I glanced at it, then smiled at Lily. “So…what’s in the news today?”
She shrugged and took a pull at one of her straws. “Just more of the usual,” she said. “Riots on Mars, riots in Shanghai, riots in Chicago. Weather clear and sunny, with a seventy percent chance of rioting mobs.”
“And in New Angeles?”
She made a face. “That’s going to depend on Humanity Labor’s press conference this afternoon.”
“Is your article out, yet?”
“It’s coming out with the noon edition. Do you want to see?”
She didn’t sound very happy about it.
“Sure.”
She pulled out her PAD and I pulled out mine, fanning the screen open. She had one of the newer, higher-end models, fancier than mine, with a virtual holographic screen as well as a keyboard field. She switched it on, typed in some characters, and her article appeared on my screen, just as it would appear in the newsrags in another hour.
I scrolled through it quickly, picking out the high points. Roger Mayhurst Dow, Jr. had been found brutally murdered in his hotel room. The investigation was continuing. Commissioner Dawn was quoted as saying that the police were putting every effort possible into the case, and that she was confident that those responsible would soon be in custody. Dow’s wife, Lupe Gonzales, wanted to see justice, and the police were doing nothing.
All the way at the bottom was a quote by Thomas Vaughn, PR Director for Humanity Labor.
“Roger Dow was a valued member of the Humanity Labor team,” he was quoted as saying, “a gifted man, and a good friend. He was at the forefront of the battle against clones and bioroids and their wholesale take-over of our jobs, human jobs, and their erosion against human dignity.” The article went on to say that Vaughn believed that clones and bioroids had been behind the attack.
I tapped at the screen with my finger. “That’s good.”
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t quote Vaughn directly about androids being behind the attack.”
“No. Commissioner Dawn was very clear about that. If I wanted access to her office, I had to play down that angle.” She shrugged. “So I’m a whore.”
The word shocked me. She didn’t usually use vulgarities like that. “You are not!”
“The free press is supposed to tell the news, and tell it straight,” she said, and I could hear a barely suppressed fury beneath the words. “We’re not supposed to cut deals with police commissioners…or with corporate bosses, or labor leaders, or politicians, for that matter. But if we want access, we need to play their games. I hate the doublethink and the politics. I hate the fraud. And…and sometimes I hate me!”
I slipped free of my foot restraints and held her for a time. I wasn’t sure what to do or say. Lily had never struck me as vulnerable, not like this. Usually she tended to have a high—and, I felt, an accurate—opinion of herself.
Teardrops drifted in zero-G—tiny, glittering, perfect translucent spheres of silver.
“So…I gather you’ve been stressing over this crap,” I said after a while.
She nodded. “Rick, the deeper I dig into this, the bigger it gets. The scarier it gets. And no one is telling the truth…not the mayor, not Washington, not Humanity Labor, not Jinteki, none of them!” She looked up at me and those brown eyes flashed. “And not the police, either!”
“I’ve told you what I can, sweetheart. And right now…well, there’s just not that much more to tell.”
“The clone and the bioroid…you claim they’re innocent.”
“Yes, I do.”
“But they’re under arrest!”
“For their protection.”
“How can I believe you?”
“It’s called trust. I know that’s not a real common commodity nowadays…”
I let her go. I was hating myself, right then, not so much because I was hiding something from her, but because I was beginning to suspect that the tears were a put-on, that she was using them to manipulate me, to get me to open up.
When had I become so cynical?
I brushed the thought aside. Probably when Nina told me I was worthless and walked out of my life.
Maybe even before that…
I returned to my side of the table as Lily used a handkerchief. There was movement outside the transplas—orbital workpods carrying out some sort of maintenance on the Beanstalk itself. Work pods were teleoperated spacecraft; their controllers were on-board the Midway platform, somewhere, linked into their mechanical alter egos by Net-based telemetry.
I saw one cruising past the window twenty meters away, a turtleback hanging on to a handhold on the hull. Ride ’em, cowboy, I thought.
It wasn’t so much that I was hiding anything from Lily. The theory I’d hashed out on the way down from Challenger was still half-formed, with no proof whatsoever. She was looking for facts, not theorizing.
And what I was certain of I couldn’t tell her. Not yet.
I looked at my hand time. “We should probably go,” I told her.
We dropped the trays into a recycler slot, and hand-over-handed along a zero-G line toward the Beanstalk concourse. The line took us past another window set in the wall of the concourse that looked into the beanpod bay, where several beanpods—pointy-ended cigars twenty-one meters long, with hulls a dull bronze in color—hung ready for their descent. I could see ours, with the passenger boarding tube already attached. Several teleoperated probes were working around the passenger pod, prepping it for the trip. I noticed a flare of light reflected from the Beanstalk itself—some bit of necessary welding on the outer hull.
I followed Lily to the security entrance, then waited as a boarding attendant hauled her ingloriously up to the backscatter scanner and gently pushed her through, while another waited to catch her at the other side to help her board the beanpod.
Regulations…
And that’s when I realized we were being watched.
