“Bastard!” she said, and aimed the gun at the bag. It took a moment to find the firing stud on the grip. Yes, she thought, sighting along the matt-finish glass barrel, this’ll show him. He’d come back and find nothing left of his baggage but a large dollop of warm sticky goo on the counter.
“Ms. Meagher?”
She lowered the weapon and took a ragged breath, feeling a little foolish.
Dog said, “What changed your mind?”
“I’d rather shoot Tom himself than his luggage.” She dropped it back in her pocket.
Dog said nothing, and went back to nosing through the clothing. It was freshly laundered and folded. Quality gear, too. Expensive. “Well,” he said at last, “He did mate in your bed, and was probably doing some kind of business here, too.”
Lou nodded. “True enough, but he’s just a distraction.” She grabbed the bag’s handle, feeling her anger now tempered to a strong heat. “You screw me over, Tom, I screw you right back, you bastard!” she muttered, turning to go. “Ready, Dog?”
Dog had grabbed one of the portable lamps in his jaws. His synth-box said, “Yes, Ms. Meagher. Where are we going, exactly?”
“Away.”
Dog jumped to the floor. He looked up at her, “You know, Ms. Meagher, I’m still getting signals from Kid.”
Lou hesitated, remembering the sound she’d heard. Kid choking on something. She felt chills. “How’s he doing? Does he know we’re trying to get him back?”
“All he knows is that he’s frightened and feels strange and sick. It’s dark. Sometimes there’s a lot of light, and voices he doesn’t understand. They don’t feed him.”
“Well,” Lou said, her voice tired, but with a hard tone to it, “once we get away from Bloody Tom, we can track down the missing Tourignon brother.” She crossed through the main room, saying goodbye to her penthouse, and wondered where they might go.
“Do you think he’s still here in town?”
“I don’t see where he could go. We could check the Stalk authorities, see if he’s booked a ride. Maybe check the Red Cross, too.”
Dog was about to ask Lou where a guy like the surviving, and presumably injured, Tourignon brother might hide while waiting for his ride upStalk. Lou was about to grab the doorknob.
Suddenly, bright light flashed between the doors’ outer edges and they began to topple. There was a deafening sound Lou couldn’t hear. Her mind assumed explosives were detonating and she felt her mouth saying, “Oh…”
The falling armored doors crushed her chest. Her knees buckled under the weight and she went over backwards, turning her head to watch for the hard tiled floor. Her hands thrust back to break her fall, but shattered on impact.
There was a burning smell, bitter and smoky. She was still conscious, aware of a distant ache in her chest.
Dog was off to one side barking and barking — she couldn’t hear him.
Next came dazzling lights against the dark. She squinted, trying to see where the light came from. Hardly able to turn her head, all she could make out were two figures, dark against darkness, and powerful lights mounted on assault guns. Light glinted off mask goggles and the gold doorknobs. It was hard to make out details for all the crazy shadows. It was difficult to see the figures behind the guns. They had no smell and that worried her. Suddenly they had square gun muzzles against her face, right under her eyes. With the light now blinding her, she tried to move, to get away. Shock gave way to fear, knowing what the guns could do to her brain.
Lou opened her mouth to speak, to yell, but found herself breathing a cloud of something moist and sweet.
Oh no.
It took no time to work and went straight to her brain.
Lou saw Dog go down, too; he twitched in the backspill from the flashlights.
Dog, no, not Dog… As a wave of dizziness swamped her mind, she felt vast humiliation and anger. Should have ignored the whole Tom thing. Who gives a damn about Tom anyway?
I’m sorry, Dog, she tried to say, but her tongue filled her mouth, and she felt extreme nausea. Her legs were numb, along with her useless fingers and broken arms. She felt very cold now, and sleepy.
Pain somehow mixed with the numbness.
Lou wanted to hold onto the floor to stop the world from spinning.
She wanted to keep her eyes open, at any cost.
She wanted another chance.
Chapter 11
Lou’s eyes opened.
A striking man with artfully styled black hair and wearing a white silk robe stood before her in a room full of light and the scent of roses and pinewood. He smiled at her. He looked kind. He looked like he was pleased to see her.
She smiled back reflexively. The light was too bright for a moment. She squinted, but then the light seemed all right. There was sleep-gunk in her eyes.
“Would you care for some tea?” the man asked her. His voice was soothing and warm. She said yes and then wondered where she was, and why she felt so different. She felt a dream-memory slipping away: warm red water, a strange, comforting tingling sensation, and soft voices.
The man turned to a tray, made of gold, that floated in the air. On the tray stood an ancient looking teapot; it was covered in sublime blue designs. Next to it was a pair of delicate cups with the same patterns. He poured tea into the two cups; steam rose gently. It smelled wonderful.
