Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “What other matter’?”

  “I don’t know that. But these trade talks with Lunase have everybody nervous.”

  “Why would that be? It’s just more of the same old who gets to sell what to whom nonsense.”

  Syvestri shrugged.

  “She’s just a cyberlink in the actuarial department,” Mace said, “working for Piers Hawthorne.”

  Syvestri frowned. “Odd. She’d hardly be in a threatening position there, would she?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. Who noticed her?”

  “I don’t know that either. Ongoing investigation, first-level priority, all those fancy adjectives. I could find out if you want.”

  “It’s got to be a mistake.” Mace grunted. “All of a sudden I seem to be in your way. I’ve got to talk to another agent tomorrow, a man named Koeln.”

  “Linder Koeln? Who did you piss off?”

  “No one. He’s good?”

  “What he lacks in talent he makes up for in tenacity. He’s good. If it’s his investigation....”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “When I came in I spotted you right off, then I saw who you were with. I didn’t think you were ever going to take a piss.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense. Nemily... what could she possibly—?”

  “I’m just bringing the news, Mace. Be clear with me now. You aren’t involved in anything that might interest me or my colleagues, are you?”

  “Of course not. I told you, I settled with PolyCarb.”

  Syvestri gave him a skeptical look. “You’ve stopped trolling for data about Helen?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just giving up on trying to get anything out of PolyCarb.”

  Syvestri was silent for a time, then shrugged.

  “Well, maybe it’s nothing. But I wanted to let you know that your companion is on a list usually reserved for assassins, freelance raiders, embezzlers, and political indeterminates—”

  Mace laughed. “Political indeterminates? That’s new!”

  “Came out of Structural Authority about six months ago. But as I was saying, she’s on that list. Nothing specified, just if she comes within certain spheres, watch her. If her status goes up, then...”

  “That’s bizarre. How come all the attention suddenly?”

  “You haven’t heard about Midline, then?”

  Mace felt his scalp go cold. “What about it?”

  “Well “ Syvestri gave the room another long look. “You’ll find out

  in a few days along with everybody else anyway. Just like Cassidy and Five-Eight. Midline broke apart about ten days ago, disintegrated. A few ships got out, but no one’s taking them in. There’s going to be a stink about it, too, since agreements had been signed after Five-Eight about refugees.”

  “God... .”

  “Like I said, I owed you.” She moved toward the exit. “Be a dear and wait a minute or so before you come out.”

  They finished the dinner with coffee and a heavy cream liqueur. Nemily gazed around her with a half-lidded expression just past seductive and on its way to drowsy, distracted by the vista of luxury around her. Mace was grateful; she did not seem to notice how distracted he was, his thoughts preoccupied now with the news about Midline.

  Besides the shock of so much death, Mace felt personally frustrated by this. Cavery was dead. Cliff Oxmire was now the only one left who might know anything about the debacle at Hellas Planitia and he was completely out of Mace’s reach. All his possibilities were dying, one by one, and what accident or mishap had not covered, judicial action compensated on PolyCarb’s behalf.

  The PolyCarb party had disappeared behind a privacy screen. Mace wanted to talk to Syvestri even more now and the screen taunted his curiosity The news Syvestri had given him still did not explain what PolyCarb security wanted with him now and certainly not with Nemily

  Nemily set her cup down with a distinct click. “Now what?”

  “Technically dinner is over.”

  “Ah. Then technically we should go somewhere else?” She laced her fingers together and leaned her forearms against the table. “Did you have anything in mind or was this part of the evening to be left to luck and gratitude?”

  Mace started, then laughed.

  “When is this party you wanted to attend?” he asked.

  “Oh, now, till first light probably There’s no rush getting there.”

  “Then... do you have anything in mind?”

  “Luck and gratitude.”

  On the landing platform, Nemily leaned against the railing and looked down the length of Aea, sparkling with light in the duskiness of nightcycle, domiciles and townships glittering like stars caught in the shaft of an improbable telescope.