I happened to turn to look across the concourse, and saw John Jones floating upside down, relative to me, twenty meters away. He was watching me, and he was trying to stay covert; as I looked at him, he raised a newsrag to hide his face, pretending to read.
It was the sort of amateurish stunt I would expect out of Hollywood. The best way to stand out in a bustling, moving crowd is to stand still—or, in this case, float still.
My first question was which John Jones it might be. The same one that had talked to me on my way up-Stalk? Or an identical twin?
But would an identical twin be so obviously keeping me under surveillance?
I pulled out my PAD and keyed Lily’s number. It took her a moment to answer; presumably, they were still helping her to a seat. “What?”
“Sit tight,” I told her. “My friend Mr. Jones is back. I’m going after him…”
“Wait! You can’t—”
“Catch you in a few,” I told her, and I switched off.
There was a wall directly at my back. I folded my legs, tucking my knees up tight, placed my feet squarely against the wall, and kicked.
Arms outspread, I sailed across the concourse.
Chapter Eighteen
Day 9
With his face behind the newsrag, Jones never saw me coming.
I hit him hard, closed my arms around his legs, and hung on as we went into a tumble, my velocity roughly cut in half by the impact. Jones yelled and pounded at my back, but I hung on until we drifted, still tumbling, into the far wall. I was able to get my legs between us and the wall before we hit, and damped our velocity by letting them collapse as they touched.
“What the frag are you doing?” he screamed, thrashing.
Other travelers and platform attendants stared at us from all over the concourse. “Police!” I yelled back, shouting so that the onlookers would hear, too. I didn’t want any of them coming to Jones’s rescue, though perhaps they wouldn’t have done so for a clone. “You’re under arrest for the suspicion of attempted murder, of conspiracy to commi
t murder, and of complicity in the murder of Roger Dow!”
“You’re crazy! Let me go!”
Looking around, I spotted an obvious businessman floating by a hand line, a PAD floating in front of him as he stared at us in shock. “You!” I yelled, pointing at him. “Hit your panic button!”
All PADs have panic buttons, a locked key that will summon police or security authorities to the site, guiding them in with a locator arrow.
Jones struggled, but I clamped my legs around his waist and held on.
“Look, you’re making a mistake!”
“Am I?” I managed to reach my PAD in its holster and switch on the record function.
“I had nothing to do with the murder!”
“No, but you planted a microbug on my jacket that almost got me killed at the Sinus Medii a few days ago, and it helped your accomplices set up an attempt to kill me early this morning. That’s the ‘attempted murder’ bit.”
“No! I never did that!”
“We also have evidence that you helped two accomplices carry out the murder of Roger Dow.”
“I wasn’t even there!”
“We have evidence that suggests otherwise.”
He looked scared, then. He was starting to sweat, the droplets of perspiration drifting about his head like tiny, silver satellites, like Lily’s tears earlier.
I took a deep breath. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney—”
“I’m a fragging clone! Clones don’t have rights!”
“You have the right to an attorney, and if you can’t afford an attorney—”
“You gilún! Let me go!”
“—one will be appointed for you. Do you understand this warning?”
He didn’t reply right away, and I tightened my grip. They’re called the “Miranda Rights,” though in fact it’s legally a warning. The Mirandas don’t qualify as “rights” under the U.S. Constitution.
“Do you understand my warning?” I repeated.
“Yes! Yes! I can’t breathe, for chrissake!”
I loosened my grip a fraction. We were tumbling slowly, dozens of surprised and curious faces drifting past my field of view.
“You are being recorded,” I told him. “Do you have anything to say?” Legally, I was in the clear. He’d been properly mirandized, and he would have to formally announce his declaration to invoke his rights.
“I’m a clone! Clones have no rights! You’re supposed to return me to my employer! You’re supposed to charge my employer!”
“Your employer of record is Roger Dow. He’s dead.”
“I work for Melange Mining!”
“Not Humanity Labor? Helping to rid the world of clones like yourself? Why’d you put the bug on me, shorty?”
“Look…look…this is all a crazy mistake! I’m with SAM, okay?”
That startled me, but I kept a firm hold on my prisoner. SAM—the organization devoted to the proposition that clones were not property, but people being treated as property. Full emancipation for clones and equality for them in the work force, and all that—something to which Humanity Labor would never agree.
“You can pull the other one,” I told him.
“No! No, really! Yeah, I put a tracker on you, but it was because we needed to find Mark Henry before Human First got to him!”
I could tell I wasn’t going to get sense out of this character here. I’d been goading him, hoping he’d let slip with something useful that I could catch on my PAD. Now it was time to go.
“You can save your statement for the desk sergeant,” I told him. “You’re coming with me.”
He started struggling again. “This is blatant persecution! Bigotry!”
A couple of yellow jackets sailed through the air from across the concourse, using bursts from their front airbelt packs to brake themselves as they drifted up, turning as they arrived by extending their left arms to change their centers of mass.
“What’s the problem here?” one demanded. Reaching out, he caught my arm and gave another burst of air from one of his packs, neatly stopping my rotation. My estimation of elevator mercs went up a notch.
