“All right,” he said at last. “But don’t tell me anything unless I request it.”
“Within defensive protocols?”
“If she’s that dangerous, certainly. But short of that, wait for me to ask.”
“Understood.”
He gazed up. Through the skylight, the opposite side of the world glittered faintly. His mood was not completely ruined.
“I’ll be unavailable to anyone but Cambel till morning,” he said.
“Of course.”
He stepped into the chamber. “Stravinsky,” he said. “‘Dumbarton Oaks.’“ He sat down and swallowed cold wine as the first measures filled the room. He did not want to think now, he wanted only to imagine. He traced in memory the ride back to Nemily’s apartment, the eagerness with which he had followed her up the stairs, the taste of her mouth, the faltering steps to a sofa, and the adolescent fumbling with clothes that made them both laugh uncontrollably, the first touch of her nipple rising under his thumb, the quick breathing and sudden need to touch every part of her and to let her touch every part of him. He had not felt so consumed in years.
Perhaps he misremembered, but it had seemed that they had made no mistakes. No false caresses, no clumsiness, no technical difficulties. . .yes, that had to be the lie of pleasant memory. But he had slid inside her with an ease of familiarity that ought to have come only with time and practice.
She had moved him deftly, contoured herself to him...
He did not want to think, but he opened his eyes, uneasy at the incipient recognitions of things not as they should be. He had been with ghosts easily that skilled, that pleasant. But this had not been a transaction. He had not been buying a service. Nemily had made love to him, with him. It was different. He drank his wine and listened to the music and avoided the questions. Tomorrow, he thought, tomorrow I can think about it. Right now, I just want to enjoy...
Then he remembered his reaction to the augments, that something about them did not seem quite right. He did not know a lot about interface protocols—Nemily had been right about the prejudices cyberlinks provoked and there were few such systems on Aea, other than ghosts— but it seemed to him that her arrangement was unnecessarily... complicated...
He filled his glass again. And again. When the bottle was empty and the music long over, he went up to bed, groggy and slightly discontented.
His normal morning routine dictated coffee, vitamins, a short workout, and a shower. This morning he went straight to the shower. He came downstairs still dripping, a luxury he indulged since returning from Mars and learning to live alone. Water was no longer scarce on Mars but Martians still treated it with near-sacred regard. He had grown up taking dry showers in a cloud of tailored talc that left his body feeling rough and thirsty, wet showers a once-every-ten-days treat, withheld as a form of discipline. He enjoyed flouting his birthworld’s traditions.
In the kitchen he poured a cup of strong coffee and perched on a stool. He drank half of it down.
“Good morning, Helen,” he said.
“Good morning, Mace. Shall I connect to Cambel Guerrera?”
“Yes.”
A few seconds later, Cambel’s voice filled the kitchen.
“Where’ve—what time is it? Oh. Damn, Mace, where’ve you been?”
“Out. Piers gave a party.”
“You went? Sorry I missed it. Um... I need to see you. Soonest.”
“A problem?”
“I think so. Have you eaten yet?”
“No. Would you—?”
“Pete’s Terrace in—what? An hour?”
“Hour and a half.”
“See you there.”
He noticed then the delivery light shining above the front door. Mace pressed the ACCEPT button and a panel next to the door slid aside, allowing a dolly to roll forward, laden with boxes and envelopes—his presents from Hawthorne’s party.
“How long have they been in there, Helen?”
“Since yesterday midcycle.”
He squatted by the stack. “Is it scanned?”
“Of course. No dangerous volatiles or suspect configurations detected.”
He hoped none of it had been spoilable, either.
The wrapping paper varied from shimmery silver and blue to plain white to dark red. Most of the packages were small, less than twenty-five centimeters on a side. One thin rectangle looked to be about a hundred by eighty.
“I don’t have time right now. Helen, would you store this? I’ll go through them when I get back.”
He watched the dolly roll off to slide into a closet by the door to his greenhouse. He went upstairs to dress.
