Downbelow Station tau-3

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  “My name here is Jessad. These gentlemen — Mr. Coledy and Mr. Kressich — Mr. Kressich was a councillor on this station, when there was a council. You’ll excuse us, sirs. I want to talk to my friend. Wait outside. See we get privacy.”

  The others withdrew, and they were alone in the dim light of a fading bulb. He did not want to be alone with this man. But curiosity kept him seated, more than the fear of Coledy’s gun outside, a curiosity with the foreknowledge of pain in it, like worrying at a wound.

  “Josh?” Gabriel/Jessad said. “We’re partners, aren’t we?”

  It might be a trick, might be truth. He shook his head helplessly. “Mindwipe. My memory — ”

  Gabriel’s face contracted in seeming pain, and he reached out and caught him by the arm. “Josh… you came in, didn’t you? You tried to make the pickup. Hammer got me out when it went wrong. But you didn’t know that, did you? You took Kite in and they got you. Mindwipe… Josh, where are the others? Where are the rest of us, Kitha and -

  He shook his head, cold inside, void. “Dead. I can’t remember clearly. It’s gone.” He was close to being sick for a moment, freed his hand and rested his mouth against it, leaning on the table, trying to subdue the reactions.

  “I saw you,” Gabriel said, “in the corridor. I didn’t believe it. But I started asking questions. Ngo won’t tell whom you’re with… but it’s someone else they’re after, isn’t it? You’ve got friends here. A friend. Haven’t you? It’s not one of us… it’s someone else. Isn’t it?”

  He could not think. Old friendships and new warred with each other. His belly was knotted up with contradictions. Fear for Pell… they had put that into him. And killing stations… was Gabriel’s function. Gabriel was here, as he had been at Mariner -

  Elene and Estelle. Estelle had died at Mariner.

  “Isn’t it?”

  He jerked, blinked at Gabriel.

  “I need you,” Gabriel hissed. “Your help. Your skills…”

  “I was nothing,” he said. The suspicion that he was lied to grew stronger still. The man knew him and claimed things that were not so, were never so. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We were a team, Josh.”

  “I was an armscomper, on the probe ship…”

  “The undertapes.” Gabriel seized his wrist, shook at him violently. “You’re Joshua Talley, special services. Deep-taught for that. You came out of the labs on Cyteen…”

  “I had a mother, a father. I lived on Cyteen with my aunt. Her name was — ”

  “Out of the labs, Josh. They trained you on all levels. Gave you false tapes, a fiction, a fake… something to lie on the surface, lies you could tell and convince them if you had to. And it’s surfaced, hasn’t it? It’s covered everything.”

  “I had a family. I loved them — ”

  “You’re my partner, Josh. We came out of the same program. We were built for the same job. You’re my backup. We’ve worked together, station after station, recon and operations.”

  He tore free of Gabriel’s grip, blinked, blinded by a wash of tears. It began to shred, irretrievable, the farm, the sunny landscape, childhood -

  “We’re lab-born,” Gabriel continued. “Both of us. Anything else… any other memory… they put it into us on tape and they can put something else in the next time. Cyteen was real; I’m real… until they change the tapes. Until I become something else. They’ve messed with your mind. Josh. They’ve buried the only thing that’s real. You gave them the lie and it washed right into your memory. But the truth’s there. You know comp. You’ve survived here. And you know this station.”

  He sat still, his lips pressed against the back of his hand, tears rolling down his face, but he was not crying. He was numb, and the tears kept coming. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What can you do? Who are your contacts? It’s not among the Mazianni, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Who?”

  He sat unmoving for a moment. The tears stopped, the well of them dried up somewhere inside. All his memory seemed white, station detention and some far distant place confounded in his memory, white cells, and uniformed attendants, and he knew finally that he had been happy enough in detention because it was home, the universal institution, alike on either side of the lines of politics and war. Home. “Suppose I work it my way,” he said. “Suppose I talk to my contact, all right? I might be able to get some help. It’ll cost you.”

