by Jack Dann
"Didn't want to set it on your work."
"It's fine," I said, indicating an empty spot near the screen. She set my utensils down, and then the bowl. The stew smelled rich and fine, black beans and yogurt adding to the aroma. My stomach growled.
The waitress tapped one of the moving images. "I remember that," she said. "I was living in Vienna. The Viennese thought that marriage was an abomination."
I looked up. She was older than I was, without the funds to prevent the natural aging process. Laugh lines crinkled around her eyes, and her lips—unpainted and untouched—were a faint rose. She smiled.
"Guess it turned out that way, huh? The wife running off like that? Leaving that message?"
"Message?" I asked. I hadn't gotten that far.
"I don't remember exactly what it was. Something like, 'The long arm of the Third Dynasty is impossible to fight. I am going where you can't find me. Maybe then I'll have the chance to live out my entire life.' I guess he nearly beat her to death." The waitress laughed, a little embarrassed.
"In those days I had nothing better to do than study the lives of more interesting people."
"And now?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I figured out that everybody's interesting. I mean, you've got to try. You've got to live. And if you do, you've done something fascinating."
I nodded. People like her were one of the reasons I liked this place.
"You want something to drink?" she asked.
"Bottled water."
"Got it," she said as she left.
By the time she brought my bottled water, I had indeed found the note. It had been sent to all the broadcast media, along with a grainy video, taken from a hidden camera, of one of the most brutal domestic beatings I'd ever seen. The images were sometimes blurred and indistinct, but the actions were clear. The man had beat the woman senseless.
There was no mention of the pregnancy in any of this. There was, however, notification of Anetka's birth six months before her mother had disappeared.
Which led me to Possible Lie Number Three: Anetka had said her mother traveled pregnant. Perhaps she hadn't. Or, more chillingly, someone had altered the record either before or after the clones were brought to term. There had to be an explanation of Anetka in the media or she wouldn't be accepted. If that explanation had been planted before, something else was going on. If it were planted afterwards, Sobol's spokespeople could have simply said that reporters had overlooked her in their rush to other stories.
I checked the other media reports and found the same story. It was time to go beneath those stories and see what else I could find. Then I would confront Anetka about the lies before I began the search for her mother.
V
I contacted her and we met, not at my office, but at her hotel. She was staying in Armstrong's newest district, an addition onto the dome that caused a terrible controversy before it was built. Folks in my section believe the reason for the thinner air is that the new addition has stretched resources. I know they aren't right—with the addition came more air and all the other regulation equipment—but it was one of those arguments that made an emotional kind of sense.
I thought of those arguments, though, as I walked among the new buildings, made from a beige material not even conceived of thirty years before, a material that's supposed to be attractive (it isn't) and more resistant to decay than permaplastic. This entire section of Armstrong smelt new, from the recycled air to the buildings rising around me. They were four stories high and had large windows on the dome side, obviously built with a view in mind.
This part of the dome is self-cleaning and see-through. Dust does not slowly creep up the sides as it does in the other parts of Armstrong. The view is barren and stark, just like the rest of the Moon, but there's a beauty in the starkness that I don't see anywhere else in the universe.
The hotel was another large four-story building. Most of its windows were glazed dark, so no one could see in, but the patrons could see out. It was part of a chain whose parent company was, I had learned the day before, the Third Dynasty. Anetka was doing very little to hide her search from her father.
Inside, the lobby was wide, and had an old-fashioned feel. The walls changed images slowly, showing the famous sites from various parts of the galaxy where the hotels were located. I had read before the hotel opened that the constantly changing scenery took eight weeks to repeat an image. I wondered what it was like working in a place where the view shifted constantly, and then decided I didn't want to know.
The lobby furniture was soft and a comforting shade of dove gray. Piano music, equally soft and equally comforting, was piped in from somewhere. Patrons sat in small groups as if they were posing for a brochure. I went up to the main desk and asked for Anetka. The concierge led me to a private conference room down the main hallway.
I expected the room to be monitored. That didn't bother me. At this point, I still had nothing to hide. Anetka did, but this was her company's hotel. She could get the records, shut off the monitors, or have them destroyed. It would all be her choice.
To my surprise, she was waiting for me. She was wearing another dress, a blue diaphanous thing that looked so fragile I wondered how she managed to move from place to place. Her hair was up and pinned, with diamonds glinting from the soft folds. She also had diamonds glued to the ridge beneath her eyebrows, and trailing down her cheeks. The net effect was to accent her strength. Her broad shoulders held the gown as if it were air, and the folds parted to reveal the muscles on her arms and legs. She was like the diamonds she wore; pretty and glittering, but able to cut through all the objects in the room.
"Have you found anything?" she asked without preamble.
I shut the door and helped myself to the carafe of water on the bar against the nearest wall. There was a table in the center of the room—made, it seemed—of real wood, with matching chairs on the side. There was also a workstation, and a one-way mirror with a view of the lobby.
