He couldn’t take this contract. Because he needed Jean Gris’s goodwill, and he wasn’t going to get that by assassinating ranid revolutionaries and allowing Rim to run a manip on him. Not when he was already mixed up in learning how to conjure.
It didn’t take much imagination to guess that coincidence might proliferate, should one cultivate a conjure man. He who touches pitch besmirches himself.
All he could do was hope Rim would be understanding about finding someone else to take the contract. And that they wouldn’t botch it, or, if they did, that the trail of testimony never led back to one André Deschênes.
He pursed his lips as if to whistle. Perhaps that could be his first real experiment in conjuring.
Another blow to the image of the hedge-wise conjuror: Jean Kroc had never been a patient man. Actually, he was rather bad all around at conforming to stereotypes. So by evening, when his new apprentice arrived, he was worrying the hard semiflexible skin from a pulpy fruit the size of his finger joint, a pile of others white and waxy on a rectangular green-glazed plate by his left hand. The fruit’s skin was rough, reddish-brown, marked in dimpled hexagons. He picked it off with gnawed thumbnails, trying to keep the pieces as large as possible. A matter of pride, or meticulousness, or just a cheap distraction.
He knew the newcomer was André by the purr of his wet/dry scoot. Jean’d left the front door propped; when André called through it, he didn’t bother to get up, just yelled back. “Take off your shoes.”
The thumping told him André obeyed. A moment later, bare feet padded from the entry. “Cricket said you wanted me.”
Jean smiled, not showing what it cost him. He held up a peeled wax fruit so André could identify it, pinched between finger and thumb. A sticky trickle of nectar crawled across the pad of his hand. He flicked the berry into a long tumbling arc.
André snatched it from the air on its descent, leaning away from spattered juice. He inspected it quickly and popped it into his mouth, then spat the pit into his palm. “When you told me you wanted information, how did you know?”
“Know?” Jean slit another fruit with his nail. The pulp was too tender to squeeze out without pureeing, so he worried at the skin until it flaked. He sucked the juice off his thumb and the pulp off the seed, and laid the shiny dark brown nut on the table beside the bits of skin. “Am I assigned psychic powers?”
André came forward and dropped into the chair across the table. His pit joined Jean’s with a subdued click. “Did you know that Rim was going to offer me a contract on a ranid?”
Jean, licking his fingers, smiled. “You said you wouldn’t tell me about contracts.”
“I’m not taking this one,” André answered. “The thing is, Rim wants to run a probability manip to give me a fighting chance to find the coolie. It’s affiliated with some froggie terrorist group—”
“Gourami.”
“Excuse me?”
Jean pursed his lips, forced to admit that perhaps not all the stereotypes failed him. He was enjoying André’s slack expression slightly more than was healthy or smart. Although he had to admire the man’s gall—well, admire was the wrong word. And respect wasn’t exactly right either. “The ranid’s name is Gourami.”
“You know it?”
“I talked to it last night.” Jean ate another wax fruit, letting the pulp burst into fluid as he pressed it to the roof of his mouth with his tongue. The seed felt as slick as it appeared, and he squeezed it out between his lips. For a moment, he turned it on his fingertips, watching the light gloss it. He pretended he didn’t notice the way André’s shoulders jerked.
“Whoa. Well, I’m glad I said no.”
“I’m not. Go back tomorrow. Tell him you’ll take it on.”
“You realize what you’re asking me?”
“Yes,” Jean answered, flicking him another fruit. “I’m asking you to lie to Timothy Closs. And buy me some time to operate.”
“He’ll want me to take the entanglement.”
Jean wondered if André knew he was shaking his head like that, a slow oscillation.
“I can lock that off,” Jean said. “We’ll set up a countervalent field; the entanglement can spend itself on that.”
André’s attention snapped to him like a shivering compass needle to a magnet. “And I’m better off letting you entangle me?”
“Just a safeguard. Not an entanglement. But take the contract. For me.”