Pete’s Terrace looked out over a long decline toward a narrow stream that flowed spinward through a strip of parkland. The restaurant was not one but four terraces, each at a different level. Mace found Cambel at a table on the uppermost, a whiskey sour half gone.
“Sometimes,” she said as he sat down, “punctuality is a curse.”
“Yours or mine?”
She made a sound half-grunt, half-laugh. In the three years he had known her since Mars, Cambel had worn. She always seemed sleep deprived, and the vertical line between her eyebrows grew deeper by the month. Judging her on that basis was a mistake, though; she could be frighteningly perceptive. “I had a talk last night with PolyCarb security,” she said.
“Oh no,” he said with mock horror. “They’ve found out about all the padding in your old expense account. Don’t worry, though. I think it’s only a felony if you took too little.”
“Very funny. As a matter of fact they were interested in our business.”
“I take it you mean the vacuum.”
She nodded and swallowed a mouthful of her drink. “Specifically, who our—my—contacts are. They’re looking for someone.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Not by the name they gave. Glim Toler. Sound familiar?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. I asked for an image, maybe I know him by another name. No image.”
“They wouldn’t let you see it or they didn’t have it?”
Cambel frowned. “I’m not sure. My interrogator was the most stone-cold poker-faced professional I’ve ever seen. Gave absolutely nothing away.”
“You didn’t know him, either, then?”
“I’ve been out of the company nearly as long as you have. They’re bound to hire new people. No, I didn’t know him. A man named Koeln.”
“Under Koeln?”
“You know him?”
“He called yesterday I assumed it was more nonsense about the suit. He’s security?”
“Yes. You haven’t spoken to him yet?”
“No, I was out late.”
“I noticed.”
“Why is PolyCarb security asking us about someone we don’t know?”
“We do business with a lot of people, most of whom don’t use their real names. I’d wager they’re asking all the vacuum dealers of any weight.”
“Why would PolyCarb be interested in him, though? If he’s a vacuum dealer, then…”
“He wouldn’t say But I am being followed now.”
“Here?”
“About five tables away, just behind you and to your left. He spent the night outside my dom.”
“May I take your order?”
Mace flinched at the finely modulated robot voice and stared at the short, columnar device that now stood beside their table. Mace could not, for a few moments, comprehend what the thing wanted.
“Urn.. .yes. Coffee, croissant, oranges. Did you—?”
Cambel rattled the ice in her drink. “I’m fine.”
The robot rolled away and Mace watched it, turning till he could glance over his shoulder to the table Cambel had mentioned. He saw one lone man, reading a slate over coffee. Short, ordinary brown hair, a squared face, large hands. Unremarkable. A perfect security agent. Mace turned back toward Cambel.
“Is that Koeln?”
“Oh, no. That
’s just a know-nothing shadow.”
“All right. If PolyCarb security is asking about our vacuum trade in relation to this Glim Toler, we can assume he’s not Aean. They’d know who he is already.” He drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “I got a call from SA, too. Officer Stat, immigration directory.”
“Immigration?” She took an ice cube in her mouth and sucked at it for a few seconds, then spat it back in her glass. “Related calls?”
“Possibly. Hell of a coincidence, in any case.”
“So Toler is an immigrant.”
“If not, he may soon be.”
“Which means there’d be an InFlux report on him. Or will be.”
“I can find that out easily enough. For the rest, they must expect him to bring something in, something they assume would interest us.”
“In that case, I think we should take an interest in Mr. Toler.”
“Agreed.”
The server trundled back with Mace’s order, then rolled off. Mace methodically peeled an orange, thinking. He had asked Piers to find out what Koeln wanted. He hoped he had not brought trouble to Piers’ life.
