by Robert Reed
“I can’t believe he’s still working,” she admits.
“Maybe he’s drinking somewhere,” Toby answers, indifferent to the wait.
“But he’d come home first to change. Usually.” She wants to talk to Gabbro, not knowing what she might say if given the chance. The anger has gone somewhere. Now it’s resentment. A couple of years of her life have been invested in that sack of hyperfiber, she tells herself, and look at the sorry things he has her doing. “Wait a minute. Wait.” She feels foolish, sitting straighter and looking down into the yard. “That’s him,” she whispers. “There.”
The figure is unmistakable. He has come from this building—what was he doing here? she wonders—and now he does a slow walk past the swimming pool, one dangerous hand lifting and touching the glass door that opens for him in the same way the inside door yielded to her hand and voice. A light comes on. Gabbro begins to undress, work clothes kicking loose the strange gritty dust and him now touching a control. World-Net comes on. The window and door darken until all she can see is a huge, imprecise form sitting where it can watch the local news. Maybe he’s finishing breakfast, she thinks, remembering it laying on a table, cold and forgettable. She leans closer to Toby now, telling him something else about patterns and the man.
“He’ll clean himself, then sleep. I bet he’s ready to nod off as it is.”
“Yeah?” Toby stirs. A clear eagerness comes into the air. The lightning bugs seem brighter. Hooting birds start to work the yard behind them, hunting as a team. Toby asks, “How long?”
“Half an hour,” she guesses.
He waits for a few minutes, leaning forward as if to better see what is going on below them. Then he announces, “I’ll be back. In a few minutes,” and abruptly stands.
She asks where he is going.
“I forgot something.”
“What?”
“In my apartment.”
What could he have left behind? she wonders. But before she can press him, the Gardener is running toward the stairs. “Wait for me,” he tells her, giggling. The giggle seems so very wrong—wrong for the mood, wrong for the night—that she doesn’t believe what she hears. She denies it. She reaches up and touches the mask on her battered face, pressing hard enough to make pain, and she concentrates on the sensations while she tries again to picture Gabbro as helpless. Something is going to happen tonight. She knows it. But here she is, thinking hard, and she can’t even make this one thing happen in her mind.
It was in the Old Quarter, in one of those secondhand shops that April had steered him toward, that he found everything he needed. A dirty place purposefully dim, the shop was run by an ancient Lunarian with a sharp face and no hesitations. A Morninger-to-Morninger recharging cord? Yes, sir. Right here, sir! Unused and worth the price for its curiosity value, I think. Anything else, sir? All right. Yes, I understand. Well, I do have several. Worn models, but functional. Power packs included, of course. Are you familiar with their use? Will this be cash? Do you want any item gift-wrapped? Thank you and have a splendid evening, sir!
Toby is standing in his bedroom, breathing hard and sweating. A worn bag is laying on the floor, its fabric dark and cracked from hard use and constant heat. He starts to kneel, reaching for the handle, and then he remembers something. Turning, he looks to the wall and finds a spot near the floor. He touches it with a finger and pulls it higher, then uses two fingers to spread out the image. Garden emerges—at least that AI version of Garden—and a multitude of bodies stand on an infinite shoreline, the salty waves beating at their ankles, the white-smears bowing in some pleasant warm wind.
The Passion Necklace has lasted for days.
He had let it slip his mind, what with the confusion and his being gone. Pressing his face closer, he sees his own self. Nothing has changed—the same tired expression, the same bliss, the same perfection now carried on endlessly. Toby finds his control console and makes a quick command. At the same instant, with the same motion, everyone on this fictional Garden collapses and trembles and dies. The corpses dissolve into the white sand itself, becoming rounded mounds with waves slapping at them, the waves carrying them away without haste.
He lifts the old bag by its handles.
He kills his connection with the fantasy channel, bills paid automatically and precious little left in his accounts. Then he leaves. He hurries. He gets to April and the hiding place, kneels and says, “Anything?”
“I think he’s sleeping.”
“You think?”
