Scardown jc-2

by Elizabeth Bear

“No,” he said. “Our damned human conviction that there's going to be a way to weasel out of this one, too.”

  0315 Hours

  Friday 8 December, 2062

  Bloor Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  I wake early, and for a moment — before Gabe's darkened apartment swims into focus — I can't remember where I am. The clock reads a little after 0300. I trained myself to go without sleep — besides catnaps — for so long that now that I can sleep through the night, I don't need it anymore. Boris came to dinner in the cat carrier; he purrs on my chest. The damn cat drools, and the quilt is wet. Gabe still snores quietly beside me, but I can tell I'm done sleeping.

  Some light filters in from the street below, so I annoy the cat by turning on my side. I stretch out and lie there for a little while watching Gabe's breath flow slowly in and out. Richard?

  “Up late, Jenny.”

  News?

  “Min-xue is developing a taste for Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I'm teaching him English. Poetry is a good motivator. He loves it.”

  It's hard to think of the Chinese as enemies when Richard gives me regular progress reports on his new project, a seventeen-year-old half-Taiwanese pilot who composes traditional poetry on the stars. I wonder how they feel about that in St. Petersburg, now. Corrupting the innocents, son?

  “Who you calling sonny, Grandma?” Richard chuckles. “How's everything going down there?”

  Scared. Trying to keep body and soul together. The usual. Elspeth sends her love and wants a nanite load of her own so she can talk to you.

  “I'm working on that. The problem is the damned control chips—”

  What if we reprogrammed the nanites to act independently?

  “There are horror movies about that. We still don't know what these things are for, Jenny.”

  Have you hacked their O/S yet?

  “It'd help to have Castaign for that.”

  Oh, come on. You're saying Gabe can do things you can't?

  “I'm smart, Jen, not omnipotent. And the command system that Charlie and Ramirez welded on over the nanites' original programs is sheer… well, it's strictly A-life stuff. Not so much a command program, per se, as training protocols. Although some of Ramirez's work is pretty bleeding edge.”

  I don't understand a word you're saying, Dick.

  “That's okay. By the way, your cocoa-tosser is Indigo Xu, and your guess was right. She's Bernard Xu's niece by his deceased brother. Age twenty-nine, college dropout. No steady employment or place of residence for two years. No outstanding debt.”

  Oh.

  “Yeah, she's probably following in Uncle Bernie's shoes, and I haven't traced her financing yet. Watch yourself, Jenny. She may have a grudge.”

  May? I laugh silently so I won't wake Gabe. I already moved out of the hotel. And I won't stay here after tonight — too much risk to the girls. Gabe can take care of himself. Even if he looks soft and fluffy these days. I narrow my eyes, squinting into darkness green-lit by my prosthetic's night sight and scented warmly with the heavy aroma of sleeping bodies. Have you managed to figure out where the generation ships are yet?

  “Less than a light-year out. It will be hundreds of years before they get there. And I don't think our friends the Chinese have any plans to go looking for them in the meantime.”

  That's—

  “Inhumane? You checked on that kid on the ventilator at NDMC recently?”

  Ow.

  “Jenny, he's conscious.”

  I gag. I literally put my hand to my throat, and gag. Merci à Dieu. Trapped in a body like a pile of meat… no, I don't have any issues about that. Isn't there anything they can do for him? What went wrong?

  “I'm talking to him whenever he's awake. I don't know what happened, but somehow the signals from his nervous system are not getting to his brain, and vice versa — or when they do, they're garbled. It may be a programming issue with the nanites. It may be something else.” I feel him shrug. “I'm making some progress with the programming, but I'd really like to talk to your boyfriend, there.”

  If only he could catch a nanite load.

  “Don't get stuck on the obvious solution.”

  I know. I just keep thinking what these little guys could do for Genie.

  Richard chuckled. “So keep her alive for three more years and get her into the pilot program.”

  Shit.

  It could work.

  Richard, you're brilliant.

  “That's long been established. Talk to you later, Jenny. Get some rest.”

  Blow me. He winks as he leaves, and I'm alone in the dark, with my warm pillow and my warmer lover, but my feet itch too much for me to stay in bed. After checking on the girls — both asleep, Genie snoring — I curl idly on the sofa and pick up my hip, intending to read myself back to sleepiness or kill a few hours till morning.