Lou inhaled the scent of the tea. She felt relaxed. Looking around, she saw she was seated on a mat on the floor. The floor was made of pine. She wore no shoes. She was wrapped in a loose white silk robe, belted around her waist. Lou looked again at her bare feet: the skin was smooth and soft, a vivid pink. There were none of the deep cracks, bruises, discoloration, or any of the other signs of her condition. Now they looked like the feet of a girl. She touched the heel of her right foot with her left index finger. The skin on her heels always used to feel hard and rough, with painful black crevices and gouges, especially when the tink was running low. Now her skin felt moist. Memories of childhood baths came to mind, her mother wrapping her in warm towels, and telling her stories and smiling. Other memories: Lou, curled up, floating in warm water, soft red light, and tingling all over. Lou wriggled her ankle and toes. She gasped at the absence of pain and the degree of movement. Lou smiled and smiled as she moved her feet. It was nearly too much, in fact. Tears started to form in the corners of her eyes. Blinking, she also realized that she could see everything with perfect clarity for the first time in years.
The beautiful man walked over to her with the gold tray and the two cups of steaming tea. Up close she admired the teapot. The man told her it was seven hundred and twenty years old.
“Wow,” she said, and took her teacup from the tray. The china was impossibly fine. “This is all … from Earth?” she asked, looking at him. His dark eyes were round, with laugh lines at their corners and around his mouth.
Where am I? The question began to surface inside her.
The man nodded. He smiled faintly. “It is.” He straightened up, took the tray back to the other side of the room and left it floating there before sitting again, cross-legged, holding his teacup, facing her. Lou noticed he did not waste movement. It’s like a dance, she thought.
They sipped tea in companionable silence. Lou wondered how long she was meant to sit here. She finished her tea. It was dark and tasted of a kind of wood and some fragrant oil she couldn’t identify. That she could taste so much of it shocked her. After years of tasting only crude traces of flavors, it was almost too much to take in. She sat and breathed hard for a while, trying to maintain her composure. She sensed that this, whatever this was, was not the time to lose her nerve.
Lou also noticed that the man took his time with the tea, sipping it as if in time to a sad piece of music that played a long time.
Later, he asked her, “Would you care for m
ore tea?”
She declined. He smiled. Their cups dissolved into the air. Lou noticed the floating tray and teapot were gone. Pointing, she asked, “The teapot? It…”
The man soothed her with a smile. “It is still here. I must point out, however, that what you perceive in this room is not precisely real, in the traditional objective sense. Your perceptions are, to a limited extent, being adjusted for your benefit.”
Lou thought, Wow.
They sat.
She wondered how she got here … where the light in the room came from … what was going on. She felt a need to get on with something, that something needed doing; that she was neglecting … something. Frowning in thought, she chewed on her thumbnail. It did not break, nor did it come off her thumb. She raised her eyebrows when she noticed this.
The man said to her, “Tell me, Ms. Meagher, about death.”
She looked at him, embarrassed. “I don’t … what, um, how do you mean?”
He said again, looking at her with great interest, “I would like you to tell me about death.”
She noticed the look in his eyes and sensed a powerful, curious mind. She had wondered if this man was a disposable, but now she decided he was a real human of some sort.
“Why that?” she asked, looking around. Wherever she pointed her eyes, she saw walls made of the same pinewood as the floor. There were no windows. She looked closely at the floor, and saw the whorls and grain of the timber, the joinery seams. When she rubbed at the floor with her fingers, she felt smooth textures in the cool wooden surface. Bringing her fingers to her nose, she could smell the wood and the staining agent, the varnish.
Lou realized she could never have detected these subtle details before … now. She sat, shocked, looking at her hands, working her shoulders and rotating her neck. She thought she needed to get back to something she was doing before, something urgent, and she felt she didn’t have time to sit around chit-chatting and sipping tea.
Lou asked the man, “Have I … have I had a tink infusion?” She whispered the phrase, as if it was the most taboo pair of words in the world. She had only ever had one infusion, the first one, for which her parents paid. It had restored her to a state so like life that her parents reacted poorly. “It’s not right, it’s just not right…” she remembered her mother saying, on first seeing her in the hospital from the other side of the Class Three NanoHazard barrier.
The thought fled, as if it had been chased away, and Lou realized that something was different inside her mind.
The man said, “Yes. Your onboard nanosystems have been restocked and refreshed, and your tissues have been extensively rewritten and revived.”
Lou sat, gasping, hand on her chest. “I don’t know what to say. I’m … You…” she blurted. Trying to find words to express her feelings, she felt the moisture in her mouth and throat. She had lived with a rasping in her lungs and throat for so long, a dry cough, a constant sense of not enough moisture to speak properly, she had forgotten what it should be like.
The man smiled like eternity. He was still. That stillness was spooky. His eyes shone. “It is our pleasure.”
Lou stared at him. “What do you mean, our pleasure?”
“I would like you to tell me about death, Louise.”
She felt intoxicating sensations slosh around in her belly and head at this. There was a sense of drowning and wanting to scream and trying to stop her eyes getting gouged out by a claw and falling from so high up one can’t see the ground and… Oh yes, she realized. Fear, the way it was, before I rotted. Her hands, she noticed, were slick with sweat and her robe clung to her back. The skin behind her knees was wet.
“Why,” she said, fighting for calm, “do you want to know about death?”