She’s uncomfortable. He can’t afford to make her uncomfortable, he tells himself. He says, “The lights are out, aren’t they?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Then let’s take a look. All right?”
“What’s this?” She touches the bag in the darkness, squeezing once. “It feels heavy.”
“Tools,” he says.
“Why?”
“To fix him. Later,” he lies. “We can’t just leave him, can we?”
She says no, they can’t. She seems suddenly pensive.
He leads. They retrace their roundabout course to the inside door, keeping their pace slow so no one will notice them. He doesn’t want trouble. He wants to be the image of casual pedestrians, touching April’s arm from time to time, saying whatever bland promises come to mind.
The door greets April by name.
The front room is dark, as is the bedroom beyond, and they stand together for a long moment and listen until a voice comes drifting out at them from the back. “Who’s it? Ape…rilll? Ape…rillll?”
There is a terrible instant when Toby is certain that trickery has failed him, that the big insulting cyborg will come lurching out of the bedroom and swing and crush his own skull. But then the voice dies away. No one moves. He prods April with one hand, coaxing her to take the lead. “It’s okay,” he promises. “He’s down.”
Gabbro is naked, darker than anything and incapable of the simplest motion. He mutters, “Ape…rilll,” once more. The voice comes from somewhere inside his worthless shell. There’s a palpable sense of fear in the voice. He’s panicky. Absolutely, undeniably full of fear. Toby turns on one light, keeping it set low, and he puts down his bag while April goes to the cyborg and runs a hand over his hairless chest, bending and putting an ear to him. She listens. She seems altogether too concerned. She lifts her head and announces, “There’s nothing moving inside him,” with a sad, surprised voice. “You’ve done it,” as if she can’t believe what she sees. “You did it, all right.”
He opens the bag and reaches inside, grabbing a pistol grip.
“Wait a second,” April tells him. “It’s too soon. You can’t fix him yet,” and she lifts a hand to his face.
“Get away,” says Toby. The power packs are massive and shortlived. He inserts one of the three into the grip, feeling excited and a little sorry that it’s all going to be done so soon. He can’t linger, he knows. He can’t let himself be caught. Eyeing the girl, he wonders how much further he can trust her. Probably not much, he decides. Giving the simple trigger a little squeeze, he makes a thin seering point of light spring from the massive barrel and passes the light over the unblinking unthinking gaze of the cyborg.
“What’s that?” asks April, her voice suspicious.
“What is it? Don’t you know?” Toby laughs. He wonders how much poor Gabbro can see, how much residual energy there is to power his senses. “Do you know this gizmo? Huh? Can you hear me? Can you see anything?”
The muted voice says nothing clearly. A choked scream, perhaps.
“Come on,” Toby prompts. “You know.”
Nothing.
April cries out, “What is it? Gabbro? Love! Tell me—!”
“Drr…illl!”
“More to the point,” says Toby, turning and proud, “it’s a special hyperfiber torch used in the mantle mines. Very tough and very powerful. For cutting and slicing stronger stuff than this,” and his free hand strikes Gabbro, knuckles complaining.
<
br /> April has turned pale. “You’re going to kill him?” she says. “Why are you going to kill him?”
“I am not,” he tells her.
“You never said…hey, what are you doing? Hey! Stop that!” She comes at him just as he touches the tip of the barrel to the cyborg’s flesh. There is pain. He hears another choked scream, then nothing, and kills the torch when April grabs him. He wheels and swings and knocks April onto her back. He says, “I’m killing no one. Do you understand me?” and he kneels and has her hands before she finds her breath. One of the bed sheets is within reach. He bites it to start a rip and makes a long thin strip that he uses to tie her hands behind her back. “Now sit still,” he warns. “Watch if you want.” He is in complete control. He stands and feels very sober, very wise, turning on the torch once again and going to the cyborg and telling him, “The eyes. First or last? First or last?”
Gabbro says nothing, the eyes struggling to focus.
“Last, I think.” He says to Gabbro, “Watch me now. Watch!”
