When the Sparrow Falls

by Neil Sharpson

  “All right,” she said, quietly.

  I had been given a specific text to read to her. Fortunately, the morning light had improved enough that I could actually read it.

  “You have been granted the status of natural-born human by special dispensation of the Parliament of the Caspian Republic hereafter referred to as ‘the Parliament,’” I began. “If you breach any of the following restrictions, the Parliament reserves the right to summarily rescind this special dispensation and place you under arrest for breach of the laws of the Caspian Republic. Notwithstanding this special dispensation, you are strictly forbidden from engaging in any form of consciousness transferal. In the unlikely event of your physical death, in the eyes of the law you will be considered dead and will be legally obliged to remain so. You will remain with me at all times. If you wish to speak to anyone you must first ask my permission, and the conversation must be conducted in my presence. If you are carrying any weaponry, contraband or recording equipment on your person you must disclose them to me now or risk the revocation of the special dispensation. At all times, you shall…”

  “Excuse me?”

  Her voice cut across mine and I fell silent. I didn’t really have a choice. There was an authority to that voice. It was not demanding. But she had that quiet power that some women have. The unspoken assumption that they are going to be obeyed, because they are.

  “Yes?”

  “Is there much more of this?” she asked. There was no hint of reproach in her voice, which made the reproach sting all the more.

  I glanced down at my text. I was around a fifth of the way through.

  “The list of restrictions is quite comprehensive,” I mumbled, as if I had let her down.

  “Do you have a car?”

  “There is an agency car waiting for us outside.”

  “Then can we go, and I’ll read the rest of them as we drive?” she asked reasonably.

  “It’s quite cold,” she added.

  So much for the Good Brother. I blushed from shame. Stammering my apologies, I offered to take her bag; she demurred, I insisted and she relented.

  I opened the door of the car for her and sat down beside her and told the driver to take us to StaSec HQ. I noticed she stared at the driver, and when the car drove off she involuntarily gripped the handrest. I realized that she had probably never been in a car that had been driven by a human being.

  “It’s quite safe,” I whispered.

  She nodded, but looked anything but reassured.

  The inside of the car was quite warm now, and she reached up to remove her hat and scarf. It was fascinating watching her move. Every motion was graceful and precise, but also very clearly conscious. She had to think of everything, down to the last motion of the last finger. When it came to manipulating this body of hers, she had knowledge, but no instinct. She took off the hat first, and long curly brown hair fell about her shoulders.

  Then came the scarf, revealing the lower half of her face and I almost screamed.

  Instead, I stared at her in dumbfounded horror.

  “What?” she asked, nervously. “What is it?”

  It is a coincidence, I told myself.

  Or, it is a trap.

  Either way, it must be ignored. Don’t let it affect you. Don’t let it make you do anything you would not ordinarily do.

  How could they know?

  Exactly. They didn’t. They couldn’t. It’s pure chance.

  Impossible. HOW DID THEY KNOW?

  “Agent South?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  There is a face that I know better than my own. A face that hangs on the wall of my mind. This was the face that greeted me when I opened the back door in the middle of a rainy night a lifetime ago, wearing defiance and apology. A beautiful face. Mysterious, maddening, loving, cruel. It was the face beneath mine, hovering in the darkness like a pale stone at the bottom of a pool when we made love on the table in the kitchen. It was the face beneath mine on the beach when she had been pulled from the ocean and my breath had not been enough.

  And it was the face of the Machine sitting across from me now in the car. It was impossible. But there it was. This Lily was Olesya alive again. Not similar. Not remarkably reminiscent of.

  The woman herself.

  Someone had done this. Someone had chosen that body for her. Someone had … somehow, re-created the body of my dead wife and given it to this code bitch to wear.

  This would lead to murder. I swore it then. I would find the person that had thought this was a good idea. I would show them that they were mistaken. I would go to the Machine world if I had to. I cursed them. I cursed Niemann for giving me this detail. I cursed the world and everything in it. The wounds of two decades had been reopened and I felt like I was bleeding to death.