  The gondola was empty when they stepped aboard. It waited a few minutes, then sealed itself and lifted off. Nemily stared out the window during the ascent. “Will we make anymore stops before ours?”

  “I don’t know It’s late, I doubt it.”

  “Good.”

  They sat opposite each other. She turned from the window. Her half-lidded expression was gone, eyes now fully open and focused. Mace felt his ears warm.

  She moved to his side, leaned close and kissed his neck, the curve of his jaw, his cheek, then drew his earlobe between her lips and tickled its edge with her tongue.

  Mace’s sleepy inertia, the pleasant fuzziness from an excess of good food, dissipated. He brought his face around, Nemily’s lips sliding over his skin, and kissed her. His breathing sounded loud. She pressed against him, trapping his left arm at his side. Clumsily, he tried to turn toward her without breaking their kiss. Nemily arched herself away from him, propping a knee on the bench, freeing his arm. He brought his hand up, intending to embrace her. It caught against her crotch, lifting her slightly off the bench in the marginal gravity.

  Part of him pulled back, amazed at what was happening. His pulse was up and he was fully and uncomfortably erect. His right hand pressed against her face, moved to her neck, her shoulder, down her back—too fast, he wanted to slow down, take more time, but they were on a gondola that could land and take on more passengers—while his left hand pushed against the heat between her legs. He did not remember the last time he had responded so strongly, so quickly. That part that seemed aware of all this wanted to stop. He preferred to be in control, in a familiar environment, moving deliberately, willfully

  Nemily’s mouth separated from his with a gush of breath and a low moan. She moved him back against the corner of the booth and began unbuttoning his shirt.

  “Wait,” he hissed, “wait...”

  Nemily stood briefly and pulled her dress off, and tossed it on the opposite bench. It drifted lazily and seemed to splash against the seat. Then she undid his pants and tugged them down over his hips, down around his ankles. She lifted his thighs easily and pulled, sliding him along the upholstery until he half-lay half-sat in the middle. He wanted to laugh. She grasped his penis and straddled him.

  “Nem...”

  “Shh. No words.”

  Then she slid over him and he pushed up, wordless and stunned and embarrassed and desperate. He held her hips, pretending to set the rhythm. He felt himself bob off the bench, eerily disconnected from everything except Nemily. Their breathing shortened, becoming small puffs synchronized to the metered slap of flesh.

  Her eyes squeezed shut and she leaned down, her head against his shoulder. Her hair flowed out in an undulous halo, stroking his face, neck, and chest. He felt her shudder, her legs closing against his thighs. She let out a long breath then, straightened up, and smiled at him.

  Mace swallowed. She began again, a different pace, slow and long. It took less than a minute. His fingers jammed into her thighs.

  “Good god—”

  She laughed. “Good goddess?”

  “Just... good...”

  Gradually, he became aware of small details. Sweat slicked his chest and stomach. His neck, bent at an angle with his head against the back of
the bench, hurt dully. He was too warm and slightly dizzy.

  Nemily moved off him slowly. Carefully, she retrieved her dress and stood. Her face glistened, her hair bobbed in the near zero g.

  “Is there—?”

  Mace waved his hand in the direction of the lavatory.

  She smiled and bounced a little. She looked momentarily alarmed, then caught the handrail and laughed. She pulled herself toward the front of the cabin, leaving a nearly invisible trail of beaded sweat.

  Mace straightened. He pulled his pants up and buttoned his shirt. His thoughts came jumbled and incomplete. Unexpectedly, he felt afraid. He sat very still and tried to figure out why, but the only thing he knew clearly was that he wanted to do it again.

  “Take us to spoke forty-five, fifth ring.”

  Mace hesitated, startled. She nodded emphatically.

  “That’s the way to the party,” she said.

  Mace tapped the commands into the gondola control at the rear of the cabin.

  NO PAD AVAILABLE AT SPOKE 45, the screen declared, NEAREST AVAILABLE PAD

  AT ARC 60.