And now she realizes that she has been awake for some time, listening to nothing and some part of her mind alert without trying to alarm the rest of her drowsy self, listening to the still night air and mild night sounds and thinking there is no good reason for her to come awake now. None. But she sits up nonetheless. Then she stands. Then she walks into the front room, halfway expecting to find Steward sitting in the dark, just home, but he isn’t and maybe that’s why she woke. She asks herself the time. A kind of reference point, time. Steward has an old-fashioned clock on one of his self-made shelves. It reads minutes short of midnight. Not late at all, she thinks. It’s still early.
So she sits.
She is wearing the white dress, invitingly snug and sleek. Steward will come through the door and she will greet him. He needs a greeting, she imagines. One hand plays with the double strands of pearls. She allows herself to feel satisfied, considering what she has managed today and through these last few days. Gabbro was a smart turn. She even toys with the idea of “confessing” to Steward tonight, through tears and weak appeals for forgiveness; she imagines Steward shaking his head, surprised and then a little mad perhaps, then telling her not to worry. He understands. She shouldn’t have done it, just like she shouldn’t have gone into that bar several nights ago, but no harm has been done and he does trust Gabbro and maybe he will go talk with the Morninger tomorrow. Just to make everything clear all around.
Someone is down in the yard. She hears a splash, then another, and thinks of a swimmer enjoying the little pool. She envies his freedom. She eases her head down on the arm of the sofa, imagining water instead of the living leather, and suddenly she can visualize a single moment out of Zebulina’s life. A deep blue-black sky is above the clear bright sea of Cetacea. The water is a touch cool. Zebulina is wearing one of the skintight body stockings that are the norm there, an artificial gill strapped to her back and humming with a reassuring steadiness. She tucks and dives. On her left side, several kilometers below the surface, is one of the Cetacean suns—a submerged fusion plant emitting carefully orchestrated flavors of light in all directions, the faint greenness brought by drifting masses of algae. Other suns lay in other directions, many deeper, some almost imperceptible under hundreds of kilometers of melted ice. Zebulina kicks. She seems utterly alone. She is breathing hard and the gill’s air is pure and cold and refreshing. Bracing. The pressure doesn’t increase like on the Earth, at least not so quickly. A school of brightly colored squid come past her in formation—big human eyes staring out at the rarest of sights, a true human on this little world. There are no whales yet, but she is patient. She knows they are tailored with their own gills, very efficient, and they range from the surface to the final crushing depths. So she keeps kicking, using an instrument on her wrist to measure depth and time and temperature and oxygen; she kicks until her legs burn and the tendons on top of her feet ache, reminding herself to keep streamlined. This is fun. It’s all so new and marvelous, she thinks…and there! There! She spots the distinctive outline of a single whale against the glare of the sun. It appears tiny. For an instant, without reference points, she believes it is close and some kind of baby. Or maybe just a fish. But no, she kicks toward it and it doesn’t flee. Indeed, it seems to be approaching. Yet it takes an age to cut the distance in half. Zebulina can make out fins and the enormous baleen and a fine network of gills deployed from its lips and belly. She remembers how the earthly whales of old were enormous at thirty meters in length; this whale is twice as long and more thinly built, one of dozens of species derived from the original colonists.
Another few meters and she will touch it.
She puts out a hand, kicking hard, thinking that this is wonderful and lovely…and she hears splashing. Chiffon hears the splashing, and she sits upright on the sofa, listening, listening, hearing something else now too…a scream! A definite muffled in-a-world-of-agony scream.
She goes to the sealed glass door, pressing against it and gazing down into the yard. Nothing seems wrong at first. She notices the water moving in the pool, no one showing above the water. She waits for a long moment, the scream finished, and she tells herself it was nothing. Just someone having fun nearby. But still the water moves. Little waves rise up and crash into one another or over the sides, splashing across the deck, and still no one shows. Who’s doing it? she wonders. It must be Gabbro doing it. “No,” she mutters. “He said he was going straight to sleep. It’s the last thing he told me.”