  The message light blinks when I thumb it on. Dr. Simon Mobarak. Well, I'll be damned.

  If it's oh-dark-thirty in the morning in Toronto, it's even earlier for a hardworking single neurologist with an on-line virtual-reality game addiction. Hell, Simon might still be camped out in his bar in the Avatar Gamespace. If he isn't, he's curled up in bed, just hitting the first sweet, refreshing flickers of REM sleep. I really shouldn't call him. I still haven't forgiven him for giving Valens the information that he needed to find me.

  I have Simon's home number.

  He owes me.

  I call.

  No visual, but a sleepy voice mumbles amid a rustle of sheets. “Jenny? It's 3 a.m.”

  “My give-a-shitter is broken, Simon. You called?”

  “Yeah.” There's a grunt and more rustling. I imagine him finding his contact and ear clip in the dark and fitting them in. He coughs and swims into focus. I laugh. He's turned a bedside lamp on and must have straightened his pajama top.

  “Who the hell sleeps in pajamas, Simon?” Damn, it's hard to stay mad at him. He looks about ten years old.

  “Dr. Hua has your message. She was apparently already interested in the case. How are you holding up? Nanite treatments still working okay?”

  Not too bad with the spy talk. We could be discussing medicine. “Better every day. Do you foresee any problems?”

  “Depends on the prognosis, of course, but it could get very ugly indeed.”

  “Are you going to be around if I need you?”

  “I'm taking ‘Das Unterwasserzug' to Europe for a conference.” His grin is as disheveled as his pj's. “I'd expect you to be all impressed if you hadn't just been up and down the beanstalk.” Das Unterwasserzug. Imagine a marble in a giant garden hose. Vacuum in front, pressure behind, and the cars themselves riding on magnetic levitation rails. Cross the Atlantic in two hours.

  We can build things like that, like the space elevator, like the Montreal. But Florida is half underwater and, while the dikes are holding around Manhattan and Boston, Houston was a little too exposed to save. “You have my hip,” I remind him. “Give me a call if you learn anything interesting.”

  He stifles a yawn with his hand and tugs the down comforter in its corduroy duvet up halfheartedly. Beige. He must have bought that after his wife left. “Give me a call if you just want to talk.” He raises his hand and cuts me off before I can respond, leaving me with my mouth half open and a snappy comeback drifting on the air.

  Is that your way of letting me know we're still friends if I want it, Simon? Rather than thinking about it too much, I enter another code and — expecting to leave a message — am not ready for an actual answer. “Yo.”

  “Face, it's Maker.”

  “Whatcha got going on? I came by your hotel but there wasn't nobody there.” He's in a room I don't recognize. The image jiggles a little as he shifts position: he must have his hip resting on his knee.

  “I'm looking for another place. When did you come by?”

  “Last night this morning. I knocked.”

  “I must have been in bed.” A little white lie never hurt anyb
ody. “I wanted to check in. I'm at Gabe's. Meet me downstairs in twenty minutes?”

  He picks me up in my truck and we head down the block to Roupen's, where we get coffee and pick at the pies. He's got that inflatable cast off, finally. I wonder if his ankle's better or if he just got sick of wearing it. Razorface, uncharacteristically, starts talking.

  “I got some weird shit going on, Maker. Those folks I hooked up with — gone without a trace, and the contact number they gave me is disconnected. Little worried out here, thinking maybe I should pull a vanishing act myself. I want you to be careful, too. I know they're gunning for your prime minister.”

  “When'd you lose track of them?”

  “Sometime this morning. Nobody around when I got back from your place—”

  “Marde.”

  “What?”

  “Razorface—” You don't get to be my age living the way I've lived without a healthy respect for your instincts. “What were their names?”

  “Got no last names. Chick looked — Eurasian, maybe? Pretty thing, lot like Bobbi. Named—”

  “Indigo.”

  “Yeah. How did you know that?”

  “I killed her uncle, Face. Do me a favor?”

  He coughs into his hand, and I don't like the way it sounds, or the gray hollows under his eyes. He picks up his coffee. “Anything.”

