by Robert Reed
The torch is hot from use. The tip of its barrel starts a small fire in the carpeting. She is amazed by its sensitivity, its accuracy. Toby says, “Listen,” and smiles behind the healing mask. She senses a wicked happiness, him saying, “Listen,” with authority and confidence. “I’m going to let you go.”
She tries talking through the gag, cursing him.
He doesn’t seem to hear. He shakes his head and says, “Look at the poor creature. Underneath, what? Nothing. Almost nothing.”
Gabbro is pale and enormously long, his true bones threatening to break through the stretched and wasted skin. He is unconscious now. His mouth is open and toothless, the hyperfiber fittings removed and the stretch marks showing through the cheeks and under the chin. The arms are sticks. His legs are knobby-kneed sticks. And his feet and hands seem unnaturally long, the bones drawn out to fit the cyborg functions.
“I’m sorry to have kept you ignorant,” Toby says. “But you were the one who helped me. In every way, I think, we are still partners.”
She tries saying they weren’t. Never.
And he shakes a webbed finger in her face. She can see his eyes, hating them, and he says, “Regardless of what you think, you did your part. No one’s going to believe otherwise.”
She tells him to fuck himself.
He ignores the muffled grunt. “And him,” he says. “Praise the Prophet! I doubt that he’ll be able to tell anyone anything. Which is good for both of us.” Those eyes are smiling. “Isn’t it, partner?” He scoops up the dead eyes, then the other hand hoists the torch again. “So do you have any suggestions for me? Any places where I might go now?” He is thoroughly at ease, standing over April, holding the the torch as if he has practiced the position for days and weeks. “I bet you don’t understand me,” he ventures.
But she does. He’s got much for brains.
“I’m going to leave Brulé,” he claims.
She says nothing. Gabbro is beginning to stir now.
“I’ve got ideas,” he says. “Plans. They’ll all take time, but now it’s beginning to make sense. All this waste. All that I’ve had to endure in this hellhole.”
No, she hopes, it’s not compassion. Never compassion. She doesn’t feel for Gabbro any more than she would feel for a brutalized dog…and yet now she starts to cry, tears flowing, moaning through the gag and trying to rise to see those eyeless sockets, that naked face…
And now the white pain comes around him, rousing him once again. But this time he’s aware of his hands and toes. This is different. He can move them now and the aching has subsided to the point where he can stand touching himself lightly, clumsily, everything feeling so terribly wrong. So wrong. He keeps forgetting what they’ve done to him. He keeps having to make himself remember. He is so whispery small on this big, big bed. A skeleton and little more. He touches himself here and here. Then here. And now he learns the sorest place. It’s his geographical center. His maleness. His shriveled finger of traumatized skin.
Talking is impossible.
Sometimes he thinks he’s making noise, shouting or something, only he can’t imagine how it might sound.
Time is compressed, hot and bright and wreathed in pain. Think of something else, he tells himself. Concentrate! Concentrate! He remembers April’s voice yelling at someone, trying to stop whoever had the drill. No, think of something pleasant. He remembers Steward’s Flower and brings her into his head. She comes before him and smiles and says something sweet and pure, now reaching to touch him. To stroke his arm.
Gabbro pulls away.
He tries to ward off her hand. Don’t! He wants to cry out, warning her away, but his atrophied jaw hasn’t the strength.
And the tips of her fingers are on him, stroking what burns. She smiles in a fine large way. Amazed, he feels the burning sensation diminish to a bearable level. He whimpers. She kneels, using all of both hands now and bending to kiss him sweetly, almost shyly, asking how he feels and does he feel better now? Can he find a difference? Yes, he thinks. Absolutely.
He thanks the Flower.
She coos in one throbbing ear.
He tries moving, rolling onto his better side, but she insists that he quit it. She wants him resting. Easy, she says. Be still and relax.
That’s it, she says.
Rest.
And he watches her drifting overhead, the white of the pain now duller and flatter. She is naked. He didn’t realize it before now. Lovelier than words, she drops toward him with supreme gentleness. Don’t move, she repeats. Careful now. Easy. She is lying on him as a blanket might, yet without weight. Again she kisses Gabbro. His burning empty sockets. His gaping jaw. His spindly neck and the rib-ridged chest. And now he is drifting too.
Be still, says the Flower. Let yourself go.
I love you, he tells her. I do.
And she presses one cool hand to his mouth, shutting off the words, and her fine distinctive smell percolates into him and buoys him skyward. Rest, she says. That’s all you have to do now. Rest.
One last time he comes to the doorway. He brings out the last of the quivering hyperfiber. He had had no idea how the chunks would move like they do. None. The muscles from the legs and back were the worst, convulsively jerking and twisting, fighting him every step of the way. Now he looks outside at the pool and the dark windows all around, hearing the waves and knowing they’re diminishing. Dying away. Good, he thinks. He kneels and opens the bag one last time, extracting the torch and the last power pack, loading the thing and turning a switch and watching the barrel’s tip turn blue-white. Then he heaves the torch out onto the coral deck. It strikes and skids and drops into the water, a sharp sizzling noise and a column of steam and then nothing. Just the fading waves.
