"Yeah, but you know Stommel," Pushpa, the second Indian woman, complained with exasperation, "he's just an alpha2 addict, never gets off the stupid thing ..."
"Fuzz-freak," Tojo added, to more laughter and comments, seated on the floor with his back to the sofa, playing with his baby son, who looked barely a year old. And the only one of them, Sandy thought, who didn't speak in technogeek lingo. Poor kid. His first words would probably be jargon. She kept eating, watching the stubby-limbed little guy bouncing up and down in his father's broad hands, looking incredulously bewildered as only small children could. And she wondered what he was thinking.
"So ... so why didn't they make you taller?" Carlo again. She glanced up, shovelling another forkload into her mouth. Besides being famished, she loved tandoori, and wouldn't stop in mid-meal for anything less than a house fire.
"Harder to hit," she responded glibly, muffled past her mouthful. Carlo grinned, maniacally. A strange-looking guy, a drawn and angular face with close-curled hair, big teeth and bulging eyes. Like a skull, she reckoned. Obviously, she'd guessed from previous conversation, a total, unmitigated genius with infotech. And very weird.
"No," she corrected herself when she'd swallowed, "it's more just efficiency. Combat-myomer doesn't handle well in large volumes; if I were thirty centimetres taller I'd suffer chronic tension, it's bad enough now at this size."
"So how strong are you?"
A shrug, and another mouthful. "Hard to say." Muffled. "A lot of it's leverage. Strength's tough to measure objectively, ask a physicist."
"But, like, I mean, you could damage anyone here, right?" Again the crazy grin, with suggestive anticipation.
"Carlo!" Anita protested, "don't say it like that, that's rude! You sound like one of the damn Rainbow Coalition!"
"Human skull strength is actually a really objective measure, for hand power," Carlo continued unperturbed, "because the curvature of the skull combined with ..."
"Carlo!"
Sandy kept eating, enjoying the distraction, which allowed more attention to her food. And these guys interrupted and jumped all over each other at a moment's notice, launching off into all kinds of curious, odd and sometimes apparently irrelevant strings of associated thought, much of it technical and some of it not ...
"No, what she's saying," the older, Arabic man named Tariq was now saying, "is really very true from a standpoint of pure physics. I mean she may well be strong enough, hypothetically, to lift your average Telosian rhino up by the tail and swing it about her head ..."
"Painful," suggested Pushpa.
"And extremely messy for the poor bloody rhino when its tail rips off," Carlo retorted, "speaking of physics."
"... but without the proper leverage," Tariq continued with forced patience, "her own relatively low mass would not allow ..."
Etc, etc. Tojo's little son was going for a walk, on short, uncertain little legs. She watched as he pottered several steps, wavered, then fell on his arse. His dad lay on his stomach behind him, watching, hands ready to assist. A big, shave-headed African man with tattoos and piercings. He was the only adult in the room not totally fixated upon her. The toddler tried again, and Sandy lost track of the conversation, watching with intrigue as she ate.
"His mother is Chinese?" she asked Tojo after a moment. Tojo looked up at her, surprised.
"Um ... Chinese, Vietnamese, and a little touch of Thai." He had the nice, deep voice of many Africans, but the manner was different. Sensitive and expressive. If she hadn't known he had a wife, she'd have guessed he might be gay. Most civilian hereto men his size seemed to like the "macho thing" ..... She's a bitsa-bitsa this, bitsa that. I'm second generation Botswanan, parents straight off the ship from Africa two years before I was born. And Mac ... he's a little mongrel, aren't cha'? Aren't cha' a little mongrel?" Affectionately patting his son on the backside.
The kid stopped pottering, and stared about wide-eyed, chewing a finger with indecision. Sandy smiled. The conversation had stopped, her fascination matched by theirs with her. She ignored them.
"I'd ask if I could hold him," Sandy said around her final mouthful, "but I'd understand if you said no. I mean, considering."
Tojo blinked. "Oh no, no," he protested, getting to his feet, "don't be silly, we all know what you are, we're not thick." Lifted his son quickly under the armpits, and handed him to Sandy. Sandy smiled broadly, with real pleasure, and placed her empty plate aside on the table. Took the dangling child out of Tojo's broad hands, giving Tojo a thankful smile. He crouched alongside.