André swallowed. “What exactly are you planning, Jean Gris?”
Jean rolled his shoulders up and back. “I’ll handle the rest. Just keep Closs thinking the situation is under control.”
Jefferson wasn’t often the first one into the office, but he was usually among the last ones home. He got a lot of work done in the evening, when things were still and quiet—dark in winter and golden in the summertime. He’d trickle the news, talk to his kids in chat, drink a few cups of coffee or kesha or a martini or two, and plow through business decisions with a ruthless efficiency that got him home in time for supper, just.
Today should have been no different. The to-do list was actually a little shorter than usual; everyone was distracted by the bombings, and as he’d delegated that to Closs it was off his desk until Closs finished the investigation and handed it back. The first item, it looked like, was to return a call to the station. Not the Slide; no problem with that. Lighters came and went, raw materials flowing freely outbound and manufactured goods coming in. The call was from one of his gurus, the Greene’s World station chief of the Exigency Corps, Amanda Delarossa. Head god-botherer.
She must have set his code to autoanswer, which was gratifying. She had a chipmunk-cheek of sandwich and a bag of pop lifted to her mouth when her image shifted, and she swallowed hastily and cleared her hands. “Chairman,” she said, as soon as she could. “I didn’t think you’d call back until tomorrow, sir.”
“I like to be responsive,” he said. “You seem to think your issue requires immediate attention.”
“Immediate awareness,” she said. She drank again, quickly, as if her mouth were dry from swallowing before she was quite ready. “I’m not sure what we could actually do about it at this point. Realistically speaking.”
“Intriguing,” Jefferson said, because it’s what he had trained himself to say when he really meant get to the fucking point. “Tell me more.”
“Well…” she paused, set her drink aside, and twisted her fingers together, “we’ve got a massive spike in side effects, and we’re not quite sure what to make of it. But some of our best theorists are on it.”
“By side effects, you mean…”
“Probability pollution. Weird coincidences. Synchronicities. We track them, you know, and attempt to mitigate. But the problem is, you get a chaotic butterfly effect with even the smallest manipulation. So you patch it up, attempt to introduce a little more randomosity into the system, and it breaks out somewhere else. Rains of toads. God knows what.”
“And we’re getting more of this?” He rubbed the edge of his desk and thought about Patience, which had been a lovely Earthlike world before the Corps got done with it.
“Some of it, yeah. You have any old coins lying around?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” Collector’s pieces, talismans, bits of old Earth. Metal from the bones of the homeworld. They had no value as legal tender anymore, but people liked them.
“Next time you think of it, flip one a couple of times,” she said. “Anyway, Dr. Gupta thinks it’s linked to omelite mining, either due to waste tanglestone escaping into the atmosphere, or a reduction in the worldwide omelite load causing some sort of shift in Greene’s World’s…equilibrium, for lack of a better word. We’re working on it.”
“And if you can’t get it under control quickly?”
She shrugged, dipping her ear toward one shoulder, and bit her knuckle instead of her supper. “Well, it’s not like we can stop exporting tanglestone.”
Of course André argued. It didn’t matter; Kroc was
always going to win. He had the superior bargaining position.
He also had the mojo. And something else that André would need to learn, before Jean would teach him too much. Jean Kroc had the moral unassailability of a god, as was necessary for the power he held.
It was always the way. In premodern societies, those who wielded power beyond oversight were bound by oaths and forms and divine wrath and sacrosanct relationships. In the modern day, there were oaths, and forms…and codes of ethics, to which professionals might more or less loosely adhere.
And divine wrath, of course. There was always that.
Jean Kroc’s God most certainly did play dice. And Jean was not the only one loading the toss.
Still, he was rather well satisfied with the way the game was going. If André could learn, there might even be a chance of—well, not winning. It wasn’t the sort of thing one won—but making some things a bit better in the short run. As a conjure man, his professional opinion was that that was often the best one could hope for.
