“I don’t have that information.”
“Is that what the second wife said? What’s her name, Wandis?”
Another little pause. “Yes. She said that he only manipulated her, that she doesn’t want to see you.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“You must form your own attachments, Mr. Steward. The past is closed to you. And Wandis, to you, is only a name. She shouldn’t mean anything at all.”
Steward felt a little claw tugging at his mind, pointing at something significant, if only he could understand what it was.
“It wasn’t me,” he said again.
*
“I met someone,” Steward said. “Someone from before.” Inside him he felt a phantom desire for a cigarette. He had given up smoking during his internship with Coherent Light. They’d thought it would be good for him.
“Where?” asked Dr. Ashraf. “When?”
“It was an accident. I was walking in the zoo two days ago and saw her. She recognized me. She was there with her—I think she said niece.”
“Who?” asked Ashraf.
“Her name was—is Ardala. Her parents were our neighbors in the CL complex in Kingston, that time Natalie and I were both training there. She was thirteen or fourteen then, I think.”
Steward was seeing Natalie’s face, the broad white forehead that wouldn’t take a tan no matter how she tried, the dark hair that framed her strong jaw, wide cheekbones, green eyes, thick, generous lower lip.
“We met for a drink that night, after she’d returned her niece to—to whoever. Talked about things. She works in a career placement office.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
Natalie sitting on a balcony twined with wrought iron, her face obscured by cigarette smoke. While gunfire echoed from the pink stucco walls.
“I told her I was divorced. She said it made me younger.” Steward could almost taste the tobacco.
“You should have told her, Mr. Steward,” Ashraf said.
“She asked me if I wanted to come home with her.” She’d had Natalie’s eyes. “I said yes.” The rest of her had become Natalie, in the smoke, the dark, the fire.
“Mr. Steward”—Ashraf was displeased—“this is your first attachment outside the hospital.” Attachment? Steward thought.
“You cannot allow a relationship to begin with such a fundamental deception,” Ashraf said. “Furthermore, I don’t think it’s healthy that your first such relationship is based on a past that, for everyone except you, does not exist. Better to have involved yourself with a complete stranger than to have tied yourself more thoroughly to a delusion.”
“No one’s deluded,” Steward said. “No one’s unhappy.”
Ashraf’s voice was brutal. “We can’t have this woman think,” he said, “that you’re the original, can we?”
CHAPTER TWO
Molten city towers cut a darkening sky, reflected a burnished Arizona sunset that was itself invisible from where Steward walked down among the groundlings. He had his green bracelet pushed up high under a light blue cotton sleeve as he stepped across an air-conditioned pedestrian plaza whose translucent roof crawled with mutating art forms and whose floor was flecked with the droppings of pigeons. Green-eyed Ardala, her light brown hair swinging, waved from across a sea of bobbing heads. The makeup rimming her eyes was extravagant, like butterfly wings, a new fashion that had originated somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars.
She and Steward kissed hello. There was a slight shock in the realization that this woman was a stranger. Steward wondered how he’d ever managed to see Natalie in those eyes, in that smile.
They walked into the bar where they’d agreed to meet. Dark, plush seats, white plastic tabletops, waitresses in corsets and short skirts, styles from thirty years before that were supposed to seem quaint. Standing in a corner was an ornate piano/synthesizer, all gleaming black plastic with chrome trim. Steward didn’t like the place. It seemed like the sort of bar where people went to smoke hash and discuss their investments. Steward didn’t want to think about investments.
In a sense, an investment is what he was.
He ordered a trailing willow, paid for it with the allowance the insurance company would provide him for the next ten months. Little anxieties seemed to leap like sparks of static on the surface of his skin. Ardala called for a glass of wine. “I should tell you something,” he said.
She cocked her head, bright. “I’m listening.”
He told her, and she shook her head and grinned. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “No wonder you look so young. You are young.”
“I’m three months old,” he said.
“And you only have his memories from fifteen years ago? Before the war and everything?”
Steward nodded. “They call him the Alpha body, his memories the Alpha memories,” he said. “That’s how they’re teaching me to think of him. I’m Beta.”
“What a bitch.” Ardala’s eyes narrowed. “I thought for a minute he was killed in the war, you know, with all the others. But he couldn’t have been, right? Otherwise you’d be older.”
“He was killed about eight months ago, in the Ricot habitat. Murdered. I don’t know how. He never had the memory store updated.” A nicotine craving brushed against his nerves. “I wonder what happened to him.”
She reached out a slim brown hand and took his fingers. He could see comprehension in her look. “It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
“I feel that it does. Somehow.”
“So all you remember,” she said, “is what he knew just before he left. Still married to Natalie and everything.”
Steward took a breath. “I keep thinking…maybe he just didn’t want me to know about the war. What he went through. Maybe he just wanted to spare me the pain.”
It was more likely, Steward knew, that the Alpha just didn’t care anymore, or had forgotten that, before everything he cared about was destroyed, he’d recorded his memories on thread and deposited a bit of flesh in a cryogenic vault, the both to be awakened if he died on Sheol. So that Natalie wouldn’t be a widow, wouldn’t go without the comforts that went with being married to an Icehawk.
