The room was beginning to smell like death. Congealing blood dropped from the chair to the carpet. Title music throbbed from the vid. Steward tried to empty himself, to make an airless space in his interior, allowing Stoichko and the influences here to fill him with meaning. He began working through Stoichko’s belongings, erasing his fingerprints with his jacket as he went.
The Group Seven agent traveled light. He had a single bag—it was made of real leather, with a steel spine—and Steward found it open in the closet. He dumped the contents onto the bed. There was an assortment of dirty clothes, a small plastic pouch of tools—screwdrivers, adjustable wrenches, and so on—and a small bag with four slots in it, intended to carry small flasks of liquor but which in this case held only a single flask of cognac. Probably Stoichko had carried the inhalers in two of the other slots. They were the right size.
The closets held only clothing. Steward appropriated a handkerchief to wipe prints with. There was nothing hidden behind the drawers in the small bureau or in the desk. The bathroom featured standard toilet articles. Steward put a tube of toothpaste and a container of stick deodorant in his pockets to go through later, in case there might be something hidden there.
On the bedside were a pair of data spikes neatly labeled, in what Steward assumed was Stoichko’s hand, as music. Steward put the spikes in his pocket.
Steward’s eyes moved over the room again. Stoichko slumped in his chair. His cigar had burned out. On the video an olive-skinned woman with bright eye makeup like butterfly wings was kissing a small Oriental man in a black silk gi.
Group Seven is going to think I killed him, Steward thought. I’d better run fast, when I run.
The hotel staff wouldn’t discover the body till tomorrow at the earliest. Maybe later, if they paid serious attention to the red do not disturb light glowing outside the room.
There probably wouldn’t be any other Group Seven people on Charter—they’d have to come up from Earth. There would be no immediate pursuit. Unless whoever killed Stoichko was calling the Charter cops and letting them know. A chill ran up Steward’s neck at the thought.
Certain chances, he concluded, ought to be taken. The mind a void.
He tried to let the room talk to him.
Steward wondered what the tools were for. And he wondered if there had been a fourth flask in the small case.
He looked at Stoichko again, and felt a coppery taste on his tongue. He knew what happened next.
The body was still warm, the blood still wet, and the reality of it moved through Steward in a wave of nausea. The whirlwind seemed to beat in Steward’s ears. He patted Stoichko down, found which pockets were full, emptied the ones he could reach. A credit spike, a waferlike hotel key, a ring of other, anonymous keys. Steward tossed them on the floor. The back pockets next. Steward stood up, then reached for the man’s belt and pulled, trying to move the heavy corpse. It was a dead weight, seemingly boneless, and was harder to manage than Steward expected. A belt loop tore with a startling, ripping sound. Pools of blood poured across Stoichko’s tilted chest. Steward stepped back quickly to keep the stuff off his pumps, then walked around to the other side of the chair and went through Stoichko’s back pockets. Nothing there.
Void, Steward thought. Let the meaning enter him.
What were the tools for? Steward wondered.
He looked around the room again. From the vid came the sound of cartilage breaking. The man in the black gi had just spun and planted a foot in the face of a blond man.
Steward turned the vid off and unplugged it. He took the tools and removed the back with one of Stoichko’s screwdrivers.
There was a small black metal flask taped to the inside of the narrow chassis. Steward reached in, pulled on the tape. It came free with a sucking sound. The flask was light and fit in Steward’s palm. It had a small paper sticker on it with the biohazard symbol: warning, it said, biologic seal. open only in sterile environment.
Steward put the flask down and wiped anything he may have touched. He reattached the back of the vid set and wiped it, then put the flask in his back pocket.
Stoichko’s blood oozed slowly through the carpet. Steward stepped carefully around it.
The hollowness in him had become an ache.
Time to go.
