Gold's Price

by Rich X Curtis

  “Suppose so,” he said. “If I’m around that long.”

  She changed the subject. “They’re in orbit, Carter.” She was sure of it. “So that’s where we’re going.”

  “Orbit?” He looked at her, around them, at the Dutchman’s puny cabin. “In this?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Gold looked at Li as she leaned against the bars of the cage. Why a cage? Whose idea was it? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Li looked back at her. Feral, Gold thought. Raised by scavengers in a tribe ruled by custom and not law. Probably destined for breeding, but her albinism had so far protected her from this fate. Gold had seen most human patterns before, and tribal trade in nubile women was nothing new to her. It was frightening to the girls, but most of the things people did to girls were frightening. People were terrible. Usually men. But women could also be beasts. She had been often enough.

  “Uncle,” she said, “I have questions.”

  “Ask your questions,” Uncle’s voice had boomed out of Truck’s grille, loud enough to carry over the rumble of his treads on the stony ground. Behind them, parallel tracks of chewed up mud revealed crumbled masonry, asphalt, concrete, and sometimes crumpled metal that looked like cars or median barriers. An urban landscape, just below the surface.

  “You were a policeman,” Gold asked. “In life.”

  “Yes, I was a detective inspector sergeant in the Ministry of Public Security’s economic criminal investigation bureau,” Uncle said, without hesitation. Everything he said was without hesitation. Gold suspected this was no accident. She distrusted glibness. People who answered too quickly were usually liars. People lied. Gold could smell it on them, but Uncle, he was something new. Like that damned Alpha.

  “And when you became a machine,” she asked, “did you continue in this same work?”

  “Yes,” he said, again quickly. “With a much wider purview.”

  “Wider how?” Gold asked. Li was listening to their words and stealing glances at her from time to time. Gold let her gaze slide over Li. The girl was the color of milk and had tied a ragged scrap of cloth, rough spun, over her in the cage. The sun through the reddish-brown cloth gave her a dusky, copper glow. It was warm, and they had both stripped down to, well, their underwear in Gold’s case, black boy shorts she had been wearing for too many days straight. Li wore a gauzy scrap of gray cloth looped under her breasts and tied behind her neck and Gold’s other pair of underwear.

  They had fascinated Li and she asked, through Truck, to try them. Gold had smiled and agreed. It was easy, she felt, to smile at Li, at her childlike discovery of something as simple as a pair of underwear, probably made within a thousand miles of where they were now, but a thousand years before. Li had asked Gold to help her tie her bra behind her neck, which Gold suspected was clumsy seduction, but she had gone along with the game, pulling the two strands of cloth tight so they had lifted Li’s breasts high. Then, with a mmmmh, like this, she had loosened them, and Li had nodded to her, blushing scarlet under her snow-white cheeks. Gold had let her fingers linger on Li’s neck for the briefest of moments before she had moved back to her spot on her side of the cage.

  You are a dirty old she-goat, Gold told herself. But there was no way around it. Silver would have chided her, but Silver was no different. Gold knew Silver, how she could talk herself into any seduction given enough time. They were different, she and Silver, and there was truly no getting around that. How could they be, being so old? Seduction was a matter of time, usually, and she had time. Anyone was aeons younger than her, so there was no way for her to not be a crone in a young woman’s body. But she could pretend, and that was usually fine. For a while.

  Uncle was speaking. “…given responsibility to assess economic criminal activity both inside and outside of the country. This was more a matter of attempting to follow leads into systems I did not have keys for, which required coordination with superiors in various departments responsible for intrusion and specialized data extraction.”

  “So,” Gold said, “you were a spy?” She smiled at Li, who had shifted in her darkened corner, uncurling her legs, and pulling her top up tight under her breasts. Sweat glistened on her belly. The day was growing warm. Gold had shed her top, and Li had made a little noise when she did so, but had not followed suit and pretended indifference. Her eyes, though, told Gold a different story.

