Niemann laughed, a weary, good-humored laugh.
“I tried,” she said. “The plan was that you would escort Paulo Xirau’s wife to the identification. On the third day you would be arrested and Sally would see Mrs. Xirau safely on her flight home. Then StaSec would present the prime minister with evidence that the notorious Yozhik, a dissatisfied StaSec agent named Nikolai South, had tried to coerce Mrs. Xirau into acting as a courier for the twelve Sontang chips containing the souls of six hundred Caspian defectors. The Old Man would have proved its bona fides and ParSec would be marginalized politically.”
“And all the while,” I said, “Yozhik would continue unimpeded.”
“Yes,” said Niemann, quietly. “She would.”
“Why?” I asked. “Money?”
“Principle, funnily enough,” said Niemann, a little embarrassed.
“Oh?”
“Well, it’s a rotten system, South,” she said. “Surely you’ve realized that by now?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I just wish you’d realized that twenty-six years ago.”
Niemann actually winced and looked away.
“Fair,” she said. “Perfectly fair. I’m sorry, South. For what I did to your family.”
“And what did you do?” I said.
I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted to make her say it.
“I killed your sister-in-law,” she said, without flinching. “Or as good as. And then, to protect a man not worth protecting I hid her body in a forest, hoping that it would never be found and that you and the rest of her loved ones would be tormented by her loss for the rest of your days, without ever knowing what became of her. And I did it because I believed in the party. And StaSec. And Caspian. Like you once did.”
“So what changed?” I asked.
“I lost my wife,” she said. “Just like you. And I realized just how perverse this place really is. Every day, in this country, people die. And we could save them. We have the technology. We could contran them and they could go on living as long as they wanted. But we say ‘no.’ We say they have to die.”
“That’s what humans beings do,” I said.
“No, South. I think you’re wrong,” said Niemann, trying to keep her voice from breaking. “Animals die. Alone, suffering and in pain. But human beings live forever. They are beautiful, unique, perfect and immortal. I believe that. And if it’s not true, then I will make it true.”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Officially you are in a secure StaSec location known only to myself and a few members of the DSD. Unofficially, between you, me and your catheter we are in Yozhik’s clinic. This is where most of my work is carried out.”
It was obvious in retrospect. The only way Yozhik could have kept an operation of this size secret from StaSec was if StaSec itself was running it. Chernov had been right, to a point. But there was something I still needed to know.
“Lily’s body,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Did you arrange that?”
Niemann’s brow furrowed. “I’m not sure I understand?”
“You’ve seen her?”
“In the morgue, yes.”
My trousers had been hung on a chair in the far corner. I raised an arm that felt like a lead pipe to point to them.
“My wallet,” I wheezed. “There’s a picture inside. Look at it.”
Niemann did so, and stared at the photograph for a few seconds.
“Olesya. My wife,” I explained.
“She’s very pretty,” said Niemann blandly.
I was stunned. Had she even looked at it?
“You don’t see it?” I asked incredulously.
“See what?” she asked.
“Olesya. Lily.”
“What? You think they look alike?”
“You don’t?!” I exclaimed, bewildered.
Niemann shrugged.
“A slight resemblance, maybe,” she said, and replaced the wallet in my trouser pocket.
My mind reeled. Had I simply imagined it?
Niemann looked at me, rather concerned.
“Are you all right, South?”
“I … I thought she had come back from the dead,” I said at last. “She looked so like her, to me. I thought you had arranged it. To make it easier for her to manipulate me.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Niemann, bluntly.
“Wouldn’t you?” I said.
“No,” said Niemann, sharply. “But that does explain why you ruined my plan to frame you as a contran smuggler by becoming a contran smuggler. If my wife came back from the grave and asked for my help I don’t think I could refuse her, either.”
“Maybe I’ve finally gone insane?” I wondered.
“Maybe,” Niemann agreed. “Maybe not. Sometimes I wonder if old Mendelssohn wasn’t on to something. Or maybe the resemblance was only there when she was alive. Identical souls rather than identical faces. People do look completely different when they’re dead, you know.”
I did. Better than I would have liked to.
“How did ParSec know? That we would try to smuggle Paulo Xirau out of the country?” I asked.
“You give them entirely too much credit,” Niemann drawled. “You see, they were listening in—”
“They bugged the room?” I interrupted.
“The bugged the book,” she corrected. “Kasamarin’s history. A tiny listening device hidden in the cover. Clever, really. One must admit a certain professional admiration. But it was fragile. When you smashed one of the figurines you broke the listening device. They were sure you were on to them, and they panicked. Chernov decided that the best thing to do would be to rally as many ParSec gullivers as he could and storm StaSec HQ to arrest you. That went about as well as anyone could have told him. But apparently one of his men saw you leave with Mrs. Xirau and they hightailed it after you. They assumed you had given Lily the chips and so they shot her rather than let her escape. And now, if we get through this week without the Triumvirate bombing us back to the Hadean Eon I may die of shock.”
“Laddi Chernov,” I said, like an ancient curse.