*
Zhou wasn’t home. Steward stopped by a delivery service, wrapped the flask in a package along with instructions and a spike with advance payment, then mailed it to him. He walked for the shuttle docks, scanning behind him regularly, trying not to run. Gravity slowly relinquished its hold. Holo adverts hammered at him. There seemed to be continual movement at the periphery of his senses, but when he looked, he could see nothing. He still felt the emptiness inside, and it was beginning to hurt. He wanted to fill it with something.
The Starbright shuttle to Earth had gone. He looked at the winking video departed notice and wondered if Reese was aboard.
He scanned the bright glowing columns of the shuttle schedule and saw one yellow column that represented a shuttle that moved from one habitat in lunar orbit to another, carrying salesmen from one hotel to the next. From solon, port arthur. To prince, new hmty, keystone, solon, port arthur.
New Humanity, where Natalie lived with the Alpha’s child in gravity-free seclusion. The price of a ticket was absurdly small.
It was weak of him, he knew. He might be bringing trouble to her. But he needed to fill himself with something real, something besides violent death in a small hotel room, a slumped and ultimately sad man cooling slowly while the video nattered on. And he didn’t expect to have to deal with Group Seven for a while yet.
And if they caught up with him after a few days, this might be his last chance.
He decided that New Humanity was what he wanted.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
To confuse anyone following he bought a ticket all the way to Port Arthur. Most of the people on the shuttle seemed to know one another, and they smiled, greeted, and chatted as they came aboard. They watched Steward with genial curiosity. Steward declined the attendant’s offer of food, and tried to rest.
Thoughts roared through his brain like a fire blown before the autumn mistral, touching his mind with burning. When he closed his eyes, he saw patterns like bright splashes of blood that printed themselves in laser color on his retinas. Coherence eluded him. He knew nothing other than the fact that Tsiolkovsky’s Demon was breathing down his neck. He gave it up and ordered a scotch.
When it came, he could tell from the taste that the whiskey was Japanese. He grimaced and drank it.
The need was growing inside him. He knew there was a madness in this, and he fought it with logic, with the words of Ashraf: “Nothing to do with you, now.” The words seemed as dead as Ashraf, and spun meaninglessly in the chaos of Steward’s mind.
Six hours and three slow drinks later Steward watched New Humanity grow through the shuttle window. It was a silver shining structure, several kilometers across, without the toroidal or spindlelike shape of a habitat with artificial gravity, a maze of modular tubes and tunnels and bright, boxlike zero-g factories, studded with antennas, receiver dishes, and solar power collectors. Steward was the only passenger to disembark.
Eighty years ago four Imagist concerns had built New Humanity as a showplace for their ideology, a habitat for the second stage of humankind, populated solely by individuals bred to live in space, free of gravity.
When Steward got off the shuttle, it became obvious how the dream had failed. The air tasted sour, as if the purifiers were contaminated by some manner of fungus or bacteria. The apathetic six-armed frog woman drifting before her video terminal at the customs desk seemed faintly surprised to see him, and the tunnels and corridors seemed empty even of the altered humanity who lived here. Graffiti covered the tube walls. There was still manufacturing going on here, but competition was stiff in metals and pharmaceuticals, and more modern plants, better supported by their policorps, were making things hard. The original four spon
sors were long gone. New Humanity was a policorporate national state now, and on its own.
There was no visible security onstation. Steward assumed there was nothing here worth stealing.
Darwin Days had come to New Humanity. The colony was losing its niche.
Free-fall sleeping bag, lav, shower, and comp terminal, all in institutional gray—that was Steward’s state-sponsored hotel room. There was a 3-D poster of happy frog children at play in a bright, clean habitat. we build the future, it said. He stuck his bag to the wall with Velcro straps. Local time indicated a shift change coming up in the next hour. He stuck his feet into restraining straps in front of the terminal and punched up the station directory.
Natalie’s address burned in front of him. He felt a dryness on his tongue, an awareness flickering like static on the surface of his skin. Hunger. He was very close to something he wanted.