  Mace pressed accept and pulled himself back to Nemily. “We’ll have to walk a little.”

  “All right.”

  “Where is this party?”

  “Out in the ring. In the Heavy.”

  The gondola descended, gaining the rotational speed it had lost in its ascent, returning gravity gradually. At first it felt as if a hand had closed on Mace’s belly; then the sensation spread outward, through his legs, up his torso, into his neck.

  The pad stood amid a tangle of construction material stacked around the circle. In the dimness of nightcycle it resembled a twisted, colorless stand of trees and shrubs, leafless and angular, winter dead. Mace saw no faces, heard no voices. The stillness teased a shudder from him.

  “This way,” Nemily said, taking his hand.

  They descended the stairs between two mounds of metal and crates and started along the pedistry. It was an empty district, no doms, no shops, no completed facilities of any kind. Work “in progress” to be finished presumably by the time the space became necessary for the slowly expanding population. The pedistry rose half a meter above the plastic underlayment upon which constituted earth would be poured—that, or slabs of plastic with preformed conduit for cable, pipes, air, a substrate for factories, shops, or domiciles. Here, around them, the primal verge, the frozen soup from which life claimed a sanctuary against the dark, the protoshapes and unformed potentials of habitat. The history of Aean evolution, a glimpse of the primitive past when all of Aea awaited development, the equivalent of an areologic stratum.

  Rising out of the motionless tangle before them the spoke looked like a vast world tree, stretching to meet its mirror growths in the gravity-less center, beacon lights coiling around it, mingled far overhead with ghostly traces of St. Elmo’s Fire.

  They reached the platform that surrounded the base of the spoke, their footsteps ringing on the metal. Nemily pressed the button for the service elevator.

  The doors spread apart noisily A few people laughed inside the large space. Graffiti covered the walls of the car, garish and complex in the flat white halogen.

  The other passengers wore drab coveralls, but no one seemed to react to Mace and Nemily. The elevator custodian wore brilliant crimson, yellow and pale blue wide pants, a swirl of rainbow squares from cuff to crotch, and looked like part of the graffiti.

  “Where?” she asked, hand poised over the controls.

  “Five,” Nemily said.

  “They know you in the Heavy?”

  “Reese invited me.”

  The custodian nodded and pressed a button.

  The elevator jerked to a stop and the doors opened, admitting a jumbled wash of sound. Nemily flashed a bright smile, grabbed Mace’s hand, and pulled him into the ocean of talk and music.

  They walked into what had once been an enormous bay for equipment and material, a distribution point in the early days of the ring. Now it was packed with shops and nightclutches, stacked in much the same way as the temporary doms of the segment four interior, though better braced.

  Many of the people seemed better braced as well. The myth of the Heavy had become the fashion and the regular inhabitants bought vacuum-distributed adapt treatments in unlicensed pathic centers to build bone and muscle to fit them for the supposedly greater g in the outer rings. Mace picked them out easily, the ones who had bartered five or ten years of life with poorly administered treatments for the presumed advantage of twenty or thirty kilos more mass, deceiving themselves that they were better suited this way to live on a perceived edge. Out here, eighty meters from the interior surface of Aea, g gained less than one and a half percent, roughly equivalent to walking up a noticeable incline; some of the bodies Mace saw seemed adapted for ten or even twenty percent higher g. Paradoxically, one of the few ways for them to regain some of the years lost to bad adapt regimes would be to live in lower g.

  Children mingled freely with the crowds. Their presence startled Mace; children were rarely seen in public in the interior. In the Heavy they were simply part of the population, the way they were on Mars and Brasa. A few of them, he saw, already showed signs of adapt treatments—pre-adolescent acne, pronounced bone structure in their young faces, facial hair—already trading a long life to be part of the myth around them.

