If Caetei wished to speak, se would find him. If Caetei was still alive and at liberty. A big if, when he’d heard nothing from any of the renegades since the night before. Whatever he’d told Ziyi about his well-established conspiracy, it could all have come down on his head.
Discomfortingly, it was not Caetei who answered his call. When he had been poling for about four quarters, a green head broke brown water. It was scarred terribly, though, and the ranid swam crooked in the channel, an effect of having only one arm. Jean winced in sympathy, as he did each time he saw Parrot.
At first he’d tried to conceal the compassion, as he would for a human, but the ranids reacted to the injury of another with patting and cuddling and a head-ducked empathy.
Parrot was inconvenient in another way. Gourami had Jean’s slate, and he hadn’t had time to obtain another. And Parrot was not a liaison: it could not lipread human speech.
Jean hoped that neither Gourami nor Caetei had come to collect him due to an inconvenience, the sort of thing that made a funny story later. But it was something to tell himself, not something he could believe.
In his belt, between layers of hide, he had a second chip. A holographic playback device in a waterproof carryall lay stuffed into his bum bag. There were greatparents in the bayou; maybe Ziyi could help, and maybe…
Maybe a few hundred amorphous amphibians that were little more than giant, highly specialized, floating, quantum-connected brains could do it better. At the very least, if he gave it to the greatparents, he didn’t have to worry about Cricket’s headworm alerting whomever had put it there in the first place.
The lack of connex had to be driving Cricket crazy. She could barely spend an afternoon at his house—at what had been his house—without jittering like a tobacco smoker denied a fix.
But everybody was entitled to a few bad habits, he guessed. He had a share of his own.
Parrot bobbed beside the skiff, swimming crookedly. It wriggled in the water, spun about, and grabbed the gunwale in one spreading, webbed hand, tugging the boat in a new direction as it frog-kicked. Jean swung his pole around, pushing the skiff after. Seeing that it was understood, Parrot dropped off the bow and sculled forward, moving gracefully enough though it swam on a diagonal. They cut through the water silently, swiftly, gold-limned brown ripples folding out behind them like the ribs of opening fans.
He was still poling determinedly two quarters later, when the first of the helicopters went over.
Cricket ought to be worried about liking Maurice Sadowski too much. It was a dangerous habit to get into, liking people. But it was hard not to like the man who had arranged for her to be sitting in Nouel Huc’s living room, her feet tucked under her on scratchy fabric, while she watched him lie to Timothy Closs.
She was off-camera, the expert system handling the uplink instructed to ignore her existence, with Nouel sitting cross-legged and gnomelike on the divan opposite. They could see each other, and they could see Closs, but Closs could not see them.
Magic.
“So tell me more about Moon Morrow,” Closs said in the presumed privacy of a coded connection. “What have you learned about this cloning process?”
Maurice picked at the luminous coils in his ear, caught himself, and fussed with a nub in the couch fabric instead. “Well, I can tell you that the situation is being misrepresented. There’s no way Cricket Murphy can be Morrow—the original Morrow—because to have been here for fifteen years, even if she sent the clone to jail in her place…quantum clones wouldn’t survive Sliding any better than anybody else.”
Closs couldn’t see her, but that didn’t keep Cricket from breathing like there was a snake in the room. This was the person who had ordered Lucienne’s death, the one who would do the same to her and Jean—and Maurice, too, and that poor frog—if he could. She studied him, the cropped hair, the hazel eyes lighter than his skin.
André, she reminded herself sternly, bore just as much responsibility for Lucienne’s death as Closs did. André was the one who had pulled the trigger.
Her palm itched. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to touch him, or strike him so hard his head would spin around. She wasn’t sure either if she wanted to hit André more, or Closs.
“So if she’s not Morrow,” Closs said, “she’s the clone? Legally inconvenient. For Morrow. Although that doesn’t tell us how she got here.”
