Gaia's Toys

by Rebecca Ore

  “My mantis took me off gradually when she must have been switching to her own sex pheromones. Allison killed her mantis,” Willie said. “But it helped her survive surgical brain scanning. You people owe her something.”

  Dr. Rae said, “I guess I would trust you more if you didn’t throw Allison away.”

  Loba said, “Willie, would you be willing to see her die if she reads out as a complete traitor? If she’s decided to turn us in?”

  Willie felt like Loba was asking a lot of him. He almost whined, But I’m only a fucked-up drode head. No, he’d gotten beyond that now. “Yes.”

  Loba said, “We’ll need to borrow a special submarine.”

  THIRTEEN

  WHAT PITY DOES TO SOME WOMEN

  I came up talking to Mike on a thirty-foot sailboat trimmed in teak and brass. I’d passed the brain scan, maybe. Whatever I’d been saying deteriorated between fugue state and the instant I took over my tongue. I wore a bikini and a bathing cap.

  “Good, you’re back,” Mike said. “Frankly, we’re concerned about your dreams.”

  “What dreams?” And why now?

  “The one where you talk to the woman in the theatre,” Mike said.

  I tried remembering, could bring vaguely to mind some dreams I’d had about people I’d talked to at a movie house. But these dreams were nothing like my nightmares. “Yeah, I guess I have some resentments.”

  Mike said, “That’s understandable.”

  From the state of my body, I realized he’d been fucking me minutes ago while I was in a fugue state. “How do you know when I’m fugued?” I asked.

  “You tend to be more childlike, less intense about being in control,” Mike said. “More trusting. I wish you could be like that when you were fully conscious. Life would be easier for you.”

  I knew why I felt loving toward him and hated him at the same time that I wanted to curl up in his arms. “Did you do this to Jergen?”

  “What?”

  “Not you, personally, but the woman Jergen married.” It stopped being a question by the time I finished speaking. Of course, imprint a captive on a mate.

  Mike said, “Rock with the boat. I’ll get you some tea.”

  We were out in the ocean, the shore invisible. Mike had gotten his way. I looked to see what was watching us, but I couldn’t see the satellites in the sky, the planes at 80,000 feet, the submarine that might be circling below, listening by hydrophone through the hull, by air-mike disguised as floating trash.

  Mike came up with tea and said, “Where are they taking Dorcas Rae?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Didn’t you pick her up? Who’s this ‘they?’ ”

  “Drode heads got her, we think. What did drode heads think of the mantis designer?”

  “We never talked about the mantises,” I said.

  “Who’s Willie?” Mike asked.

  “He was the drode head connection when you guys were looking for me. When I was in Berkeley. He’s ex-Army with a security clearance.”

  “Does he have imperfect fugues?”

  “Imperfect fugues?”

  “Memories from the times under. Like you can have.”

  Can, but didn’t this time.

  From a non-dream I was just beginning to remember, Loba said something about Willie being part of the technoscape to his users. I lied. “I don’t know.” I sipped at the tea to give my face something to do while Mike stared at me.

  Mike said, “When we picked you up in Louisiana, your own crew considered you expendable. We saved your life. We’re still offering you new chances.”

  “To be the tame deer in a faked chase,” I said. I wanted to say, I’m sorry I’m resisting you, Mike. I will cooperate body and soul. I couldn’t believe I wanted to say it. Mike was warm, loving, utterly trustworthy, not the man who’d kill me, but he’d screwed me while I was fugued childlike. I absolutely wanted to trust Mike. But I’d even had reservations about Jergen, tiny ones. Absolute trust wasn’t like me.

  “Woman, I really care what happens to you,” Mike said. “Did they drug imprint you, too? Or is it an ego thing, winning me completely over? I’ve been cooperating with you to catch someone who’s messing with the environment. I can’t declare all my life before forty completely invalid.”

  “You’re not forty anymore,” Mike said. “You’ve got a chance to reach forty again, with a whole different life. We could make you even younger.”

