Nobody intervened. It was a humen bar.
4
IF CRICKET HAD A MAN, IT WOULD BE ANDRÉ DESCHÊNES. But she didn’t. And after last night, she was doubly glad. She hadn’t wanted a man before and she didn’t want one now. They had both been happier with the sort of halfway state in which—things—stood, the one where nobody owned either one of them.
And now there was Lucienne.
She knew what he’d say if she asked him. It was business, and he didn’t talk about business.
She wondered if she would ever forgive him. Even if Jean was right. She wondered if she would ever want to forgive. So she let her fingertips brush his palm when she relieved him of the bucket, and smiled back when he smiled, white teeth flashing in the dim, damp entrylock of the minifab, and felt mostly like she’d swallowed ice. There was more plascrete underfoot, badly poured so her sandals scuffed on the ripples, and the bolts holding the structure’s shell to the slab around the margin protruded enough to tear careless toenails off. No smart matter here, no computronium, nothing electronic at all.
André blinked heavily in the darkness, his eyes adjusting without the help from his headset. Cricket nibbled her lip to stop the frown, even if he probably wouldn’t have seen it, and walked past him to the inner door. She knew her way around in the dark.
The main room of the minifab had a galley kitchen in the back corner, just where your line of sight would land as you came in the lock. The walls had a curious texture under the paint that hid the extruded surface. Somebody—Jean Kroc, as far as Cricket knew—had papered over them in layers, tearing the sheets into ragged bits, so the edges left abstract patterns under saturated blues and greens and oranges and yellows. The colors were bold but not glaring, and the overall effect was sunny, reinforced by braided rag rugs softening the plum-colored plascrete floor.
In addition to the warm decor, the room was full of light. Jean had torched curved windows in the minifab shell and fixed clear poly over them expediently, by cutting the sheets larger than the windows and running a torch around the edges so the bubbled scars made a weld. With Cricket’s help, Lucienne had sunk hooks and hung curtains across the scorched bits; it looked pretty good.
“Shoes,” Cricket said, once there was enough light for André to see his feet. She toed out of her sandals and kicked them back into the entry. After a moment, André copied her, though she noticed him craning his neck as if searching for signs of either Jean or a flicker stage-set of a conjure man’s workshop.
He caught her looking, and tipped his head. “I was expecting—”
“—stuffed alligators,” Cricket agreed. “Lucienne gave them all to Planetary Relief. Have a seat, André. I’ll get the tea.”
“Where’s Kroc?” He did as she said, though, and settled his long body into a blue-cushioned basket chair that creaked under his weight. When he leaned forward to lock his hand around his wrist, hugging his knees, his red brocade fogjacket strained over muscular shoulders. He’d shut down the autofit, too.
She kissed the top of his head as she went past, a calculated reward for following orders, and made sure she held the muddy bottom of the bucket clear of both the upholstery and his clothes. “He’ll be inside in a minute,” she said, as she dropped the bucket in the sink. “He knows you’re here.”
The plumbing was old-fashioned, too. She had to turn a knob to pull water from the pipes. She slid a copper kettle under the stream and started the gas fire while it filled. Water droplets sizzled when she set the kettle on the burner.
She stretched on tiptoe over the stove to pull down pottery cups—teal and rose, cheerful and antiquated as everything else in the ’fab—and let them clink on the tile counter. The silence that followed lasted until the water boiled, and then André cleared his throat again.
“Did you put a word in for me, Cricket?”
She turned off the stove and came back to him, balancing two cups in hands damp from washing the dirt and pea-pod strings from under her nails. She slid André one cup and plumped down on a cushion on the floor, elevating her own mug until she was settled so it wouldn’t spill. “Who else would have done it?”
“Good.” He sipped the tea. “Glad I can count on you.”
Cricket smiled around the rim of her cup. She had loved how André could never quite meet her eyes when she glanced up at him through her lashes. It made her feel powerful. Now it made her feel lied to. “You should come by more often,” she said. “You haven’t seen where I sleep now.”
“I thought you might be with Kroc, too.”
