Damage Time

by Colin Harvey

  Shah smiled, a slight smile hinting at the irony of this. "But that wasn't Sunny?"

  Aurora said, equally dryly, "Of course not."

  "Why not tell this guy's papa?"

  "You have no idea of how much Daddy spoils him, do you? No companion would ever win an argument about his son."

  "So come with me," Shah repeated.

  "I don't think that's a good idea." Aurora stared fixedly ahead.

  "Look, I'm not happy about what I did. I can't undo it. But–" Shah stopped. What did he want? How much of this is really about turning her? Shah took a deep breath, and another. "You said I seem different."

  "Yeah."

  "Do you believe that we're born the kind of person we are?"

  "What the hell kinda question's that?"

  "Or do you think that we're the result of our lives?"

  "I don't know! What is this? Philosophy 101 with Pete Shah?"

  Shah blurted, "If you believe we're the sum of our memories, then there's a reason I'm different." This was proving harder than he'd thought. Shah swerved into a curbside parking space, provoking a blast on the horn from the car behind, which only just missed them. "Can't be more than a dozen cars in the city," Shah muttered, "and I have to get the Tailgate Queen."

  Comprehension dawned in her eyes. "You've been ripped," Aurora breathed. "Oh, Pete! I'm so sorry!" She touched his arm.

  Shah had almost convinced himself that the attack had happened to someone else. But the anger and grief bubbling up threatened to overwhelm him. He put a hand over his mouth to keep them inside.

  "What did they take? What did they leave you with?"

  Shah shook his head and scrambled out of the car, almost into the path of the traffic. He made himself think about something else. She seems to know about it. I suppose everyone in big cities knows someone who's been ripped. Cities draw them like planets catch passing meteors. Then again, ripping don't usually happen in small communities. It's hard to hide, and away from 'civilization' justice usually includes a rope and a lamp post or tree.

  Distraction wasn't working. Shah had thought that he couldn't mourn for what he didn't know he'd lost, but some part of him knew and he had to clamp his eyes shut and rock backwards and forwards to stop from screaming his grief aloud.

  He was dimly aware that Aurora had left the car and was holding him, smoothing him down with her hands and hushing him. He was acutely aware of her warmth, and her perfume, and the softness of her as she held him. "I'll drive," she said at last. "And we'll forget about eating out. I'll make us lunch."

  They parked in almost the same spot that Shah had greeted her from earlier that morning. It seemed like days ago.

  Despite the distraction of their small talk Shah was agonizingly aware of his own fragility, and burned with embarrassment. He had inherited Old Shah's disdain for the kind of people like those mourners at funerals who rended their clothes, tore at their hair and beat their chests with grief. That he'd allowed his feelings to explode in the car had been almost as self-indulgent.

  As they left the car Aurora said, "Keep to the left side of the path and turn your face away. You'll stay mostly out of sight of the house's surveillance cameras. But try not to be too obvious about it."

  "You expect Sunny to check the tapes?"

  "Wouldn't you, if I wasn't here and didn't answer my eyepiece?"

  Shah stared at her. "You're coming back to New York, then?"

  "Just for a day or two. With luck, I'll fly north again as he's returning to New York. Now come on, I'm hungry." She led Shah up a side path to a gate, and through there into the kitchen. "We'll just talk about generalities, the weather, baseball, yada yada yada." Aurora unlocked the back door.

  The cottage seemed impossibly old to Shah, but he'd noticed the day before that it had solar panels and a windmill, and the kitchen was modern, albeit minimal. "You make the coffee, I'll do the rolls." Aurora nudged him out of the line of sight of the kitchen camera. She disappeared, leaving Shah to make both before reappearing – just as he'd finished – with a small carrybag tucked behind her. She placed it beside the garbage dispenser, into which she dropped something as cover.

  As they ate they made small talk. It seemed so stilted it would scream "suspicious" to anyone checking the footage. Her paranoia makes sense if she's coming to New York, though.

  When they finished, Aurora said, "Thanks for coming round, Jim. If you could drop me at the Dalern Mall, that'd be good. I've got a three o'clock there."

  "Sure," Shah muttered and followed her out. He waited in the shadows again while she locked the door.

  The drive back was uneventful, as Shah had hoped. They made small talk, often about the idiots who still worked on local radio stations, trying not to talk too much about Kotian or Sunny. Aurora seemed genuinely shocked that he had been ripped, but Shah realized she could be playing him, just as he was trying to play her.

  Playing him would involve asking about his memory loss to learn how much he knew. Shah tried to walk a tightrope of seeming to be open about it while fishing for tidbits about Aurora's employers.

  "They're not strictly my employers," Aurora said when he used the term. "They're patrones, clients to use an old-fashioned term."

  "But they still give you money."

  "So do a lot of other people, many of whom even you would consider legit."

  "They gave you a job." Shah looked away from the road momentarily to return her smile.

  "True."

  As they entered Connecticut Aurora said, "Have you got your memories back?"