  I smiled.

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  9

  The Machine is not human, but is uncannily similar to a specific class of human, namely the psychopath. The Machine lies perfectly, as it has no sense of shame. The only reason a Machine captive will tell the truth will be if doing so is the only way to prevent its own destruction. Even then, it will conspire to use the truth to its own greatest advantage, and to the detriment of its enemies.

  —Agent’s Handbook of the State Security Agency of the Caspian Republic

  I had not really had a chance to consider Chernov’s theory that someone in StaSec was in league with the contran operation that had claimed the Paria twins among hundreds of others. If I had given it any thought, it was to consider it much as I considered Chernov himself: dangerous and lethally stupid. That was partly lingering institutional loyalty, on my part. StaSec was in many ways the long-suffering older child of the government’s many apparatuses: distrusted, maligned, overlooked in favor of its more fanatically zealous younger sibling, ParSec. But it was (in its gray, plodding, jaded way) quietly and deeply loyal.

  “If you had so much as a traitorous thought in your head I would have pried it out and stamped on it a long time ago,” Niemann had warned. And I believed her.

  The idea of anyone in StaSec running or even assisting in a contran operation seemed grotesque and bizarre. And then there was Chernov’s theory that Lily Xirau was a courier, intended to accept custody of the Sontang chips that would carry the consciousnesses of hundreds of Caspian defectors to the Machine world. I could see why it would appeal to Chernov: It was an obvious, stupid plan and he was an obvious, stupid man. But anyone with an ounce of savvy could have told him that Lily Xirau was the worst possible candidate for such a task. Her arrival in Caspian was an event. Shocking. Unprecedented. Guaranteed to draw attention. Instructions that “StaSec is handling this” notwithstanding, every security agency in the country would be watching her like a hawk. It was perhaps more dramatic to imagine Lily Xirau smuggling the chips out from under the very noses of the nation’s gatekeepers in her handbag, rather than some anonymous, unshaven smuggler ferrying them across the sea to Persia in a fishing boat on a foggy night. But that was ParSec’s entire problem. They were less an intelligence agency, and more a gang of enthusiastic amateurs pretending to be one. They saw drama and plot everywhere.

  Unbidden, I heard Chernov’s voice in my head: But now, here comes Lily Xirau.

  Yes, indeed.

  Mrs. Xirau’s appearance had thrown everything into question, and what had once seemed lurid and unthinkable now stood revealed as the only likely scenario. I glanced at her briefly, for the fifth or seventh time, to be sure I was not imagining it. She pretended not to notice, but I could see her wince miserably under my gaze. She knew something was wrong but didn’t dare to ask what. She was most likely cursing the day she had decided to come here. I was not imagining it. Lily Xirau was a perfect double for Olesya, my wife–ex-wife, who had drowned in the Caspian Sea twenty years ago.

  Very well. The situation was plain. Now, to figure out why. Preferably, in the twenty minutes before the car reached StaSec HQ.

  First thing
s first, to dispose of the obvious. Could this be just a coincidence?

  This was simultaneously the most mundane-seeming, and least likely of all possible scenarios. After all, one meets people who remind one of other people all the time and there are only so many faces to go around. But it could not be overstressed, Lily did not simply resemble Olesya. She was identical. And the notion that out of all people, I had been chosen to escort her, and out of all people on earth that she could have resembled she just happened to be the perfect double of Olesya? Ludicrous. Impossible. There was intent here. There had to be.

  Very well, then what was to be gained? What would I do for someone who looked like Olesya that I would not do for someone else?

  Oh, that was clever. That was despicably clever. Yes. I imagined that if you could approach someone in the body of a loved one who had died long ago, someone that they had failed, someone that they had let down, and gave them a chance to make things right … the jigs and reels you could make them dance. The vows and loyalties they would betray for you. The Machine was the devil, we were often told. Clearly, we had not been giving it due credit. That was clever.

  Very well. I was being targeted. Lily Xirau was going to try to turn me or somehow use me for her own ends. How then did they get her to look so like Olesya?