He asked the terminal how to get from his hotel to Natalie’s habitat. She proved to live in a housing unit on the far end of the station, near the bio plant where Steward assumed she worked. He memorized the connections he’d have to take to get there, then left the hotel and kicked off from the wall, heading for an access tube.
The shortest route proved not to be the most well traveled. After Steward took one branch, he noticed the passage was dark. Only one light in three was functioning, the others having been removed. The tunnel emptied into a darkened housing unit. There was a broad pathway along the interior of the unit, hexagonal in shape, with six banks of apartments opening off the six sides. The air was musty, and Steward realized the air circulation here had been shut down. The housing unit had been abandoned. New Humanity’s population was draining away.
A few lights still gleamed along the main route through the unit. Steward kicked off, aiming for the distant green light that meant the access tunnel to Natalie’s living module.
Steward’s path drifted slightly, nearing some of the housing units. Some of the apartment doors, he saw, had been forced in, some had been removed. In the dim light he could see that the interior of the apartments were gutted, the fixtures pulled out, pipes and wires thrusting in clumps from the walls. Graffiti coated every flat surface. Rubbish hung motionlessly in the interior. Steward brushed one of the unit’s internal struts, seized it, spun around, and kicked out, correcting his trajectory.
Something ahead eclipsed the green light that was his destination. Steward looked closer and saw a pale face moving in his direction. There was something wrong with the silhouette, and as Steward came nearer, he saw the bulging brain case sparsely covered with pale hair, the six limbs, four of them growing from modified hips and terminating in hands. A high-pitched giggle sounded in the still air, echoed from the many walls. Steward felt his nape hair rising at the sound. As Steward came closer he saw eyes bright with madness returning his gaze.
Two of the hind limbs seized one of the padded cross-members of the habitat, then the body swung around, redirecting its motion toward one of the apartment doors. The limbs were sticks only, the elbows standing out like knobs. The huge brain was absorbing nutrition and oxygen, starving the body. The frog man was no taller than a ten-year-old child.
Another titter broke the silence. Limbs reached out, snatched a rung near the apartment door, and then the frog man opened the door and crawled inside, moving with fast, unnatural movements, like an insect diving down a drain. Blue light glowed through the door, casting azure highlights on the frog man’s naked skin, on the computer equipment floating in the apartment amid a bright collection of rubbish, empty drink containers, fast-food trays, old-fashioned ROM cartridges, on the slogan painted on the door, covalence rule. One of the slogans of the New Rejuve Movement.
The frog man stuck his head out the door and looked at Steward with a nervous grin. “Germs, you know,” he said in a high voice, and then the door slammed shut. Steward drifted on in the growing darkness.
Building the future, he thought. Darwin Days.
The next tube accessed Natalie’s apartment cluster, identical to the other but inhabited, brightly lit. There was life in this place after all. Steward was relieved by the sensation of circulating air on his skin, by the laughter of children playing some kind of complicated brachiating game on a jungle gym attached to one of the cross-members. It was shift change, and people were floating to and from their apartments. Most of them were frogs, a few were unmodified humanity. Floating directional holograms told him which of the six banks of apartments he wanted. He kicked out and soared toward Natalie’s door.
His veins seemed afire. Sweat was prickling his eye sockets. He planted his feet on the Velcro strip by the door and bent to ring the buzzer. The scent of fresh coffee drifted from the closed door. Memories fluttered in his belly.
Natalie opened the door. She floated in the apartment with her head toward him, and looked up at him with eyes he knew. A slow pulse of shock moved through him. He hadn’t known what to expect, what blend of old and new, but whatever he’d anticipated, it wasn’t this.
Her hair was short now, the black shot lightly with gray. She was wearing gray canvas trousers and a reinforced short-sleeved shirt with metal harness rings attached, enabling her to anchor herself to a desk with straps. Her feet were bare. She held a bulb of coffee in one hand.