“Laddi. Fucking. Chernov,” Niemann agreed darkly.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Well,” and she looked like she was about to give some bad news. “If we let the story stand that both you and Lily were innocent and were gunned down in cold blood by Chernov and his baboons, ParSec is disgraced and humiliated. All to the good. But that leaves the hunt for Yozhik very much alive and I’m afraid there is too much at stake. Too many lives depend on my being able to get them out of the country. So I’m afraid you were the head of the contran operation, South.”
“Was I?” I said, and I did not sound at all convinced.
“You were,” said Niemann firmly. “You felt the investigation closing in on you and you needed to get the chips out of the country immediately. You wrote to me, volunteering yourself for the Xirau detail.”
“That’s a lie,” I spit.
“There is a memorandum in my desk even as we speak, written on your department stationery in what is unmistakably your handwriting,” said Niemann without missing a beat. “I am the Deputy Director of State Security, South. I do not come to play without my racket and ball.”
“And then what happened?” I asked bitterly.
“Thanks to the criminal actions of ParSec Senior Special Agent Chernov, you were made aware that ParSec would be closely monitoring the identification of Paulo Xirau. You smashed their listening device and then threatened Lily Xirau to force her to act as a courier, taking the chips back with her to Tehran. However, you panicked and, fearing that there would be ParSec agents surrounding the airport, you callously destroyed the chips rather than risk being found with them. I’m sure you will remember where you did this at some point but it’s not really relevant, what’s done is done.”
“And where are they really, Deputy Director?” I asked.
I scarcely cared, by this point.
She reached into her pocket and took out a small plastic bag and tossed it to me. Inside, through the clear plastic, I could see a small white disk smeared with blood.
I looked at Niemann with shock and a terrible, fearful hope.
“They dug more than bullets out of Lily Xirau,” said Niemann. “That was her automatic backup. All the newest models have one. Everything that Lily was, right up until the moment she was shot, is perfectly safe on there, just waiting to be brought back to life.”
“And if I…,” I began.
“You say nothing. Not a word about me. Or Yozhik. Or anything. For the rest of your days. And in return, I will get Lily home.”
“What about Paulo?” I asked.
“Him, too.” She nodded. “They’ll get their second chance. So that’s the deal, South. You’ve met her. It’s up to you to decide whether she’s worth it.”
I had to think about it.
For a second, perhaps.
“The lady is worth it,” I said.
“Good,” said Niemann. “I believe we’re done here. Good night, South.”
She rose to leave.
“What’ll happen to me?” I asked. “Death or jail?”
“Which would you rather?” she asked.
It was not an easy question. Jail would most likely be death, but of a nastier kind than simple execution. Then again, who knew what the future held? Only those who chose death.
“Jail,” I said at last.
“I’ll do what I can,” said Niemann.
“You’ll never let me out, will you?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But that’s the wrong way to think of it. Don’t think of it as imprisonment. Think of it like this: For the rest of your life, three square meals a day. Four strong walls. And time to think. I imagine that in the coming years there will be many in Caspian who will envy you.”
Time to think. Yes. Time to think.
I lay in the darkened room, listening to the machine beside me hum and murmur as it disinterestedly kept me alive.
My story was over. If I escaped the firing squad, there would be a few sharp years in prison and then death. I was already fifty-three. Old for my nation.
But I still had time to think.
Lily. Olesya. I had looked at the machine and seen the woman I loved, back from the dead. How?
Because South, I told myself, you are a sad and lonely old man who saw what he needed to see. You have lived too long in Caspian, and Caspian broke you.
But as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it. Sad, lonely and old I might be. And possibly delusional. But I did not see Olesya reborn in some random woman on the streets of Ellulgrad. I saw her in Lily, the first AI woman to set foot in the country (by invitation, at least) in the history of the state. A woman I, by pure chance, was assigned to escort. There were plenty of old, sad, mediocre, expendable men in StaSec. Niemann could have chosen any of them. Why me? Why her? Why Lily? Why Olesya?
It could not be a coincidence.
No. Lily had appeared to me as Olesya, and there had to be a reason. And if there was a reason, it followed there was a culprit.
Niemann?
Well, who else? Who else could it be? And yet, it felt wrong. Too ornate. Too clever by half. Niemann was a fearsomely intelligent woman, far too intelligent to risk being clever. Arranging for Lily to look like Olesya would have taken time, effort and resources for a plot that could have backfired a million and one ways. Hadn’t I almost arrested Lily on the spot when I had seen her face? That would have been disastrous for Niemann’s plan and a very easily foreseen outcome. It was the kind of trick that Chernov might try if he had the imagination for it. But not Niemann.
Niemann had said she hadn’t arranged it, and never would, and I trusted her. An odd thing to say about a woman who had lied and manipulated me into an early grave, but there it was. I trusted her.
Not Niemann then.
Lily?
No. That I simply knew. I did not need to go over the evidence or weigh the probabilities. Some things you just know.
Well, who did that leave?
I remembered what Niemann had said: Sometimes I think old Mendelssohn was on to something.…
Well, now we were scraping the barrel, weren’t we? Deus Ex Machina. Or, to be more accurate, Deus Est Machina.