I noticed they both carried stunsticks hooked to their belts. Handguns were tough enough to handle in low-G; they were damned near impossible to use in zero-gravity, where they acted like rockets to knock the firer into a nasty tumble.
“Captain Harrison, NAPD,” I told them. “I need your assistance and a pair of cuffs.”
I felt them ping my e-ID for confirmation, and one of them pulled a zip-strip out of a thigh pouch.
“Where are you taking him, sir?” one asked. “Local sec station?”
I shook my head. “Boarding tube,” I said. “The 1200 beanpod for Earth. I’m taking this character down to NAPD headquarters.”
That elicited a sudden and violent response from the prisoner. “No!” He kicked, hard, catching one of the yellow jackets in the crotch, and nearly tore himself free from my grip. He threw his elbow at my face and I blocked the swing, which put both of us into another slow but awkward tumble.
One of the yellow jackets unclipped his stunstick and gave it a snap with his wrist, extending it to two meters. I twisted, then released Jones, giving him a gentle shove toward the yellow jacket with the stinger, drifting backward with my arms and legs outstretched. “Clear!” I yelled.
The yellow jacket extended his stunstick and let Jones have a solid jolt across his solar plexus. He jerked and stiffened, then went limp, curling into the fetal position, drool bubbling from his open mouth. The other yellow jacket spun him around with slick efficiency, grabbed his arms, and used the zip-strip to pin his wrists behind his back.
“Need a hand getting him on-board, sir?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
With their airbelts, they were able to maneuver him to the security scanner more easily than I would have been able to do with muscle alone. As they took him through, I argued for a moment with the SEA official at the desk: no, Jones didn’t have a ticket, he was my prisoner, and the SEA could bill the police Earthside. When I threatened to commandeer the pod under the provisions of article two, paragraphs one and two of the New Angeles Municipal Public Safety Code, she relented with bad grace and keyed something into her computer.
I followed my prisoner through the backscatter, and took him down the boarding tube and into the waiting beanpod.
“Thank God!” Lily said as I entered the pod. “I thought you were going to get left behind!”
I glanced at my hand time. “Plenty of time, babe,” I told her.
An attendant and one of the yellow jackets helped me maneuver the unconscious clone into an empty seat and strap him down. I left the zip-strip on his wrists. He might be a bit uncomfortable during the G-and-a-half descent once he came around, but the trip would only last fifty-one minutes. Once Jones was secure, I took my seat between him and Lily. I noticed that she’d popped her monocam over her left eye and had been recording vid of us strapping the clone down.
“…in an exciting new development,” she was saying, her voice just loud enough for me to hear. “The clone was apprehended at just before noon, today, in the passenger concourse outside the down-Stalk station of the Space Elevator’s Midway station. It is believed that he may have had a part in the brutal murder of political lobbyist Roger Dow last week in a hotel room up at Challenger.
“I have the arresting officer here, Captain Rick Harrison of the NAPD. Captain Harrison…would you care to comment on the capture of this clone?”
“He’s not a clone,” I told her.
Lily looked so shocked she almost lost her monocam, but she recovered fast. “N-not a clone! How do you know that?”
“I’ll need a DNA test to prove it…but he’s not a clone. He’s a member of a conspiracy to make us all think that clones are capable of murder.”
“Would you care to elaborate, Captain Harrison?”
�
��No, Lil, I wouldn’t. Let’s wait until we have that DNA test, shall we?”
It was two minutes before noon.
The beanpod was fairly full, eleven people including the three of us, with only one empty seat left on this deck and, I assumed, full or nearly full decks above and below. It looked like a fairly average mix of citizenry: two business people, two elderly women probably on their way down-Stalk from a retirement community to visit family on Earth, a couple of construction workers, and two Wyldside-types with heavy g-mods and lots of jewelry. One of them had scales instead of skin, the other a face that looked like a snub-nosed wolf.
A holographic attendant flickered into view to let us know we would be departing soon, to remain buckled in until after the seatbelt light went out, and polled us as to whether or not we wanted to see the Earth during the descent.
Everyone on our deck voted yes.
I was glad. It was going to be good to get back to Earth, I supposed, but I always enjoyed it when I had the opportunity to go up-Stalk. I never got tired of the view, and I wanted to drink my fill before plunging back into the crowds and the noise and the bustle of Earthside life.
On the display overhead, the beanpod bay doors opened wide, revealing Earth, as wide as forty full Moons edge-to-edge, hanging in the night above us…though words like “above” and “below” had little meaning in microgravity. Then we started accelerating, and up was up, while down was most definitely down. It felt like we were climbing toward the Earth.
It was all a matter of how you looked at it, of course. We were accelerating toward Earth at 1.5 gravities, so “down” felt like the direction of the Midway station, which was rapidly falling away into the distance, while Earth, blue and white and beautiful, appeared to be suspended overhead. At the halfway point, at an altitude of around 18,000 kilometers, the pod would rotate 180 degrees and begin its deceleration for the second half of the journey the rest of the way down to the Root.
Android: Free Fall Page 25