  “Mike, I really want to throw myself in your arms and weep for you to show me the right way. But that’s so unlike me that I figure you guys drugged me or reprogrammed me, or something, so I’m here, drinking tea, getting pissed off. I told you who was making the insects. You didn’t want to believe I knew she made me for an agent, that the way I handled it made her feel enough guilty about what she’d given drode heads that she decided she might be wrong.”

  “But who financed you when you were out spiking trees and wrecking mining machines?”

  “Jergen had money, I guess. Or Joe and Miriam.” Why wasn’t I curious about that? Did someone else play post-hypnotics with me? Or had I been so angry I didn’t care where the money came from? I felt like I was tripping over wires in my own head. “Fuck all of you.”

  “You’ve got to trust someone. We’re the most powerful set of players.”

  I pulled off the bathing cap and let the wind play over my baldness. True enough. “But the most powerful people I knew as a child threw me out of a car when I was eight.”

  “Allison, your government has laws against child abandonment. You refused to cooperate with the police.”

  I said, “My mother could throw away something she nursed, but I couldn’t betray my momma.” I began crying.

  He looked away, hands working the tiller and main sail sheet, then he said, “I apologize for trying to manipulate you while you were fugued.”

  “Mike, I’m your job. Manipulating me unfairly is part of your craft.”

  He shifted the sail, then said, “Do you want to help me with the jib?”

  “Not really.”

  He wrapped the main sail rope around a cleat, then raised the jib. I took the jib sheet anyway. He took the tiller again, and unwound the main sheet. We nodded at each other, and began to cooperate on the business of making airfoils out of polyester canvas.

  A small motorboat passed us on what felt like the shore side. I remembered hearing that some drode heads used their transportation passes to get otherwise-unrented boats at Coney Island and went out for tuna. Share-fishing—the people who did it gave half the catch to the boat owners. What did they do with the fish they kept, transport them back by subway?

  Mike listened to the transceiver buried in his ear, the only sign of it his eyes’ inward focus and his head tilting to the right. Then he smiled at me, turned the boat slightly so we headed away from the motorboat.

  I adjusted the jib. “What’s the deal? You gonna take me sailing until I’m all yours, or what?”

  “Amnesty knew you surrendered, but someone’s reactivated your file, and the New York representative wants us to produce you. Was Amnesty tipped by the people who snatched Dr. Rae?”

  “Probably. But I’m only deducing it, not knowing it. And if Kearney shows up, I’ll jump overboard, save you the trauma of seeing him kill me.” I jerked the jib sheet, then let it out so loose the sail popped in the wind.

  “Allison, aren’t you overreacting?”

  “Shit, I’ve been born and abandoned, rescued and abandoned, raped by hacker dicks and Kearney’s fingers. You fucked me while I was fugued, so maybe that’s another rape. Am I overreacting?”

  “I’m sorry. You know, you’re my first agent. I’m a very new case officer, really.”

  “No, I think you’re a lying nanotech oldie. Not inexperienced, just callous.”

  Mike straightened up and wrinkled his lips, as though I’d hit him. He said, “I am new. I need some advice.”

  “Shit, call Kearney. He’ll come fix me for you. Pull
all my brains out and install a computer or something.” Maybe they could do that. Why ever did I want to stay alive? I’d been dead since I was born.

  Without saying another word, Mike tied off the rudder and dropped the sails, then went below. He came back up and sat down at the tiller, but didn’t do anything. We drifted.

  I heard the motor before seeing the cutter. The cutter, an unmarked fifty-five-footer like a Coast Guard dope catcher, swung around us, dropping a Zodiac which came at us like a motorized condom waiting to be unrolled.

  I said, “So you called for the bad cop?”

  Mike said, “I wanted this to be so nice.”

  “Moral of this story is don’t put attitudes and emotions in an agent’s head she wouldn’t be able to come up with on her own. Makes her suspicious.” I’d asked them to kill me once and they didn’t do it. Maybe they would now.

  The cutter turned back, perhaps not wanting to attract too much attention to our boat. Who besides the Feds might have satellites? The Zodiac came at us, rubber bladders twisting. I could make out Kearney, standing with a gun in his hand.