Of all the people he had known in PolyCarb, Piers and Cambel surprised him with their loyalty. He did not pretend, even to himself, that he understood it in either case. Cambel resigned after Mace did, her reasons as complex as they were clear. PolyCarb wanted her to spy on Mace. She had always felt he had been unfairly shut out of the investigation into Hellas Planitia; she believed him that Helen had been there, which meant the company was lying to its employees—not a surprise, but Cambel thought her position cleared her for that kind of information. When she refused to conduct surveillance on Mace, they began transferring her from place to place the way they had done most of the senior staff involved with the recovery operation. Insulted, she quit. She had been working with Mace since.
Piers had been the only one immune to PolyCarb’s security games, at least so far. Mace wondered in the beginning if Piers had accepted the assignment Cambel had refused, but if so Piers had proved incredibly bad at it. No, Mace had decided, Piers simply knew too little about too much. He was an insurance adjuster. He was good at that.
“Toler could be a decoy, just to see if we do look,” Cambel said abruptly.
“To see who we’d contact to find him, where it would lead? Don’t credit them with more imagination than they have.”
She smiled, then reached across the table to grab his croissant.
Or, he thought, they really want to know where he is, who he is, and don’t want to be directly involved in finding him...
“Unless Structural Authority shows up with charges,” he said, “we go on. PolyCarb can’t make arrests, can’t expel anyone, can’t legally do much at all.”
“PolyCarb security can obtain a judicial mandate.”
“Until they do—”
Cambel rattled the ice in her glass. “So where were you so late? Have yourself a ghost after the party?”
Mace winced. “As a matter of fact, no. I didn’t expect to be out so late. Helen said you called at one yesterday morning. A little early. What time did Koeln talk to you?”
“An hour before.”
“An odd hour for him, too. At your dom?”
“No, I was out, too. He found me... there.”
“At Reese’s.”
She nodded. Reese owned a club called 5555 down in the Heavy, “underground” in the outer circumference of ring five. Mace and Cambel had done security work on their commlines; over the last year and half, Reese had retained them to run security checks on employees and a few guests and recently they had done a large amount of work vetting guests for an upcoming private party. The place was more reputation than substance, but a great deal of illicit activity, especially vacuum dealing, went on in and around it. Cambel, to Mace’s dismay, had developed a taste for it, despite the possible consequences to her reputation and conflict-of-interest problems. Mace had never questioned it too closely, though, because she had also developed other clientele and useful sources of information through Reese’s.
“He wouldn’t come into the club,” she said. “Sent a request that I meet him nearby, at a coffee kiosk.”
“Does Koeln know what we’re looking for, then?” he asked.
She smiled wryly. “Do we?” She shook her head. “I want to say no, but I’m not entirely sure. Linder Koeln is an import. He’s Lunessa, apparently worked security in Lunase.”
“And we all know how thorough Lunase security is supposed to be. Hmm. Interesting.” Mace finished his coffee. “I’m going to see Philip.”
“What do you want me to do meanwhile?”
“Business as usual. But start asking about Toler. And if Mr. Koeln has contacted any of our sources. Who knows, you might have some of the same acquaintances.” He stood. “I’ll have a talk to him myself. Do you have only one tag?”
“As far as I’ve been able to tell.”
“Good. In a few moments you can leave without him.”
“What—?”
Mace walked away from her and made his way between the forest of tables to the lone man with a newssheet. Before the tag could react, Mace had sat down across from him.
“Good morning. My name is Mace Preston, I don’t believe we’ve met. Have you tried the yams here? They’re excellent. Allow me to treat you—”
The man began to rise. Mace stood.
“Don’t make a scene,” Mace said. “We’ll both end up detained by SA, I guarantee it, and then you’ll have to explain more than simply losing your target. Unless, of course, you are SA?”
The man scowled, glanced over Mace’s shoulder, and tried to move around him. Mace blocked him.
“I didn’t think so,” Mace said. “Sit down and have some yams. We should talk anyway. Or at least, I should talk, though probably not to you.” The man made one more move and Mace placed two fingers on his sternum. “I will put you in pathic if you don’t sit down.”
