by Sage Walker
“But who runs Lisbon?” Paul asked.
“Alan,” Signy said.
“Me?” Alan’s voice asked.
“You’re staying in Lisbon, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Well, the vote goes or it doesn’t. Tanaka has their sales pitch. The room will run itself, unless a sequence crashes, and we can work on that from here.” Jimmy could, anyway. “We’ll help, Alan. We’ll help—we’re right here.”
Alan didn’t say anything. Signy heard him take in a breath.
“Fine, then,” Paul said. “I’ll send you a contract.”
“I don’t recall saying yes to all this,” Alan said.
“You—” Something caught Signy’s eye. “You haven’t said no,” Signy said. In the Taos shadows, Jared sprawled on the banco by the fireplace, his arms folded. The glow from the embers highlighted his cheekbones, the Zuni ring of turquoise and coral on his left hand. He winked at Signy.
Jimmy watched Paul’s screen, unaware; Pilar was stretched out on her back, looking up at the vigas. They didn’t see him. Not yet.
“Janine?” Signy asked. “Hurry, babe.”
TWENTY-NINE
“If you’re going to stick around here, you’ve got to keep up with what’s happening,” Signy whispered to the ghost in the corner. “So file this in your memory. You have a daughter.”
She blinked the ghost away. Jared didn’t flinch when Signy spoke to him, didn’t seem to register what she’d said. But Paul, later, would replay her words.
Jared had a daughter. The child’s existence created uncharted territories, changed the architecture of future spaces. And areas of legal responses surrounded the little girl named Kelan. Paul would explore them, when he heard of her.
Pilar, sprawled on the floor next to Paul’s console, heard Signy’s whisper. “What?” Pilar asked.
“Nothing,” Signy said.
Pilar rolled on her side and stared at her empty plate. She stood, bent to pick up the plate, got Jimmy’s as well, and went off toward the kitchen. Signy retrieved Paul’s dishes from beside his elbow.
On Paul’s flatscreen, the interior of the Siranui’s hangar ran herky-jerky, stopped and then speeded up, the space draped with arcs of chain and the angular geometries of tools. Standing near the sheet metal of the wall, an imaged Alan drew coffee from a dull steel urn. Flick: The scene switched to a pan of the deck, a view from Signy’s cameras as she looked around for Anna.
“It doesn’t look like Cordova’s helo ever came inside the Siranui’s hangar. Not while Signy was looking.” Jimmy had propped his feet up on the desk next to Paul’s flatscreen. He’d found an improbable point of balance with his butt at the edge of a rolling chair, his notepad on his lap, and his chin resting on his parka, which Jimmy had rolled around his neck like some sort of pillow. It kept his head from dropping too far forward, Signy guessed.
“It didn’t,” Signy said. “Cordova came in and left that morning without leaving the pad.”
“San-Li would have hired somebody to louse up his helo,” Paul said. “What do you think, Jimmy?”
“I think if I go crawling around the Siranui’s personnel records one more time, alarms are going to go off clear to Kobe.”
“Let ’em,” Paul said.
Pilar came back from the kitchen, picked up her backpack from the floor, and wandered toward the workroom off the kitchen. Signy heard a click as the lights went on, the hiss of closing draperies. Still holding Paul’s plate—he’d eaten most of the food—Signy followed her.
Pilar dug lumps of colored stone, an assortment of hammers, and sharp steel tools from the depths of her backpack. She scattered them on the scarred wooden table where Jared used to putter. Pilar’s face had that oblivious, faraway look of hers, spaced out and elsewhere.
Wanting comfort, wanting talk, just talk, but Signy said nothing. Shouldn’t it be enough that Pilar had come here, where she didn’t like to be?
Pilar pulled a bubblewrapped cylinder from her backpack and unwrapped a votive candle, one of the fat yellow ones in a glass. This one had a picture of the Virgin on it, done in bright blues and reds. Pilar set it upright and lighted it.
Signy stood in the doorway, quiet. Surprised? Yes, for Pilar never mentioned church when she talked of her childhood. Pilar never went to mass, certainly, and she had a fine cutting skepticism about religion in general. Pilar’s candle-lighting seemed a fumbling, clumsy thing, a return to the half-remembered comforts or pains of childhood.
