, but they are well-managed concerns and are the only ones who will exist as an issue long enough for us to be able to sell them.”
“My boy,” said the old man. “That’s . . . pretty damn good news at the moment.”
“Yes, it is,” said Kelly.
“And have you run the numbers through the Abacus?”
“You know I don’t trust those projections, sir.”
Tony Daniel Page 8