“I haven’t got a man,” she said. And might have said more, but she heard slapping footsteps beyond the door beside the galley and twisted where she sat to catch Jean Kroc’s eye as he entered. He was barefoot, his rinsed toes leaving damp pad-prints on the plascrete. He dried his hands on his shorts and smiled. He was a ropy, sallow, middle-aged man whose round spectacles sat unevenly on crooked ears, half-concealing slight epicanthic folds that gave his eyes an Earthasian cast. Cricket knew one of his grandmothers had been Korean, and that was probably also where he got the high forehead that shone with sweat on either side of a widow’s peak. A short grizzled beard softened his gaunt cheeks and the worn line of his jaw, but that wasn’t why they called him Jean Gray.
He half-nodded to Cricket and André, then fetched another mug down from over the stove. Jean Kroc wasn’t as tall or as broad as André, but he didn’t have to stand on tiptoe to reach as Cricket did. “You lived,” he said with his back to Cricket and André both. “Good, that’s good.”
“I lived,” André answered. He finished his tea in three gulps; it was still hot enough that steam came out with his breath when he continued. “So, Jean Gris. Who is it that you would like for me to kill?”
Gourami woke dry and aching. The surface se lay on was spongy without being soft, a kind of foam mat like the ones the humen used under their offspring’s climbing apparatus. The adults mostly seemed landbound, but the offspring were as light and agile as mossgliders, without the vestigial wings—
Gourami curled handfingers over eyes and squinched them tight, trying to chase out random thoughts for something a little more presently useful. Se neck hurt, fizzing pain like a chemical burn, and se remembered the shocker and the hand on the shoulder. Se flinched, and then gingerly slid fingers around the back of se skull in order to check the burn.
The flesh felt crusted and cracked, two finger-pad-size sores that were moist in the middle but dry at the edges. Se dabbed skin mucous over the wounds and the pain eased at once, leaving only lingering tenderness and a ringing in se skull like the vibrations from an outboard motor.
Se sat upright, blinking in the darkness. If se eyes had been going to adapt, they would have by now, which meant there was very little light. And se slate was missing, along with the web-rig, rigging kit, and passcode stick.
No way to call for help.
Se rolled belly-down, pressing soft-tacky skin to the mat, and laid jaw to floor. Bone conduction might tell more—like whether the structure in which se was trapped was a floating one or rested on land.
Se held a breath, and listened.
Waves. Waves slapping against the hull, and the thrum of engines attenuated by water. And voices, people voices, which could be carrying ten or a dozen humen miles. They spoke of commonplaces: work and egglings, food and education. Gourami’s handfingers twitched toward them spastically.
Se pushed up, unmolding from the mat. The mat was bad; it was not helpful. Se could not send signals ringing through the water by tapping on the decking, for example, even if se had something with which to tap.
The wounds itched. Se resealed them and set about exploring the prison in a crouch, sweeping long arms through the darkness, feeling for obstacles. Se touched nothing. Gourami clicked tongue against palate to generate saliva, and dragged each webbed hand across the tongue in turn. Sticky saliva adhered to the webs, mingling in strings with the mucous; se chafed the palms and fingerpads together
, licking dry eyes in concentration. The chemical reaction was fast and a moment later se palms began to glow with blue-green bioluminescence.
Se lifted glowing hands in the darkness. As long as se didn’t look at them directly, the light was enough for dark-adapted eyes to see.
The prison was small. There was a metal door in one wall, and the bulkheads were all metal, too. Gourami couldn’t make out the color by biolume, and anyway the humen would see it differently. Their eyesight was shifted into the infrared; they could see as colors wavelengths that Gourami perceived only as heat.
Metal. The walls were metal. Which meant that the flooring under the padding was probably metal, too.
Well, that was something, then.
Se plumped down on the padded floor with knees lifted on either side of se head, smoothed more mucous—glowing now—over the wounds, extended claws from toefingers, and dug hard into the tough membrane of the mat, peeling it back.
