by Sage Walker
“Pilar? Signy is here,” Jared said.
“Why do you hide?” Pilar asked, looking up toward the studio speaker. “It’s only Jared—”
Signy drew away, leaving Pilar’s presence, Pilar’s world of malleable gems and waking dreams. Signy closed down her console and fled from the familiar touch of its keys.
She was left with the fleshtime studio, the eerie stillness of predawn, the quiet, fidgety realities of Jimmy and Paul. Their company was that of zombies; they had gone away into their separate and shared closed worlds again, back into places Signy couldn’t bear to enter.
She had to get away. Why had she wanted to bring these strangers here? Signy wanted, very much, to go home. Home?
Signy pulled her headset over her eyes.
—Signy paced the familiar corridors that spanned the world and listened to androgynous, calm voices listing the day’s events. The world went about the business of murders, brush-fire wars, and water riots. Same as it ever was.
THIRTY
In the emptiness, icescapes formed, perfect, pristine.
Signy fought for balance. Bitter snow found the top of her boot and melted, burning, against her ankle.
Signy was utterly alone. Her huddled, tiny shape marked a central point in an infinity of windswept snow and howling winds. Above her arched a dome of hazy sky that diffused a sourceless, abrasive light.
Somewhere, far away, Signy could hear the sea.
She could die here. No outcrop of stone, no wind-carved drift offered shelter from the cold. Crevasses waited beneath the blurred white contours under Signy’s feet. If she took a single step, any step, her weight would break through the crusted snow. She would fall, fall forever, past walls of eternal ice. Signy sank to her knees, slowly, afraid to move.
“Signy? Signy Thomas?”
The girl’s face was so close that Signy could see the perfect texture of her soft, ivory skin. Warm in a black room, San-Li wore black brocade, draped high against her long, narrow throat.
“Hello, San-Li.”
San-Li gripped the arms of a narrow, highbacked chair carved from a rich reddish wood. She held herself rigidly upright.
“The events in Antarctica have been unfortunate for you. I extend my deepest sympathy, and my regrets.”
“Do you?” Looking at the child’s gaunt, immobile face, Signy said, “I think you believe what you say. Did you kill them, San-Li? Jared, and the others?”
As if she hadn’t heard, San-Li said, “There will be a time of mourning. But when it is over, growth must continue. I would offer you—not your Jared, who is lost, but something to meet the challenge of your talents.”
Did this little monster have any concept of the utter outrageousness of her intrusion? Signy told herself she wasn’t on her knees, that she wasn’t cold. She was sitting at a desk in Taos, New Mexico, and she shifted in her skinthin so that her image stood with folded arms, looking down at San-Li.
“Don’t push me, infant!” Signy said.
San-Li lifted her hand, palm forward, and spoke with a staccato rapidity. “Our plans to acquire the Antarctic ice have a high probability of success. The intricacies of transporting it will be very great, but those are engineering problems only. I should like to circumvent some of the environmentalists’ alarms, their innate conservatism. You could be of great assistance to me.”
“You’re offering me a job.”
“Yes.”
“The others?”
“No. Only you, Signy Thomas. You have welded a group together from individuals with many weaknesses. Without your skills, they would have flung themselves into chaotic pursuits long ago. You could correlate, and disarm, the myriad warring interests a new water source will represent. The others could not.”
“You think that my loyalty is easily transferred,” Signy said.
“You have an elastic sense of boundaries. The boy Jimmy now holds your loyalty as well, and a man named Alan Campbell. Was it not easy to include them in your mosaic?”
It had not been easy. It had been necessary. Child, you have built a simulacrum of me that shows me much about myself.
“Come work with me,” San-Li said.
Paul had said those same words, so many years ago, with that same pleading tone, with that same underlying assurance.
“Wrong words, San-Li.” Feeling burning tears across her cheeks.
“Come and work with me.”
