Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  “No, that’s not the way it was,” I said, guessing that he would probably not believe me, but telling him the truth anyway about how I had an emergency at my hiding place and lost contact with the double long enough for him to be seduced by Tara.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “But everyone lies about sex, so I suppose you’re entitled to some of that too.”

  “I’m actually not lying this time, Terrey, believe it or not.”

  “Well, either way, I find it really interesting that your wife recognized the double as soon as he walked in the room, but that Sheila shagged him and still thinks it’s you.”

  That was interesting, now that I thought about it. Going into the meeting with Tara in my office, I had a backup plan in case she realized that the double was not me. Because Tara and I had been so close at one time, I thought it was unlikely that the deception could survive the two of them talking, let alone what they did together. So it now shocked me to realize how substantial the difference was in my relationship between the two women. It made me feel more grateful for Lynn, and made me think that I should treat her differently than I had been. But the idea of fooling Tara also brought to mind something that made me feel sorry for her.

  “Speaking of the shagging,” I said, “Jon may still have AIMS, so she could have gotten it from him.”

  “Not my problem,” Terrey said right away. “I don’t get paid to protect her.”

  “But Terrey, think about it. She could end up dying, or not being able to be with anyone the rest of her life. And she thought it was me, so she was trusting me. And this all was your plan—I think we have at least some responsibility here.”

  “All right, I have an idea,” he said. “I’ll give it to you, but then we have to get back to our business.”

  He suggested that I require all high-level staff at BASS to be tested for AIMS, for some humanitarian purpose, and have the results sent to me alone. If Tara tested positive, I could break the bad news to her and offer her the treatment, which I would have to buy from Protection G. If she was negative, Terrey said, then “No worries, mate.” I was impressed by Terrey’s mental acumen again, but also a bit surprised that my old friend was being such a cutthroat businessman, with very little human compassion. Which made me think of Lynn again, not just because of her compassion, but also because of how my life had gone in a different direction from Terrey’s, probably because I married Lynn and had two children with her.

  “The idea that you might be having an affair,” Terrey said, getting back to business as he promised, “also draws attention to your wife, and the media are talking about the fact that she hasn’t been seen since the fire, or even before. And since our photo op at the cemetery didn’t work out, I’m thinking we really need to get her out somewhere, even briefly. I know you don’t want her near the double unless it’s necessary, but if they both could do something together, it would go a long way to lessening the media scrutiny.”

  Terrey didn’t say it, and I didn’t know it until later, but he also was hoping to draw out any assassination attempts that were still pending.

  “Now I have an idea,” I said, thinking back to my last conversation. “Lynn feels very strongly that both of us should take the twins to see their brother John. And I think if we don’t do that fairly soon, we may actually have a lot more of that media scrutiny you’re worried about. John is John Rabin, of course, the son of Paul Rabin, who I killed last year. John is angry at me and anything to do with me or BASS, blaming us for the death of his father and grandfather, and I’m sure now for his mother. Lynn is driven by a sense of ethics, but it would also be good PR for us to visit him with his sisters, and put out an olive branch. At least it might head off another round of stories about how we are ignoring and mistreating him.”

  “Sounds like a possibility,” Terrey said, “if it can happen someplace safe.”

  “There’s the rub … John refuses to set foot in any BASS property, so he won’t come here or to the castle. And he’s living in a seamy part of Marin.” There were very few seamy parts of Marin County before the big quake, but the flood of refugees from the city had changed all that.

  “Think about it some more,” Terrey said, “And I’ll have the Trois look into it. Maybe we can find somewhere that works. In the meantime, in light of the possible risk involved in an outing like that, and other dangers, I wanted to ask you again to do a ban lan colors ritual with me. In case it might help us.”

  “You’ve been doing that?”

  “Yeah, mate. I did it three times.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got some recitations off the net, in Chinese because that’s the only place this cult exists, and transliterated them on another site so I could say them. And I just programmed the net room to display a bunch of different colors while I read them out loud. That’s it. According to the literature, I was supposed to experience the spirits coming over me for confirmation, or something like that, but I didn’t really feel anything.”

  “Didn’t really feel anything?”

  “Well, the last time I guess I did feel something.”

  “This is bizarre, Terrey,” I said. “Next you’ll be into snake handling.”

  “Ah, you laugh, but they actually do that sometimes as a part of the rituals. Really. And there’s a rare snake around here called a San Francisco Garter, which is one of the most colorful in the world. I was thinking of getting one and using it, but I don’t believe in this enough to get bit, and I don’t see how it’s that much of a confirmation anyway, because the venom’s not lethal.”

  “Has anyone else been doing this with you?” I asked, still shaking my head, but in the back of my mind wondering whether there could be something to it. I was still alive, and against the odds all the assassination attempts had failed so far.