She has to will her eyes into motion, hunting for other signs of trouble. Gabbro’s door is partway open. It doesn’t surprise her. She won’t let it surprise her. He is probably swimming and she expected to see the door open, and the darkened indoors doesn’t mean trouble. It means nothing. She sighs. She tries to take a half step backward, as if that will make everything a touch less serious, distance, and then she happens to spy a lone figure in the open doorway, standing there with something moving in his hands. Of course it’s not Gabbro. Much too small. She hopes it could be April, but he’s too lean. That leaves everyone else in the world. Who is it? Does it matter? She takes the half step to diffuse her fear, one hand coming over her mouth, and the figure uses both long arms to toss the moving something into the air, squirming and dropping ker-plash into the water, gone.
Now the scream repeats itself. Chiffon can’t know for certain, but it does seem to come from the open doorway—weak but unmistakable and sad throughout, halfway dead, and she hurts for hearing it; the figure steps out a little further, turning now, the angle and the starlight showing Chiffon some kind of mask over his long face.
Now she understands.
Instinct makes her shrink away from the glass, wanting to hide, a trembling voice rising out of her throat. “Dirk,” she says to herself, to the room. Somehow he has found Gabbro, knows about him and the climb, in spite of Steward’s assurances. Dirk and Minus too. They want Steward, she realizes. “And me!” she whines. Suddenly she is exposed, frightfully vulnerable. Where’s Minus? she wonders. He must be inside, out of sight, working on Gabbro by who-knows-what means, working to extract the confession.
Steward said they couldn’t track him down.
He promised, she tells herself.
And now she feels a sudden anger. The one she trusted most has let her down, in essence. And he isn’t even here to see what he has wrought. Sweet sphincter of God! she thinks. She shudders and focuses her anger, weighing her prospects. If they haven’t come storming up here already, Dirk and Minus and the rest, then they don’t know. Gabbro, dear and durable Gabbro, has kept the secret inside himself somehow. But he can’t last. No one has a chance of outlasting these tortures.
So there is one option.
One course.
One.
And in a whirlwind she changes clothes, remembering the map that Steward drew for her, finding it among the half-read books, then stuffing her things down the garbage chute. Her dress. Her purse. The pearls…no, not the pearls. Keep
them and Dirk’s little gun, she decides. The glass money and the white shoes. She can’t very well wear Steward’s, after all. The gun is where she hid it, undisturbed. She turns and turns, hunting for anything else, anything forgotten. A message! Leave Steward a warning! Then she takes off the gun’s safety and opens the door and runs. She doesn’t look back. The hallway’s dirty white walls are a blur. She is running, following the curls and curves, the map in one hand and the gun in the other and the slapping sounds of her feet barely dampened by the worn, half-dead carpeting.
19
I used to travel with a tailored monkey. It was small and clever and had my face—handsome, I like to think, and forever smiling—and the monkey had a limited vocabulary and an assortment of witty sayings and light jokes. It was quite popular wherever I went. To a point, at least. I noticed that after a while the jokes began to wear thin. Audiences grew bored, or worse. But then I never linger long when I make my journeys, and so long as I came and went rapidly enough my monkey made me nothing but friends…
—excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net
She gets to the point where she wants him unconscious, wishes for the pain to put him into nothingness for a little while. The screaming is reaching inside April and wounding her. It isn’t guilt. No, it’s not. She didn’t know, after all! How could she have known what Toby was planning? And nothing she could have done would have saved him. So no, it’s not guilt. Just like it’s not compassion that makes her cry now. Compassion would mean that she wouldn’t forget this terror soon. It would mean that she couldn’t walk away like she would walk from a suffering stranger. Toby ripped off her mask after he tied her down, after she tried to scream, and then he gagged her mouth and propped her up and made her suffer, too. Watching it. Hearing it. He has finished carving off the last of the hyperfiber now, at last, and he moves toward her and kneels and sets down two shiny dead eyes before her, then the torch.