Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  She considers this, and though she’s fairly sure he’s slept with the beautiful deaf girl it doesn’t feel like he wants that from her. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she says, “but why bother?”

  “Because you’re interesting,” he says carefully, “and we might both be around for some time. I’m looking for potential points of continuity.”

  “As for longevity, you do realize that, financially speaking, I’m not even remotely in your league? Wouldn’t you be better off bonding with the capitalist elite over, I don’t know, skeet shooting?”

  He leans in across the table as the deaf girl returns with little plates of olives and bacon and another bottle of white wine. “Hardly. The capitalist elite are mostly heirs, who are dull, and founders-who-got-lucky, who are even duller. At least the heirs have manners. But they’re not interesting, and, more to the point, none of them will last as long as me.”

  “Why not? Money is money.”

  “The why is a secret,” he says, smiling. “A great secret. Lately it’s all secrets with me.”

  I’m sure it is, she thinks. Your AIs aren’t what you think they are. You have some kind of new computer on your desk but you don’t know how it works. You’re more interested in me than seems warranted, and you’re spending money like it’s the end of the world. Someone is stalking me, and someone stole my friend’s memories, and mine along with them. You’re very old but still speak of the long-long term. There has to be a greater shape here but it’s one she can’t quite see.

  “I want to make a deal,” he says, and though he’s trying to hide it she can tell that he’s nervous, even behind three glasses of wine, and her thought is that he’s rushing it, that this is the crux, though he’d planned to wait longer, and she notices at some point the moon set, leaving the balcony lit only by candles and the stray light of the city. “First, I’ll tell you what I’m offering. I’ll pay for the Mayo Clinic.”

  “I can pay for the Mayo Clinic.”

  “You can barely pay for the Mayo Clinic. There’s also the degeneration around your implant. I’ll pay for that, and for the Mayo, for the next fifty years.”

  “That’s a lot of money, even for you,” she says, keeping her voice neutral as his words ring in her ears, and this, at last, could be an end to fear and struggling, and she tries to imagine what he could want for it. She could appear at his cocktail parties and perform prodigious feats of memory for his guests, or she could follow him home and slide into his bed, or she could wear a corporate badge on a lanyard and sit through boring meetings drinking muddy coffee and it would still be worth it, unless it won’t, for as quickly as it formed her abjection has dissolved, and she wonders if she’ll have to destroy him for humiliating her. Have to see how that goes. She watches him, waits, remembers to breathe.

  “My net worth is higher than the press imagines,” he says, and now the benign mask is gone and he’s perfectly cold, a chess player driving through the steps of an intricate combination. “In any case. My security service prepared a précis of the circumstances of your life, as they do for everyone allowed within fifty feet of me. You have a rented apartment in Boston, and you recently allowed your lease to expire on another in Santa Monica, though both are all but unfurnished, and chosen in large part for their proximity to the airports. In the past year you’ve spent about sixteen nights in both combined. So on top of the Mayo I’ll throw in a home. There’s a house I own in Noe Valley where I sometimes put visiting dignitaries—it’s quite beautiful, very private and very secure, built around a central garden, rather like the Gardner Museum in Boston. I think the architect won a prize. I’ll sign it over to you, and take care of the taxes. It’s not far from your friend Philip, who would consider himself my rival.”

  A silence, and finally she says, “And in exchange?”

  “First,” he says, “no questions.”

  He sits up very straight and drains his glass and it occurs to her that whatever he wants he wants it entirely, that this moment is the crisis of his life, and then he says, “I want your memories.”

  As her rage rises like a black wave she’s aware that there’s something she’s been missing and looking into his eyes while he waits for her answer she sees his terror.

  She kills the power to the building.

  30

  Ossuary

  The town car’s headlights illuminate the stones and the streamers of fog as it jolts over the steep pitted dirt road. Once again Thales dials his mother’s cell from his own but, like all the family’s secured electronics, his phone is mired in firewalls that make even the basic things nearly impossible, and once again his cell’s screen flashes CONNECTION UNAVAILABLE, but now the road crests and levels out and there in the headlights is the house.