  Mike sat with his hands between his knees, head bent down slightly. Kearney’s Zodiac pilot swung up beside the sailboat stern and Kearney holstered his gun and came up the swimmers’ ladder.

  He said, “Allison, quit trying to jerk Mike’s chain. You say one instant you’re cooperating. Another, you’re acting like you want us to kill you.”

  “Mike said Amnesty reopened my case.”

  Kearney didn’t react, but Mike flinched. “Allison, what if we slipped up and let someone rescue you?”

  “Kearney, make this fool apologize for trying to get me to imprint on him.”

  Mike said, “Allison, I think I said I was sorry. I just wanted what’s best for you, what would make it easier. You’d be happier, trust me, if you gave up the hard bitch attitudes.”

  Kearney said, “Ever occur to you that he might be imprinted on you? He’s honestly and earnestly trying to win you over.”

  I said, “Imprint Mike on me? You were that stupid?”

  Then the Zodiac pilot said, “Fuck.”

  A large shape rose in the water, a submerged Viking longboat, no, an oared submarine. The Zodiac popped, the pilot disappeared down what looked like a giant vacuum cleaner hose.

  Then we heard a “thwuck” against the sailboat hull. Kearney pulled his gun and aimed it at me. The sleazy little bastard was going to get to kill me after all.

  I said, “But didn’t you plan this?”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you using me for bait? You’ve got your fish. Bring in all the crap you’ve got to protect the coast.”

  Mike shook his head. He went down to the cabin and came up surrounded by two thin women in projectile-resistant cloth and motorized exoskeletons. Behind them, the woman from my non-dreams used tiny fingers on stub arms to prop herself against the mast. Her foot moved like a hand to draw something from an ankle holster. A short muzzle pivoted inside a tiny housing topped with a wide-angle lens.

  Loba and the projectile muzzle moved slowly, but Kearney seemed too amazed by the spectacle to shoot either me or the woman. The gismo muzzle stopped pivoting, fired, pivoted as though panning, fired again, a head shot.

  Kearney’s gun hand convulsed, shooting the deck. As Kearney’s body fell, Mike dived off the boat.

  I yelled, “Motherfuckers. All of you are motherfuckers.” I kicked Kearney in the head, then stomped the hand he’d used to search me. “Fuckers.” Then I looked more closely at my rescuers. The fake dreams gave me friends who looked like demons.

  The woman with the tiny arms used her toes to reholster what must have been a gun. I couldn’t understand how she aimed it, holding it in her toes, but Kearney was dead enough.

  I said, “How did you pull the trigger?”

  “It doesn’t have a trigger,” she said. “It fires when it reads the preprogrammed target. We knew Kearney would be here.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  One of the tall women in the exoskeleton pointed to Mike in the water and asked, “What do you want us to do about him?” Both women had bones too thin to support them.

  Then Miriam and Joe came up and I thought I understood completely now. From my dream that must have been a buried memory I remembered the seal-armed woman’s name, Loba. Joe said, “Allison, do you want to shoot him yourself?”

  Mike pulled a tab and his vest inflated. He’d killed my rapist. He’d been my control lover. He paddled like crazy in the water, but faced the boat, staring at me. Joe handed me a revolver with laser sights.

  I put the light bead on Mike’s forehead. He almost seemed to feel it, twisted his head. “Allison, I’m not the bad guy.”

  I said, “He was kind to me when they were jerking me around by my brain. He thought I’d be happier if I let myself trust people.”

  And shot him. Pity kills.

  The body jerked, blood oozing out of the hole between his eyes, but he didn’t bleed a lot. He died without having to worry about it much. And I couldn’t unkill him. I wondered if Kearney would have been as quick in killing me. “Don’t mind me,” I mumbled before I began wailing sensory and emotional overload hysterics.

  Miriam and Joe took my arms and lead me down the steel tube into the submarine. One of the powered girls must have been rowing, because the oars were all slaved to a central mechanism. Now the girls in exoskeletons pushed most of the oars out of their holders, through the gasketed oarlocks, and screwed covers over the oar holes. Then the submarine dived and crawled for days on rubber treads. At obstructions, the powered girls used the four remaining oars to walk or swim the submarine over, lifting off the bottom. We spent almost two weeks doing that quiet creep.