"Who's that?" In hushed baby talk, as the toddler stared at this new adult person into whose charge he had been unexpectedly deposited. "I wonder who that is? Who's this pretty blonde woman? Who is it?"
Not a clue, Sandy thought, smiling at the little boy, holding him upright in her lap. He was the only person in the room who didn't know. And therefore probably the only person from whom she could expect a totally straight response. Up to and including piddling on her leg. Mac. Short for Macintosh ... apparently significant, among underground computer-philes, for reasons she didn't understand. She thought it a terrible waste, though, and an inappropriate name for a person with such an interesting ethnic background. But a lot of techno types were like that. Certainly the League was full of them. Had built an entire collective ideology upon them, disregarding old concepts of ethnicity, gender and other "increasingly meaningless" cultural affectations. Some of these guys were League sympathisers, no question. She certainly guessed Tojo was. It explained why he trusted her with his son, where others would turn pale, sweaty and fidgety at the mere suggestion.
"Hi, bubs," she said to him. "You know, I've got a friend who used to be as big as you." In a fair approximation of baby talk, she thought. "In fact, everyone used to be as big as you, once. Except me."
Playing for the audience, she chided herself. All about her, faces were staring, smiling or grinning. There was supposed to be some kind of huge, emotional, revelatory moment, she guessed, when a person of artificial construction held a child for one of the rare times in her life, and realised with great, dramatic force the true difference between herself and every other straight, biological human. But she felt nothing like that. It didn't even feel strange.
Mac nearly smiled, then stared again. Sandy imitated his smile, exaggeratedly. Mac stared in astonishment, pulling at gums with a gooey forefinger. Then grinned delightedly, and gurgled. About the room, everyone laughed. As if that reaction were somehow significant. Sandy pulled a face. He gurgled again, and bounced with excitement, arms flapping.
She supposed it was just that she knew what she was, and was at peace with it. She couldn't really think of a time when she hadn't been. It was the other "GI cliche," she supposed-a desperate yearning for humanity. Which was pathetic, and aroused her deepest indignation. It supposed that humanity was somehow lacking in the first place. Humanity had nothing to do with what she was made of. It was who she was, and what she did. Bouncing a baby boy upon her knee, she felt affection, and intrigue, and ... and something else, indefinable and warm and pleasant. She didn't need some team of damn shrinks or academic philosophers to put names to what she felt, or how she felt it, or why ... she didn't care. And they could call her whatever they liked-GI, artificial human, android (though that grated, as Motherworld residents had been known to steam at the tag of "Earthling") ... none of that mattered either, in the end. Human, by any other name. The details didn't matter. She was Sandy. That was enough.
Though if some fat newspaper prick editorialised her as a "robot" one more time, she was going to take a stroll to his big, highrise office, up to the eightieth floor, where all such media importances surely resided, and lob him gently out the window.
And she handed Mac back to his father, not wanting to stretch that generosity too far ... the kid flailed wantingly at her in the process, and Tojo decided that he liked her blonde hair. Held him close enough to grab a few handfuls, which Sandy tolerated with a grin until he began dribb
ling on her jacket. Then she heaved herself reluctantly to her feet.
"Okay ... I gotta ask a favour. I badly need a massage before I stiffen up like a plank. Who's got strong hands?"
"Not me, I'm afraid," Tariq replied, hands warding, "my darling wife would kill me."
"No she would not," Pushpa corrected, "she would inflict great pain and suffering, but leave you horribly alive and dripping gruesomely at the end." Pushpa was apparently calm and mostly sensible by comparison to the rest of them.
"How badly?" Carlo asked, predictably. "What'll happen if you don't get one?"
"I told you, I'll stiffen up like a plank."
"For God's sake," said Anita, "don't let him do it, he hasn't set hands on a woman as attractive as you in his life, he'll barely be able to reach you past the enormous erection."
"Thank you, Madam," Carlo said with a madly grinning bow in his seat, "for the compliment."
"You've just spoiled my dinner," Tariq complained.