Toby eases outside.
He is on his toes, straining to see what happens.
A few dead fish rise and then sink away. An eel struggles feebly, kicking with all of its body and then pulled under by the convection currents. Toby smells a warm vapor in the air. He squints. The pool begins to boil. Bubbles burst. Foam gathers at the sides. The still night air is saturated with moisture, and the boiling worsens. There’s a violence to the water. “Praise the Prophet,” he mutters, retreating now and removing the healing mask and thinking what else does he need.
He goes upstairs, up to his apartment. There’s almost nothing to pack. Cash and a few small quiver chips—not much to rely on—and then a handful of biscuits, cold but edible.
He has to hurry. He leaves without taking a last look, believing that the key is remaining unseen. Or at least unnoticed. He goes down the stairs as if he belongs here, one step at a time, and then pushes open Gabbro’s door, now unlocked. April is lying beside the bed, struggling without effort. Toby removes her gag and says, “Remember. You’ve been warned.”
She is on her knees, looking at Gabbro. “I didn’t help. Not with this…not this.”
“Partner,” he says. He waits until she glances at him. “I mean you,” he tells her, stepping to the bed and touching the bare flesh, sweat soaked and twitching, and he tells both of them in a barely perceptible whisper, “In my place, under these circumstances, the Prophet Adam would have done what I’ve done. I know it.”
She doesn’t talk.
He turns away from Gabbro, drying his moistened hand on his shirt. “All right,” he says to April. “Run and don’t tell what you know. Don’t forget. You’re so much a part of this that you can’t even think about what’s happened tonight. Okay?”
She nods, something about her defeated. Helpless.
And he unties the bindings and even helps her to her feet, telling her to hurry now, the neighborhood is still sleeping but someone’s going to notice the pool eventually. She goes with him into the hallway, then pauses. He turns and starts to walk in one direction, toward the stairs, and April acts as if she expects him to shoot her. To threaten her. To do any last thing.
Toby has to laugh.
He climbs the stairs one at a time, casual
and cool, thinking that a floater to the Old Quarter is the first stage. Then he can rest and think about the next tasks. He steps up onto the roof and the floater pad and immediately senses something, someone watching him. He grows cold. He turns slowly and spies an enormous bird perched on the edge of the pad, on golden feet, dark and massively built, black eyes dancing inside its brain-fat skull.
Saying nothing, Toby looks at the sky and wonders how long before a floater comes. He can smell steam even this high. It smells like cooked fish and machine parts.
“Have you see her?”
The bird has spoken to him. “Pardon?” asks Toby.
“A girl. Have you seen her?”
“What girl?”
“Pretty blonde. Blue eyes. Big tits.” The bird’s voice is rude and simple and self-assured. “Pretty as pretty can be. Have you see her?”
“Leave me alone.”
The bird moves its weight from one leg to the other. “Big reward,” it promises.
“Yeah?”
“Wearing a white dress. Pearls. Garden pearls, double strands—”
“All right. Did he make you?”
The bird blinks, rather confused.
“What is this? Another joke? Are you something new he’s conjured up for me?” And now he laughs. “Well, I don’t care,” he tells it. “Say what you want, you ugly sack of tinkered genes.”
The bird is speechless now.
“Funny, isn’t it? You come now of all times—” A floater is descending, but Toby has time to rush the big bird. With one hand he pulls a hard cold biscuit from his pocket and throws it like a flat stone. The biscuit misses. The bird is vast as it pumps its wings and wheels and climbs higher, shouting down at him, “A Flower! A Flower! Have you seen her?”
“Get away,” Toby mutters under his breath. Then the floater is down and open, waiting, and he climbs inside and gives his destination and watches the world drop away. The blood coursing through his skull is telling him there are enemies everywhere, everywhere, and the only wise response is to keep alert. Always alert. Yet now for the first time he feels the match for his enemies, he does, and never again will he cower. He will never let them do him any more harm.
The hawk was produced from an old template—a functional design easily trained, linked to a certain AI in the Old Quarter. Everything it senses is analyzed, and it knows exactly what it wants. The Flower. The blonde girl. She fills its thoughts when awake and its fleet little dreams during its brief sleeps. A few more days and it will be dead, no rest and no food and the speed of its creation all factors in its demise. It’s been over Brulé dozens of times already, as have its siblings. Nothing has been found. No distinct whiffs of Flowers. No figures in a window. No leads leading anywhere. But the neurotic driving force inside it keeps it hunting, forever eager, forever optimistic, circling now by the moonlight and leaving nothing to chance.
It’s using the heat off the boiling pools to rise, riding it like it would any thermal.
Conserving its reserves.
Circling again, its head pivoting and every sense straining.
What’s this?
What’s this?
A figure has come into view. It’s the right shape, yes, and the hawk’s brain is screaming that the size is right and the characteristic things like stride length and wiggling hips and the planting and lifting of the tiny feet in the white shoes. Not a white dress, no, but that’s okay. It’s the Flower. The hawk knows. But then a dose of caution comes from somewhere. The distance is enormous. The moonlight is flat and broken into shadows, long and tangled. It needs to get closer. Closer! So it beats the air with tired wings, rushing o the east.