At some point in human history, somebody had figured out that you could change the future by staring at it hard enough. The problem with the power of prayer was that it was never exactly quantifiable, though research was suggestive. And then there were the odder aspects of certain studies, where an average taken of ten thousand amateur best guesses turned out to be closer to the truth than any single expert’s considered and researched opinion.
In a really profound cosmic irony, it was the failure of A-life consciousness research that finally provided the key. They couldn’t make a self-aware computer, but they did find out what the I was good for.
The I was the evolutionary consequence of the observer effect, the power of luck, the denial of everything ten thousand generations of mothers passed down to ten thousand generations of daughters. Wishing hard enough did make a difference. Not a big difference. Not a profound difference. And not a difference every time.
But a few tenths of a percent, a difference almost indistinguishable from experimental error.
It was just that little bit of an edge that let one species thrive when another one perished. Black wings on a should-be-white moth, concealing it against a soot-blackened tree.
The practical application of quantum engineering made it replicable. The technological outgrowth of mojo satchels and washing the car to make it rain. A bit more than an edge, these days. Call it a necessity, rather.
People with both the knack for being lucky and the courage to do it right were not, in Jean’s experience, common. And they were often opportunists, because their gifts made it possible for them to do very well by living on their wits.
A certain moral flexibility had needed to be shocked out of Jean as well, when he was young.
André Deschênes might do. And if he couldn’t be salvaged, well, Jean couldn’t exactly leave him wherever he fell. But he’d execute that problem when it became unavoidable.
In the meantime, he had a frog to catch.
After André left, Jean pulled his boots on again. The leftover wax fruit went into the cooler; the peelings into Lucienne’s…into Cricket’s compost bucket under the sink. If he felt up to it, he’d turn the pile over for her tonight, aerate the rot. It was what he was good for.
The boots sealed over his pantlegs, he made sure he had a light, slung his hip pack around his waist, and locked the door behind him. He’d have been three times through the swamp from sunset to sunset, but twenty years wasn’t enough to make him a real creature of the bayou. There were men and women who’d grown up here, who could vanish among the reeds without a ripple, soft as a ranid slipping underwater. Jean knew a few: Old Mike, Sally Feathers. Both born when Greene’s World was the sort of place you went to lose the records, both stubborn and self-reliant enough that their names were what they said they were, that they’d never nursed on the crystal teat of a reality skin.
Greene’s World was still a new enough planet that folks mostly knew each other, and still a wild enough planet that they mostly stayed out of each other’s way. Outside of Novo Haven, anyway, where the corporate boys played politics and pretended that instantaneous communication meant they had any idea what was going on in the Core, or any influence that was heard there.
A delusion, Jean admitted with a rueful shake of his head, he was prey to himself.
Reeds cracked where he stepped, the spongy ground oozing water. The sky over the bay was streaked in seashell colors—coral, salmon, dusky clouds like the indigo lip of a mussel shell—by the time he reached the distributary nearest to his minifab, the one where the ranids came to talk.
He crouched on the riverbank, folded his arms across his knees, and waited. When the evening star—technically, the planet Endymion—shimmered ice-white on the horizon and the last pearlescent light was draining down the darkening sky, a gleaming dart-shape broke the water. One ring of ripple heralded the ranid’s arrival, so faint it smoothed before it reached the reeds.
Jean dabbed at the water. His ripples passed over where the ranid’s had been, flowing in the opposite direction, and lapped its skin below the eyes. The eyes—great light-gathering half-orbs—blinked. One stem-fingered, four-digited hand reached above the surface, the fingertip pads slightly enlarged, sticky.
Jean reached slowly to lay his waterproof wrist slate in the ranid’s grasp. It did not flinch, but rose from the water as if drawn to an anchor. The hand rotated as the eyes came level, both swiveling forward so binocular vision focused on the face of the slate. The other hand emerged from the water as the ranid climbed the bank, crouching between angled knees, its pale ridged throat swelling.