  "Most of them are other people's views of me," Shah said. "But what they don't tell you is that they're not the same as having your own. Even when I've got a copy of mine, from where I downloaded them onto the web for friends or family years ago, they seem to belong to someone else."

  "That's horrible."

  Shah shrugged. Keeping his eyes on the road made it easier to keep his emotions in neutral. "Uploading memories allows us to share other people's experiences – it doesn't make us become someone else."

  "What about personal memories?"

  "Mostly gone. I found burns of my children being born, plus meeting my wife – odd little things I've shared over the years."

  "That's terrible." Aurora touched his shoulder, gently. "I'll burn the day we met. It's nothing very exciting, and it'll have some content removed, but it's a start."

  "Thanks."

  "I'll drop it round tomorrow."

  The rest of the drive passed quickly, and before long Shah was parking the car at the hire firm's premises.

  "I'm going to get the subway into town while you finish up here," Aurora said. "But I'll see you tomorrow?"

  "Definitely," Shah said. "After work."

  "Well, take it easy." She leaned across and kissed his cheek.

  Shah watched her walk away, unable to identify too many of the emotions boiling away inside him.

  Tuesday

  "Far as I'm concerned," Shah said, "We can connect Sunny to Tasha Sirtisova's murder."

  ADA Grunwald snorted. "We got nothing."

  "Not quite true," van Doorn said.

  Harper was silent, but attentive.

  Nancy Grunwald's office was full of recent shots of her in college and law school, islands of personality amid the sea of files that filled the office – the criminal justice system still firmly believed in hard-copy. But there was no mistaking the idealism that she radiated. It took Shah a few seconds to work out who she reminded him of, with her ruthlessness and ambition. Then the memory from a download clicked into place – Marietetski.

  "I'm as desperate as you to land Kotian, Shah," she said. "But without this… Aurora's testimony, Kotian's defense lawyer will tear our case apart – all we have is a string of coincidences. Even with her testimony, she didn't see him do the deed. We need more. We need her to cough her guts up."

  Van Doorn looked at Shah.

  Shah stared back. "I can do that, but it'll mean taking more time
out."

  "You're owed enough leave, sick leave, and so on," van Doorn said. "Kotian and his equivalents in the other boroughs cost millions, and wreck lives. Do it."

  IXL

  Instead Shah returned briefly to work to offload as many of the new cases –which had bred faster than rats – as he could.

  "What are you going to do?" Bailey said.

  Shah looked across, torn. He needed someone to talk to. And Bailey couldn't be the mole because she wasn't working for the Department at the time. "If anyone asks, I've taken the afternoon off to visit my daughter."

  "OK." Bailey added, "Is anyone likely to ask?"

  "I dunno. People like to gossip." But not with you. Bailey was already getting a rep as aloof, even rude. Shah said, "Don't take this the wrong way…"

  "But?"

  Shah grinned. Bailey smiled back, though it was clearly an effort. Shah said, "You could try making small talk at the water cooler. Not like Olivia Germain, who used the same phrases all the time, until people mimicked her. Ask them how they are, like you mean it, or what they're doing at the weekend. Tell them your plans. Unless you're having an orgy."

  Bailey frowned. "We don't have orgies."

  Mentally shaking his head in despair, Shah returned to work.

  When he checked out at twelve, Bailey said, "Enjoy your afternoon." She even smiled.

  Shah hid his surprise. "Thank you."

  Outside, heat rippled the air off the sidewalk. Shah draped his jacket over his shoulder.

  He had a memory from among the copies provided in his Get-Well Disk, of the guy who'd provided it and Shah walking with jackets draped over their shoulders, eyeing up the pretty girls. Whoever it was watched Shah chatting to a blonde bagelseller, and recognized that the dirty old man had a thing for long-legged blondes.

  Shah stopped dead, causing someone to barge into him and snap, "Wake up fool!"

  Whoever knew that might be the leak.

  Shah walked briskly to where Aurora waited at a cafe, midway between the office and her apartment.

  "How was your morning?" Shah gave her a peck on the cheek, noting her raised eyebrow as he sat.

  "Busy," she said, smiling. "You wouldn't believe how hard it is to do business on your eyepiece while dodging calls from some of your patrones." She added, "I'm only avoiding Sunny. I told Abhijit that I'm here, but I had things to attend to. I'd had two calls from Sunny that I diverted to mail. After I'd spoken to Abhijit I had five more, the last sounding like an angry hornet." She broke off to order two coffees. Shah noted wryly that she'd remembered his order from the day before. He'd accepted her paying for it, after he'd realized he'd have to ride the generator bike out back for a week to pay the calories.

  "So what memories did they take?" Aurora said. "I know it's not easy to talk about, but it would help to know."

  "Why?"

  "What did they take?"

  "Everything," Shah retreated into facts: "Semantic memory – general knowledge of the world, acquired through school, concepts, facts. Overlaps with procedural memory, which are skills like learning to drive. Episodic memory, which is unique experiences, the things have happened to us."