I leaned against the bar, holding my water glass. It was thick and heavy, sturdy like most things on the Moon. "Your father's will has been posted among the Legal Notices on all the nets for the last three years."
She nodded. "It's common for CEOs to do that to allay stockholder fears."
"It's common for CEOs to authorize the release after they've died. Not before."
Her smile was small, almost patronizing. "Smaller corporations, yes. But it's becoming a requirement for major shareholders in megacorps to do this even if they are not dead. Investigate farther, Mr. Flint, and you'll see that all of the Third Dynasty's major shareholders have posted their wills."
I had already checked the other shareholders' wills, and found that Anetka was right. I also looked for evidence that Carson Sobol was dead, and found none.
She took my silence to be disbelief. "It's the same with the other megacorps. Personal dealings are no longer private in the galactic business world."
I had known that the changes were taking place. I had known, for example, that middle managers signed loyalty oaths to corporations, sometimes requiring them to forsake family if the corporation called for it. This, one pundit had said, was the hidden cost of doing business with alien races. You had to be willing to abandon all you knew in the event of a serious mistake. The upshot of the change was becoming obvious. People to whom family was important were staying away from positions of power in the megacorps.
I said, "You're not going to great lengths to hide this search from your father."
She placed a hand on the wooden chair. She was not wearing gloves, and mingled among the enhancements were more diamonds. "You seem obsessed with my father."
"Your mother disappeared because of him. I'm not going to find her only to have him kill her."
"He wouldn't."
"Says you."
"This is your hesitation?"
"Actually, no," I said. "My hesitation is that, according to all public records, you were born six months before your mother disappeared.
"
I didn't tell her that I knew all the databases had been tampered with, including the ones about her mother's disappearance. I couldn't tell if the information had been altered to show that the disappearance came later or that the child had been born earlier. The tampering was so old that the original material was lost forever.
"My father wanted me to look like a legitimate child."
"You are a clone. He knew cloning laws."
"But no one else had to know."
"Not even with his will posted?"
"Like you said, it's only been posted for the last three years."
"Is that why you're not mentioned?"
She raised her chin. "I received my inheritance before—already," she said. I found the correction interesting. "The agreement between us about my sister is both confidential and binding."
" 'All of my worldly possessions shall go to my eldest child,' " I quoted, "That child isn't even listed by name."
"No," she said.
"And he isn't going to change the will for you?"
"The Disty won't do business with clones."
"I didn't know you had business with the Disty," I said.
She shrugged. "The Disty, the Emm, the Revs. You name them, we have business with them. And we have to be careful of some customs."
"Won't the stockholders be suspicious when you don't inherit?"
Her mouth formed a thin line. "That's why I'm hiring you," she said. "You need to find my sister."
I nodded. Then, for the first time in the meeting, I sat down. The chair was softer than I had expected it would be. I put my feet on the nearest chair. She glanced at them as if they were a lower life-form.
"In order to search for people," I said, "I need to know who they're running from. If they're running from the Disty, for example, I'll avoid the Martian colonies, because they're overrun with Disty. No one would hide there. It would be impossible. If they were running from the Revs, I would start looking at plastic surgeons and doctors who specialize in genetic alteration because anyone who looks significantly different from the person the Revs have targeted is considered, by the Revs, to be a different being entirely."
She started to say something, but I held up my hand to silence her.
"Human spouses abuse each other," I said. "It seems to be part of the human experience. These days, the abused spouse moves out, and sometimes leaves the city, and sometimes leaves the plant, but more often than not stays in the same area. It's unusual to run, to go through a complete identity change, and to start a new life, especially in your parents' income bracket. So tell me, why did your mother really leave?"
Nothing changed in Anetka's expression. It remained so immobile that I knew she was struggling for control. The hardness that had been so prevalent the day before was gone, banished, it seemed, so that I wouldn't see anything amiss.
"My father has a lot of money," she said.
"So do other people. Their spouses don't disappear."
"He also controls a powerful megacorp with fingers all over the developing worlds. He has access to more information than anyone. He vowed to never let my mother out of his sight. My father believed that marriage vows were sacred, and no matter how much the parties wanted out, they were obligated by their promises to each other and to God to remain." Anetka's tone was flat too. "If she had just moved out, he would have forced her to move back in. If she had moved to the Moon, he would have come after her. If she had moved to some of the planets in the next solar system, he would have come for her. So she had no choice."
"According to your father."
"According to anyone who knew her." Anetka's voice was soft. "You saw the vids."
I nodded.
"That was mild, I guess, for what he did to her."
I leaned back in the chair, lifting the front two legs off the ground. "So how come he didn't treat his other women that way?"
Something passed through her eyes so quickly that I wasn't able to see what the expression was. Suspicion? Fear? I couldn't tell.