Mendelssohn’s great, loving machine, his Sparrow Catcher. Sending its tendrils back through time, manipulating all of us to ensure its own creation.
“Ridiculous,” I said with a weary grin to the life support machine. “Don’t you think?”
The machine, whose own tendrils were buried in my chest and abdomen, hummed uncertainly as if it wasn’t quite sure.
It was nonsense, obviously. But I ran through it just for my own amusement.
The Sparrow Catcher makes Lily appear to me as Olesya.
And what is so special about you, South, that the almighty has taken such an interest in you?
He needs me to do something. Something I would not have done otherwise.
And what, pray tell, would that be?
In my mind I heard the click of a chip being laid down on the surface of a table.
Ah …
I had been assuming that it was something to do either with Lily or myself. But there were three of us in that room.
Lily had found Xirau floating in the empty sea. An amnesiac foundling with no idea of where he had come from or why he had been brought into the world. And doesn’t every orphan dream of secretly being the chosen one, the prophesied messiah?
Xirau was now back in the Machine world, thanks to me. I had broken him out of the clay, and set him swimming free again. He had spent his time among humanity, and had now returned to become what he had been created to become.
Which, if we followed this ridiculous line of thinking to its absurd conclusion meant that Xirau …
Xirau the atheist.
Xirau the self-loathing AI.
That Xirau.
He was …
I laughed. I laughed long and hard until the machine started beeping in a most alarming way.
* * *
I slipped into a deep sleep where I dreamed that I was crawling through a desert on my hands and knees.
There was a forest on the horizon, black and bristling like a dead fly on a windowsill.
With a dreamer’s premonition, I knew that Zahara was lying there and that I had to reach the forest to bury her. I felt a weight on my hand and I lifted it to see a massive scorpion, black and heavy as gunmetal, perched on my hand.
It twitched its tail and casually plunged its stinger into my wrist.
I awoke with a jerk to find myself surrounded by bodies. One of them, their face invisible to me, was injecting something into my wrist. Hands gripped the side of my bed and before I knew it I was flying through a corridor, the ceiling lights passing over me impossibly fast. I felt like I was riding on the wind. Then I was lifted from my bed and gently placed on a flat surface while a smooth white sensor did a cautious ballet dance around my head. I had been drugged, or anesthetized, and my mind was falling apart. But I still had enough wherewithal to wonder why they were scanning my skull. I had been shot in the chest, after all. There was nothing wrong with my head.
But then, I remembered that I had hit the tarmac pretty hard when I had fallen. Perhaps they were worried I had a concussion.
The last thing I remember as the machine did its work before the drugs kicked in was the dim outline of a face watching me.
It was a slim face, neither masculine nor feminine,
and kind in its way.
I had the strangest notion that it was Sally Coe.
34
To: The office of Brother Johann Pesk, Prime Minister of the Caspian Republic (“CR”).
From: The office of Brother Samuel Papalazarou Junior, Director of the State Security Agency of the Caspian Republic (“StaSec”).
Subject: Invocation of Article 52 in respect of StaSec Agent Nikolai Andreivich South.
Date: 27 October 2210
Brother Prime Minister,
As you are aware, the current crisis has arisen due to the reckless actions of Bureau of Party Security and Constitutional Enforcement (“ParSec”) Senior Special Agent Vladimir Alexandrovich Chernov, particularly the unsanctioned killing of Mrs. Lily Xirau at Ellulgrad Airport on Tuesday 25th of this month. As requested, I have prepared my account of the matter.
On 20th October the autopsy of Brother Paulo Xirau, (party membership posthumously revoked) a well-known journalist and columnist for The Caspian Truth, revealed Xirau’s true nature as an Artificial Intelligence. The European embassy was informed, and responded with the official line that Paulo Xirau was an EU/American machine citizen who had gone missing some twenty years ago and that he had not been in CR on behalf of any intelligence agency. The American and European embassies jointly petitioned the Foreign Ministry to allow Xirau’s spouse, Mrs. Lily Xirau (also machine), to transit to CR and conclusively identify her husband. It was the opinion of the Foreign Ministry that this request represented a valuable opportunity to improve relations with the machine powers and could possibly lead to a lifting of the most recent economic sanctions placed on CR in reaction to the execution of the political dissident Leon Mendelssohn. The visit was approved by your office, with oversight of Mrs. Xirau’s arrival delegated to the Caspian Air Force and security for her visit to be overseen by StaSec.
Concurrently, StaSec had been making progress in its investigation of code name Yozhik (see briefing submitted to your office 02 November 2209). Yozhik, by far the most prolific and sophisticated contranner in the history of CR, was the target both of a StaSec investigation and of a separate ParSec investigation under the supervision of PSSA Chernov. This ParSec investigation began as an inquiry into several party members who had made use of Yozhik’s services but seems to have expanded far beyond ParSec’s remit into a parallel investigation of Yozhik himself, conducted without consultation with StaSec and without our knowledge.
When the Sparrow Falls Page 24