The tiny light wavered, then steadied. Pilar sat down with her hammers and her stones. The heavy weight of her hair covered her shoulders and veiled her face.
Signy twitched the corner of her eye, looking away from real time and into virtual, hoping Paul had set up a Jared to follow her motions through the house—but she saw only lists of names, the work of Paul’s real time.
Jared wasn’t where Signy needed him to be. Not when she needed him. Jared’s ghost offered no presence, no answers.
The challenge, Signy supposed, was to deal with what was possible. Things To Do; she stacked Paul’s plate in the sink while she began a list—Janine would get here by dusk tomorrow. Jimmy seemed to be taking over the job of interacting with Paul. That would make things better, or worse. For the moment, Signy didn’t give a damn. And what was she supposed to do, for now? Wash dishes?
Fuck that. Signy went back to her own console. To build a structure of a San-Li, to understand her, to know her intimately, for only then could Signy find the special pleasures that would trap San-Li, the private pains.
Staccato glimpses of Edge’s archives returned Signy to a familiar, timeless state, a place in her body called work, a pleasant, righteous measuring out of energy that distanced her from the welter of emotions around her. Here, in the world defined by Signy’s fingers, her eyes, Jared existed as he ever was, in every damned nook and cranny. Of course Jared was here, no ghost, nothing Paul had made to haunt her. Jared was simply here.
These were not photo albums, not flat, static images, not diaries whose words, edited even as they were written, created frames for memory and wishes to alter. Damn it, the spaces Signy entered gave her the breathing, laughing presence of the man himself. Ghost? Jared seemed no more a ghost than—than she was, a younger Signy who lumbered her way through the past, grumbling and worrying. Jared was no more a ghost than Pilar, and perhaps less of one than Paul. The Paul who walked through Signy’s private world seemed more real than the man who sat beside her.
In fleshtime and not three feet away, Paul mumbled something to Jimmy, and they both chuckled.
All of them had accepted Paul as a virtual these past few years, a construct Paul had altered to suit himself, one made to please them. The imagined Paul was a much healthier persona to deal with than the real one, and he was a lot more likable.
What the hell was real around here, what was alive? Signy planned to construct a San-Li Tanaka, a San-Li existent in pixels and bytes, and build her to walk in the Taos house. But would she recognize the girl herself, if San-Li came to the door tonight and asked shelter from the storm?
San-Li, San-Li, where art thou?
—Signy searched for her, found a dull hive of business as usual at Jimmy’s old address for her in the Seychelles, backed up from there to a Tanaka payroll that listed San-Li’s name in Kobe, last year, and dead-ended.
Paul and Jimmy made a lot of noise, getting up for a break. The sound of their steps went toward the kitchen. Cabinet doors opened and closed, chairs scraped.
Where to go from here? Signy could ask Jimmy to upload his interchanges with Evergreen, if he’d saved them. Word frequencies might indicate what bothered San-Li, some hints of her fleshtime life might be buried in there somewhere.
Signy got up and followed the men. Paul, holding a mug of tea in both hands, leaned against the refrigerator. Jimmy sat on the countertop next to the sink. He nodded to Signy and thumped his heels against the cabinets in a slow blues rhythm.
&
nbsp; “We’ve got San-Li’s face,” Jimmy said. “Her speech patterns, such as they were when she talked to Janine and Kazi in Lisbon. The little bit of history Paul found, about how her dad doesn’t seem to like her much. There’s the two guys on the Sirena, but they’re scooting north as fast as they can, and they just aren’t taking calls. I tried ’em.”
“What about Cordova?” Signy asked.
“Cordova was in and out everywhere, and the guy worked cash only, as far as I can tell. He’s got relatives, a big, big family. Checking through them would be a fleshtime job, it looks like. Cordova may not have known anything. What we’re looking for could have happened on that Greek boat, or back in Chile.”
“We may just have to fake it,” Paul said.
“Fake what?” Signy asked.
“A fabricated presentation, a simulation of a crime. I’d rather use the real thing, of course.” Paul looked sad and completely serious.
“This San-Li didn’t give us much to work with,” Jimmy said. “Not good hard copy, anyway. She keeps real quiet, old Evergreen.”