  “How, cost?”

  He leaned back in the chair, nodded toward the outside of the booth, where Coledy and Kressich waited. “You have pull of your own, don’t you? Suppose I contribute my share. What have you got? Suppose I could get you most anything on this station… and I don’t have the muscle to handle it.”

  “I’ve got that,” Gabriel said.

  “I’ve got the other. Only there’s one thing I want that I can’t carry off without force. A shuttle. A run to Downbelow when it comes off.”

  Gabriel sat silent a moment. “You’ve got that kind of access?”

  “I told you I had a friend. And I want off.”

  “You and I might take that option.”

  “And this friend of mine.”

  “The one you’re working the market with?”

  “Speculate what you want. I get you whatever accesses you need. You make plans to get us a way off this station.”

  Gabriel nodded slowly.

  “I’ve got to get back,” Josh said. “Start it moving. There’s not much time.”

  “Shuttles dock in red sector now.”

  “I can get you there. I can get you anywhere you want. What we need is force enough to take it when we do get there.”

  “While the Mazianni are busy?”

  “While they’re busy. There are ways.” He stared a moment at Gabriel. “You’re going to blow this place. When?”

  Gabriel seemed to weigh answering at all. “I’m not suicide-prone. I want a way off as badly as anyone here, and there’s not a chance that Hammer can get to us this time. A shuttle, a capsule, anything that stands a chance of staying in orbit long enough…”

  “All right,” Josh said. “You know where to find me.”

  “Is there a shuttle docked there now?”

  “I’ll check into it,” he said, and rose, felt his way past the shadowy arch and out into the noise of the outside, where Coledy and his man and Kressich rose from a nearby table in some apprehension; but Gabriel had come out behind him. They let him pass. He wove his way among the tables, past heads which stayed bowed over drinks and dinners, shoulders which stayed turned.

  Outside air hit him like a wall of cold and light. He drew a breath, tried to clear his head, while the floor kept developing lattices of shadow, flashes of here and there, truth and untruth.

  Cyteen was a lie. He was. Part of him functioned like the automaton he reckoned himself bred to be… he acknowledged instincts he had never trusted, not knowing why he had them — drew another breath, trying to think, while his body navigated its way across the corridor and sought cover.

  Only when he had gotten back to his cold dinner on the back table in Ngo’s, when he sat in that familiar place with his back to the corner and the reality of Pell came and went at the bar in front of him, the numbness began to leave him. He thought of Damon, one life, one life he might have the power to save.

  He killed. That was what he was created to do. That was why the like of himself and Gabriel existed at all. Joshua and Gabriel. He understood the wry humor in their names, swallowed at a knot in his throat. Labs. That was the white void he had lived in, the whiteness in his dreams. Carefully insulated from humanity. Tape-taught… given skills; given lies to tell — about being human.

  Only there was a flaw in the lies… that they were fed into human flesh, with human instincts, and he had loved the lies.

  And lived them in his dreams.

  He ate the dinner, which kept sticking in his throat, washed it down with cold coffee, poured
another cup from the thermal pitcher.

  He might get Damon off. The rest had to die. To get Damon out he had to keep quiet, and Gabriel had to mislead the others following him, promise them all life, promise them help which would never come. They would all die, except himself and Gabriel, and Damon. He wondered how he should persuade Damon to leave… or if he could. If he must use reason… what reason?

  Alicia Lukas-Konstantin. He thought of her, who had helped him in the process of helping Damon. She could never leave. And the guards who had given him money in hospital; and the Downer who followed them about and watched over them; and the people who had survived the hell of the ships and of Q; and the men and the women and the children…

  He wept, leaning against his hands, while somewhere deep inside were instincts which functioned in cold intelligence, knowing how to kill a place like Pell, knowing that it was the only reason he existed.

  The rest he no longer believed.