Jefferson Greene sat back and amused himself by contemplating the humors and nature of his second-in-command. Timothy Closs did not think of himself a nice man, or even a particularly good one, but if pressed he would call himself honest. He believed in hard work, deserved rewards, and a refined form of Social Darwinism, though he didn’t actually identify it as such.
He was currently furious almost beyond the capacity for rational thought, and Jefferson could tell because he was sitting quietly, all of his usual intent energy focused on the backs of his hands as if he could bore through skin and bones and the desktop interface and the decking below, and sink the whole damned office cruiser into Novo Haven Bay.
He could have been checking his tickers, instant messages, voicemail. But Jefferson knew he wasn’t, because his eyes were perfectly still, his lips compressed, his fingers motionless—not shivering with nearly imperceptible commands.
Jefferson sat still for five minutes, thirty-two seconds, timed on his head’s-up, and listened to Closs think. He managed not to sigh when Closs lifted his head, but the truth was that he’d been close to resorting to a pharmaceutical drip.
The expression on Closs’s face provided no relief, just a clarifying rush of adrenaline. Jefferson sank his nails into the arms of his chair. “This is bad.”
Closs nodded with sarcastic slowness and got up out of his chair. He was a smallish man, fit in middle age, still military in his bearing though his hair was ash gray at the temples. “We’re going to have to kill it,” he said.
Jefferson shuddered. He’d been hoping for a softer solution, or at least a calming euphemism. “Major”—Closs was still the Major, though he hadn’t seen military service in twenty standard years his body-time. Which came out to 150 or so nonrelativistic since he’d become attached to the Colonial Rim Company, Greene’s World, and associated territories—“there’s got to be another way.”
Jefferson wasn’t the Greene that Greene’s World was named after, but rather the grandson of the famous explorer. Those were big shoes to fill: by Novo Haven standards, the biggest. He forced himself to meet Closs’s gaze when Closs turned to stare at him.
“Your position here rests on keeping the stream of omelite coming. No tanglestone, no Slide. No Slide, no connex. No Rim, no Core, no nothing, except a scatter of planets hundreds of years of travel time apart. Nobody’s going to let the Roman Empire fall, Jefferson, because you didn’t have the balls to do what you have to do. Make no mistake, this is your balls-up. If you’d just let the frog go, there would have been nothing to explain except a drowning. Now that you’ve grabbed the poor creature, what did you expect us to do with it?”
Closs paced back and forth in front of the curved windows overlooking the bay, the spaceport, and the sparse ranks of drill platforms marching out to sea beyond. Jefferson relaxed slightly: a pacing Closs was a Closs with a plan. “Not only have you given it a better story to tell and a reason to tell it,” Closs continued, “but if it can ever prove it was detained, you’ve validated its word. I already have ranid terrorism to contend with, reformers and Greens picketing my drill platforms, omelite and petroleum quotas to meet—”
“It’s a fucking ranid,” Jefferson replied, fiddling his ring, not bothering to rise. Omelite was a proprietary secret; as far as most of the galaxy was concerned, there were no natural sources of entangled pairs. The primary mission of the Greene’s World Charter Trade Company was classified. “It doesn’t even know the word tanglestone, much less what it’s mining. And it brought up the body. There hasn’t been time for the hard memory to dump yet, and Security will download whatever’s in there.”
“Which at best will prove her a criminal.”
“And at worst will prove somebody killed her, and maybe uncork the thing you wanted her dealt with to cork in the first place. Can we talk about how close we are to a native uprising right this second, Tim?”
Closs lifted an eyebrow at him, and for a moment Jefferson thought he’d won the round. None of his employees gave him half the trouble Closs did. But then, Closs wasn’t exactly an employee, though he controlled a smaller percentage of the Greene’s World Rim Charter Trade Company than Jefferson did. Jefferson cleared his throat. “I thought we could question it, find out how much it knew.”
“More now than it did this morning, that’s for damned sure.”
Jefferson took a breath. Losing his temper with Closs wouldn’t get him anything either, except Closs’s scorn. “Who the hell is it going to talk to? The local media?”