  I spent the first day and a half lying on a bunk wondering who the fuck I’d joined this time, refusing to sleep to keep the dreams away. Mike and Kearney waited for me in the back of my brain. Everyone left me alone, which was fine because I’d have torn anyone’s head off for condescending to sympathize. Then I got hungry enough to sit up. I felt dizzy and guilty for shooting Mike. Food would cure the dizziness. If I hadn’t killed Mike, how could these people trust me? They’d think I was rescue-bait.

  Trust was my problem.

  I got further up and asked the general air, “Where’s the galley? The head?”

  Loba was closest, looking at ocean bottom charts. She bent slightly at the hips and pointed with one foot toward the rear of the submarine. I got up, lurching to the uneven motion of the crawling vehicle. Loba seemed steadier on one foot for that second of pointing than I was on two. She put her foot down and said, “We have microwave packets, but ask security before using. Otherwise, try something canned.”

  I said, “I had to kill him or fall completely in with him.”

  Loba said, “Obviously, he wasn’t the nastiest person you dealt with.”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Then I’m glad you have regrets.”

  Well. I went back, found the head, pissed, holding myself down on the lurching toilet. Could my urine be identified, I wondered as I wiped my hands on a packet towelette. I waited for a few seconds of steady forward motion before I stood. The submarine rolled almost smoothly as I found the galley. Miriam and Joe were eating cold sandwiches, Joe listening to something in his left ear. I suspected that meant we couldn’t use a microwave source, but asked, “Can I have hot food?”

  “Not now,” Joe said. “They’re pinging us.” The submarine slowed down, rose slightly, then lurched across what felt like a boulder field. I flopped down into a chair. Miriam pushed a half sandwich across the table to me.

  I said, “I saw Jergen while I was captured.”

  Joe said, “So he cut a deal that he’d betray methods but not all the people he worked with.”

  I said, “I wish he’d betrayed me.” I wanted to know if they’d been eco-warriors, primarily, or if they’d been these people. “Most of these people look damaged.”

  Joe sai
d, “Sometimes it doesn’t show. Or it’s been sort of repaired.”

  If I began asking questions, then they might wonder whether I’d tried to turn in everyone, too. Actually, I had. “Jergen’s eidetic for retina patterns,” I said.

  Miriam said, “You were planning to cooperate fully when they read you. We need to read you again.”

  I said, “When they caught me, I thought I would rather die. Kearney, the guy Loba shot, proved to me that I really would prefer to live. He stuck me with the curare needle and let me pass out, but kept me alive on a respirator.”

  Miriam looked at Joe. He said, “We’ve got someone who can read you. We’re going deep, to the motivation level.”

  I felt sick to my stomach, not just from the lurching. My head ached. I said, “I understand,” and bit into my sandwich. Then I said, “Mike pitied me.”

  No one else dared pity me.

  In eight or nine more days, we surfaced in a fog bank, put on a disguise superstructure with Angolan registry, and went up on hydrofoils. I wondered then how the boat was powered.

  I asked Loba, the woman who’d shot Kearney, “What if a satellite spots us rising?”

  “Fortunately, the satellites transmit digital data, not analog. We’ve painted in a boat crossing the Atlantic, and found a convenient fog bank so we don’t have to match exactly.”

  “How did you break the encryption?” The encryptions must be changed daily, if not hourly.

  Loba said, “We have our ways.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To pick up Mr. Hunsucker and Dr. Rae,” Loba said. “Who?”

  “Willie. He was very concerned about you.”

  “I hate being a pity object.”

  “You will find Willie more convenient than that,” Loba said. “He felt if we didn’t keep faith with you, then we might not keep faith with him. The idea of not having a side to trust made Dr. Rae hysterical.”

  I said, “I also hate being an object lesson.”

  “Would you have preferred to died at Kearney’s hands? You will stay below when we’re stopped by the customs agents.”