  “I was, of necessity, a spy,” Uncle said. “I needed to protect the state from those who sought to defraud her, and also to advance the interests of the state.”

  “Who were these criminals who defrauded the state?” Gold asked, though again she suspected she knew the answer already. It was good to hear from Uncle, his perspective. If he could be trusted.

  “Tax cheats. Embezzlers. Residence permit violations. Sometimes industrial crimes, such as hiding carbon tax duties or selling counterfeit goods on the black market.” Gold could almost hear him shrug. Li rolled onto her side, face towards Gold, to make herself more comfortable. Gold traced the flare of her hip with her eye. Li’s eyes watched her, a hint of a smile on her lips. They were very pale, those eyes.

  “And did you hunt criminals solely?” Gold asked. “Any Party members among those you prosecuted?”

  “The Party is of the people, and the people come in all forms.” He sounded aggrieved.

  “Any members of high rank, among those? Leadership cadre?” Gold yawned. She knew there would be, of course, there always were. Some, at least. And there was always crime. People were sneaky and did crimes. The trick was, she knew, to accept some level of abuse, but make the occasional example.

  “A few. It was rare,” Uncle answered, a note of prickly condescension in his amplified voice. “Later, though, the Party had virtualized. Leadership was cloud-based. Implemented via my superiors, who presented to me as very serious, dedicated public servants.”

  So, it made sense. Offer people long life as intelligent systems inside a vast machine, especially powerful people who knew their days were numbered, and they would leap at the chance. Kill for it, even. Immortality? Even as machines, it would be attractive. It made her want to vomit.

  They camped that night on a low hilltop which seemed natural. It was overgrown with low, scrubby pines and bramble, but Truck cleared a path to a bald patch near the summit, tearing out trees too big for him to roll over. Gold and Li made a fire, even though it was a warm night. They cooked dinner and practiced talking together.

  Gold had learned the word for firewood, and for water, for the sky and the stars. Li delighted when she learned a new word and pronounced it correctly. She clapped her hands and nodded. “Very good,” she said in English, her new phrase.

  Pretty, Gold had taught her, picking a flower. Showing her. And Li blushed again, grasping her meaning.

  Gold spread her blankets out beside the fire that night. The embers were dying and it seemed a waste to build it higher. The night was warm.

  “Uncle,” Gold asked, “can you hear us if we turn you off? The box?”

  “No,” he answered. “I will go into a kind of standby mode, throttled down to minimize processing and conserve battery power. I cannot recover by myself though, so if you need me or Truck, you must turn me back on.”

  So, later, after they had eaten their rice and vegetables, cooked with a little rabbit over a fire, she asked Li for Uncle’s box. She found the switch and, not warning him, switched it off. As she did this, she wondered at her actions. She wanted, of course, to be unwatched and alone in her thoughts, at least for a while. Or alone. Or, just unwatched. Li watched her with big round eyes, bright in the firelight. Not alone, at least.

  “Off?” she asked. Gold nodded. Li nodded back and ducked her head a little swooping gesture, almost a bow. They watched the sky for a while. There were lights there, moving among the stars. Satellites, some quite large, Gold thought.

  “Lights,” Gold said to her, knowing she didn’t understand. “Satellites. Big ones, some of them. There are pro
bably people up there, watching us.” It was, she realized, a very real possibility. Probability, she realized, if anybody up there had sensors sufficient to track things like Truck. He had some sort of reactor powering him, Uncle had said, and his shielding would be a compromise of weight vs protection. They could be seen, she knew, if anyone up there was watching.

  “People,” she continued as if Li could understand her, “are living up there. Doing stuff, while we’re down here. Why do you think that is?”

  Li jabbered at her, in Chinese or whatever passed for Chinese these days. It was like a stream of sounds, sibilant and soft. Water over smooth stones. Gold looked at her. “I like your voice,” she told Li, who paused and looked over at her across their little fire, on their little hilltop above a wide, dark land below. Li smiled back at her.

  Li pointed at the sky. “Lights,” she said, jabbing a finger at the sky. Spreading her fingers at Gold. Ten fingers, her hands clenched and opened three, four times.