Signy could. The concept tempted her. Leave these imperfect souls, this morass of cross-purposed desires and needs. Abandon Paul to his introspective, gleeful madness, Pilar to her restless pursuit of tomorrow. Leave them, they would hardly notice.
A multiple series of futures tumbled through Signy’s mind; she walked the boundaries of a grim room tinted in sepia, alone with a doddering Paul and his ravings. Janine, in another set of possibilities, had gone off to find yet another unapproachable personage to reject her. Or Jimmy remained with her and Paul, a Jimmy isolated in his static, frozen timescapes of old art and new music.
“No,” Signy said. I have built the foundations of my possible futures with my own hands. Whatever they might become, they are mine. In time, San-Li, what you offer would be the same as what I have now. Only different.
Signy’s fingers knew the way to disappear the room, the girl, the sense of presence. She hesitated.
“San-Li? Be wary of us. If we find a way to charge you with murder, we will. We do not wish you well.”
Signy forced herself into real time. She spun in her chair and grabbed at the arm next to her, plump soft skin—Jimmy’s arm.
“Shit!” Jimmy jerked, forcibly pulled into fleshtime.
“San-Li’s—” Signy stabbed at an override button on her console, giving her system a faked power surge, a burst of static that she doubted would fool San-Li.
“—in here with me.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Let’s just run a little tracer here, shall we?” Jimmy’s fingers sped on his keyboard and he began to hum a little tune.
Signy released the override.
—San-Li’s face returned, perhaps puzzled, perhaps aware that someone nudged at her privacy.
“She’s still at McMurdo,” Jimmy whispered.
Signy permitted the flick of her fingers’ motion, vanishing the warm room, the girl’s dark eyes, her pale, vulnerable throat.
* * *
“When she was Evergreen, she was so sweet. She used to ask about my music. She sent me haiku,” Jimmy said.
“She did it,” Signy said. “San-Li killed them all. But nobody’s got evidence.”
“I found this old geezer on the net,” Jimmy said. “He says that all you have to do is put a condom full of Drano in a gas tank, or anyhow, that used to happen in ’Nam. The lye dissolves the condom, and sooner or later it corrodes through a fuel line. Out of gas. Just like that.”
The technique wouldn’t guarantee spectacular, flaming crashes. Over deadly cold water, a forced landing would be all that was needed. “What’s the timing?” Signy asked.
“Six, eight hours.”
“So that’s how it was. If San-Li killed Psyche and her boys, then nobody could ever trace Miss Tanaka back to the sinking of the Oburu. They could wonder, but that’s all they could do.”
“Lemme get Paul out here.” Jimmy took Pilar’s console and eased his way into Paul’s world. “Fleshtime break,” Jimmy whispered, and Paul nodded.
“I was listening,” Paul said. “From the top, here’s how it goes. San-Li hired Skylochori and company to attack the Oburu. They blew the job. We know that much.”
“Then San-Li backed off,” Signy said. “Either Papa got wind of what happened and cut off her allowance so she couldn’t pay up, or San-Li just wasn’t going to pay Psyche for a bad job. My vote is Papa was nosing around San-Li’s accounts. San-Li knew about this iceberg scam and I’ll bet she wanted a part of it. I’ll theorize that Papa found out she’d been interested in the harassment going on in the fishing fleets. That’s when he
sent her to clean fish.”
“Sounds good,” Jimmy said.
“After San-Li didn’t pay up, Psyche and the brothers started lurking around the outskirts of the Tanaka fleet. Somehow they faked a distress signal and the sub carrier went out to look for it. The Skylochoris came in close, saw somebody on deck, and hooked Jared overboard. Then they told San-Li they had a hostage,” Paul said. He leaned back in his chair and laced his hands beside his head. “Good heavens. I don’t do criminal law. This is so juvenile.”
“San-Li is seventeen,” Signy said. “She heard, because she was listening to us, that Jared was the hostage. She knew we were looking for him. Shit, the whole world knew we were looking for him.”
“Not quite,” Paul said. “But go on.”