And that was it, wasn’t it? Her nails weren’t sharp enough to cut her flesh. Unfortunately. Because she couldn’t argue with Maurice’s logic, and it was kind of stunning.
“She is the clone,” Maurice said. “I’m convinced of that. Which means, legally, she’s Moon Morrow, and legally, Moon Morrow does not exist. She’s not a person, Tim.”
“And dead from having Slid here.”
“There’s a theoretical answer.” Another day, Cricket might have admired how smoothly Maurice interrupted Closs. “When you create a quantum clone, you don’t have to create it in the same place. It’s easy enough to reconstruct your parent body…”
“On the other end of a Slide,” Closs finished. He stared at his steepled fingers, blinking, for long minutes. “What’s to stop anyone using that as an instantaneous method of transportation?”
“Nothing,” Maurice said promptly. “As long as you don’t mind duplicates of people piling up all over the galaxy. Or you’re willing to indulge in a little flexibility with regard to your definition of the word murder. If I’m right about how this works, when word of the technology leaks—”
“When.”
“—information always leaks, Tim. It’ll mean the end of interstellar travel by ship. Adjust your portfolio accordingly.”
Maurice glanced down at his hands—a mistake, Cricket thought. That always made it look like you were lying even if you weren’t. He cleared his throat and continued, “Did you get anything out of the Spivak file?”
Thank you, Maurice. But of course he cared as much as she did. If Closs cracked it—assuming Maurice was telling the truth, and boy wasn’t she getting tired already of caveating her every thought with that clause—then Maurice was as dead as Lucienne.
“We’re working on it.” Closs’s steepled fingers interlaced and dropped together. He looked up, as if glancing over Maurice’s shoulder: something on a wall screen, or his headset, or somebody had come into his office. “No luck identifying a code key yet. Also, I need to see if you can dig up some information for me on what Jeff’s up to.”
“Chairman Greene? You mean, my notional employer?”
“Tell him all about me if that’s how you feel about it,” Closs said. “He’s up to something, and whatever it is, I have a feeling it’s a dealbreaker.”
“Ethics?”
“I think,” Closs said, “I think I shouldn’t offer too many leading comments. Just see if there are any currency transfers, unexplained visitors in the middle of the night. You know what to look for.”
“I do,” Maurice said.
“You’re the best in the business, after all.” Cricket’s chin snapped up at that comment, but of course—Closs didn’t know she was there. “Anything else?”
Maurice nodded. “You wanted to know if we should blame GreenWorld for the recruitment barge explosion.”
“It doesn’t matter so much now, with Spivak dead.”
“It might,” Maurice said. “I don’t think it was them. Mostly a gut feeling, but if they needed a conjure man, and if we’re right about Spivak being the replacement for Tavish…well, why would they need anybody but Kroc?”
“It could have been Kroc.”
“Explosions aren’t his style,” Maurice said. “Too random. Too much collateral damage. I think we’re looking for somebody else. And there’s another piece of evidence.”
“You turned up something about Angley?”
Maurice smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “You might want to double-check and see if she’s really dead, Tim. Because I found a pattern of credits to her accounts that match incidents of sabota
ge and news leaks. She might be your girl.”
“She faked her death?” Closs did not seem to change expression when he was startled—if he was startled. He did, however, get up from behind his desk and begin slowly to pace.
“I’m not prepared to commit to that,” Maurice answered.
Cricket fidgeted. Across the room, Nouel sat like a statue, but his eyes were unfocused. Cricket suspected he was a few hundred light-years away.
“But you’re suspicious.”
“I’m always suspicious,” Maurice answered with a flick of his forefinger against his forehead, as if he were tweaking a nonexistent hat. “Cheerio, boss. Unless you have something else for me?”
“No,” Closs said. “Thanks. Closs out.” His image snapped one-dimensional and went out.
Maurice sat back on his chair. “Fuck,” he said. “I think we are going to have to hack Rim.”