Jean did not hear what it said, but he felt it, the low-frequency words shivering his nape hairs. The ranid was deft with the slate; more literate and practiced than Jean. He thought it might even be the one called “Gourami” by humans who could not replicate its given name.
He waited until it was looking at his mouth. If this was the liaison, it could lipread. “I’m Jean Kroc,” he said. “I think we met last night.”
The ranid bobbed one fingertip, pausing in what it was doing with the slate. —Yes.
It was Gourami, then. He fumbled in his hip pack. The ranid didn’t draw back, but waited, curious and impassive, while another star or two slipped out of the twilight. “I have something for you,” he said, careful to lift his chin and shape the words formally. He might just have mouthed them, but it seemed to help it lipread if he put the voice behind them.
Again the pulling gesture, one finger raking the words in.
“Mojo,” he answered. His hand closed on the box, protective cling-sheeting adhering to his skin. Plastics, of all things, were imported to Greene’s World. Petroleum was mined here but there was no significant manufacturing.
He pulled the box from the pack, extended his arm, and opened up his hand. Palm skyward, fingers cupped slightly, offering the plastic-wrapped object to Gourami.
It was not a gesture a ranid could make. Their arms did not rotate at the elbow.
Carefully, Gourami lifted the box from his palm. Still holding the slate, it untwisted the plastic and peeled it back, but stopped before lifting the lid of the box. Its head and shoulders canted back slightly. It wrote a word and turned the slate. —Mojo?
“Luck,” he answered. The ranids knew about luck, although Jean could never hope to duplicate their word for it. The sounds of their language echoed through an expanded throat that served as bellows, sounding board, and voice-box all in one, and were meant to be heard through bone conduction and the vibrations of water or air on skin and tympanic membrane, not by a mammal’s seashell external ear. They knew about all sorts of things; theirs was not a material culture, but in their physical abilities made up for it. They could communicate across half a world, read each other’s physical health with pulses of ultrasound. They could build fires, forge metal if it moved them, though the activity was even more risky than it might be for a human; a ranid could not afford to dry out too much, or too often. T
hey built their blast furnaces on rocky beaches, and tended them during short dashes up from the waves.
—Thank you, Gourami said, and folded the plastic back into place. It did not care to commit, Jean understood.
“You’re welcome.” Jean leaned forward, strengthening the connection with the ranid, but careful not to make eye contact. He did not wish it to feel coerced. “I’m going to bring a man to you tomorrow. He’ll go with you upriver. Protect you.”
—Safer in the swamp.
“You’ll be in the swamp. He’ll stay in the swamp with you.”
—Humen are easy to track.
“It will be all right. He’s being paid to kill you, Gourami. If they think he is chasing you, nobody else will come after.”
The ranid’s fingers didn’t twitch on the slate. They didn’t have to. Its stolid froggy regard was enough. The ranid thought it would be safer in the swamp with the savages, trading in its web belt and company housing and advanced medical care and access to connex—all the benefits of Rim technology that the ranids worked for—in return for belts of shells and pearl-and-carnelian necklaces and stories murmured in reedy backwaters through jaws that need not move to make words.
Jean let his lips pull askew, aware the expression would mean nothing to the ranid. He hunkered lower, dropped his chin against his chest. “It’s not for you,” he said. “It’s for him.” He paused; the next was hard to say. “And for Lucienne.”
The argument with Caetei took longer than the one with Jean Kroc, despite the awkwardness of communicating with the human. But humen were manageable; all Gourami had to do was keep saying no. Whereas arguing with Caetei was like arguing with the tide. And there was the small matter of Gourami owing se self’s life.
—They killed se mate, Caetei finally said. Which was unfair because Gourami had brought back her body, and owed weal to the human’s band. Which meant, se guessed, in humen terms, her mate, her children, if she had any. Her siblings, though se wasn’t sure how much store humen set by siblings. Their reproductive system was so invested, it made everything about their biology and society peculiar, locked up, committed.
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