  Aurora stared at him, her eyes glimmering. She closed them. "Jesus," she whispered. "How did you cope?"

  "I relearned everything from scratch." Shah laughed a humor-free bark. "I was lucky."

  "Lucky? Lucky? How exactly?"

  "Let's change the subject," Shah said. "You going to see Abhijit?"

  "Maybe." Aurora's eyes narrowed, "Why?" Her voice was amused. "You jealous?"

  Shah smiled too, but when he said "maybe", there was an edge to his voice. "Damn. That's a surprise." Aurora's chin rested on her fist, elbow on the table. "Stop looking so smug," he grumbled.

  "Now, why," she tapped his forearm with a long red nail to each word, "would you be jealous?"

  Shah looked away, not sure how to answer. Had he always been so uncertain of everything? He suspected not, from the clips of him that he'd seen. That Shah had cut through life like a laser. Now the only thing that he was sure of was work. Or maybe that had always been the case, and the old Shah had been a better actor?

  "Pete." Aurora used her nail to get his attention. "I was only teasing."

  He forced a smile. "Sometimes I think that I should have taken a new name, show that I'm not him. Maybe I should use Pervez?" She shook her head. He said, "Maybe not, then."

  Their coffees arrived. "What did you have planned?" Shah said.

  "I have things to do," Aurora said, "But not till later. We can sit here for a while, if you want, or we can go somewhere – just to talk."

  "I have someone that I have to see," Shah said. "I could use some company, as well."

  "Oh?"

  "Moral support."

  "Duty call? Rather than something you want to do?"

  "A little of both. I'll explain on the way."

  Aurora wrinkled her nose. "Classic hospital smell. Bleach and that institution smell – dunno what it is. Decades of dust and a base note of scrubbed puke and shit." Shah stared at her. "My grandma had cancer," she explained. "I've hated hospitals ever since."

  Marietetski lay exactly as he had the last time Shah had visited, but now there was another woman beside the bed. Black-skinned, high-cheeked and pretty, she was younger than Mrs Trebonnet, although the lines were etched even deeper into her face than the older woman's, and Shah could see the resemblance to both Marietetski and Mrs Trebonnet. Unlike the old woman, she was wearing an eyepiece.

  She looked up as they approached the bedside, Shah clutching another plant. He noted that the older one looked neglected. The woman returned Shah's thin smile, glanced at Aurora and looked away again.

  Shah said, "Are you John's mother?"

  She nodded. "You must be his partner. I've seen you in the uploads John sent."

  "I'm very, very sorry for what happened to John. No one should have to suffer what you've been through."

  Mrs Marietetski nodded, her gaze already back on her son. "Why him? Why did you survive and he's lying here?"

  "I don't know. Pure luck, I guess."

  She sighed. "Pray for him. If he doesn't recover soon… we can't pay for this forever."

  Aurora nudged Shah. "I should wait outside."

  "I'll be out in a few minutes," Shah whispered.

  He stayed in silence, and when he left, Mrs Marietetski refused to look at him. He couldn't really blame her for reproaching him for surviving, when her son hadn't.

  Outside, Aurora was talking agitatedly to someone on her eyepiece, and she walked out of range when he appeared, only returning after several minutes. "You OK?" She said before he could speak.

  "What's wrong?"

  She shook her head. "I'm just upset at seeing him in there. How come he's so bad?"

  "And I'm not?" Shah could feel anger rising from deep within, fuelled by his own guilt at his inability to answer Mrs Marietetski's question. "Blind luck, maybe. Now you know what I meant, heh? Though I don't feel too lucky sometimes. Maybe I'm just too ornery to give up." Shah finger-combed his hair. "I don't bloody know!"

  Aurora nodded rhythmically, her lower lip thrust out, deep in thought. Suddenly she turned. "Do you think that I had something to do with this?"

  "Did you?"

  "NO!" Aurora took a breath. "I wouldn't – I mean, I'd never do anything like this." She shook her head. "You've got this obsession that Abhijit's mixed up in this."

  "Or Sunny." Aurora stared at him. Shah continued, "The sheer number of people who've passed through their circle or who know someone who has, there has to be a connection." He added, muttering, "Time we got back"

  Aurora said, "I'll send you the burn I promised you later on."

  They walked down the street in tense silence, Aurora still visibly simmering, Shah still angry at his own survivor guilt, and for her seeing through him. Maybe he had wanted to show her, this is what your precious patrones do to people.

  A man bumped shoulders wi
th Aurora, muttered, "Watch where ya goin', bitch." He was just a stoned punk. He flipped them the bird and strolled on.

  Shah started after him, but Aurora pulled him away. "No!" She held his shoulders as Shah took a deep breath. They walked on slowly. Aurora said, "Come back to my place."

  They walked with an arm around the other, for support or comfort, Shah wasn't sure.