The drinks came. Ardala pulled a credit spike from her bracelet and gave it to the waitress. Steward sipped his Chinese willow. Fire burned deep in his throat.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“Look for a job.”
“What sort?”
“I don’t know. Coherent Light gave me some very specific skills. I imagine they’d be unsuitable in today’s job market.”
“Security work?”
“That’s what…the other one did. The Alpha. It didn’t work out for him.”
Ardala gnawed her generous lower lip. “Let me think about it. I’ll bet I can place you somewhere.”
Steward looked uneasily left and right. “I don’t like this place,” Steward said. “Any second now somebody’s going to start playing old favorites on that piano, and they’re going to be favorites from ten years ago and I won’t remember them. Can we finish our drinks and go somewhere else?”
A smile tugged at her lips. “My apartment?”
He felt, deep in the pit of his stomach, an anxiety dissolve.
“D’accord,” he said.
She looked up at him, touched her tongue to her teeth. “Before last night, I never made it with a clone.”
The willow trailed fire down his throat. “Fortunately,” he said, “they’ve given me the right memories for all that.”
*
When he returned to the hospital in the morning, the police were waiting for him.
The walls in the interrogation room were pink, trimmed with chestnut brown and marred with graffiti that no one had bothered to wash away. Steward remembered somebody telling him once that pink walls subliminally soothed the violent. There was a portable recorder/computer, an institutional bunk bed, a pair of detectives. Lemercier was a short young man, aggressive, who made many sudden, angry ge
stures. When he gestured, he often bared his teeth. Hikita was older, gray-haired, with a little toothbrush mustache and a weary air. They had tried to run good cop/bad cop on him earlier, but neither of them seemed to have his heart in it, not after he told them where he’d spent the night.
Hikita was drinking coffee out of a foam cup. “Your alibi checks,” he said.
“Thank you,” Steward said. “We agree on that.”
“You seemed an obvious suspect. Being a trained killer. Not being where you were supposed to be.”
Steward shrugged. He didn’t like cops, whether they agreed with him or not. Call it an old reflex. Lemercier looked at him and sucked in his lips, his mouth becoming a thin, angry line.
“You have no idea who would want to kill Dr. Ashraf?” he asked. “Just for the record?”
“I only saw the man between five and ten hours per week, and even then I did all the talking. I don’t know who else he knew. Check his records.”
“He didn’t die in a nice way, Mr. Steward.” Lemercier was showing his teeth again. “He was tied into his office chair and tortured. First with something very sharp, like a scalpel. Then with pliers. Then they garroted him. Almost took his head off. Would you like to see the pictures?”
Steward looked at him. “No.”
Lemercier leaned closer. Steward was thinking about the soundproofing in Ashraf’s office and how no one could have heard anything. The doctor’s screams wouldn’t even have been as loud as the bullet train. Someone knew that.
“Field interrogation,” Lemercier said. “That’s what they called it, right? When they taught you about how to do things like that. You learn anything about the use of pliers?”
Steward gazed into Lemercier’s eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I remember the lecture on pliers. They made us take notes.” His eyes moved from one detective to another, then back. “You still trying to make this case, or what? My alibi checks, remember?”
Hikita and Lemercier exchanged featureless glances. Hikita turned to Steward. “We can’t check Ashraf’s records,” he said, mumbling into his coffee cup. “Somebody broke into the hospital main computer and wiped them. We only have his appointment book.”
“Did they teach you to wipe computers in the Icehawks, Mr. Steward?” Lemercier, of course.
“I imagine anything I know is out of date,” Steward said.
He looked at the graffiti on the pink walls, lounge lizards rule. manx man was here. Dates. écrasez l’infâme.
The last was his own, drawn two hours ago while he was being observed through the two-way glass set in the wall. It had been the motto of the Canards. He said, “Did he have an appointment scheduled for last night?”
“No.”
“Not much help, huh?”
“Écrasez l’infâme,” Hikita said mildly. “I looked it up. What infamous thing do you wish to eradicate?”
“What infamous thing do you have?”
Hikita put down his cup of coffee. “You can go,” he said.
Steward eased himself out of the bunk, opened the soundproofed door, and stepped into a corridor. It was yellow and smelled of fresh paint.
Outside, the view of the mountains was cut into strips by glass towers. Steward chose one of the long reflective canyons that had a mountain view and walked along it, toward the green on the horizon.
He decided it was time to find out about Sheol.
*
At the hospital they told him it would be several days before he would be assigned his new doctor. They gave him a chit for the pharmacy in case he felt anxiety in the meantime. He cashed the chit, put the capsules in his pocket, and forgot about them. Then he went to the library and looked up the Artifact War.
There wasn’t much that filtered through the Outward Policorps’ security. There hadn’t been many survivors, and after the breakup of the policorps responsible, those remaining in authority preferred to discourage interest. A mistake, swept under the rug in an atmosphere of universal embarrassment.