The striking man looked a little surprised. “I was asked to ask you.”
Lou sat for a while, humming off-key. She thought about this. Her fear was like boiling mud inside her.
There were no doors here — or none she could see through her altered perceptions. Damn.
“Why did you, whoever you are, give me the infusion?” She still had her buzzcut blonde hair, only now it was clean. It was healthy. For a dizzying moment, she allowed herself to run her fingers through the soft velvet of it. How long had it been since she could do this?
What’s the catch? she asked herself.
The man’s face was serious. “You needed it.”
“I know I needed it. But I also know what it costs. Someone here spent a big chunk of change on me.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you did this out of charity.”
A frown. “No?”
Exasperated, she said, “Nobody does anything like … this…” She realized she was shouting, and it felt somehow wrong to shout here. “Because people just don’t do things like this for no reason. Everybody wants something, no matter what.”
He sat and thought. “I would like more tea. Would you?” He got up in one movement.
Frowning, Lou said, “No, I don’t want any more tea! I want you to answer my questions. Where the hell am I? What’s going on?” Immediately, she felt guilty for using even that mild expletive, and wished she had not.
The man went to the back of the room. The gold tray was back. The teapot and a single cup were there, too. He poured tea into his cup, then returned to his place in front of Lou. He breathed in the smell and steam of the tea. “I love the aroma of this tea. It reminds me of my home.”
Lou wiped her face. She watched him sip his tea, savoring all of it. There was no rush, for him.
“How can you sit there like that, drinking your tea so slowly?”
“This is the way to take tea.”
She pointed at him. “You sip it like you’ve got all the time in the world.”
He nodded, “Yes.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got stuff to do. Always stuff … to do,” she said, looking away, thinking … thinking there was something she had to do and she was running out of time.
“You are already dead. How can you be short of time?” He looked amused.
“I’m still conscious. That’s not the same as alive. And my body breaks down. Entropy. And this … bloody great rock … is going to wipe out my home. There’s stuff I need to be doing, things I still want to do. I’ve got plans.” Though, thinking about it, she could not recall a single plan she might once have had.
“Perhaps now you can.” The man made a calm hand gesture to suggest open possibilities.
Lou wriggled her toes some more.
Then, with a flash, she remembered.
Oh God… Looking at the man, her eyes became enormous and she found it hard to breathe.
“What happened to my dog?” The fear was back, huge and suffocating. She felt herself reaching out to hold the floor. It had been so long since she had feelings this vivid. “Last thing, I saw him twitching, unconscious. Is he…” Tears formed in her eyes. She coughed, feeling choked up.
Crap, I’m crying! she thought, and was so overwhelmed at the idea she wanted to cry more. I’m really crying!
The man said, “Your dog is well. We have taken excellent care of him.”
That stopped her. She paused, sniffed, sobbed more, and wiped her eyes and nose, trying to find her way back to calmness. “You gave me an infusion. God. That takes…” She counted on her fingers, thinking through the steps in her head. “Three, four days. Four days! Oh God…” She felt the panic wave burst over her afresh and stared at the floor, mouth hanging open, blinking fast. In her mind, in the emotional whirlwind, she remembered what had happened before. About Dog, and the missing Tourignon brother, and the sick kid choking to death and her having to find the kid, and Dog worried, and Tom being an asshole-maybe-terrorist and… She clu
tched at her head, scared.
Four days!
“Damn,” she said, mouth-breathing, feeling like the world was spinning on an axis she knew nothing about. “How do the living deal with this crap?”
“We muddle through.” The beautiful man said this with the gravest tone. “I think that’s the term.”
Lou took a deep breath, broke into another spasm of despair-soaked sobbing, and wiped at her nose, her eyes, trying to find her bearings. “I want…” she managed during a moment of stability, “to leave.”
The man said, quietly, “You are interested in Etienne Tourignon.”
She felt wrenched. How could he know about that? Squeezing her eyes shut, she took a moment, forcing herself to get it back together, to pay attention. This was serious stuff. At length, she managed to look at the man. “Not romantically,” she said, feeling good that she had enough poise to quip.
He smiled. “An interesting man. He has achieved a great deal.”
Lou flexed her fingers. “I want to leave.”
“I would like you to tell me about death.”
Confused, she rubbed at her eyes as if to clear her vision, to see things better. “That’s my ticket out of here? I tell you about death, for God’s sake?”
“No.” He paused for what felt like a long time. His face remained serene. “You may leave at any time. I am enjoying your company. You are the only non-living person with whom we have had the opportunity to talk.”
This sounded not quite right. Frowning, she said, “But you have the means to give nanobot infusions.”
A small off-handed gesture. “We contracted a reliable firm to supply that service.”
Lou didn’t want to think about the money behind whatever was happening here. She couldn’t think of numbers much bigger than twenty. “So, you’re curious about death, then.”
“Isn’t everyone?” he asked, allowing himself a warm, amused grin.
“All right.” She took another deep breath and wondered how to think her way out of this. “I will tell you all about it. If you answer my questions.”
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