“It wasn’t that I expected her to be running her cameras when she got someone to mess over that helicopter,” Paul said. “But she’s difficult to trace, even on the Siranui. You’d think the ship would run monitors on people, time clocks or something.”
“She said she cleaned fish.…” Something nudged at Signy’s memory, Jared’s walk above the Siranui’s hold, a masked face that looked up to stare at him. San-Li? “Paul? When San-Li called into Lisbon, that’s the only time we’ve seen her, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I’ve seen her somewhere else.”
Signy went back to the studio, Paul and Jimmy behind her. Jimmy carried a bag of trail mix. Well, Signy figured, any calorie is a good calorie right now, I suppose.
—Signy called back the scenes of the Siranui’s hold, the rows of workers, the woman who had stared up at Jared. The eyes might be San-Li’s. Signy splitscreened that face next to the view of San-Li that had appeared on the Lisbon screens after Jared’s death. In the green hood of the protective suit the woman wore, it was so hard to tell if the faces matched.
Signy faded them away and switched to a close-up view of San-Li’s chapped knuckles, the silver letter opener. There. A round red burn on her ring finger, raw and ugly.
“Her hands. She’s hurt her hands. Do you think she could have done the sabotage herself?” Signy asked.
The mark on her finger was a burn, definitely. Signy vanished the hands.
“No.” The fleshtime Paul put his cup down on top of a stack of printout. “We’ll look.”
“Your San-Li may be a little different from the one we’re building,” Jimmy said.
A model, a personality simulacrum to fit into one of Paul’s clever little matrices. “We’ll meld them later,” Signy said. “If we don’t have the real woman, we’ll need a model to predict her reactions, her behaviors. It seems we plan to use her against herself.”
“You got that straight,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t have much to work with. I don’t know her lovers, or how she spends her money. I don’t know what turns her on. Did you save your conversations with Evergreen?” Signy asked.
“Yeah, I did,” Jimmy said. “She was just somebody on the boards, someone friendly. We didn’t talk that much, and it’s all script, anyway. I’ll pull the files for you.”
Jimmy sat at Signy’s console and tapped through old type-screens. “You might want to look at some stuff Pilar found, while I fix a file on Evergreen for you.”
“What stuff?” Signy asked.
“Medical records and stuff.” Jimmy got out of the chair as Signy dived for it.
Medical records. Well, they hadn’t had time to tell her everything. Before Signy left fleshtime, she saw Jimmy settle the bag of trail mix on the desk, close to Paul’s hand. Good work, that.
Medical records and stuff, yeah. What Jimmy sent to Signy’s screen was a list of orders from a pharmacy. No discount house, this; the markup on the drugs was a substantial one.
Human growth hormone, esoteric estrogen analogues; Signy puzzled her way down the list and found antiseptics, heparin. Heparin? To keep a medication port from clogging. And there, orders for replacement catheters.
Intravenous medications, adjusted by daily monitoring of blood levels, this little girl was finely tuned. Growth hormone in chronic doses, her thin, thin face. They—they? Somebody, or San-Li herself, was following a shifting set of longevity regimes that Signy knew quite well; this mix of medications implied a program very similar to the one Signy had researched back in Atlanta. But the regime they’d used had been for lab animals, damn it. Nobody had even thought about testing it on humans.
Semistarvation was part of the routine. The child’s gaunt face suddenly made sense. San-Li was anorexic, or close to it. Had she chosen to starve herself? Or was her hunger a discipline imposed on her from outside?
Other drugs had been ordered at various times, even occasional small doses of amphetamines and antidepressants. So San-Li did get hungry, or wakefulness was needed for long periods, and the tranks suggested temper outbreaks, or anxiety attacks, or other, more subtle manipulations of mood. Signy ran a quick correlation, and yes, the tranks, when they had been used, matched up with increases in circulating progestins. Finely tuned, finely tuned.
Some hospital or research lab had to be doing the blood work to keep this pharmaceutical jigsaw puzzle together. Try private, discreet, try research clinics first—
Try the Index Medicus for longevity research in the past, make it—ten—years, flag it for Japanese researchers, again for Kobe. Go, go, go.
