It wasn’t much of a plan, but Jack couldn’t think of anything better. He was pretty sure that Algren Rees wasn’t any kind of spy, but he’d developed a curious feeling of kinship with the man during the time he’d spent trailing him around the chambers of old Xamba. Yet although he’d spent a couple dozen hours in his company, he still knew almost nothing about him. It had become a matter of pride to find out who Algren Rees really was, and why he had chosen to come here, and live amongst the Outers.
When they met up early the next morning, Mark wanted to know what was in the box Jack was clutching to his chest. Jack told him that it was a foolproof way of keeping the man busy.
“I’ll tell you what it is if you’ll tell me how you’re going to break into his apartment.”
“I’m not going to break in,” Mark said with a sly smile. “Are you sure you can keep him busy for half an hour?”
“Absolutely,” Jack said, tapping the top of the plastic box, feeling what was inside stir, a slow, heavy movement that subsided after a moment.
Actually, he wasn’t sure at all. He’d slept badly, his mind spinning, tracing and retracing every part of a plan that seemed increasingly silly and flimsy. Two hours later, when Algren Rees finally left his apartment and he followed him to the cafe, the muscles of Jack’s legs felt watery and his stomach was doing somersaults. But it was too late to back out. As Jack skimmed up a short ropeway to the cafe, he knew that Mark would be breaking into the apartment.
The cafe was little more than a bamboo counter in the shade of a huge fig tree, with half a dozen stools, a hot plate, and a hissing coffee machine that the owner, a very tall, incredibly skinny woman with long snow-white hair, had built herself, using a design centuries old. The food was prepared from whatever was in season in the garden spread on either side of the fig tree, and whatever came in trade—the citizens of old Xamba had a complicated economy based on barter of goods and services.
It was the middle of the morning. Algren Rees and Jack were the only customers. Jack set the plastic box on the counter and asked the owner for an orange juice, then turned to the man and said as casually as he could manage that he’d heard that he treated sick pets.
“Who told you that?”
Algren Rees, hunched over a bowl of porridge flecked with nuts and seeds, didn’t look up when he spoke. He had a husky voice and a thick accent: the voice of a villain from some cheap virtuality.
“She did,” Jack said, nodding to the owner of the cafe, who was filling a blender with orange segments and a handful of strawberries.
“I guess I did,” the woman said with cheerful carelessness, and switched on the blender. She’d braided her hair into a pigtail that twitched down her back as she moved about in the narrow space behind the counter.
“Stop by my apartment when you’ve had your breakfast,” Algren Rees told Jack. “It’s just around the corner, down the ropeway, past a clump of black bamboo. The one with the red door.”
He was eating his porridge slowly but steadily. In a few minutes he would be finished. He’d walk back to his apartment, find that red door open . . .
Jack pushed the box an inch along the counter and said, “I have it right here.”
“So I see,” Algren Rees said, although he still hadn’t looked up. “And I have my breakfast right here, too.”
“It belongs to my little sister,” Jack said, the little lie sliding out with surprising ease. He added, “She loves it to bits, but we’re scared that it’s dying.”
“Why don’t you take a look, Al,” the woman said as she placed the bulb of orange juice in front of Jack. “The worst that can happen is that it’ll improve your karma.”
“It will need much more than fixing a pet to do that,” Algren Rees said, smiling at her.
The woman smiled, too, and Jack was reminded of the way his parents shared a private joke.
“All right, kid,” Algren Rees said. “Show me what you got.”
It was a mock turtle, a halflife creature that produced no waste or unpleasant odors and needed only a couple of hours of trickle charge and a cupful of water a day. It had large, dark, soulful eyes, a soft yellow beak, a shell covered in pink fur, and a fifty-word vocabulary. Although it didn’t belong to Jack’s wholly imaginary little sister but to the youngest daughter of Jack’s neighbors, it really was sick. It had grown slow and sluggish, its fur was matted and threadbare, its eyes were filmed with white matter, and its breath was foully metallic.