“Not with a bug in my head, we aren’t hacking anything. My motherself is a nasty piece of work.” It was actually a sort of lightning relief to realize she wasn’t exactly who she thought she was. A chance at denial, at a new life, free of guilt.
She hadn’t done those things.
Except she had, hadn’t she? If she was honest? If she accepted responsibility? She hadn’t served the jail time. But legally, she was Moon Morrow.
She caught herself nibbling her nail, and made herself stop.
“Fisher—” Maurice said, and when she looked up she realized he was staring at her. He blinked three times once she met his eyes, and then smiled at her. Cricket realized he’d had her filtered, too, so that his reactions to her presence wouldn’t give anything away to Closs. “Sorry,” he said. “You know, I can go in and look for what she left.”
She let her hands fall to her sides and stood, pacing like Closs. Time to decide. Not about who she was, what she owed.
She wasn’t Moon Morrow. She was Moon Morrow. She wasn’t sure any of it lessened the burden of guilt. Moon Morrow had forked herself in two. But Cricket was a graft on the same root.
That could wait. About Maurice and Huc. Time to pick a side. “If we find it, can we use it to hack into Morrow’s head?”
Maurice smiled like he was sucking ice chips. “Nouel. Can I isolate your entertainment system? Take it offline for a while?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“It should have enough memory to download whatever Fisher’s got in her head,” he said. “And then we can pick it over on a code level.”
“How long will that take?” Nouel sounded more curious than unwilling.
“If we’re lucky, an hour. If we’re not lucky or there’s nothing to find, a month.”
Cricket knocked the back of her hand against a chair arm for attention. “What about me?”
“We purge your system and start over from the ground up,” Nouel said. “We can’t use your backups.”
She scratched her thigh. “I want to start clean. Fresh licenses.”
“Big deal,” Maurice said, with a respectful half-nod. “Can we do this?”
Do I trust you? Cricket wondered. Nouel trusted him. And André trusted Nouel.
And Cricket did not for a minute trust André. But sometimes you had to commit.
“All right,” she said, into the silence in her head.
Maurice tipped his head, his earwire shifted red-green-scarlet. “Excellent. Come on over here, darling, and we’ll see about getting your pretty head scrubbed clean.”
“And then,” Nouel said, “we have an awful lot of work to do.”
André didn’t hear, at first, what caused the frogs to cringe and scatter. The enormous creature they had gathered around submerged abruptly, trailed by ropy stings of algae and bubbles. Mud swirled through viscid water.
André’s shin shot white heat to his groin as he struggled upright, trying not to think about what he’d do if the ranids left him there. There wasn’t anything within reach from which to improvise a crutch. His lacerated back, a minor irritation beside the pain in his leg, flared when he turned, craning to see what was behind him.
He heard the thumping of rotating blades, and knew. Bastards. There was nothing he could do to avoid them. And they’d used him, hadn’t they?
Like a Judas goat.
But then a green-yellow shape trailing slimy greener strings of algae and waterweed charged up the bank in one tremendous leap. Gourami crouched beside André, long arms pulling him out of the stretcher. André knew enough about froggy physiology to know that it must have hurt the ranid when it ducked under his arm and lifted. He felt its protective mucous coating skid and tear, and felt its astonishing strength as it shoved him upright.
And then they were staggering down the bank, toward the water, as three helicopters swept over in formation. No gunfire, not yet, but they were low, bending reeds until they snapped against one another like the sticks of a rattled fan. At least there was no dust, though bits of hurled plant matter whirled around them. André coughed and shielded his eyes.
Gourami staggered, slid. What surprised André most was its silence. A human would have grunted, whimpered, made some small sound of distress. He felt its joints pop through the contact; alien as its strength might be, he was still nearly twice its mass. But it just got under him and heaved.
André helped as he could, using the ranid as a crutch and trying to limit the weight he put on it. It hopped and he hobbled, and the thump of retreating, turning, returning choppers shattered the steaming, insect-stirred stillness.