  Nemily gripped his hand and dragged him through the mélange of bright clothes and noise and the smell of open cookeries and a faintly astringent odor of strong cleanser and disinfectant. They crossed the bay and entered a crowded narrow circuit, where the knot of bodies thickened even more near the entrance to 5555. Green and violet neon marked the door before which three overadapted bouncers stood guard. Nemily reached the edge of the throng and touched one of them. The big man glared at her and Mace nearly jerked her back. The bouncer grinned. “Nem! Good to see you. In.” “This one is mine,” Nemily said, patting Mace on the chest. The bouncer gave a slow nod, examining Mace. “Welcome. In now” Nemily pulled Mace behind the bouncer and squeezed through a narrow door.

  The room that housed 5555 had once been fitted for something else, like almost every other place in the outer rings. From the elevated sections of floor and the peripatetic walkways around the rim, Mace guessed an ops center. Now a forest of people grew from every horizontal surface. On one raised platform, a circle of guests sat crosslegged, a glowing cube the focus of their attention. Overadapted men and women wandered the crowd, conspicuously naked and carrying small trays. Two tubes bisected across the ceiling, slowly, sinuously changing color along their lengths, the only common light source. Mace followed Nemily through the overlap of acoustic shadows from privacy fields and the loud rumble of undamped talk.

  “—rumble rumble, and it has stance, so—”

  “—right here when she fell and then claimed that g had changed. The blood flow was the same anyway. I told Spin, the only constant changed was the one in your head, E-Quil-Librium. Shall I spell it or spill it?”

  “She doesn’t spell when she’s lateral.”

  “Is that a religious thing?”

  “—posted on a public board isn’t worth shit, they feed better to the worms in ponic. If you want good equation—”

  “—the moon rises high, tho’ it never once moves, in a gaze to the lie, of a—”

  “You never said it rhymed! Damn, waste my time—”

  “Listen, you doggerel, find a fuckin’ dog—”

  “—better interiors in a rock garden, he insists on wielding the brush alone and it’s going to be a mess.”

  “Public?”

  “No, of course not, those morons in three-seventy would pound pus out of him. You don’t do postcaloteric for brutes, they don’t see the way we do.”

  “—just float, spigot, you have a problem and I don’t want it—”

  “I heard they shipped up from Earth, upwell, that they have Gaians in custody. Something about a possible exodus—”

 
“That’s static, they can’t launch a fistful of rain anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

  “How do you underestimate nothing?”

  A waiter stepped into their path, holding her tray back as if prepared to throw it at them. “Something to swallow?”

  Nemily craned her neck. “Where’s Reese?”

  “He hasn’t made an appearance yet. Something to swallow? You?”

  “Not yet,” Mace said.

  “Come on,” Nemily said, “I know where Reese is.”

  The waiter scowled and stepped aside. “House rules, you have to swallow.”

  The snatches of conversation teased Mace. He wanted to stay and listen to some of them; the place seemed filled with the kind of rumor that suggested arcane, hidden and significant knowledge. He had only been here once, a couple years ago. He searched faces now for Cambel. Nemily drew him along, never allowing him to hear more than barely enough to intrigue him.

  “—the maximum allowable sentence for that kind of infraction is eighteen months’ civic penance, cleaning parks and trimming bushes and trees, washing stains off walls, that kind of grunt. If he opens his mouth to argue, that’s contempt, that can get you five years—”

  “—Rome managed without a space program for twenty-seven hundred years and in the end they still didn’t get anywhere—”

  “—wider, wider, then I thought, ooh, if I could do more than watch—”

  “—excavations on Mars have turned up nothing of any past civilizations, understand? We’re there, we’ve looked, we’ve seen, it wasn’t true. Lowell was hallucinating.”

  “But—”

  “—doing the whole thing in thirteenths over a whole-tone scale, modulated to ninths in a minor. On the page it’s ugly as ugly gets, but when you hear it—”

  “Didn’t Debutante use the whole-tone scale?”

  “That’s Debussy.”

  “Yeah, her. I read once—”