Algren Rees studied it for a moment, then took a diagnostic pen from one of the many pockets of his brocade waistcoat, lifted the mock turtle from the box and turned it upside down, and plugged the instrument into the socket behind its front leg.
“Tickles,” the turtle complained, working its stubby legs feebly.
“It’s for your own good,” Algren Rees told it. “Be still.”
He had small, strong hands and neatly trimmed fingernails. There were oval scars on the insides of his wrists; he’d had neural sockets once upon a time, the kind that interface with smart machinery. He squinted at the holographic readout that blossomed above the shaft of the diagnostic pen, then asked Jack, “Do you know what a prion is?”
Jack’s mind went horribly blank for a moment; then a fragment of a biology lesson surfaced, and he grabbed at it gratefully. “Proteins have to fold up the right way to work properly. Prions are proteins that fold up wrongly.”
Algren Rees nodded. “The gene wizard who designed these things used a lot of freeware, and one of the myoelectric proteins has a tendency to turn prions. That’s what’s wrong with your sister’s pet. It’s a self-catalyzing reaction—do you know what that means?”
“It spreads like a fire. Prions turn ordinary proteins into more prions.”
Algren Rees unplugged the diagnostic pen and settled the mock turtle in the box. “The myoelectric proteins are what powers it. When they fold the wrong way they can no longer hold a charge, and when enough have folded wrongly, it will die.”
“Can you fix it?”
Algren Rees shook his head. “The best thing would be to put it to sleep.”
He looked genuinely sorry, and Jack felt a wave of guilt pass through him. Right now, Mark was breaking into the man’s apartment, rifling through his possessions . . .
“If you like, I can do it right now,” Algren Rees said.
“I’ll have to tell my sister first.”
Algren Rees shrugged and started to push away from the counter, saying, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, kid.”
“Wait,” Jack said desperately, knowing that Mark must still be in the apartment. Adding, when Algren Rees looked at him, “I mean, I want to ask you, why is someone like you living here?”
“Why does who I am have anything to do with where I live?”
There was a sudden sharpness in the man’s voice.
“Well, I mean, you’re an incomer. From Earth,” Jack said, feeling the heat of a blush rise in his face. “And incomers, they all live in the new city, don’t they? But you live here, you sell herbs . . .”
“You seem to know an awful lot about me, kid. Why the interest?”
“I saw you at the produce market,” Jack said, blushing harder, certain that he’d been caught out.
Algren Rees studied him for a moment, pinching the point of his neat black beard between finger and thumb. Then he smiled and said, “I had the feeling I’d seen you before. You like the market, huh?”
“It’s one of my favorite places in the old city.”
“And you like the old city?”
Jack nodded.
“Most incomers don’t much care for it.”
Jack nodded again.
“So maybe we have something in common, you and I. Think about it, kid,” Algren Rees said. “If you can figure it out, stop by my stall sometime. But right now I have an appointment to keep.”
The woman behind the counter asked him to have a good thought on her behalf, and then he was skimming away. Not toward his
apartment, but in the opposite direction, toward the chute that dropped to the floor of the chamber.
Jack didn’t dare ask the woman (who refused his offer to pay for his juice, telling him that he could bring her some sour oranges next time he visited the produce market) where Algren Rees was headed, who he was going to meet. As he set off after the man, he called Mark, told him about the conversation, told him that he believed that Algren Rees was going to meet someone. Mark said that he’d catch up, and ten minutes later arrived breathless and excited at the canalside jetty just as Algren Rees was climbing into one of the dinghies that ferried people around the city’s waterways.
“He’s a spy, all right,” he told Jack.
“You found something. What did you find?”
Mark patted the pouch of his jumper. “I’ll show you after we get going.”
There were several high-sided dinghies waiting at the jetty. Jack and Mark jumped into one, and Mark stuck something in a slot in the fat sensor rod that stuck up at its prow and ordered it to follow the boat that had just left.
As their dinghy headed toward the tunnel that linked the chamber with its neighbor, rising and falling on the tall, sluggish, low-gravity waves that rolled along the canal, Jack said, “That’s how you got into his apartment, isn’t it? You used that card on the lock.”