“San-Li was already close to real trouble with Papa, or maybe Papa knew about the whole thing and was planning to keep San-Li in that fish hold until she grew scales. She had to try to fix things, so she got in touch with Psyche. San-Li couldn’t have known what documentation Psyche had of the Oburu’s sinking—film? Audio? Psyche would have told San-Li she had it all recorded, even if she didn’t. San-Li wanted Psyche’s recordings, bad. So she hired Cordova at McMurdo. Cordova was supposed to bring Psyche in, and San-Li would have promised payment. I don’t know what San-Li thought she would do with Jared.”
“She thought he was with the brothers. He was supposed to climb in Cordova’s helo with everybody else when Cordova went to pick them up,” Jimmy said. “They would have made one nice neat disposable package, Psyche and the two men and Jared. It would have taken Cordova four hours to fly from the Siranui to the Sirena and two hours to get back to the Siranui again. There was the risk that the helo would poop out on the Sirena’s deck, but it was a risk San-Li had to take.”
“Well,” Paul said. “Well, then.”
“You don’t have any hard copy of any of this,” Signy said.
“Oh, that’s hardly needed.” Paul turned back to his console. Signy jumped for her keyboard.
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to stage the sabotage,” Paul said.
—a sleek, immaculate Paul sat in the New Hampshire library. A grinning shark appeared near Paul’s shoulder. The creature swam through the air, circling Paul’s chair with lazy interest.
“Can’t we just subpoena the Skylochori brothers or something?” Signy asked.
Jimmy popped his image into one of the Queen Annes. “Signy, I can figure what they know. They know somebody hired their brother to try to blow up a ship, but they don’t know who; I’d bet on it. They kidnapped a guy, but a good lawyer could coach them to say they picked up a man overboard and were just trying to get somebody to come after him.”
“They’re no help, then.”
“Nope,” Jimmy said.
Edges could get the Skylochoris harassed, maybe get them jailed. Why bother? Let them have their Sirena and the labor that went with her. Let them worry for the rest of their lives about every stranger’s knock at their doors, wonder if this time the man with the warrant had found them. Let them wonder every day if this was their last day of freedom.
Jimmy vanished, and Paul, replaced by a view of McMurdo’s sloppy, muddy landing field, a view Signy had seen on her way into the domes.
Paul could use McMurdo as a background and land Cordova’s helo on it. He could image a San-Li beside the helo. Cut and paste. Make it real. To what purpose?
Because it was doing something, and doing something, right now, seemed to be good for Paul, and if that’s how the thinking was going around here it was time to call the boys in white coats to come and pick up everybody.
Signy left them at it and went to the kitchen. The dishes hadn’t moved themselves out of the sink. Shit. Signy turned on the water and began to rinse plates. At least an apparition of Jared wasn’t standing around trying to help her.
THIRTY-ONE
Muffled thuds came through the house speakers. Janine’s voice yelled, “Let me the fuck in!”
Signy opened the front door on fresh, wet air while Janine was still giant-stepping through drifts.
“You made it.” Signy hugged her, and they spun around in the doorway. Janine brought motion with her, struggles with time and distance, and impatient, electric energy.
“What the fuck have you been doing?” Janine backed away and shook her head. Snow, flung from her hair, turned to tiny dots of wet mist on Signy’s face.
Jimmy got himself behind Janine’s shoulders in a maneuver that avoided eye contact. He held Janine’s parka while she twisted out of it. Janine ignored him. Jimmy brushed snow away from the sleeves of the parka and hung it on a peg.
“I was washing dishes. My hands were wet so it took me a minute to get the door,” Signy said. “Oh, babe. I’m glad you’re here.”
“We were working, idiot.” Pilar came out of the studio and grabbed Janine in a rough hug.
“Yeah, right. My God, I’m wired.” Janine closed her eyes and butted her head against Pilar’s shoulder.
“Hello, engineer,” Paul said.
Janine looked up at him. “Uh, hello.”
“I know. I look like shit.”