Which was Rim-owned. Like Security. And easier, in general, to control. There were idealists in Security. Far more of them, ironically, than in Com. A good thing there was no chance of it getting in touch with Earth; the press there liked to bring down governments.
Closs shook his head. He put his back to the glass and folded his hands. “It’ll have to be killed.”
Jefferson clambered from his chair, finally, to face Closs on his feet. “I hope you don’t think—”
“Don’t worry,” Closs answered, turning back to his desk, giving Jefferson his shoulder with an air of finality that both relieved and infuriated. “I wouldn’t ask. You figure out what we’re going to do about getting whatever was in Spivak’s hard memory away from Security, would you?”
“I know who to assign,” Jefferson said, thinking of Dayvid Kountché. Who was both ambitious and discreet.
“You mistake me, André.” Jean Kroc leaned against the counter with a mug cupped in his right hand and the still-hot kettle by his left. Half-moons of dirt darkened his fingernails, and he bowed his face over the steam, breathing deeply with closed eyes. “More tea?”
André got up and brought his cup to Kroc. The tea-making involved Kroc dumping the old teabag in the sink, fishing a new one from the box, and adding it to the cup in advance of water—which he reheated to boiling before he poured. It was like watching a medieval alchemist at work.
“You don’t want someone killed?” André asked. Just to be clear, because sometimes people didn’t want to come right out and say it. “Then what did you want me for?”
Kroc returned the pottery cup to him and gestured him back to the padded wicker chair. “I heard you were lucky,” Kroc said, picking up his own mug again. “You proved it today. I also heard you wanted to learn the mojo, sing gris gris. You want to be a conjure man, André Deschênes? Bend the world to your will?”
“You make it sound like magic,” André answered.
Kroc’s eyes were a flat pale color under his gray-laced brows. His spectacles caught the light in level reflections when he turned his face toward the window, but then he’d look back at André directly and André would almost feel his gaze, like a pin scratched over his skin. It was peculiarly intense, focusing; he wondered if there was something in the tea, something his wetware couldn’t have caught because he’d powered down.
There were easier ways to kill him. Though, who knew what a conjure man thought an initiation was supposed to look like?
If that was what this was.
Andr
é set his mug on the glass-topped wicker table.
“It’s not magic.” Kroc spoke suddenly, breaking the stretched silence, dismissing the comment with a flip of his hand. “It’s not luck either, though luck helps prove you can be taught. What it is”—he grinned, showing tea-stained teeth, and tapped the side of his nose with a finger—“is a useful manipulation of the observer effect. So you can change the world if you just think at it right.”
Kroc drank his tea; André folded his hands in his lap. Cricket crossed the ’fab silently and settled onto the wicker lounge, drawing her bare feet up under her ass and curling into the corner like a cat.
“That’s why some people are so spectacularly unlucky, too, isn’t it?” Kroc asked, glancing sideways to fix his gaze on her.
“Hmm?” She raised her eyes dreamily. André recognized the role. No one ever saw the real Cricket Earl Murphy. Nobody even knew her real name. “Oh, right, Jean. Yes, I’d say you’re right.” She didn’t smile, studying André over her tea.
André smiled. “So you can teach what I want to learn. How do I earn the teaching, M~ Kroc, if you don’t want me for my skills?”
“I didn’t say that.” Kroc moved now, finally, crossing the rugs to sit on the floor beside Cricket’s lounge. He folded his legs and settled straight down. “I’d like to put you on retainer, as it were.”
André had already set his cup down, so he had nothing to divest himself of when he stood. “I don’t take open contracts,” he said. “I know what I’m doing when I’m going in. That’s not negotiable.”
But Kroc didn’t hasten to his feet or hurry to smooth things over. He emptied his hands and laced his fingers together. “M~ Deschênes,” Jean Kroc said, tipping his head back to look André in the face, “did you know that the model of wet-dry scoot you use has a small, but deadly, history of explosion following a hydrogen leak? No? Three instances, I think, on the five worlds where they’re in service. Freak accidents happen.”
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