  “Many lights,” Gold agreed, nodding to her in the darkness.

  Li held up one finger and pointed. Low on the horizon.

  “Ah, yes, the big one. I have seen it.” There was one slow-moving dot, which seemed to be larger than the others, so it could have been bigger or closer. Gold couldn’t tell.

  They pretended to sleep, later, like any other night, bedding down apart from each other, but only by a few feet, sharing the fire. Gold wrapped her blanket around herself. You are acting like a shy virgin, she jeered at herself. There had been a time where Li would not have been safe around Gold. In danger, really. But that side of her had gone, it seemed, gone with her gods. Poof. She was different; she decided. She would be different, she told herself. Not like before. She was uncertain around Li, which scared her. She didn’t want Li not to like her, she realized. She didn’t want that at all.

  After an hour or so of listening for Li to sleep, she heard the rustle of her movement. The sound she had hoped for. Li, pausing briefly as she knelt up on her blankets. Gold saw her in the dim light of the dying fire, shrug out of her top, and peel down the boy shorts. She was very white. Porcelain. She knelt on her blankets for long seconds. Gold could hear her breathing, felt like she could feel her heart beat across the distance between them. Then, as if reaching a decision, a careful, deliberate decision, Li moved and came to her.

  Chapter Twenty

  They did not encounter any storms over the Pacific. The clouds they saw were some sort of local disturbance caused, Silver suspected, by the Bucket, as she’d dubbed the thing. That thing, swooping down from orbit, would heat by its passage through the atmosphere, and throw off a lot of vaporized seawater every time it came around in its wide, sweeping arc. The Bucket transferred much of that heat to the water and surrounding air with every scoop. She wondered how much water actually made it into orbit. Not a lot, but they might not need a lot, as long as there was a steady stream of it.

  They. Who were they? Someone living in orbit needed water. And they had a thirst deep enough to justify some pretty impressive infrastructure. The atmosphere had water vapor, but perhaps that was too thin to harvest reliably. Or someone wanted to prove they could do this. Without knowing who it was, it was hard to say much about them other than they planned big, and built big.

  Dutchman arrived off the Asian coast with the dawn. Silver smelled it before she saw it, earthy and loamy. As the sun rose behind them, she saw a dark line on the horizon. Some seabirds, big white gulls, flew by to inspect them. Carter was asleep, and she considered waking him, but he was often surly.

  When they reached land, it was miles and miles of swamp. She saw a few signs of human habitation, but they were rare and hard to get a sense of. A square outline in the overgrowth here, a few piles of what looked like collapsed buildings a few miles away. Straight lines through the swamp that were likely old roads or railway beds that vegetation and weather hadn’t churned up yet. The coast looked like Florida, mostly gone under the waves. She didn’t know where they were.

  Carter came through to the cockpit. “Land ho,” he said softly. He looked down and behind them to the open sea. “Must have hit land overnight?”

  “About dawn,” she said. “Smelt it as we got closer. Rotting stuff.”

  “Looks like lots of that about down there.” He flicked the map she spread on the dash with a finger. “Figure out where we are?”

  She shook her head. “Coastlines are all different now. Flooded, eroded. Everything is different now.”

  “You can say that again,” he said.

  “Everything is different now,” she said.

  “It is to laugh,” he said. “That’s a dad joke if I ever heard one. And I did. From my dad. Might have used that one myself, once upon a time.”

  “I remember a comedian,” she said. “From the fifties, who used to say that. It was his line.”

  “Must be where my dad got it from.” He looked at her. “You were in Russia back then, right?”

  “Da,” she said. “In Moscow. And other places. The Americans loved their radio, and part of my job was to learn English.”

  “But you knew English already, right?” He looked at her, puzzled.

  She inclined her head. “Good memory,” she said. “I pretended to learn. Not that hard.” She smiled at him. “I’m a good liar.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. Then he jerked, doing a double-take. He pointed. “That’s a boat down there, a sailboat.”