He was sitting in the stern, the plastic box with the mock turtle inside it on his knees.
Mark, standing at the prow with one hand on top of the sensor rod, said, “Of course I did.”
“I suppose you stole it.”
“No one stole anything,” Mark said. “I borrowed my mother’s card last night, and Sky cloned it.”
“If she finds out—”
“As long as I don’t get into trouble, my parents don’t care what I do. They’re too busy with their jobs, too busy advancing their careers, too busy making money,” Mark said. He had his back to Jack, but Jack could hear the bitterness in his voice. “Which is fine with me, because once they make enough, we’ll leave this rotten little ball of ice and go back to Earth.”
There was a short silence. Jack was embarrassed, feeling that he’d had an unwanted glimpse of his friend’s true feelings through a crack in his armor of careless toughness. At last, he said, “If we prove that Algren Rees really is a spy, your parents will be proud of you.”
Mark turned around and said carelessly, “Oh, he’s a spy, all right. Guess what I found in his apartment?”
It was the kind of question you were bound to fail to answer correctly, so Jack shrugged.
Mark, smiling a devilish smile, reached into the pouch of his jumper and drew out a small silvery gun.
Jack was shocked and excited. “Is it real?”
“Of course it is. And it’s charged, too,” Mark said, pointing to a tiny green light that twinkled above the crosshatched grip.
He explained that it was a railgun that used a magnetic field to fire metal splinters tipped with explosive or toxin, and showed Jack the Navy sigil stamped on top of its reaction chamber.
“If he’s a spy, why does he have a Navy sidearm?” Jack said.
“Maybe he was in the Navy before he became a spy. Or he killed someone in the Navy, and kept this as a souvenir,” Mark said.
Discovering the gun had made him bold and reckless. He talked about catching Algren Rees in the middle of some act of sabotage, about arresting him and forcing him to tell everything about the conspiracy in which he was clearly involved.
Although Jack was excited, too, he could see that his friend was getting carried away. “This doesn’t change our plan,” he said. “We follow the man and see what he gets up to, and then we decide what to do.”
Mark shrugged and said blithely, “We’ll see what we’ll see.”
“We shouldn’t just charge in,” Jack said. “For one thing, if he really is a spy, he’s dangerous. Spies were hardwired with all kinds of wild talents.”
“If you’re scared, you can get off the boat anytime you want.”
“Of course I’m not scared,” Jack said, even though he was, more than he cared to admit. “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful.”
Algren Rees’s dinghy stopped three times, dropping people off and picking up others, before it headed down a long transparent tunnel, with Mark and Jack’s dinghy following a couple hundred meters behind it. The tunnel was laid along the edge of a steep cliff, with a stunning view of the crater. It was the middle of Rhea’s night. Saturn hung full and huge overhead in the black sky like God’s own Christmas ornament, the razor-thin line of his rings stretching out on either side of his banded face, his smoggy light laid across terraced icefields. Jack leaned back, and for the ten minutes it took to traverse the tunnel was lost in wonder at the intricate beauty of the gas giant’s yellow and dirty-white and salmon-pink bands, their frills and frozen waves, forgetting all about the gun in Mark’s pouch, forgetting all about following Algren Rees.
At the end of the tunnel, the canal entered a skinny lake pinched between two steep slopes of flowering meadows and stands of trees and bamboos. It was the city’s cemetery, where bodies were buried in soil and trees planted over them, so that their freight of carbon and nitrogen and phosphorous and other useful elements could reenter the loop of the city’s ecosystem.
It was a quiet, beautiful place, artificially lit in the even golden tones of a late summer afternoon. On one steep slope was the black pyramid, hewn from crystalline iron mined from the heart of an asteroid, that commemorated those who had died in accidents during the construction of the old city; on the other was a slim white column topped by an eternal blue flame, the monument to the citizens of Xamba who had been killed during the Quiet War. For although the city had remained neutral, more than a thousand of its citizens had died because they’d been trapped in sieges in rebellious cities, or in ships crippled by neutron lasers, microwave bursters, and EMP mines. Apart from these two monuments, and the bone-white paths that wandered here and there, the woods and meadows seemed untouched by human hands, a tame wilderness where birds and cat-sized deer and teddy bear—sized pandas roamed freely.