The bank here, at least, wasn’t covered in wooden knives of broken reeds. André opened his mouth to ask what was going on, closed it again in red frustration. Even if he could get Gourami’s attention and make himself understood, distracting it might get them both killed. And it had no fast way to answer him; he didn’t think either of them wanted to spare the time to type lengthy explanations.
He stumbled gamely along, thought about crawling, decided it would be faster to hop. The splint wouldn’t help him bear any weight; he didn’t dare put the broken leg down. Muscle spasm locked it, anyway. He gritted his teeth and, with intermittent success, tried not to let it drag.
Gourami seemed to be headed for the water, though. Which was smart; less than a meter would protect them from propellant weapons. Less than a meter, and they would be safe.
Pity he couldn’t breathe it. He hoped Gourami remembered that.
There were some reeds standing along the bank. André patted Gourami’s arm as he’d seen the ranids do for attention, and gestured.
Its head didn’t turn, but its eyes swiveled. Then it croaked, a deep rolling resonant sound.
He wasn’t sure if he’d expected it to drag him the length of the bank, across the stinking mudflat, or if he thought it would leave him precariously balanced on one leg while it bounded down to the stems and tore them loose. Instead, it croaked again, urgently, and another weed-dotted head lifted from the water, followed by a lean body strung about with nets.
Tetra.
The second ranid lurched from the water, through splintering plants, and up the bank. Something chattered in the near distance; gunfire, and André sucked in his gut, as if that would make the slightest difference. The old atavism didn’t care, though—and the bullets were aimed somewhere else. He didn’t even see the muzzle flash.
Tetra caught them still ten meters from the water, and so did the second wave of choppers. The downdraft was like a strong hand pushing André down. Bullets smacked around them now, and Tetra—slick, tender-fleshed—dove under his other arm. Gourami and Tetra grasped André each by one elbow, and leaped.
His arms snapped against his shoulder sockets; he would have yelped in pain if he’d had the air to do more than huff. His head jerked back on his neck, whiplash and insulted muscle, but the hurt was nothing to when they hit the water.
It knocked the air from him and spasmed his diaphragm; as if expecting it, Tetra punched him in the back. He gasped, kickstarted, and the ranid shoved a broken r
eed into his hand. One quick desperate breath, that was all, and they were under, muddy water gritty in his eyes. Tetra’s long fingers enfolded his hands, molding them around the reed. He held on somehow, as the ranids pulled him under, turned him bodily, and rolled him onto his back. The water in his ears thrummed with cries and argument. He didn’t understand a note of it, but it beat against his skin until he felt like a sounding chamber, resonating with anger and distress.
But he guessed what Tetra and Gourami meant him to do, and stuffed the end of the reed pipe into his mouth and sucked.
No air.
He might have panicked as the ranids dragged him deeper, but he was too goddamned tired for hysterics. He puffed out, felt whatever was in the reed give way, and blew harder. The air in his lungs was used up anyway.
The plug shot from the reed like a blow-dart.
The next breath came laden with dust and fiber-glass-sharp broken plant. And sweet, sweet moisture-drenched air.
André gasped like a fish, breathed out through his nose because it was faster, dragged at air again. The water was tepid, too close to body temperature to knife shocks of pain through his wounds. But he knew; infection was inevitable, amoebosis likely.
He couldn’t think about that now. He breathed, and let the ranids pull him. Long pulsing strokes kept them moving. André concentrated on breathing, and wished he could ask where they were taking him.
12
GOURAMI SPENT FAR TOO LONG THINKING ABOUT WHAT TO do with the human. But se couldn’t have left him to be shot. Se had brought him to the village. Se had brought him to the greatparent’s attention. Se had left him stranded on the bank.
Se hadn’t expected Tetra to be the one to help. Se hadn’t expected Tetra to crouch beside se, hunkered under the overhang of a bank of reed bound together by cutthroat weed and broken at the root by the hail.
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