"My father never allowed himself to get close to anyone else."
"Not even his Broadway actress?"
She frowned, then said, "Oh, Linda? No. Not even her. They were using each other to throw off the media. She had a more significant relationship with one of the major critics, and she didn't want that to get out."
"What about you?" I asked that last softly. "If he hurt your mother, why didn't he hurt you?"
She put her other hand on the chair as if she were steadying herself. "Who says he didn't?"
And in that flatness of tone, I heard all the complaints I'd ever heard from clones. She had legal protection, of course. She was fully human. But she didn't have familial protection. She wasn't part of any real group. She didn't have defenders, except those she hired herself.
But I didn't believe it, not entirely. She was still lying to me. She was still keeping me slightly off balance. Something was missing, but I couldn't find it. I'd done all the digging I could reasonably do. I had no direction to go except after the missing wife—if I chose to continue working on this case. This was the last point at which I could comfortably extricate myself from the entire mess.
"You're not telling me everything," I said.
Again, the movement with the eyes. So subtle. So quick. I wondered if she had learned to cover up her emotions from her father.
"My father won't harm her," she said. "If you want, I'll even sign a waiver guaranteeing that."
It seemed the perfect solution to a superficial problem. I had a hunch there were other problems lurking below.
"I'll have one sent to you," I said.
"Are you still taking the case?"
"Are you still lying to me?"
She paused, the dress billowing around her in the static-charged air. "I need you to find my sister," she said.
And that much, we both knew to be true.
VI
My work is nine-tenths research and one-tenth excitement. Most of the research comes in the beginning, and it's dry to most people, although I still find the research fascinating. It's also idiosyncratic and part of the secret behind my reputation. I usually don't describe how I do the research—and I never explain it to clients. I usually summarize it, like this:
It took me four months to do the preliminary research on Sylvy Sobol. I started from the premise that she was pregnant with a single girl child. A pregnant woman did one of three things: she carried the baby to term, she miscarried, or she aborted. After dealing with hospital records for what seemed like weeks, I determined that she carried the baby to term. Or at least, she hadn't gotten rid of it before she disappeared.
A pregnant woman had fewer relocation options than a non-pregnant one. She couldn't travel as far or on as many forms of transport because it might harm the fetus. Several planets, hospitable to humans after they'd acclimatized, were not places someone in the middle of pregnancy was allowed to go. The pregnancy actually made my job easier, and I was glad for it.
Whoever had hidden her was good, but no disappearance service was perfect. They all had cracks in their systems, some revealing themselves in certain types of disappearance, others in all cases past a certain layer of complexity. I knew those flaws as well as I knew the scars and blemishes on my own hands. And I exploited them with ease.
At the end of four months, I had five leads on the former Mrs. Sobol. At the end of five months, I had eliminated two of those leads. At the end of six months, I had a pretty good idea which of the remaining three leads was the woman I was looking for.
I got in my ship, and headed for Mars.
VII
In the hundred years since the Disty first entered this solar system, they have taken over Mars. The human-run mineral operations and the ship bases are still there, but the colonies are all Disty-run, and some are Disty-built.
The Emmeline has clearance on most planets where humans make their homes. Mars is no different. I docked at the Dunes, above the Artic Circle,
and wished I were going elsewhere. It was the Martian winter, and here, in the largest field of sand dunes in the solar system, that meant several months of unrelenting dark.
I had never understood how the locals put up with this. But I hadn't understood a lot of things. The domes here, mostly of human construction, had an artificial lighting system built in, but the Disty hated the approximation of a twenty-four-hour day. Since the Disty had taken over the northernmost colonies, darkness outside and artificial lights inside were the hallmarks of winter.
The Disty made other alterations as well. The Disty were small creatures with large heads, large eyes, and narrow bodies. They hated the feeling of wide open spaces, and so in many parts of the Sahara Dome, as Terrans called this place, false ceilings had been built in, and corridors had been compressed. Buildings were added into the wider spaces, getting rid of many passageways and making the entire place seem like a rat's warren. Most adult humans had to crouch to walk comfortably through the city streets and some, in disgust, had bought small carts so that they could ride. The result was a congestion that I found claustrophobic at the best of times. I hated crouching when I walked, and I hated the stink of so many beings in such a confined space.
Many Terran buildings rose higher than the ceiling level of the street, but to discourage that wide-open-spaces feel, the Disty built more structures, many of them so close together that there was barely enough room for a human to stick his arm between them. Doors lined the crowded streets, and the only identifying marks on most places were carved into the frame along the door's side. The carvings were difficult to see in the weird lighting, even if there weren't the usual crowds struggling to get through the streets to God knew where.
My candidate lived in a building owned by the Disty. It took me two passes to find the building's number, and another to realize that I had found the right place. A small sign, in English, advertised accommodations fit for humans, and my back and I hoped that the sign was right.