  “Lie low. Stay close. Things are going to get ugly in Hartford and maybe here, and I may wind up with my ass extradited. The information you got Simon is in good hands, and I expect walls to start crumbling.” The coffee in its white stoneware mug is burned. I finish it and get the night-shift cook to bring me a carafe while Razorface is still doctoring his second cup with too much cream and sugar. I stare out the window at the chrome and neon of the sign. “How willing are they to kill people, Face?”

  “Real willing.” Despite all the creamer, he blows across his coffee. He doesn't have much appetite for his pie, and the scrapes on his head aren't healing well. I can still see pink raw edges, half knit. “It's going to be soon, too. I–I dunno, I had them half talked out of going after Unitek, but now they think I'm a problem — surprised there's not a bullet in my brain. Farley'd like that.”

  The name clicks over in my head. “Who?”

  “There were two in the cell. Girl was Indigo.”

  “Indigo Xu.”

  “Whatever. Man went by Farley. Big white guy with light tattoos. Another one who thinks the space program money should be spent at home.”

  “Oh, shit me not.” If I had been holding onto the edge of the table, I would have left fingermarks on it. “Face, he's got a Unitek badge. I saw him there yesterday.”

  Alberta Holmes hired my sister, not too long ago. Barb Casey was what Razorface might have called a stone killer; the phrase didn't do her justice. Holmes wouldn't flinch at hiring another assassin or two… and it would amuse her to use somebody in ways they wouldn't imagine, for goals they wouldn't approve. It would probably amuse her to keep dredging up bits of my past and seeing if she could make me twitch. Keep me off balance.

  Seeing as how hiring Barb worked out so well.

  Which makes me wonder, actually, why Alberta and Fred have so much invested in keeping me distracted. Wonder what on Earth I can possibly do to mess up their carefully laid plans?

  Unless some of the fighting is over me.

  I wonder, watching things click over in Razorface's head and the light go on in those deep brown eyes. I wonder if Holmes thinks she can use me to run Fred. Because if she does, she's seriously underestimating the ruthlessness of the man.

  Razorface thinks for what seems like a long time before he talks. “You think they work for Holmes.”

  “Either that or they have an in and they're still planning to do the job. There are too many variables to be sure.” I lean my elbows on the table and my face into my hands, the cool metal edge furrowing my stomach and my pants sticking to the washed-damp bench when I shift. The sensitive polymer over my steel hand feels strange to me still, after so many years of metal touching my skin. Razorface's spoon clinks and I try to make sense of what I know.

  I just don't know enough. “Face, go to ground. Stay down. You willing to stay in this thing for a while?”

  He shrugs. “What the hell else I got to do?”

  I drop my hands and put the left one over his enormous one, squeezing enough to get his attention. “Stay hard.”

  “Whatcha gonna do?”

  I think back twenty years, twenty-five years. To a girl I used to know and the things she thought she had to do. She didn't have a clue how hard things could get. “I'm going to call Fred Valens,” I say, amazed I can get the words out so smooth. I swill coffee, stand up, snatch my scarred black jacket off the back of the booth. “I'm going to turn Indigo and Farley in. You have a way to get Indigo a message that Farley won't see?”

  “Indigo? I got an e-mail box, but she ain't been answering.”

  “Face, let her know what I'm doing. Tell her to get out of Canada.” It's not a plan. It's not even close to a plan. But when you don't have a plan, sometimes the controlled application of chaos will shift things enough that you can find a plan. “You tell her Genevieve Casey says her Uncle Bernard would have had more sense, and she doesn't have to trust me but if she's smart she'll do what I say. You tell her Farley works for Alberta, and you tell her I don't. Clear on that?”

  Slow sharklike unveiling of his knife-tip smile, and Razorface shakes his head admiringly. “You kicking over the board again, Maker?”

  “Fuck,” I say, fastening my buckles against the cold. “Fuck, yeah.”

  I hope Gabe doesn't worry too much when he wakes up to find me gone. Probably not; I get these moods every so often. He knows that by now.

  An individual woman can't do a damned thing to change the world. It's a tremendous machine, a monstrous automaton that will grind you up to grease the wheels and pound you into cookies. I know that. I know it better than you might think.