  “No,” Terrey said. “I’ve asked, but nobody’s interested. The Trois and Min are as stubbornly scientific as you think cyborgs would be, plus Min wants nothing to do with anything associated with Zhang Sun. Korcz just laughed and Stephenson is into his dream thing too much to try anything else—that’s his religion. Tyra has some Catholic in her background and is worried about demons entering her if she did something like that. And of course I didn’t even ask Lynn.”

  “Smart move,” I said.

  “So you’re in?”

  “No thanks,” I laughed. “But I’ll think about it more, maybe check into it.”

  “Remember not to use the net if you don’t have to. We’re in big trouble if anyone finds out where you are, especially with us not there to protect you. Did you get a chance to look at the holo of Taiwan?”

  “Yes, I watched the whole thing, but unfortunately nothing new turned up. The only person I saw with any connection to Sun was General Ho.” I hesitated before saying this, because I didn’t know how my friend would react to hearing that name.

  “Did you risk going into the net,” Terrey asked, “to explore that connection further?”

  “No, because I figured Sun was his superior officer, so that explained it.”

  “Right,” Terrey said. “My thoughts exactly. How did it feel to watch yourself put a bullet in that bugger’s head? I’d like to see it again myself—I’m still paying off the debt to the doctors who put my plumbing right, after he took me apart with his knife. Not to mention the pain itself. But you and your Trinity put him right, that’s for damn sure.”

  Terrey was, of course, the soldier with the code name Talon 2 in the Taiwan operation. He was the friend whose life I had saved that day, despite the fact that it ultimately cost me my position in the British military, and that’s why I was so sure he would never be the one to betray me.

  Thinking of the subject of betrayal, and knowing Terrey would be feeling grateful to me at this time, I asked him about something he had mentioned before but not wanted to elaborate on.

  “Tell me your suspicions about a traitor,” I said, always wanting to know as much as I could, regardless of the rele
vancy or magnitude of the information. He objected again that it might make me paranoid for no reason, but I insisted.

  “I really think it’s nothing,” he said, “just a coincidence probably. But I found out that Korcz grew up in a town called Gdańsk, in Poland.”

  “So?”

  “Gdańsk is known as one of the most colorful cities in the world,” he explained. “The mansions along the main drag are all painted with solid colors like peach, olive, mauve, etcetera. Tourists go there just to see the colors.”

  “How did you find this out?”

  “I had the Trois run a scan of the net with the names of our team members, to see if any of them had any association with China or colors or whatever. This was the only result they got.” I was thinking hard about whether this could actually mean anything, and he anticipated my question: “Is there any possible way that the Chinese could have foreseen us hiring Korcz?”

  “I don’t see how,” I said. “My only interaction with him in the past wasn’t the kind of thing where you would think I would ever see him again.”

  “So if that’s true, then the only way this could be more than a coincidence is if they somehow found out he was coming and contacted him. But that also seems highly unlikely.”

  “Maybe you should keep an eye on him, just in case, and check him out a little more.” Then I had another thought. “If he does happen to be a traitor, he’d be waiting until I returned home to take me out, right? Because he doesn’t know where I am. In that case, we couldn’t keep him on staff at BASS like we promised, or Stephenson for that matter.”

  “Right,” Terrey said. “If no traitor is revealed before you come back, we would have to at least send them away, to be safe, promises or no promises.”

  “What do you mean, ‘at least send them away’?”

  “Well, if we had some reason to believe one of them was on Sun’s payroll, we’d have to take more drastic measures.”

  We didn’t go on to discuss exactly what those might be, because right then the mysterious words appeared on my other screen again.

  YON: I WAS THE ONE WHO FOUND OUT THAT KORCZ LIVED IN GDANSK. AM I GOOD OR WHAT?

  “You’re good,” I said after hanging up on Terrey. “Do you really think Korcz could be working for the other side?”

  YON: I DIDN’T SAY THAT. BUT HE DOES LOOK LIKE A VILLAIN. HE’S NOT HANDSOME LIKE YOU.

  I rolled my eyes, thinking about how I now seemed to have three beautiful women after me. Most men would probably kill to have this problem, I thought, but I’m more like dying to get out of it. But then something completely different occurred to me.

  “Terrey said Korcz grew up in that city,” I said to my secret admirer. “But you just said he lived there. Did you mean the same thing?”

  There was no response, even after I waited for a minute, so I figured that her window of time had closed again, and she had to go before her sisters found out that she was moonlighting by talking with me.

  I checked the time and realized it was too late for me to do anything else tonight, so I hit the hay and fell asleep thinking about how I could confront the double about what happened with Tara, and hopefully use him to repair it. Despite the unmitigated disaster earlier in the day, I still hadn’t fully learned my lesson about the danger of doing anything important by proxy.