  My wife had been buried in the Resting Place of the Founders, on the northern outskirts of Ellulgrad. In order to clone her body they would have had to exhume her, extract a viable genetic sample (after twenty years?), somehow smuggle that to the Machine world and clone Olesya, growing her to maturity in time for Lily Xirau to be contranned into her and sent to Caspian. Impossible. Niemann had informed me that I was being assigned to the Xirau detail only yesterday, and had presumably come to that decision at most only a few days ago when Paulo’s autopsy had revealed him to be machine. There simply wasn’t enough time.

  An alternative: The Machine had been informed that I was to escort Lily Xirau. They had found a cloned body that closely resembled Olesya, and then surgically altered it to close the gap. I glanced again at Mrs. Xirau. I could not see a trace of surgery anywhere on her features, but who knew how advanced the Machine’s techniques were? That seemed far more plausible.

  Regardless, if one accepted that Mrs. Xirau’s resemblance to Olesya was not a coincidence, that led one inexorably to the following conclusions:

  1) Lily Xirau, far from being an innocent grieving widow, is an agent of the Machine Powers and she is on a mission.

  2) This mission will require her playing on my feelings for my dead wife, and using them against me.

  3) Given the recent uptake in contran in the city, it is most likely that she is here to accept custody of the dozen missing Sontang chips and will try to suborn me to aid or at least overlook her efforts to do so.

  4) Given that the Machine knew to disguise its agent as Olesya, it has a source that was able to provide it with photographic references of her. Such as would be available in my StaSec file.

  5) StaSec has therefore been compromised, and someone within its ranks is working with the contran operation and quite possibly running it.

  Or, to put it another way, Chernov had been right about every single thing. And that was not the most mind-boggling thing of all, only because I had literally just seen my wife return from the grave.

  I briefly wondered if perhaps Mrs. Xirau was blameless. Maybe she didn’t know the significance of the body she had been given? No. No one gave a spy a gun and then neglected to teach them how to shoot. She had to know. She had to know why she looked the way she did. Lily Xirau was the enemy, and I would have to treat her as such.

  For a moment, I considered simply blowing the entire thing up. March up to Niemann’s office, explain that Lily Xirau had obviously been sent as an agent and have her dragged off to a small cell, a cold meal and a quick death.

  Unless …

  Oh, be careful here, South.

  Imagine if the outside world hears that the brutal, backward Caspian Republic has executed a poor innocent woman who had been invited to identify the body of her murdered husband? It had long been taken as gospel within Caspian that the ultimate goal of the Triumvirate was to conquer or crush us. We were the random element that could not be incorporated into their perfect system, a recurring flaw, a virus in the data. What if George or Athena were not interested in a few hundred contranned Caspians? What if their goal was the whole nation?

  The state-sanctioned murder of poor, grieving Mrs. Xirau.

  I had certainly heard worse pretexts for war.

  Be careful here, South. Play your part, for now.

  10

  It is common to hear Koslova, Papalazarou pére and Dascalu referred to as the “Holy Trinity” of the Founding. With regards to Dascalu, the comparison would be apt only if the Father and Son had dismissed the Holy Spirit, and hired Satan as his replacement.

  —Ignatius Kasamarin, personal correspondence, date unknown

  Mrs. Xirau and I walked through the lobby of StaSec HQ, past the massive portrait of Dascalu that scowled over his children like God watching the Israelites pay homage to the golden calf. When Lily walked past him I half expected that Dascalu would burst into flames, or the paint melt and bleed onto the marble floor. Beneath the portrait was the main desk, manned by an ancient creature named Berger who was as much an institution in StaSec as the portrait that hung over him. The rumor was that he was immortal. He was on the phone as we approached, taking notes on a large yellow pad. He glanced up and gestured for me to wait until he had finished. I did not wish to look at Lily, and so I fixed my gaze on the massive portrait that hung above us. Doctor Simon Augustine Emmanuel Dascalu. Looking at him, you could mistake him for an elderly Darwin, or George Bernard Shaw, his face enrobed in a magnificent white beard as pure white as an angel’s wing. But Darwin always looks sad, and Shaw mischievous. Doctor Dascalu’s expression was a warning. Even as he glowered up at you from the obverse of the fifty moneta bill he seemed to be questioning your motives: What are you going to spend that fifty on, Brother? Nothing disloyal, I trust?