Steward had the sense that things had been worse than anyone had ever imagined. The war had been triggered by the near simultaneous discovery of three planetary systems, each crammed with ruins and artifacts built by an unknown starfaring alien race that had vanished or been wiped out a thousand years before. The Powers, though no one knew it yet. The Outward Policorps, with their monopoly on star travel, had leaped madly into unregulated space in order to exploit the new technologies and techniques resulting from the investigation and understanding of the alien culture.
Out in the far reaches things had fallen apart very quickly, particularly on a planet called Sheol, which orbited around an obscure star called Wolf 294. There were sixteen separate armed forces, each maneuvering for sole domination, each months away from home in terms of communication time. What had begun as exploration and investigation degenerated into a mass plundering of the alien ruins. Commanders in the field made and broke temporary alliances independently of their superiors, who were creating their own temporary alliances and enmities back in the Sol system. Every latent, aberrant military technology in the ancient inventories was brought out and used: biologic weapons; extermination drones; tactical atomics; terraforming techniques stripped of their benign aspect and used to blacken tens of thousands of square kilometers of forest, plain, herbage; asteroids captured and used as weapons, creating craters on the surface of the planets where suspected enemy positions had been, and used as well to destroy the enemy’s alien loot so as to make one’s own more valuable. The ultimate aberration of a war out of control: the demolition of everything they had been sent to capture.
At the end, there were still a few survivors who fought on, isolated from the superiors in the Sol system who had proved unable to support such a war at such a distance. Amid an escalating round of Sol system bankruptcies and “retrenchment,” the Powers, having finished whatever mysterious business had drawn them away, returned to their devastated homes: The war was over.
The Icehawks had been brought back from Sheol by Power craft, delivered like a package at Earth’s door. Coherent Light had long before written them off, had sold them in a complicated deal with Far Jewel. Had assumed they were dead, or hadn’t cared if they were alive.
Steward thought for a moment about the faces he remembered. Colonel de Prey. Wright. Freeman. Little Sereng, solemnly drawing blood from his finger every time he sharpened his kukri. Dragut. A hundred others. How many had survived? A handful, the reports said, and no names were given.
Years ago. The other survivors would have had time to forget, build new lives, start again.
All except Steward, whose loyalties still drew him to a company that no longer existed, comrades that were dead or scattered, a child he had never seen born to a woman whom he had loved but from whom, in the fifteen years that he did not remember, he had been divorced.
Who was lost in time, adrift as in a glider under a featureless sky, nothing but blackness below, with nothing to guide him but the sight of distant fire.
*
The next day, after lunch in the hospital cafeteria, he went to his room. There was a package on his bed, a plain brown-paper envelope with his name written on it. No stamps, so it hadn’t come with the mail. He tore it open and found a black metal video cartridge, the size of a cigarette lighter. He looked in the envelope. Nothing else.
He turned on his vid and put the cartridge in the slot. The screen, gray, hissed at him for a moment, then the hissing stopped and a voice began. A coldness settled in Steward’s spine.
“Hi,” it said. “There are some things you should know.”
The video portion was nothing but interference pattern. Steward tried to adjust it but couldn’t find a picture.
“If you get this,” the voice said, “it means I’ve been killed. I’ve given this to a friend of mine who can be trusted so far as to give this to you. Don’t try to find him. He won’t be able to help in any other way.”
Steward looked up at the screen, seeing his ow
n pale reflection in the glass, a ghost of himself: bushy dark brows, hair cut short, eyes like darting shadows.
“I’m on Ricot right now. I’m working for Consolidated Systems, and I’m involved in something very complicated…” The voice seemed to fade away for a second, as if the man had taken his mouth from the mic. Maybe he was just trying to make up his mind how much to tell, or how to tell it. Then the voice was back, louder than before. Steward almost took a step back.
“The thing is”—gratingly—“that when you become important in certain ways, there’s no one you can trust. That’s the lesson the Icehawks learned, that everything on Sheol taught us. Because we were trained and set up and then sold by our own side.
“So when you can’t trust anyone else, you learn to trust yourself. That’s what I’ve had to do. And when the official rules that they give you, all their morality, all turns out to be a fabric of, of . . .” The voice faded again. When it came back, it was almost a scream, each word forced out with such intensity that Steward’s throat ached to hear it. He was glad he couldn’t see the man’s face, the taut throat muscles, the way the eyes must be glaring into the blank face of another video set. “When it’s all lies, when you can’t turn around for the lies…well, you have to find the truth yourself. Find morality in your own mind. Do what you have to do. Like I’m going to try and do.”
Steward heard a clatter very close to the mic, the sound of glass on glass. The man was pouring himself a drink, none too steadily. Steward looked down at his own hands. They were perfectly calm.
“I’m doing a job for a guy named Curzon. He’s my chief here. I’m going to get into the Brighter Suns complex on Vesta, and do something…that doesn’t entirely feel right. It looks as if I’ll get in and out okay. Listen up now.”
At the sound of the command, Steward’s eyes snapped to the screen again. He laughed at his nervous reflex.
“The reason I’m going is that Colonel de Prey is there. He’s the one who’s responsible for what happened on Sheol. It was all his idea. Now he’s back in business for Brighter Suns.”
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