  He wiped his eyes, drank the coffee, sat and waited.

  ii

  Union carrier Unity: deep space; 1/8/53

  The dice rolled, came up two, and Ayres shrugged morosely, while Dayin Jacoby marked down another set of points and Azov set up for another round. The two guards always assigned here in the lower-deck main room sat watching from the benches against the wall, their young and flawless faces quite passionless. He and Jacoby, and rarely Azov, played for imaginary points, pledged against real credits when they reached some civilized point together; and that, Ayres thought, was an element as chancy as the dice rolls.

  Tedium was the only present enemy. Azov grew sociable, sat black-clad and grim at the table, played with them, for he would not bend and gamble with his crew. Perhaps the mannequins amused themselves elsewhere. Ayres could not imagine it. Nothing touched them, nothing illumined those dull, hateful eyes. Only Azov… joined them from time to time as they sat in the main room, eight and nine hours a tedious day of sitting, for there was no work to do, no exercise to be had. Mostly they sat in the one room freely allowed them, and talked… finally talked.

  Jacoby had no restraint in his conversation; the man poured out confidences of his life, his affairs, his attitudes. Ayres resisted Jacoby’s and Azov’s attempts to draw him out to talk about his homeworld. There was danger in that. But all the same he talked… about his impressions of the ship, about the present situation, about anything and everything he could feel was harmless; about abstracts of law and economic theory, in which he and Jacoby and Azov himself shared some expertise… joked lightly which currency they should pay their bets in; Azov laughed outright. It was inexpressible relief to have someone to talk to, and to exchange pleasantries with someone. He had a bond with Jacoby… like that of kinship, unchosen, but inescapable. They were each other’s sanity. He began at last to conceive such an attachment to Azov, finding him sympathetic and possessed of humor. There was danger in this, and he knew it.

  Jacoby won the next round. Azov patiently marked down the points, turned to the mannequins. “Jules. A bottle here, would you?”

  One rose and left on the errand. “I rather thought they had numbers,” Ayres said under his breath; they had already had one bottle. And then he repented the frankness.

  “There’s much in Union you don’t see,” Azov said. “But you may get the chance.”

  Ayres laughed, and suddenly cold hit his belly. How? stuck in his throat. They had drunk too much together. Azov had never admitted to his nation’s ambitions, to any designs beyond Pell. He let his expression change ever so slightly, and in that moment Azov’s did too… mutual dismay, a moment which lasted too long, slow-motion, alcohol-fumed, with Jacoby a third unwilling participant.

  Ayres laughed again, an effort, tried not to show his guilt, leaned back in his chair and stared at Azov. “What, do they gamble too?” he asked, trying to mislead the meaning.

  Azov pressed his lips to a thin line, looked at him from under one silvery brow, smiled as if he were dutifully amused.

  I am not going home, Ayres thought despairingly. There will be no warning. That was his meaning.

  iii

  Pell: Downer tunnels; 1/8/53; 1830 hrs.

  The dark place shifted with many bodies. Damon listened, started as he heard one moving near him, and again as a hand touched his arm in the blackness of the tunnel. He angled the lamp that way, shivering in the chill.

  “I Bluetooth,” the familiar voice whispered. “You come see she?”

  Damon hesitated, long, looked toward the ladders which stretched like spiderweb out of the range of the lamp he carried. “No,” he said sorrowfully. “No. I only walk through. I’ve been to white section. I only want to go through.”

  “She ask you come. Ask. Ask all time.”

  “No,” he whispered hoarsely, thinking that there were fewer and fewer times, that soon there would be no chance at all. “No, Bluetooth. I love her and I won’t. Don’t you know, it would be danger to her if I came there? The men-with-guns would come in. I can’t. I can’t, much as I want to.”

  The Downer’s warm hand patted his, lingered. “You say good thing.”