  He sits in the car, watching steam billow from the square pool of black water and dissolve in the wind. Smoking mirror, he thinks, form erupting out of nothing, driven by the temperature differential between the hot water and the cold night air. The pool, fed by a hot spring, is cut from the coarse granite of the mountain, the grey of the concrete of the low house behind it.

  She’d designed the house before he was born, when she was barely older than he is now. In the library of their house back in Rio there’s a photograph of her at the building site, sitting on the boulder that’s still there by the pool. She was very thin then, and entirely serious, staring past the camera as though unaware of its existence. She’d never been to architecture school, had just traveled the world when she was young and had no money, drawing and redrawing the great buildings, trying to render their essences with maximum economy of line. She’d spent three nights in a copse of trees at the base of the Acropolis, and later had shared the basement of a squat in the 16th arrondissement with runaways and junkies. He’d found an old interview on a long-defunct blog where she’d said she viewed the mountain house as an exercise in pure form, and as a sort of ossuary, the only place she’d want to leave her bones.

  Turning off the car’s lights, he sees light in the house’s windows.

  He gets out of the car. It’s cold there, and smells of rock, dust, fog. Sharp fragments of glass scattered on the rocks—his brothers sometimes come here with girls and bottles of wine. They deride the house, even as they used its isolation, saying it’s eerie, like all their mother’s aesthetic fancies, just stark water, stone and wind, a lot of nothing in the middle of nowhere, not seeing, as he does, how the house, with its rough planes of crumbling grey stone and its trickles of black water, is like geology abstracted from erosion.

  His phone finds the house network; he gestures over its screen to unlock the doors.

  The front door swings open under his hand. Inside, it’s really just one room, not very big, and feels less like a house than a temple, or a library, or maybe a tomb—his mother, in the interview, had said her influences included the library of Alexandria, Taliesin West, Ryōan-ji and Louis Kahn. No one there, and no sign of his mom. He sees that the cushions have been pulled from the couches set in the walls to make a sort of nest on the floor, probably his brothers’ doing, and he worries he’ll step on a stray condom. The back door is ajar, probably through their carelessness. He wonders how long the lights have been on.

  Standing in the doorway, he hears rock clatter in the dark behind him. For a moment he stands there, perfectly still, willing it to have been the wind, and he could retreat to the car and the protection of its armament but it’s twenty feet away and feels unattainable. It’s still somehow unbelievable that some stranger would really try to hurt him, even after what happened, and he wonders if this is often what people think right before they die; how fitting, though, to leave his bones by the square black pool. He waits, listening, decides it was nothing, but when he finally he goes inside he locks the front and back doors.

  His mother’s computer is on the desk before the one large window. It dates back to the decade before he was born, but she’s particular about her vintage hardware, insisting that she can only work with what sh
e knows. It’s a museum piece, but functional, and it occurs to him that it’s probably too old to support the protocols that hamstring every other secure family device, so maybe for once he can make a fucking phone call.

  The computer wakes at his touch. Its interface is quaint, but intuitive enough, and it’s easy to find the program for making calls because it’s the last one that was used. It won’t work, he thinks, keying in his mother’s number, but then it starts to ring.

  The ringing goes on and on, and he’s about to hang up when his mother, half asleep, picks up and says, “Hello?”

  “I’m glad I found you,” he says.

  “Helio?” she says groggily. “Is that you?”

  “No, Mother,” he says, unable to control his irritation. “It’s me. Good lord.”

  “Marco Aurelio?” she says.

  “Yes, exactly. This is Marco Aurelio. I dropped fifty IQ points, changed my name and started smoking reefer. I’m calling from the mountain house.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who do you think? I’ve been looking for you. It’s probably nothing but I thought I heard someone outside.”