"No, that's your fourth beer," Pushpa told him.
Sandy stood in the middle of the rapid exchange and blinked from side to side. Beginning, she realised, to enjoy these weird, misfit, super-intelligent people, and their utterly un-hip, uncool, un-fad-ish ways. Ari came from here, she realised. This was his society. His home. His politics. God ... he was an escapee, a misfit among the misfits. Handsome, athletic, broad-minded ... he'd run away to the CSA, to officialdom, to operational expense accounts, cool wardrobes and nonregulation sunglasses. To politics. To bureaucracy.
The ultimate sin among the anti-officialdom-he'd taken a side. And she wished, suddenly, that she had longer to stay and question these people, and learn more of An's politics, and theirs, and where they saw it all going in the near future. Well, there was still the massage ...
"Come on," she said as she pulled off her jacket and lay face down on the floor before the sofa, "I don't care who, just someone screw up some courage and volunteer." Carlo leapt forward, but Anita beat him to it. Stuck her tongue out at him, and Carlo retreated, grinning, to his seat. Carlo seemed to grin at everything. A compulsive grinner. Weird, weird, weird.
"So someone tell me about Ari," she said, as Anita knelt alongside and grabbed firmly at her tight shoulders, kneading deep. "Who is he, where did he come from, and what's the guy's problem?"
"Bloody hell," Tariq retorted, with the tired exasperation of an older man who had seen and done it all before, "how many years do you have to spare?"
"You sure I can't drop you there directly?" Pushpa asked her, with the anxiousness of someone very keen to assist. The car rolled into the drive-through stop off, a slow pace in the queue as cars arrived and departed further up amid a flow of commuters.
"The fewer people who know my exact movements, the safer I feel," Sandy replied.
"You ... you really think they could trace you from that?" Anita gasped from the backseat. Anita and Pushpa were a team, friends since school, they said. And unpossessed, at that time, of the standard obsessions for youthful Indian girls in Tanusha, like parties and dancing, and like clothes, jewellery and the money to buy them. Tech-science majors, they now made more money from their network consultancy than most of their high school class combined-but still dressed like struggling artists or philosophy majors. Or in Anita's case, a fringecult punk. Weird again. Sandy liked them.
"I've no idea," she told Anita. "It just makes me happier. No point taking risks."
"Hey look, security," Pushpa said, nodding toward the maglev station entrance. Sandy looked at the four uniforms on standby before the doors, and the van parked nearby. And remembered a security procedural tidbit she remembered reading from her review file.
"In the event of terrorist threat or perceived threat to vital public infrastructure ..." she trailed off ... probably shouldn't recite the entire passage and verse before these two.
"Wow," said Anita, leaning forward between the two front seats, they must really be running low on manpower, there's only four, it should be eight of them for a maglev."
Maglevs, of course, being "A Grade" infrastructure ... Sandy frowned, and turned to look at Anita.
"How do you know that?"
Anita pouted. "Know what? I didn't say anything, you must be hearing voices."
Sandy sighed, and leaned back in her seat. Hackers. If there was
information, they got it, somewhere, somehow.
"So what do we tell Ari if he calls?" Pushpa wanted to know.
"You have to tell him anything?" Sandy replied. "He's not taking my calls, serves him right."
"You sure you shouldn't wait for him?" the other persisted.
"He's got his leads," Sandy said. "I've got mine." The car pulled up at the next designated mark, and the doors whirred open automatically. "Hey, nice to meet you both, I'm sure I'll be seeing more of you in the future."
"Oh, I hope so!" Anita said, enthusiastically shaking her hand.
"Don't work too hard," said Pushpa, in her turn.
Sandy smiled. "I'll try not to. Take care." And left the car to Anita's final call of, "And for godsake, don't trust the CSA!"
Which made her grin as she joined the flow of pedestrians headed for the maglev entrance, and the car lane bumped haltingly along behind. Paranoid to the last, these hackers. And maybe with good cause. But she was flattered that Anita would automatically include her as "us" in the "us and them" equation. Unconditional love was a strange response to be facing, particularly from such intelligent people ... but any Tanushan League-sympathetic technophile would just die to meet a real GI in person, let alone the famous, super-advanced friendly GI the Neiland Administration had befriended. She didn't trust it. But it beat the hell out of the alternative.