For a moment it loses sight of the Flower. It halfway panics. Where did she go? Where? Is she hiding? But then hiding is good. It’s a clue. Hiding is the act of a fugitive. Shape and avoidance. Two clues. A surge of adrenaline alerts the Old Quarter AI. Computer elements and an antenna sewn into the base of the brain squirt the data home. And now the hawk, frustrated and panting, turns and circles in a tight figure eight pattern, high above the sleeping shadowy landscape and hunting.
Nothing.
It’s so high that a Flower squatting in those trimmed lines of bushes, for instance, could look up forever and not see it. Yet its own eyes can make out individual leaves, polished to a high gloss, and the tiny sleeping fish here and there in a tiny stream, and now a small predatory something—a weasel, a mink, whatever—moving like a fluid dark rope up to the edge of one tangled mass of pruned vegetation, stopping and suddenly peering at something that is moving, shaking limbs, scaring the predator until it turns and flees.
The Flower stands, unmistakable in the middle of the ornamental bushes. She has cut herself in several places, blood showing on her hands, and she wears a disgusted distressed expression while she looks for something in particular. In one hand is a tightly folded piece of white plastic, unreadable marks sketched on it by hand. She lifts the plastic and squeezes a corner, making it glow. The angle is bad. The hawk can’t make out the details. The AI monitoring everything feels certain of her identification now, sending a strong alarm to Dirk’s apartment while continuing to pick and probe at the incoming data. Is that a map? it wonders. What does she want in that bush? And as if to answer the question, the Flower wades out from the tangle and begins to trot to the next similar-shaped bush.
There is something inside one of them.
The AI makes immediate inquiries, linking to the city libraries and old construction plans, discovering a hidden entry port into one of the multitude of underground passageways leading everywhere. And indeed, she has found the port. But it’s sealed, the AI thinks. These ports are kept firmly sealed at all times, Brulé’s government not wanting its citizens getting into its cellars.
The Flower wades into the bush, grimacing as she kneels. She doesn’t quite vanish this time. The buttery hair shows, and her back, and for an instant the AI disbelieves what the hawk sees quite clearly and accepts without trouble. The port is coming open when it shouldn’t, and the Flower is scrambling downward and pulling the port closed again, gone. It’s too late, thinks the AI. The quarry is gone. With a thoroughness, it studies its actions and decisions and can find no fault. None. It repeats its alarm to Dirk’s apartment, then it turns to things more profitable.
And the hawk, unsure as to the Flower’s whereabouts, continues doing figure eights. Until ordered otherwise, or-death, it will maintain its vigil. The night air feels cool at this altitude. The moon is a bright green wafer halfway in shadow. Those same eyes that can probe the ground below can pick out the sky’s spinning cylinders and wheels, minor worlds and major worlds and stars beyond human reach, and to the south, over the limb of the Earth, the occasional bright bolts of lightning coming on a long, long front.
20
Nothing is so strong as the invisible…
—a Yellowknife proverb
“We’ve got her!”
The figure sits up in bed, a pistol showing for an instant. The dry voice asks, “Minus? Is that you?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you say?” asks Dirk.
“She’s found!”
And now Minus watches the old man come to his feet, thinking that he sure shows the mileage by the way he moves. He can’t quite tell what shows—a stiffness, a slowness, a certain sappy resistance to motion—but it’s apparent nonetheless. Particularly during these last few days. “Where is she?” he hears the tired voice ask. “You’ve got her?”
“No.”
“But you know it was her?”
“Absolutely.” He tells it. Moving to one wall and touching controls recessed into the corner, he causes a variety of images to appear. Largest of them is a three-dimensional map, baffling to the clearest mind, a maze of intricate lines linked and spreading out underneath a portion of Brulé City. One blinking red dot marks where the Flower vanished. There’s no knowing which direction she went underground, but Minus assures, “She can’t stay in ther
e too long. The city’s AIs will find her. The police can pull her out themselves, and she’s got to know it.”
“We can’t cover every way out, can we?” Dirk is concerned but very much in charge now, dressed in trim clothes that lend him a certain poise. “Well,” he admits, “at least we know you were right about them leaving.”
“Yeah.” Minus had spotted the false trail earlier today. Two people leaving Brulé. He had said then that it seemed too easy and maybe they shouldn’t waste the AIs and manpower on checking it out. Maybe later, but not today. Minus tells him, “There’s more. A lot more.”
“What?”
Again he touches the controls, enlarging another image and pushing the map aside. “The hawk got a glimpse of a map, I think. She’s going from one safe house to another—”
“Why?”
“She got spooked. That’s my guess.”
Dirk walks up to the bedroom wall. A local news channel is broadcasting from a district in the east, from a place not far from the Flower’s last position, and the cameras show a crazy scene that baffles him for a moment. “What’s happening?”
“The floaters? Around the pool?”
“Yeah.”
“Medical units. The police are parked on the roof.” The swimming pool is halfway empty, a column of vapor rising up into the moonlight where it’s stained and spreading thin in the motionless air. “I guess they’re bringing out someone. Some miner.”