Algren Rees and two women disembarked at a jetty of black wood with a red-painted Chinese arch at one end. The two women went off along the lakeshore; Algren Rees started up a steep path that bent around a grove of shaggy cypress trees. As soon as their dinghy nudged the jetty, Mark sprang out, bounded through the arch, and set off up the path after Algren Rees. Jack had to hurry to catch up with him. They went around the cypress grove, climbed a ropeway alongside a tiny stream that ran over white rocks speckled with chunky black shards of shock quartz, followed Algren Rees as he cut through a belt of pines.
Beyond the trees, a lumpy heath of coarse tussock grass and purple heather and clumps of flowering gorse rose in steep terraces to meet the edge of the chamber’s curved blue roof. The flame-topped white column of the monument to Xamba’s war dead stood halfway between the pines and the painted sky. Algren Rees stood in front of it, still as a statue, his bald head bowed.
Crouched behind a pine tree, Jack and Mark discussed what they’d do when Algren Rees’s coconspirator appeared, agreeing that they might have to split up, follow the men separately, and meet up again later. But no one came. Big silver and gold butterflies tumbled over each other above a clump of gorse; rabbits emerged from their burrows and began to nibble at the grass. At last, Algren Rees turned from the monument and moved on up the slope, silhouetted against the solid blue sky for a moment when he reached the top, then dropped out of sight.
Rabbits leaped away in huge, graceful arcs as Jack and Mark followed the man. Jack still hadn’t quite mastered the art of moving quickly in low gravity, and Mark outpaced him at once, making a bounding run up the rough slope, disappearing between rocks spattered with orange lichens. Jack hauled himself through the rocks, discovered a narrow stairway down to the floor of a narrow gully, and saw Algren Rees and Mark facing each other in front of a steel door set in a wide frame painted with
yellow-and-black warning chevrons—the entrance to an airlock. Mark was pointing the pistol at Algren Rees’s chest, but the stocky man was ignoring him, looking instead at Jack as he came down the stairs, saying mildly, “Tell your friend he has made a mistake.”
“Kneel down,” Mark said. He was wavering like a sapling in a high wind, but he held the pistol steady, bracing his right wrist with his left hand. “Kneel down and put your hands on your head.”
Algren Rees didn’t move, saying, “I believe that is mine. How did you get it?”
“Just kneel down.”
“I must suppose that you broke into my apartment while your friend”—he looked at Jack again, a sharp, unfriendly look—”kept me busy. What is this about? What silly game are you playing?”
“It’s no game,” Mark said. “We know you’re a spy.”
Algren Rees laughed.
“Shut up!”
Mark screamed it so loudly it echoed off the blue sky curving overhead.
Jack, clutching the plastic box to his chest, frightened that his friend would shoot Algren Rees there and then, said, “You said that you had an appointment with someone. Who is it?”
“Is that what this is about? Yes, I visit someone. I visit her every Monday. Everyone knows that.” Algren Rees looked at Mark and said, “Hand over the pistol, kid. Give it to me before you get into trouble.”
“You’re a spy,” Mark said stubbornly. “I’m arresting you. Kneel down—”
There was a blur of movement, a rush of air. Mark was knocked into Jack, they both fell down, and Algren Rees was standing a yard away, the pistol in his hand. He was sweating and trembling lightly all over, like a horse that had just run the hardest race of its life. He stared at the two boys, and Jack felt a spike of fear cleave right through him, thinking that the man was going to shoot them and dump their bodies in some deep crevasse outside. But then the man tucked the pistol in the waistband of his shorts and said, “My nervous system was rewired when I was in the Navy. A long time ago, but it still works. Go home, little boys. Go back to your brave new city. Never let me see you again, and I won’t tell anyone about this. But if I find you following me again, I will have a long hard talk with your parents, and with the police, too. Go!”
The Starry Rift Page 34