“Yeah, you do. You really do.” Janine drew away from Pilar, stood on tiptoes, and kissed Paul’s cheek, gently.
Janine, Pilar, motionless and wary, assessed each other as wrestlers might.
“Come in here a minute,” Pilar said. “I want to know what you think about this.” Pilar grabbed Janine’s hand and led her into the workshop.
Jimmy, watching them go, looked like he was going to cry. Paul went away as well, back to his console and his headset.
Signy leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “You won’t lose Pilar. Or, when you do, I promise you it won’t be this easy. They’ll be out in a while.”
“I’m not worried,” Jimmy said.
“I think you are. A little.”
Jimmy grinned and shook his head. “Yeah.” He looked at the closed workshop door. “I’ll make coffee,” Jimmy said.
“I just did,” Signy said. “It’s probably ready by now.”
“Oh, rats, I forgot the groceries.” Janine reappeared, at a trot, and grabbed her parka from its hook.
“How were the roads?” Signy asked.
“I followed the snowplow in. I rented a runabout; we’ll have to take it back. Somebody help me get the groceries, okay?” Janine slammed the door behind her, letting in a swirl of cold wind and the neutral, soft light of a late, cloudy afternoon.
Jimmy shrugged and got his coat.
“Peace offerings of brute labor are often effective. Also, she likes flowers, sparklies, and good neck rubs,” Signy said.
“I’ll remember that.” Jimmy followed Janine out the door.
* * *
Signy spooned up the remnants of her bowl of buffalo chile and had a last bite of sopapilla dipped in honey.
The group had settled where they could in the clutter of equipment near the holo stage, their tropisms leading them to find space close to the warmth of the corner fireplace. This used to be called a “living room,” Signy remembered. A place to rest and socialize.
Jimmy guarded the fire. He was pleased with it, it seemed; he’d been intrigued by the art of making fires vertically, with three pine splits stacked like a teepee.
Huddled in the early evening, they ate and rested. Paul sat on the floor, spooning up chile from his bowl. There had been some bickering over whose duty it was to chop onions (Jimmy had, while Janine and Pilar argued about it), and there had been a studied lack of interest in Paul’s appetite. (It was ravenous.)
Signy braced her back against the banco where Jared was wont to sprawl and watch the fire. She pulled a knee up to her chest and rested her chin on it.
Begin. Somebody, begin, she pleaded silently. For I can’t.
They had no words.
It had been Signy’s needs that brought them here. They had traveled here in their flesh because of her urging, becaus
e she said she’d needed help with Paul. And now they seemed more isolated, more distant from each other than they had ever been in the safe intimacy of the net. Where the blows they gave each other were cushioned, where the hurtful words they spoke—could be deleted, or explained away.
They were all so quiet. Jared was not here. Jared, if he were here, could get them talking. Jared could let them sort out what Paul might need and how they might help him find it. They would begin to deal with hurt, with grief, with what came next. Jared could do that and the talk was never clumsy or stilted, it just happened.
“I—” Janine said; a word that trailed off while Pilar said, “Impossible. We’re so impossible.”
In a rush of motion, Pilar left them, to wall them away behind whatever she did in the workshop. Paul put down his bowl. Blind to them, he went back to Jared’s console.
Their flight left cold, empty spaces in the room.
* * *
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Alan’s voice said. The lights on Signy’s flatscreen threw red and blue swirls onto the empty holo stage. “But if anybody’s interested in what I’ve been doing in this icehouse you left me in, I’d be glad to tell you.”
Signy got to her feet, to her chair, to her headset. “We’re here,” she said.
—Alan in a business suit was a changed Alan, a polished Alan. He was, Signy decided, beautiful. Behind him, the Tanaka suite lay deserted, cluttered with empty dishes and crumpled napkins.
“They went through a lot of food last night.” Alan waved his hand at the disordered tables. “We had to send a runner for more water, though, and I threw in an order for a couple of cases of champagne. So if you wanted to make ’em thirsty, you managed just real well.”