  And so, she saw, there was. In a wide channel of the swamp, which appeared to be more of a proper river delta than flooded landscape. The delta was wide, hundreds of miles wide. A big river. Yangtze? Or as she hoped, the Pearl. The Pearl would put them directly on her dead-reckoned course.

  The boat was small, close to fifty feet long, wide in the belly and junk-rigged, with a low, ribbed sail. A familiar pattern to Silver for this part of the world. The little ship, with its buff-colored, batten-braced sail, made her heart ache. She remembered entering the great port in Shanghai, crowded with boats like these. She’d worn silk, then, and been in a sedan chair. Her husband? He’d been a magistrate of some sort. Puffed up with it. She’d been in China for a long time, back then.

  She snapped out of her reverie. Centuries ago, she told herself. They were all dust even before you came to this place. Long since dust. Focus.

  “They will know where we are,” she said, nosing them down and to port in a wide arc, set to intersect with the boat. Dutchman swayed and came around.

  “How will you ask them?” Carter asked.

  “I’ll say, ‘What river is this, my friends? We are a bit lost,’” she said, in Chinese. She smiled at him.

  His eyebrows went up. “A woman of surprises,” he said, looking at her.

  She smiled and concentrated on nosing the Dutchman on the right course. A delicate trick, lining up the boat and the little blimp to intersect. The boat pilots didn’t seem to change their course, which helped. But then, there wasn’t much room to maneuver on the river.

  She spoke the language. She’d lived in China for several generations under the Chu and then the Ming emperors. A mostly happy time for her, as far as she remembered it. China was big, almost too big to take in, even then. Her main pose in that life had been as a scholar and academic, she recalled, or living at the intersections of administrative power and intellectual life. She’d even written poetry. She wanted to laugh out loud at the thought of that.

  The Chu court had viewed her as an exotic. She was, with her pale eyes and dark skin, too unique and memorable. And she was pretty; she knew. Even her Murta chided her for that. Too pretty, too pretty, she would cackle. In China, it meant she was something to own. Rich and powerful men pursued her. A few powerful women too. In those circles, there had been a lot of social maneuvering, all the time, one faction after another. She never stayed too long in one place. But China was big.

  She’d fallen into an old pattern she knew well. Become a useful tool of a powerful man. Control that man. Liv
e long enough to engineer a departure, preferably into another province or country. She’d been a wife, a woman and a witch here in China, like that. Long ago and far away. She folded this, these memories, away for another time. Maybe.

  She brought the blimp in behind the little ship, about a hundred feet up. As she descended, she watched them on the ship, scrambling around. On the rear deck some sailors were grappling with what looked like a cannon, which she did not like at all. But it was big and heavy and it didn’t look like it would elevate enough to shoot at her.

  She switched on the loudspeaker and spoke into the microphone. “We are unarmed and peaceful. We bring greetings from the great western empire of California. Who rules this land?”

  She grinned at Carter. Even though he didn’t understand, he saw she was enjoying this. He glanced out the window.

  “Some of those guys on deck have guns,” he said. “Like, musket-looking guns.”

  “Fuck,” she accidentally said out loud, into the microphone. Her mouth dropped open, that she had done that. He smiled at her quizzically.

  She looked down, over the dash. “Rifles, that’s bad.”

  “You should take her up. This basket is fiberglass and some kind of cardboard laminate. It’s tissue paper.” He looked back out over the dash, frowning.

  “But they haven’t answered my question yet,” she said. “I need information.” She glanced at him. “We, whatever.”

  “They’re yelling something,” Carter said.

  “No way we will hear them,” she said. She looked at him. “You fly.”

  “Me?” He looked at her like she was nuts.

  “I’m going down there, to talk with them.” She peeled off her jacket, checked her pocket inventory, nothing electronic. “This makes it go forward, left and right like a car, up and down here. This is speed, too, but you don’t want that. Pick me up from the river. I will leave the rescue cable out; it’s a hundred feet long. You pick me up.”