“You don’t have to resist it. They can make this work.”
He struggled for words. The space between them, the experience and the perspective, was so vast. Her optimism for the project baffled him.
“Why make it work, Cassie? To sit around here, thinking about nothing that really matters? The whole world is out there and we’ve cut ourselves off.”
“You’ve cut yourself off, Bel. Out there with people and scams isn’t the real world. It’s all just patterns and algorithms and block time. Here is where we should put our research.”
“Should nothing. A bunch of genetic engineers and investors decided to give us these instincts. The project took away the decisions we ought to have made about what we want for ourselves.”
They were on different worlds. He was losing her. And losing her for the con.
“You’re not free, Bel! You’ve run away from yourself.”
“We’re as free as the Tribe of the Mongrel or the Puppets.”
Cassandra made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
“When people can determine, before we’re born, what we’ll want and what will make us happy, we’re the same as the Puppets.”
“I love what I am, Bel,” she said. “I love the math! I love staring into the cosmos in a way no other people ever could. The same way you can.”
“What are you doing with what you learn, Cassie? The Homo quantus are cosseted away, a passive channel for information. In twenty years, you’ll still be the same person.”
Her hands tightened into fists and her lips pressed tight. “And what will you be, Bel? You’ve been running away from yourself for twelve years. In twelve more years you’ll still be running.”
“I have this,” he said, holding the wafer of silicate between them. “The Garret would never have had this. You’d have been spinning theories forever. I haven’t lost what I love, but I control my instincts now.”
“It sounds horrible,” she said.
It felt like the world was lurching. This conversation was going sideways. The reunion he’d dreamed about was a wreck. He lowered his voice.
“What’s horrible is that I can prove that your curiosity is programmed, Cassie. With this data. But I didn’t come to try to change you. Or have you change me. There’s much more data in this job. Come with me. Please.”
Her eyes softened. He held the silicate wafer between them.
“We’re going to touch the Puppet Axis directly, Cassie. I’ve discovered how to manipulate it.”
Cassandra stared at him. “How dangerous is this, Bel?”
He watched the two instincts war in her. Knowledge against self-preservation. In her, self-preservation was slightly stronger. He’d still be living in the Garret if he’d been built the same way.
“Do you know what’s going through my head, Bel?”
“No.”
“I’m not worried that you may be trying to remake a romance of the past. I’m not worried that whatever you have in mind is illegal or dangerous. I don’t even worry that I think you’re conning me.” She let that hang between them. Her dark eyes narrowed. “I’m afraid you falsified this data.”
He sat straight. Shocked. He was Homo quantus as much as she was. The project ached in his veins, tempting him to sink into the fugue so that he could understand. What did she think he’d become? He put his hand over hers. She was still fever-warm from the fugue. The low electrical current they made together tingled in his fingertips.
“The data is good, Cassie, and I won’t con you. You’ll know the whole plan.”
Her eyes narrowed and she turned her hand, touching fingertip to fingertip, where the carbon nanotubule channels to their electroplaques surfaced on the skin. It was an intimate kind of throbbing, completely unforeseen by evolution and mate-recognition software, but one that tugged at heartstrings and old innocence. Their warm fingertips pressed like a kiss for long seconds. She exhaled heavily.
“I wish I trusted you, Bel,” she whispered, “but I’ll go.”
Chapter Eleven
ALHAMBRA WAS THE premier city on Nueva Granada, but not the capital. This followed patterns in such odd political-economic pairing as Brasília and São Paolo, Québec City and Montréal, Bonn and Berlin, and Enceladus City and the Titanian Hive. The capital of Nueva Granada was Trujillo, and its economy was driven by the tricameral legislatures, by artistic endowments, and by a prison.
Officially called Singh Memorial Penitentiary, poverty advocates referred to it as Dickens. It held debtors, as well as those guilty of forgery, breaches of contract, investment or insurance fraud, and patent infringement.
The Anglo-Spanish penal system either struck visitors as refreshingly civilized or as stingingly rapacious. Sentences could be commuted or pardoned for large cash payments, or for the transfer of assets such as stock or annuities. Absent this, prison corporations happily extended moderate-interest sentence-mortgages to a sponsor, or even to parolees themselves. Visitors could buy different levels of access to the prison via a transparent list of escalating fees, which in the Congregate would have been called bribes. Some nations just did prisons better than others.
Belisarius bought an executive access package that came with an escorted tour, a five-course meal and an open bar. Prisoners produced the food and alcohols on site, and could earn money as meal servers or escorts to pay for room, board and air. First-rate linen and tableware matched superb apéritifs and hors d’oeuvres. As Belisarius spoke with the prison sommelier, the waiter opened the door with a subdued flourish.
A man in a cheap synthetic suit waited uncertainly. He’d recently shaved. His gray-black hair was slicked damply back. He frowned at Belisarius and then at the opulence of the table.
“The executive visitor package is impressive. Want to try their Pinot Noir?” Belisarius asked, indicating a chair.
William Gander stepped in slowly. He looked to be about sixty-five, with a pale, Old European complexion. He stood woodenly at the table, took up a wine glass and drank it down completely. He frowned, then held out his glass to the waiter, who poured carefully.