  37

  POLYAMORY

  In the morning, I went out to the living area and ate the nice breakfast that Angelee had prepared. She was feeling much better now that her switch had been turned off for a while, but she also seemed slightly depressed. Her window of opportunity for our “marriage ceremony” had obviously passed, and so now all she could do was continue to serve me and wait for it to open again in a week or so. Her depression was probably because she knew there was a good chance that window might stay closed, now that she had missed this opportunity.

  I didn’t want her to become too sad, for business reasons and also for personal ones, because I had begun to genuinely care about her and Chris. So I talked with her cheerfully while I ate, and found out that Chris was still sleeping, but the medication would wear off sometime soon. She said that she wanted him to enjoy the pool again, so he wouldn’t become afraid of swimming, and I told Vera to lower all the water to a safe level, and checked to make sure it was okay before I went back into my room to make my calls.

  The first one I made was to Jon—I used the netroom equipment in his quarters at the hill, and put his face on one of my screens.

  “We need to talk more about what happened with Tara,” I said, “and make it right.”

  “You’re not gonna tell her about the AIMS thing?” he asked. “Are you?”

  “Not at this point,” I answered, and explained Terrey’s plan about having the upper-level staff at BASS tested so we could hopefully rule that out without having to tell her.

  “But I need to make sure we understand each other,” I continued, “before we talk to her again. You’ll have to be able to make clear that I don’t want to be with her, without any hint of flirting with her. And to do that you absolutely have to grasp how serious this is, and what a bad mistake you made by doing what you did.”

  “Like I said,” he answered defensively, “I’d have to be gay or dead to not—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “About that. I’m not gay, and I’ve said no to her for years. So that’s no excuse.”

  “You’re also married,” he said. “So that makes it easier for you to say no. You would suffer more consequences if you give in to what you know you want to do. But I don’t have that motivation.”

  “Listen, Jon,” I said with frustration, “you have to be motivated, because you’re representing me in everything you do. This mistake is sufficient reason for me to withhold your pay, if your sorry arse happens to make it out of this alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, changing his tune fast. “You just have to understand how difficult it was for someone with my condition.”

  “What does AIMS have to do with it?”

  “Not AIMS,” he said. “I’m a poly.”

  I knew enough from the web to know what he meant by that—that he was polyamorous—but not much more. I had never personally known anyone who went by the label, so I asked him to enlighten me.

  “I’m genetically unable to abstain or have just one partner,” he said. “Other people can say no much easier, and they can be satisfied by someone they love. I can’t do that—it would be denying who I am by nature, and bring on the kind of mental and emotional hell that I’ve already been through.”

  “So you’re a sex addict?” I asked.

  “And you’re not?” he answered. “Imagine if you couldn’t be with your wife at all, for a long time. You’d go into a kind of withdrawal, wouldn’t you? That’s what it’s like for me, but worse, because I need multiple partners.”

  “Living without my wife, or any partner, would be hard,” I said, “but I hope I would have self-control.”

  “You would have self-sex, that’s what you would have.” He smiled. “And it wouldn’t be enough for you. See, you’re an addict, too, if that’s what you want to call me.”

  “I don’t have time to argue with you about this,” I said, even more frustrated now, partly because he was partly right. “If you can’t get with the program, you’re gone, with no compensation. Do you want to end up back in that Exit website?”

  That sobered him up, and he said, “This is how I got there. I found out I was poly after my wife and kids died, because I was filling the holes left by them. Whatever faults I had, I was a good father—I really loved my kids. You can’t blame me when you know what I’ve been through.”

  On the one hand he was saying that he was born that way, and on the other he was citing the trauma he suffered. It seemed inconsistent, but it could take forever to figure stuff like this out, and I needed to focus on our current situation.

  “Why didn’t you tell us that you have this … condition?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “I told you about the AIMS. I figured that was the biggest problem.”

  “The AIMS thing was a wash for us,” I said, “because the very small risk of you infecting someone was offset by the motivation it gives you to do a good job for us, so you could be cured. But if we would have known that you’re ‘genetically unable’ to stay out of women’s pants, that might have changed our thinking. AIMS and this poly thing are a bad combination.” I thought of how he had been looking my own wife up and down, and was now gladder than ever that Lynn had so little interest in other men, even when she was mad at me.

  “It was a personal issue,” he added in his defense. “Tyra didn’t mention that she was a woman, then a man, then a woman again.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of medication that can help you?” I asked, wanting to feel that he was stabler and safer to have around.

  “Would you take chemicals to stop being who you are? To stop wanting your wife, for example?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but I didn’t have a chance to answer anyway, because the door to my room suddenly opened behind me—I had neglected to lock it—and little Chris came running over to me and gave me a big hug. Then Angelee appeared in the doorway, in the white bikini top and a towel wrapped around her waist. She stepped over to pull Chris gently off me.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said as she did. “I was telling him how you saved his life yesterday, and he just ran away from me toward your room. I guess he wanted to say thank you.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet, Chris,” I said. “I’ll come out and play with you when I’m done with my calls, okay?”