Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  So he watched the real fire burn, across the water, while windowpanes alongside his primary view overlaid close-up, replay, feeds from the rescue choppers and the divers’ masks. The barge’s own connex had not dropped when the explosion hit, which told Closs—and his Rim security agents, who would not be sleeping tonight—that any feed they’d gotten off the ship itself was useless, a patch-loop.

  They’d been hacked.

  Closs dragged his fingertips down the image of the burning vessel. “Connect,” he said, command-pitch. “Rim Corporation, Paris head office, code one four seven H.”

  It would be just after ten in the morning in Paris. He’d been waiting until she would be there, leisurely breakfast seen to, a second cup of coffee cooling on her desk. It did not do to hurry the vice president.

  She was stirring cream into a china cup when her image resolved. Her hair fell across her forehead, razor-cut, brushing the architectural precision of one dark eyebrow. When she looked up, setting her chased silver spoon down on the saucer with a delicate click, he was caught by the flecks of darker color in her eyes. She was fashionably thin, the line of her jaw sharp as the detail on a porcelain horse, the tendons in her throat vanishing under the ivory silk collar of her suit. “M~ Morrow…” Closs began.

  “Major,” she replied. “I’ve seen the feed. I hope you’re not calling to justify yourself to me.”

  “I’m afraid the error is beyond justification.”

  She lifted her cup and sipped, steam caressing her cheek. She took her time about it, which was more a statement of her willingness to waste Closs’s time than of any unconcern about the cost of the call. The Slide was cheap—instantaneous transmission of matter or data over any distance.

  Matter, or data. As long as it wasn’t alive. Transportation of personnel between worlds was complex and costly, and travelers must contend with relativistic effects. But transportation of goods only required a matter transfer. This was the same technology at its base as the specialty of the Exigency Corps: probability manipulation. But a much safer manifestation, at that, without the risk of unforeseen coincidental fallout.

  Unfortunately, this process could not be used on living creatures. You could certainly put a person in one side of a matter transmitter, but you did not get a living person back out the other end. Any organism complex enough—conscious enough—to have a concept of I could not Slide alive.

  This was because—Closs did not entirely understand the science—the Slide was a quantum device, relying on the uncertainty principle to work. But a self-aware cargo counted as an observer.

  In Schrödinger’s famous thought-experiment, the cat knows whether it’s alive or it is dead.

  M~ Morrow swallowed twice, her larynx making shadows under the pale skin of her throat. “This won’t affect your delivery schedule?”

  “For petroleum?”

  She set her cup down, dabbed her lip, and shrugged. “Greene’s World is not the only source of base materials for manufacturing. It’s the omelite I’m concerned with.”

  Closs considered his answer. Tanglestone’s existence and its sole source were closely held. And unlike the Slide, whose inexpensive operation it made possible, it was not cheap. Just cheaper than manufacturing entangled pairs. Whether it was a natural substance, or some relic of a prior advanced civilization, no one had determined. Teams of Corpsmen were at work on it, but unless somebody higher than Closs had sealed the results, the god-botherers had nothing.

  “You understand, Vice President, that we are still having issues with native uprisings and with human abolitionists who think we’re interfering with the ranid culture. Such as it is.”

  She waited, stroking the gold-painted thumb rest atop the handle of her cup.

  Closs folded his hands behind his back. “We also have labor unions that are unhappy with the use of ranids in any job that could be handled by human divers.”

  M~ Morrow nodded. “I appreciate the challenges, Major. However—”

  “The quota,” he said, “will be met.”

  She let her fretting hand slide to the desk. “I need you to exceed it.”

  “Vice President?”

  Her head turned slightly, as if she lifted her eyes to a wall screen or a skin. Her fingers moved across the desktop; Closs recognized the gesture as a pass through a virtual three-dimensional interface. “What I am about to tell you, Major, is not to leave your office.”

  “What about Greene?”

  “No one,” she said. A fine arrogant dodge of the chain of command, ignoring the fact that Greene was the CEO of Charter Trade, the titular head of Rim on-planet. She slid her cup aside and leaned forward on her elbows. “Major, what do you know about artificial intelligence and the Slide?”

  He closed his teeth on a snide comment and counted three. Backward. “Practically?”

  “Theoretically.”

  “Theoretically,” he said, “an intelligence that was neither organic nor self-aware might be Slid. But it’s practically irrelevant because—”

  “—strong A.I. is still fifteen years in the future, just as it has been for the last three hundred years.” She wet her lips, a gesture of nervousness he had not seen her make before. Her fingertips blanched as she steepled her hands.

  “But?”

  “But we may have run up against somebody who has found it. Or something that looks a hell of a lot like it. Unless they’re running their ships by remote control, which is ofcourse possible. And whatever they are, they’re aggressive, Timothy.”

  He could have asked, What did we lose? He could have asked, Where did they hit us? How far from Earth? How close to the Core? But it wasn’t his need to know, anymore. It wasn’t his war to fight. And of course it didn’t matter where they were now, or how far from Earth, if they could Slide.

  “If they’re not…conscious,” he said, quietly, “then they can’t conjure, can they?”

  Her nose wrinkled at the crude term for probability manipulation, but she nodded. “Omelite,” she said. And then answered a question he would not have chosen to ask, her little pat on the head to keep him well behaved. “They attacked shipping near Greene’s World, Timothy. Once is not much of a sample, but I think it’s you they’re gunning for.”