  The Old Man. That was what they had called him. Even in the earliest days of the Founding, when he had only been in his fifties. It was the title, the beard. The air of a stormy king in winter. If Koslova had been the heart and blood and muscle of the revolution and Papalazarou Senior its voice, Dascalu was its cold, ruthless intellect. The Old Man, even the official histories would admit, had no scruple about doing what needed to be done. Kasamarin’s appraisal of him was practically blistering, which made reading his chapters on the Founding of StaSec a giddy, delicious thrill. But Kasamarin was party royalty, and could say such things. And besides, Dascalu was long dead, and his reach (though considerable) did not quite extend beyond the grave.

  Dascalu had been StaSec’s first director, its founder and its midwife. He had lobbied for its creation in Parliament, and taken control of it when it was done. In the twenty-seven years of his reign StaSec was (quite rightly) seen as simply an extension of Dascalu himself. If you were Dascalu’s enemy, you were StaSec’s. And if you were StaSec’s enemy, you were the enemy of the Caspian Republic. The distinction was moot. That was the point. So melded together in the common mind were StaSec and Dascalu that the doctor’s nickname attached itself to his creation. StaSec was “The Old Man,” and the name stuck long after Dascalu had finally shuffled out the door to be replaced by his ruthless young lieutenant, Samuel Papalazarou Junior. He truly had been the “old man” by then, eighty-six years old and drifting like a rudderless ship. He had retired to his dacha and died a few months later, as we all knew he would. Separate Dascalu from StaSec? A separated Siamese twin would have better odds of survival. So the old man had died, but The Old Man lived on. But names have a habit of changing their meaning over time, and “The Old Man” had taken on a rather different cast in recent years. No longer did it conjure images of Dascalu’s scowling face and penetrating, all-seeing glare. With the rise of ParSec, StaSec was an old man like
any other old man: tired, increasingly irrelevant, mocked, faded and almost certainly not long for the earth.

  “Hello, Agent South. Have you been promoted yet?” Berger asked.

  “Not yet, Paul. Not yet,” I said with a smile.

  Paul Berger had been the porter when I had joined StaSec. I had been a young man then, and he most certainly had not, and yet here he was still. I had sometimes wondered if he had been here even before StaSec. Perhaps he had been the receptionist of the Neftchilar Grand Hotel and had been included with the building when StaSec took over. It would explain why he was always so welcoming. If you spent your whole day in StaSec and saw only one smile, you could be certain that it was Berger’s.

  “Ah well,” he said, “any day now. And who is your lovely guest?”

  “This is Lily Xirau,” I said. “She should be in the book.”

  “Yes indeed, yes indeed, yes indeed,” Berger muttered, running his finger over the relevant page of his diary, and then ducking under his desk, which caused his knees to crack like gunfire.

  “Welcome to Caspian, my dear lady,” said Berger, smiling beneficently as he re-emerged. I wondered if he knew she was machine, and if it would have made a difference to him. In his hand he had an identification badge and lanyard which he delicately placed on her neck as if presenting her with a medal.

  “Please be sure to keep it visible at all times, thank you, it helps us a great deal.”

  Lily nodded, smiling. “I will, thank you.”

  “Now, you’re in room fifteen, on the third floor—”

  “No,” I interrupted, “we’re in … are you sure?”

  I had been going to say “the morgue,” but that had felt indelicate.

  “Quite sure, Agent South,” he said, a little peevishly and showed me his diary. Sure enough: “A. South, W. Xirau-12.00 a.m. F3 R15.” (The “A” and “W” standing for “agent” and “witness” respectively.)