  “Thales? Baby? I’ve missed you so much,” she says, and it’s just like her to get so emotional over nothing and most likely she is drunk.

  “That’s fine, Mom, but something isn’t right.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The mountain house, like I told you.”

  “I’m going to come get you. I’m coming right now. Don’t go anywhere. Is anyone with you?”

  “I’m fine, no one’s with me. Are you at the hotel? I can just come back.”

  “Baby, is it really you?”

  Annoyed by her sentimentality, he’s on the verge of saying something cutting but the call drops. He tries to call again but just gets network errors.

  He stares out at the wisps of fog, remembers reading that the aesthetes of feudal Japan would spend hours watching the steam rising from bowls of hot tea, and then, in the stray light from the windows, he sees someone’s silhouette on the mountain.

  He ducks down out of the window’s lines of sight, and he realizes the house, which was never meant for defense, has become a trap. No weapons here, just books. This is an ossuary, he remembers, built to hold the family bones. He imagines a sniper with his sights trained on the door, smoking cigarette after cigarette, as blasé as if he were hunting a deer; he imagines soldiers out in the night, poised to fire a grenade through the window but waiting till one of them, grinning and exhilarated, finishes telling a dirty story. Finally it occurs to him to turn off the light.

  He runs his hands over the rough concrete in the dark, wonders irrelevantly if it’s drone-built, but no, it’s too old—when his mother was young builder drones were a strictly military thing, used mostly for raising bunkers in the North Americans’ interminable desert wars.

  Uselessly, he tries to intuit his hunters’ thoughts, guess their lapses in attention. He curses his worthless phone, then realizes that he can use it. Before he can think, and therefore hesitate, he scrambles to the door, presses a button to light up his phone, and as he flings the door open throws his phone as far as he can, hoping it will draw their eyes and perhaps their fire. Running for the car, he hears the phone bounce on the rocks.

  The car’s door recognizes his fingerprints, unlocks. He slams it shut behind him. “Maximum offensive footing,” he says, as the crash seat envelops him. “Take us home.”

  Insulated from the night, he relaxes a little. He wonders if they’ll find his phone on the talus, maybe keep it as a trophy or search it for usable intelligence—he hopes it will be as useless to them as it was to him. He wonders if there was really an enemy or if it was just one of the vagrants who haunts the wastes beyond cities.

  And then as the car turns there’s a girl in the headlights, looking right into his eyes, and in the high beams she looks overexposed, her face a mask of light. Clouds of dust rise glowing around her. Time seems to slow. At first he thinks its the madwoman from the hotel but, no, she’s younger, maybe Asian. The car is accelerating toward her, its forward guns whirring as they spin up. He’s going to tell it to stand down, though he knows it’s too late, but before he can speak or the car can fire she’s gone, must have leapt out of the way, the car passing through the space where she was standing.

  31

  Refuge

  Irina takes the stairs of necessity, using her phone for light.

  As she runs down the first flight she uses her wireless to attack Cromwell’s phone. In the fashion of phones, it has conservative security, and immediately bricks itself. She does the same to the deaf girl’s phone, thinking, Sorry, beauty.

  There’s a cluster of phones and what are probably guns on the floor beneath the Dernière and as she attacks them she wonders if they work for Cromwell and if she’d graciously declined his offer would there have been quiet footsteps behind her and then an iron hand closing on her shoulder.

  She takes the stairs five at a time, letting gravity do the work.

  She remembers the thick blades of the steak knives on the table. In the first second of darkness she probably could have killed Cromwell, if she’d wanted to go the full Lady Macbeth, but even now can’t see herself stabbing him in the carotid, though she wonders if she’ll come to see her passivity as a failure of will and a strategic catastrophe.

  Nightmare descent past floor after floor through the near-dark, and the unexpected joy of the headlong flight. She reaches the lobby, bursts out onto the street. As though preordained a drone taxi is stopping ten feet in front of her. An overcoated man with an umbrella is reaching for the cab’s door when she body checks him—flash of his astonishment as he sprawls on the sidewalk—“Sorry!” she calls, the word cut off by the slamming door.