By the expression on the man’s face it was clear he was weighing options. But suddenly he looked sullenly resigned and Mace knew Cambel was gone.
“Good, good,” Mace said. “I want you to tell your supervisor—Koeln, is it?—tell him that I want to speak with him. I’ll be at my dom later, but if I’m not, he can leave his code with my house and I’ll get back to him. Now, really, let me buy you lunch. It’s the least I can do after fouling up your assignment.”
Mace went to the nearest shunt station and descended to the platform. As he expected, the shadow followed at a discreet distance. Mace boarded a shunt downshaft, toward the “south” cap of Aea’s twenty-three kilometer length.
A map of Aea’s tube routes covered the ceiling of the car, a bright red dot indicating their position within the nine hundred thirty-eight square kilometers of surface area. Elaborately geometric, the system broke the five segments down into quadrants and octants, station by station, the lines multiplying thickly toward the downshaft cap where industrial districts required short spur lines and inter-manufactory connections. The red dot moved from the lip of the second segment into the third, slowing at one of its two stops on the way to the fourth segment. Mace got off at the second stop.
Law forbade electronic surveillance in public on Aea, a rule many in Mace’s profession found a nuisance. But Mace preferred it this way If you wanted to follow someone you had to do it yourself. Structural Authority had tried to implement public surveillance once and had narrowly avoided a riot downshaft and strikes in the mid- to upshaft segments. Worries over crime or possible terrorism failed to persuade independence-minded Aeans to adopt thinking that made such practices necessary and normal. Aea was not Lunase, with its constant surveillance and intrusive security, and sometimes seemed to impair its own ability to operate to guarantee the distinction. Mace approved. In its own way, Mars had been as bad as Lunase.
The shadow followed him to Philip’s, having already lost Cambel. The man was actually very good—Mace lost sight of him a couple of
times—but it did seem a waste of skills. Mace did not worry about being followed to Philip’s since he was a known customer of Philip Huxley.
Philip’s shop occupied the center section of a long strip of shops that formed one wall of a broad plaza in arc one-seventeen. From here, some of the construction work in segment four was visible. People dotted the plaza; by midcycle it would be crowded and noisy.
Most of the shops had been decorated over time, some elaborately, others—like Philip’s—with small details, like the three neon tubes that outlined the door and the anodized aluminum radiators extruding just below the roof line. A neatly lettered plaque to the right of the entrance announced “P. Huxley, Minuscule Rarities.” Mace pressed the mici.
The door slid aside and Mace, with a last backward glance at his shadow, entered the shop.
Glass cases rose above heavy banks of drawers. Behind the glass stood rows of small objects. Toys, trading cards, mounted prints, ancient bound books. Toward the rear of the room a counter separated the brightly lit work area from the front. In its own wall niche, back by a panel that resembled waxed paper that gave off a gentle light, was a maidenhair tree, perhaps thirty centimeters tall, gracefully shaped in Moyogi fashion, the trunk curved ever so slightly It was an elegant tree and Mace always felt a twinge of envy when he saw it. Philip had taught him the art and, as far as Mace was concerned, would always be the superior.
As Mace reached the counter, Philip looked up from the broad table at which he sat.
“Macefield.” He grinned. “You’re early, but welcome.”
“I got your message,” Mace said, leaning on the counter. A half-size chessboard lay beside his elbow, the tiny pieces intricately-carved orbital vehicles done in pyrite and corundum. He whistled appreciatively.
Philip stood gracefully. He was extremely tall, born and raised on one of the conversions, an asteroid hollowed out and filled with an environment. The low g explained his height to some extent, but his full two-point-three meters was the result of the adapt treatments he had undergone in order to live in the higher gravity of Aea. The only part of the treatments that had worked, Mace knew. A small number of people reacted badly In Philip’s case, his bones and musculature failed to respond properly. As a result, he wore a fine mesh of exoskeleton over his legs, torso, and arms. Without it, he could not walk, might even have trouble breathing.
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