“Didn’t expect to ever see you again,” William said. He drank only half the glass this time. “You here to reminisce about the good old times?”
“You thought they were good?”
“Until you hauled ass, but I guess I’m here to kiss it now? I need more wine, if that’s the case.”
“We should start with the roast beef,” Belisarius said. “The reviews of the prison in El Tiempo say the horseradish grown here has been engineered for extra kick.”
“Oh, for the love of—” William rolled his eyes and slumped into the chair.
The waiter served a thick ginger-spinach soup and retreated.
“The prison farms must be good,” Belisarius said.
William grunted as he focused on his soup.
“How did you get caught, Will? I bought a subscription to your records, but I can’t understand how you got pinched. What were you pulling? It sounded like the Martian Mining con, but I don’t see how you could have been caught there, unless maybe you were playing the financier.”
“Picking at my mistakes again?” William said, without looking up. “It was the Ceres Estate two-man con.”
“The other guy crumbled?”
William set down his spoon, lifted the bowl to his lips and drank down the last. Belisarius tilted his bowl and spooned to the finish.
“My bankroll fell through,” William said. “The dummy account got picked for a random audit by a forensic sub-AI—”
“—and by then, you were too far out to come back in,” Belisarius finished.
William nodded, not meeting Belisarius’s eyes. The waiter entered, took the bowls and returned with carrot and apple salads carved into sculptures of tiny fish with interlocking scales of orange and white, soaked in a lime vinaigrette. They ate with chop sticks in crunching silence.
“I sent Kate a present for her birthday,” Belisarius said. “I knew that you mi
ght not have been able.”
William exhaled loudly. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I’m not holding anything over you, Will. Kate’s a good kid. I was happy to do it. You helped me when I needed it.”
“You didn’t really need help,” William said. “You proved that you and your big brain could have done it all.”
“But however big my brain was, I was scared of everything.”
The waiter brought the main course. Pink-centered roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, young potatoes and the prison’s specialty, a horseradish named by reviewers as Fagin’s Whip. William visibly restrained his melting reaction to the smell.
Belisarius signalled and the waiter leaned close.
“I’d like to upgrade my privacy package,” he said. The waiter nodded, but Belisarius touched his forearm. “Not the standard. I mean the privacy package that’s not on your price list.”
“Of course, sir.”
The waiter left and closed the door. After some moments, the lights yellowed subtly. Other EM transmissions in the room that had been pressing gently at Belisarius’s magnetosomes ended.
“Well, you don’t need anyone now,” William said, cutting his beef. “You living this high off the hog all the time?”
“I’ve gone legit, mostly.”
“Of course,” William said bitterly.
“I came here looking for some help.”
“I’m not much use to anyone anymore. I’m taking freelance contracts to pay my way through my sentence.”
The beef and horseradish tasted bitter as Belisarius looked for words.
“I’m sorry you’re sick, Will.”
William cut his beef more violently and shoved a piece into his mouth.
“I’m planning a big job,” Belisarius said. “Bigger than anything I’ve ever done before.”
“So what?”
“I want you on the crew.”
“I didn’t ask you for a present for Kate and I didn’t ask for this,” he said, waving a knife at the feast. “I’m not looking for a pity party.”
“This isn’t pity. I need somebody good.”
“I’m good enough for you now, but not ten years ago?”
Belisarius’s succulent meal lay on his plate, now unappetizing.
“And I need someone who’s willing to go through with a con they won’t be coming back from,” Belisarius said.
William froze. “I’m on a one-way trip, alright,” he said. “I don’t see how a job will help me now.”
Belisarius set his fork and knife on either side of his plate, perfectly parallel. “Maybe you can’t enjoy your stake, but Kate could. And do you really want to die here? You’ve got some time left. I’ve got the ultimate con for you to pull off.”
William shoved his plate away. “Sounds a lot like I don’t have any choices. Work as your assistant instead of the other way around, or rot through my last days in the Dickens.”
“You’ve got options, Will,” Belisarius said, pushing his own plate away slowly. “I paid off the interest and principal on your sentence. If you need walking money or more, let me know. That’s on the house because I owe you. You want to go do something else? Be my guest. I know what you’ve got isn’t curable. You’ve got to deal with how you go. But if you want a big job, I’ve got one.”
“What’s the payout?”
“Seven figures in francs,” Belisarius said.
William choked and coughed. He picked up his wine and swallowed it to the bottom.
“What are you hitting?”
Belisarius tapped a pad and a hologram grew between them. It listed prices for air, apartment and food on Alhambra, along with tuition fees for schools and the costs of various job openings in trade monopolies and Banks.
“For about fifteen thousand francs Kate could go to a good school and get an entry position at a Bank. Another hundred thousand would catapult her into the shareholders’ ranks. Can you imagine your daughter as a shareholder in one of the big Banks?”
“Hell, you’re cold, Belisarius.”
“I’m giving you a chance to score big, Will.”
“What’s so one-way about this? Your con needs a fall guy?”
“It’s the worst fall guy job you could imagine,” Belisarius said. He couldn’t look at William when he said it.