  He was surprised. A Downer reasoned, and though he knew that they reasoned, it surprised him to hear that train of thought follow human lines. He took the Downer’s hand and squeezed it, grateful for Bluetooth’s presence in an hour when there was little other comfort. He sank down on the metal steps, drew a quiet breath through the mask… drew comfort where it was to be had, to sit a moment safe from unfriendly eyes, with what had become, across all other differences, a friend. The hisa squatted on the platform before him, dark eyes glittering in the indirect light, patted his knee, simply companionable.

  “You watch me,” Damon said, “all the time.”

  Bluetooth bobbed slightly, agreement.

  “The hisa are very kind,” Damon said. “Very good.”

  Bluetooth tilted his head and wrinkled his brow. “You she baby.” Families were a very difficult concept for hisa. “You ’Licia baby.”

  “I was, yes.”

  “She you mother.”

  “She is.”

  “Milio she baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “I love he.”

  Damon smiled painfully. “No halfway with you, is there, Bluetooth? All or nothing. You’re a good fellow. How much do the hisa know? Know other humans… or only Konstantins? I think all my friends are dead, Bluetooth. I’ve tried to find them. And either they’re hiding or they’re dead.”

  “Make me eyes sad, Damon-man. Maybe hisa find, tell we they name.”

  “Any of the Dees. Or the Ushants. The Mullers.”

  “I ask. Some know maybe.” Bluetooth laid a finger on his own flat nose. “Find they.”

  “By that?”

  Bluetooth reached out a tentative hand and stroked the stubble on his face. “You face like hisa, you smell same human.”

  Damon grinned, amused in spite of his depression. “Wish I did look like a hisa. Then I could come and go. They nearly caught me this time.”

  “You come here ’fraid,” Bluetooth said.

  “You smell fear?”

  “I see you eyes. Much pain. Smell blood, smell run hard.”

  Damon turned the back of his elbow to the light, a painful scrape that had torn through the cloth. It had bled. “Hit a door,” he said.

  Bluetooth edged forward. “I make stop hurt.”

  He recalled hisa treating their own hurts, shook his head. “No. But can you remember the names I asked?”

  “Dee. Ushant. Mul-ler.”

  “You find them?”

  “Try,” Bluetooth said. “Bring they?”

  “Come bring me to them. The men-with-guns are closing the tunnels into white, you know that?”

  “Know so. We Downers, we walk in big tunnels outside. Who look at we?”

  Damon drew a deep breath against the mask, stood up again on the dizzying steps, hugged the hisa with one arm as he picked up the lamp. “Love you,” he murmured.
/>   “Love you,” Bluetooth said, and scampered away into the dark, a slight moving, a vibration on the metal stairs.

  Damon felt his own way further, counting his turns and levels. No recklessness. He had come close enough, trying to enter white. He had rung an alarm over in white. He had a sickly fear it might bring investigation into the tunnels, trouble on the Downers, on his mother, on all of them. He still felt the tremor in his knees, although he had not hesitated to shoot when he had to; had fired on an unarmored guard; might have killed him; had meant to.

  That sickened him.

  And he still hoped he had, that the alarm had not involved his name. That the witness was dead.

  He was still shaking when he reached the access to the corridor outside Ngo’s. He entered the narrow lock, tugged down his mask, used the security-cleared card he reserved only for extreme emergency. It opened without alarms. He hurried down the narrow, deserted hall, used a manual key to open the back door itself.

  Ngo’s wife turned from the kitchen counter and stared at him, darted out into the main room. Damon let the door close behind him, opened the storeroom door to toss the breather mask in. He had forgotten it in his panic, brought it through with him. That was the measure of his wit. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands, his face, tried to wash the stink of blood and fear and memory off him.

  “Damon.”

  “Josh.” He turned a weary glance toward the door to the front room, dried his face on the towel hanging there. “Trouble.” He went past Josh into the front room, walked to the bar and leaned against it. “Bottle?” he asked of Ngo.

  “You come in that door again…” Ngo hissed unhappily.

  “Emergency,” Damon said. Josh caught his arm gently from the side.

  “Never mind the drink for a moment,” Josh said. “Damon. Come over here. I want to talk to you.”