Signy waited, tapping her virtual toes, and found—Well. Stupid (image of heel of hand striking forehead, so Signy did that, thumped herself on the head and groaned), if she’d looked in Tanaka’s home turf first, she might have gotten here a little sooner. The researcher was a D.V.M. What else would she be, working the aquaculture division of Tanaka’s own labs? And there, carefully dated and timed in to the minute, a log, a graph that listed daily weights, blood glucose levels, painstaking measurements of free radicals (that list dropped after a five-year run), circulating steroids of all varieties and fractions. Filed as Cyprinus carpio #14, heaven help us, a carp. A forty-kilo carp.
Well, what the hell? Fish had this funny tendency to be functional immortals.
Functional immortals. This San-Li was no unplanned child. Somewhere, somewhere, there would be records of careful embryo selection, of genetic screenings, primitive though they may have been when this child had been designed.
A little wave of pity bubbled up from somewhere, a small voice that said poor baby. Its echoes vanished in a greater pool of speculations, fear, and a puzzled feeling of envy.
A thirty-year treaty, to such a woman, would seem so short. Poor fool, did San-Li think to live until the seas restocked themselves, the species changed to thrive on toxins and oil sludge? Did she plan to set up great, slow engines in the seas to cleanse them?
How much would San-Li fear injury, accident, death by violence? The imminent chances of sudden death on that harvester ship must have terrified her beyond all reason. But San-Li was young. She was human, mostly, and still adolescent, therefore reckless. San-Li would be incapable of believing that she could ever die.
Paul and Jimmy were close enough to touch, and worlds away.
[Signy] Paul?
“What?” Paul answered in an ordinary way, in his ordinary voice in the fleshtime present.
“She’s an immortal. I mean, San-Li’s got a chance at a long, long life.”
“Don’t we all?” Paul asked.
“Oh, shit. I mean, San-Li’s been altered in major ways. Aging is going to be a long, slow process. I’m talking a really good chance for two hundred years, here. Maybe longer. Maybe longer.”
“Really?” Paul folded his arms and nodded. “If this is so—if San-Li lives far beyond our deaths, she will have many, many years
in which to remember us.” The smile on Paul’s face was a ugly thing, a primate threat.
“What are you planning?”
“I would like for her to know her victims. Better than she’s ever known a lover, or ever will.”
“Jared…”
“Jared what?”
“He wouldn’t like it, Paul.”
“Don’t speak for him, Signy.”
Jimmy, make him stop. But Jimmy was elsewhere, goggled and remote. “Pilar?” Signy whispered. Interrupt this, Pilar, distract Paul, find a way to call back the sane parts of him.
—Signy entered Pilar’s vision, Pilar in Jared’s Taos workshop. Pilar scrutinized the lump of red, rough coral she held and turned in her hands. She had shaped a claw, roughly carved, incomplete. Its talons splayed wide, grasping for something just out of reach.
“My feelings for Janine are far more complex than even you might have imagined,” Pilar said, speaking to someone else. “There exist some forms of love that physical intimacy can destroy. Such a love is mine for Janine.” Pilar’s voice pleaded with her listener.
“I know,” Jared said. Jared sat at the scarred, battered pine worktable. Pilar gazed at the smooth strong veins tracing their outlines on the backs of his hands. The votive light’s yellow flame wavered, flickered, steadied. Pilar reached to touch Jared. His hands, their warmth, their strength, encircled hers; Signy felt their touch when Pilar did. Signy wanted to draw away, to vanish the sensations, but Pilar’s calm repose stayed safe in Jared’s touch, yes.
El Dia de los Muertos. The altars would be draped in marigolds, bright gold to honor the dead. Pilar’s yellow candle glowed with a paler light. It was not a tradition Signy knew, and she doubted Pilar knew or cared to know its origins. Pilar was Anglo, and Pilar carried genes from the Pueblos and from the Spaniards that had come north out of Mexico, fleeing the Inquisition or seeking land and wealth.
Rituals overlap, resonate; genes, even in those isolated early centuries in the New World, always managed to mingle. Far to the south, in a day of bright and pleasant sunshine and on through a torchlit night in November, the descendants of the Aztecs still went out to picnic at gravesides. Bakers made sweet pastries to honor the dead, colored with happy pinks and bright oranges, gay little creations with explicit ribs and skeletal grins made of sugar frosting. In that worldview, some people of one’s acquaintance happened to be alive, some happened to be dead. All of them enjoyed company. Es verdad.