She tried Ari's connection again on the maglev. She was seated by the window at the very rear of the open tube, with a good, long, winding view of the people-filled interior. No response, not even an engaged signal to acknowledge the call. Busy, Ari? More secrets to pursue? Contacts to meet? She wondered. Mostly she wondered just how much she didn't know, and how much Ari hadn't told her.
CSA uplinks showed it was pointless to try Vanessa again-she'd been rotated onto standby at the hostage crisis, and her heart sank when she saw it. Please God, no shooting. Vanessa would be fine, she was sure, but civilians, targets and high-power firearms did not mix, and such unpleasant combinations could stain the memory for the rest of a person's life. Please no shooting. But she could only hope.
Another connection ... and a temporary hold, then an auto-recog- ition ... fuzzy static pause, then click ...
"Cassandra?" came Director Ibrahim's voice. "Where are you?" The auto-rec rechecking her freqs and racing through a positioning analysis ... she didn't mind, there were two people in Tanusha whose systems she trusted implicitly-one was Vanessa, and the other was Ibrahim. An, she thought a little darkly, was a long way from qualifying. Especially after tonight. "Ari said you'd been shot?"
"I had, but I'm fine now. Where is he, do you know?"
"He's busy ... Cassandra, I tried to contact you earlier but you were apparently unconscious. I have spent much of today warding off queries and accusations from the SIB, Cassandra, apparently Ms. Izerovski was most upset after her agents `lost' you on your motorcycle this morning. "
"Have they placed me at Cloud Nine?" As the possibility suddenly occurred to her-Cloud Nine was the name of the premises the GI had been chased into. The CSA were doing the follow-up investigations now, taking various mafia types into custody for questioning. Not that anyone expected them to be helpful.
"No ... field investigation is not an SIB strong point, Cassandra, particularly not in fluid, chaotic realtime scenarios ... although I do not discount the possibility that they may place you there eventually. " He sounded calm, as was Ibrahim's habit. The slight edge to his voice may have been adrenaline. Other people functioned worse in a crisis. Some functioned better in direct proportion to the seriousness of the situation. Ibrahim was one of the latter. And she wondered if it c
ould be his SunniAfghan ancestry, perhaps, that made such a positive out of adversity. Or predisposed him to love a good fight. "I'm afraid the situation is actually much worse than that. "
"Of course it is," she formulated, dryly.
"Cassandra, Izerovsky has informed the Senate Security Panel of your `escape from Senate-mandated surveillance,' to use her words." Among the many passengers on the train, Sandy refrained from swearing, or placing her head in her hands. "The Security Panel have been demanding an interview with me personally. I have declined. They have accused me of orchestrating the whole thing, and have formally placed a deposition with the Parliament, requesting my resignation effective immediately."
Incredible. It took her breath away, the sheer, bloody-minded, single-focused stupidity. Demand the CSA Director's resignation over that small matter, in the middle of a Federation-wide crisis? Those were their priorities?
"You're not going to accept it, I hope?"
"Only if Allah should command it, Cassandra." With a dry, deadpan, implacable resolve. "To the best of my knowledge, Allah cares little for the workings of the Senate Security Panel, and has no seat at the table. "
Nor did Allah have a place in the Neiland Administration, Sandy thought. Which meant Ibrahim was not intending to step down for any politician. Not now. The very prospect of changing horses in midstream was horrifying in its implications for planetary security. That anyone senior should possibly suggest such a thing, over any matter, was completely incomprehensible to her.
"News of this has spread through the major political parties, Cassandra. They cannot leak to the press without breaching security guidelines, but I cannot guarantee that the unofficial rumour mill will not carry this further. " No, he certainly could not. She'd discovered just today, with Ari's friends, how far and wide the rumour mill spread. "However, the President herself is of the opinion that this could prove sufficient distraction in tomorrow's debating session to effectively derail the day's proceedings. Some Members have threatened to withdraw from the process indefinitely until the Neiland Administration makes its position clear on this matter. "
Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel Page 24