“The mobs? The Banks? You’re not hitting a Bank, are you?”
“Worse.”
William reached across the table, took the wine and drank straight from the bottle. He stared blankly ahead.
“Shit,” he said finally, then smiled. “If you need a fall guy who’s also a con man, you don’t have many choices, do you? I’ll do it, but I want one and a half shares of the haul.”
“It’s already seven figures!”
“Now it’ll be one and a half times seven figures,” William said. He drank from the bottle again, emptying it. “If it’s worse than the mob, I deserve more than somebody who’s just risking jail.”
“I’ll give you one and a half shares, but don’t have any illusions. If this goes south, everyone stands to get killed.”
William leaned back in his chair, his expression a sudden mixture of queasiness and elation.
“You know,” he said, “you’re right about the horseradish.”
Chapter Twelve
THE UNDERGROUND CITY of Alhambra, the economic heart of the Anglo-Spanish territories in Epsilon Indi, was beautiful. Laneways of rowed trees shaded sidewalks of sintered regolith. Buildings of plastiglass had been deposited over webs of carbon nanotubules. The university campus struck the eye with swooping curves, light bridges and balconies, and even great gardens suspended high above the city. Outer facets of the plastiglass had been shaped to refract spongy sunlight into rainbows that painted the ground. The Universidad de Alhambra leaned against the rocky western wall of the city. It was a strange place to find a Puppet.
Despite what he’d said to Cassandra, Belisarius had still been lucky to be born among the Homo quantus. There were worse places to be born. In the Epsilon Indi system, being born on Alhambra or in Saguenay was like winning the lottery. Other parts of the system had mining stations running on debt-bonded labour. Nor would Belisarius have wanted to be born a woman in some of the independent religious fundamentalist sects.
And no one did not, at least once, shiver at the thought that they might have been born among the Homo eridanus, the people who called themselves the Tribe of the Mongrel. They could only survive deep in the crushing pressures of an alien ocean, severed from humanity and home, trapped within imperfect genetic systems, suffering mental pathologies and misaligned instincts.
Yet even theMongrels would not trade places with the Homo pupa, the Puppets.
The Puppets evoked revulsion and loathing from all the nations and peoples of civilization. Their very existence was a crime against humanity. The Puppets were biochemically hard-wired to always revere their creators, the Numen. Despite this biochemical cage trapping each Puppet, the Numen still feared the adoring slave species and engineered them to grow only to a miniature adulthood. No one would ever trade places with a Puppet or with their captive divinities.
Yet some Puppets were still worse off. Chance mutations could generate Puppets without the physiological infrastructure to detect the pheromones of the divine humans. Such beings could not in any way be trusted on the Puppet world, Oler. Biological apostates might be capable of anything. A few of these defective Puppets chose banishment over execution. Belisarius didn’t hate the Puppets, nor did he hate those mutant Puppets who could not live among their fellows. He wasn’t about to throw stones in a glass house.
Up the stairs, through corridors with branching faculty offices, Belisarius found a door with the nameplate: Manfred Gates-15, Assistant Professor.
He knocked. Shuffling sounded behind the door. Then stillness. Belisarius knocked again.
“Go away!” a voice called.
“I’m not here to hurt you, Professor Gates,” Belisarius said.
“I have a business proposition.”
“Get away!”
Gates’ reaction was reasonable. Even if not everyone wanted to kill the Puppets, many people would conscience hurting them. That didn’t get Belisarius through the locked door, though. He pressed his fingertips to the cool metal plate around the doorknob. A millisecond current, a slight burning sting in his fingertips, and the latch clicked. He opened the door.
The small office seemed empty of life. A very low plastic-topped desk with pads and holograms and displays stood on the left, with a child’s chair before it. A table and three chairs stood to the right, one of which had three steps leading up to it. A smart board and hologram projector dominated the back wall.
“Professor Gates-15, I’m just here to talk,” Belisarius said.
A miniature blond head peeked above the lip of the desk. A small hand held what looked like a shocker, aimed at Belisarius. Shockers were usually restricted to police. Another hand came up with a folding knife.
“Get out!” Gates-15 said.
Belisarius closed the door. The Puppet fired the shocker. A loud snap of electricity leapt between them, right into Belisarius’s hand. Belisarius spasmed and yelled, then stepped back. Gates-15 showed wide eyes over the desk.
“Don’t do that!” Belisarius yelled, shaking the sting in his fingers.
His heart hammered. He sheltered his smarting hands under his armpits. Where the charge had entered his body, his fingertips throbbed red, maybe burnt. The current had travelled through the nanotubule channels, directly to his electroplaques.
His body wasn’t designed to charge his electroplaques with external power, even though it was possible. Now they were overcharged. Fingers still stinging, Belisarius jabbed them at the table, electrifying it, releasing the pent-up charge. Gates-15 spasmed backward. Belisarius sat. This wasn’t a great first impression. He really wasn’t a good contemplative. He blew on his fingertips.
Gates-15 stood groggily to his full height of ninety centimeters and backed against the wall, holding the knife before him. He had graceful arms and legs, narrow hips, a small head and a stubbly beard. He wore his blond hair short.
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