  * * *

  “Come over,” Philip says on her phone as she scans the street.

  “I’m not going to put you at risk,” she says.

  “For fuck’s sake, come over. It’s a secured building, and I’ll tell them to go on low alert. Can we please just take the rest of the back and forth as read, or maybe do it while you get your ass over?”

  She’s going to argue, but bites it off, says, “See you soon, then.” She hangs up, gives the cab Philip’s address.

  She breaks into the cab’s computer and changes its log so it thinks it picked her up near the Ferry Building, half a mile from Maison Dernière, then turns off her implant’s wireless.

  The cab’s nav shows five minutes to Philip’s house. She’s agitated, wants to do more than slouch down in her seat and hope her friend knows what to do. She thinks of flying down the stairs, how much fun it was, like skiing on virgin snow in high alpine country, but actually she’s never done that—she’s been skiing all of four times, and never left the bunny slopes—the memory is Constantin’s—they turn up from time to time. It’s a misery and a desecration that whatever fragments of her friend remain are, presumably, in Cromwell’s hands, and regarded without tenderness.

  On her phone she finds the website for Iliou Engineering, Constantin’s father’s company in Athens, and the website for the family office, which consists of just a stylized drawing of a dam and an email address. As the cab turns toward the hills she starts writing a message.

  * * *

  The cab stops on a hill with a view of the city that looks silver with the moonlight on the towers and the fog. On the uphill side of the road are expensive-looking condos behind a high wall topped with broken glass. As she reaches out to open the cab’s door her phone rings.

  “Ms. Sunden?” asks someone, young, male, indistinctly foreign.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Mr. Iliou’s secretary. Will you take a call with Mr. Iliou? I’m instructed to tell you that it’s highly urgent.”

  She hesitates, but owes it to Constantin not to keep the old man waiting. “Sure,” she says.

  Another male voice, older, intent, weary. “Ms. Sunden,” he says. “This is Cons
tantin’s father. I got your note. Thank you for that. The disposition of my son’s remaining memories does in fact concern me deeply. But before we discuss that, I have the sense that you believe yourself to be in danger. Is this true?”

  She thinks of Cromwell, whose guilt seems certain, who must be hunting for her. “Yes.”

  “Then the first thing is to get you out of it. I’d like you to come and see me. I’m currently in Patmos, a Greek island in the Dodecanese. But forgive me—obviously, you know where Patmos is. I have a jet standing by at San Francisco airport—with a flight path allowing mostly supersonic speed, the flight should take about six hours. Without going into detail, the security situation here is sufficient to deter even a highly resourced adversary. Will you come?”

  His calm is fathomless, and his sincerity evident. She remembers Cromwell mentioning Philip with casual contempt, and that he’d known where Philip lived. She thinks of him floating in the black water, how she’d wanted to save him, how he’d let himself be destroyed before backing down. “I’ll come,” she says, her fingers moving over the cab’s screen, redirecting it to the airport.

  32

  Still Unformed

  He wakes to the T-shirt on his eyes, murmuring voices, footsteps passing by. Remembering his circumstances, he wishes he could go back to sleep. He tries out the idea that he’ll be fine if he doesn’t move, but it’s day and he must already be conspicuous. The phone is still in his hand, the cable connecting it to the port in the wall. “You up?” he asks the ghost, but she doesn’t reply.

  He swipes at the phone’s screen but it stays dark; in fact, it’s been dark for as long as he’s had it. “I’m going to unplug you, okay?” he says, and does. Through the earpiece he hears what might be wind, maybe the sea. He isn’t too bothered—she has to sleep sometime, whatever she said.

  He crawls out of his nest, struck afresh by the bustle of the concourse, its scale. The sleeping bag rolls small and tight and fits into his new luggage. So that’s it, he thinks, looking at the vacated space under the bench, and walks away.