Her skin was white and slack, blotched red in places, the sign of a life lived indoors. Her face was rounder than he’d expected. She had been long without the gravity that gave tension to the skin and character to the face.
She looked up in shock, took a breath, let it out. Her fingers tightened on the doorframe.
“I should have known you’d come,” she said.
The voice hadn’t changed, and at the sound Steward felt fire burn him to the marrow. “Can I come in?” he asked.
Her eyes looked him up and down. “You look so damned young.”
Steward shrugged. “It’s the way I look.”
“A hard boy. Nothing soft. I remember that.”
“You liked me that way,” Steward said. “As I remember.”
She was looking at him, saying nothing. It bothered Steward that he couldn’t read the look, that his memories provided no clue to what was passing through her mind.
“I’d like to come in,” he said.
“I have to go to work in just a few minutes.”
“I’d like to come in. For just a few minutes.”
The shadow of a decision crossed her face. With a push of her arms she moved back from the door. She touched the far wall, absorbed the momentum, and waited, hanging there, looking up at him. Steward pulled his feet from the Velcro strip and hooked one shoe under the doorframe, then pulled himself in till he could grip the edge of the door with his hands and control his motion. He closed the door behind him and pushed off to the wall where Natalie waited.
The room was small and neat. No floor in zero g, no ceiling, just six walls. Small tables and a desk were folded against the wall. There was a small kitchen, a computer console with straps and hooks to hold someone to the keyboard. Books and labeled data spikes were strapped into shelves. A door led to a darkened bedroom. A small robot clung to the wall, doing the cleaning. There was no sign of the boy. Steward wondered where he was. Boarding school, perhaps, offstation.
Steward’s mouth was dry. “Could I have some coffee?” he asked.
“Help yourself.” She was watching him with a thoughtful expression. He found himself surprised by it—it was uninvolved, objective. As if this didn’t matter to her.
He took coffee, rotated in place near the kitchen to face her, hung in space, and tasted the coffee. It wasn’t bad.
“You’ve been drinking,” she said. “I can smell it.”
“Yes. Japanese scotch, on the shuttle. It wasn’t good.”
“Do you drink in the morning, these days?”
“It’s a little past midnight, my time. I think.”
She opened her arms, making a gesture that indicated herself, the apartment, New Humanity. The movement
was graceful, assured, as he remembered. “I hope it’s worth staying up late for,” she said.
He watched her, looked for clues, something he could touch, could hang on to. He wasn’t finding anything. “Me, too,” he said.
Natalie cocked her head at him. “I had forgotten about the intensity. It mellowed a little, with the first one. But he could always call it up when he wanted it.”
“The Alpha.”
“That makes you a Beta, I suppose?” A smile twitched at her lips. “The terminology doesn’t do much for your self-esteem, I suppose.”
“I try to work at it a little harder.”
Her green eyes gazed at him. “Work at what? Being the Alpha?”
Steward felt a spasm inside him. He looked for an answer, found nothing. He shrugged instead. “At being what I am, I guess.”
“And your coming here? Is that a part of your work?”
He looked at Natalie, held her gaze. “A part of my hope. I think.”
Her eyes slid away from his, nervous. She bit her lower lip. “That’s not a real description of me, Beta,” she said. “I don’t exist in that way.”
“You can’t know that.”
She turned from him, began to drift toward the bedroom. “I’m going to have to make myself up for work.” She waved an arm toward the door, dismissing him.
“You can’t know that,” Steward insisted. “What my hopes may be.”
Natalie’s voice was muffled as it came from the next room. “I know what’s possible between us.”
Steward rotated in place, kicked off, shot across the small room, checked himself at the door. Natalie hung next to a mirror. She flicked a switch, and bright light illuminated her face. It was merciless. Even halfway across the room Steward could see the slack skin, the blemishes. Steward remembered sand, ocean, distant song. He swallowed coffee. “Can’t you tell your people at work that you’ll be late?”
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