  I've got an eagle feather in my pocket and — not too long ago, standing on the deck of a space station, watching the Earth spin like a roulette wheel under my feet — I promised the ghost of Bernard Xu I'd try to change the universe for him. Because I felt like I owed him something, and maybe he would have wanted that. Or maybe he would have wanted me to fuck off and die, considering I testified against him at his trial.

  But Bernard — Peacock — doesn't get a vote anymore.

  One of the drawbacks of being dead.

  I walk for a long time. I like walking; it clears the head. Fred Valens is already at work when I get there, although it's before sunup. Or possibly the man is a robot who never goes home. Except he's got a grandkid he seems to like. Fucking people won't stop being human even when you want them to.

  I take that back.

  Alberta Holmes is a goddamned machine.

  I rap on Valens's open office door and go in. He's in shirtsleeves, and for the first time I notice the circles under his eyes and the fact that his hair needs washing.

  “Casey.” He stands, not bothering to power down his interface. Dancing images hover in the air over his desktop. It looks like a thermal map of the Atlantic Ocean, at a glance, and I wonder what he's working on. “An unexpected pleasure this early in the day.”

  “I'm buying you breakfast,” I say. “We need to talk.”

  He glances at his desktop, taps it off without a word, and gets his coat. We walk — all the way down to Larry's West-Side restaurant, steaming like a pair of old-fashioned locomotives in the brutal cold. “Snow tonight,” Valens says.

  “I hadn't heard.” I crane my head back, the sky overhead limpid with the first glow of morning, a soft periwinkle shade like baby blankets. “Fred, what's troubling you?”

  “I could ask you the same.” He's got a swinging, confident stride. I keep up without effort. “Or is this just a friendly fence-mending?”

  Wry irony in his voice. I stop and look at him hard; he takes four more steps and turns back
to me, sidelit by a streetlamp dimming in the gray light of dawn. “Jesus, Fred. Who told you that you could go get human on me, you son of a bitch?”

  “On the Montreal, when I gave you that gun, I half expected you to shoot me in the back.”

  “I still might.” I start walking again, and he falls into step. “Fred, I hate your guts. Don't get me wrong. You're a slick, callous son of a bitch with an agenda that bends for nobody.” He doesn't argue, just lets the sound of footsteps fill the next five seconds. “But I think you're one of the good guys. Damn you to hell.”

  He coughs. I look over, but he's turning to follow a passing car with his eyes. One of his broad-fingered hands slips into his pocket, and then he reaches up as if scratching his ear. As casually as I can, I switch my hip on, glancing at it as if checking for messages. One blinks: a request to open an encoded transmission channel.

  I enter an authorization and slip the plastic oblong back into my pocket. A moment later, Valens's subvocalized tones fill my ear. “You have some information for me, Casey?”

  And it is down to us. You and me, Fred. The way it started, all those years ago. The palm of my steel hand itches. “Holmes is planning on having the prime minister killed.” Okay, I don't know that for a fact. But you never got a bunny to jump by walking up to it quiet like.

  Valens, give him credit, doesn't stop. Doesn't look up from the sidewalk, glance at me, or pull his hands out of the pockets of his insulated coat. “You're sure.”

  Not a question, and he doesn't glance at me.

  “Sure enough.” I cough lightly, cover my mouth with my meat hand. “Bernard Xu's niece is involved. You remember Bernard, I trust? She's working with somebody who reports directly to Holmes. I saw him at Unitek, but I only know his first name. Farley.”

  He shoots me a look. “Riel is trying to shut us down. How do you know the assassination plot isn't my doing, Casey?”

  “I—” Damn. “Fred, I just know.” And that's when all the puzzle pieces start dropping into place. Richard's concerns. The colony ships. Unitek spending money like water on something with, at best, a very speculative rate of return. Not that that's conclusive. The city we're walking through wouldn't be here if somebody sometime hadn't taken a gamble without knowing what was on the other side, and my own ancestors wouldn't have been here to get their asses handed to them if their ancestors hadn't taken a similar gamble ten, fifteen thousand years before that. All circumstantial as shit, but generally there's a reason people make that kind of a leap of faith. And a reason why I wound up with some white girl's name, as well.