  He swallowed. “I’ll get you everything I can.”

  André’s executary had tagged the message from Timothy Closs as highest priority, but he didn’t answer it immediately. Instead he cleaned his teeth and used Cricket’s elutrior. She was out of bed when he emerged, the covers shaking themselves tidy as she unsnarled her hair. The static wand first made it writhe, then stand straight out, crackling. Another tap and a touch to the control and strands drifted over her shoulders, briefly silken. It would cord into locks again by lunchtime, he thought, fondly.

  He stored the image of her fixing her hair in hard memory, so he could take the file out and replay it later, and kissed her on the head. “Tonight, where are you?”

  “Working,” she answered. She touched her headset access port—a nervous gesture, the controls were all neuroelectrochemical—and smiled with one corner of her mouth. André’s reactivated skin put a warmth in her complexion. Pretty girl. “I’ve seven hours of data mining to get through, more if I’m not lucky enough to hit the information in the usual lodes.”

  “Blink me,” he said, and showed himself out.

  On the gently pitching deck, he leaned against the rail and watched a pump glide up and down atop a distant mining platform. His skins adapted to the glare off the water, the weave of his fogjacket opening to catch the breeze as sun warmed his shoulders. He paled the jacket’s color to ivory and watched ripples break against the barge’s hull.

  He preferred his messages transcribed; he could read more quickly and with greater retention than he could listen.

  M~ Deschênes:

  Please contact me regarding a possible extension of our previous contract, if you are interested. Something of an unusual case. It might prove a challenge.

&nb
sp; —Closs

  André cleared the message and used a subroutine to overwrite the sectors, a precaution he never skimped on. Especially for innocuous messages. He knew how Cricket earned her bread, and she knew what he did as well and they had a tacit agreement not to ask. But not all the synthesists, archinformists, or net miners on the Rim were his lovers. And though he trusted Cricket Earl Murphy as much as he trusted anyone, only a fool baited temptation.

  Any business Closs had to offer wasn’t the sort of thing best discussed on a broadcast channel. Especially when André wasn’t certain he’d be able to avoid a conflict of interest. He inspected his scoot, wincing in self-consciousness when he located not so much as a loose wire, and dropped into the saddle. He could have walked; Cricket’s float hooked up to a sidewalk, and there was a bridge across the canal that would lead him downtown, through the maze of barges and waterways that made up the floating city of Novo Haven. But he’d have to come back for his scoot then.

  Meanwhile, the major would be expecting him.

  Later, sitting on Jean Gris’s crude wicker couch, Cricket Earl Murphy reviewed her few remaining articles of faith. For example, she believed that if one must keep secrets, it was best if they happened to be incredible. Melodrama was good, especially when it involved spies, forgotten royalty, or the downfall of governments. Outrageous scandals were more survivable than petty ones; a truly lurid tale could only improve one’s reputation, unless it involved allegations of rape (squalid), insider trading (pathetic), or cannibalism (still beyond the pale).

  Petty moral failures led to disgrace only because they had no scope. It was too easy for the opprobrious to condemn their own small criminal hypocrisies when they recognized them in another. An adultery, a financial manipulation, the poisoning of a spouse: anybody could compass such crimes. And because they could imagine them, they could defend against them.

  A truly outrageous crime provoked disbelief—such things only happen in melodramas—and then, after, awe.

  If you must steal, swipe a planet.

  As a consequence of this philosophy, Cricket very rarely lied. Her secrets, while plentiful, were the sort that people did not inquire after. She was safe—safe here, especially, here on the Rim, on Greene’s World, a corner of the settled galaxy that could not be less interesting to the Core, to anybody with money, to the woman she had been.

  The Core never thought about the Rim if it could help it, except to set pulp holodrama there. As far as civilization was concerned, the Rim had nothing to offer except wilderness, Iron Age aliens—the ones that had advanced that far—and a romantic but generally nasty and unsafe frontier. And, of course, the bounty of limitless natural resources to exploit and fortunes to be made. With the added benefit that any personal problems one left behind on Earth would very probably be dead by the time one landed on Greene’s World, Xanadu, or Yap.

  And she kept telling herself that, right up to the moment Jean Gris steepled his gnawed fingertips and said, “It’d be the biggest scandal since Moon Morrow resigned.”

  Cricket’s shoulders tautened. She kept her eyes wide and innocent, and did not even allow the name to echo in her mind. Superstitiously, as if Jean were the wizard the ignorant painted him. As if he could read her thoughts.

  She wondered, even should she say it outright, if he would ever believe her. “Moon who?”

  The crease deepened over his broken nose, shadows rough along his bristled jaw. His eyes caught the light as his head tilted. “Morrow. She was the Earth Unified government’s minister of colonization during the first Downham administration. She resigned under a cloud about fifteen Standard ago. Took the fall for an antimatter test station failure at Patience. Do you recall that?”

  Of course she did. The destroyed space station, the devastated biosphere of the planet below, the frozen corpses floating in orbit—where there was anything to recover. The disaster had been caused by a failed Exigency Corps engineering operation. Morrow, it came out later, had pushed the god-botherers to augment the chance of success for the experimental power station beyond any margin of safety.

  There was still debate as to whether the plant’s design was flawed, or whether the Corps interference caused a localized probability storm.

  Twenty thousand, two hundred and thirteen dead. Unsurprisingly, almost no surviving wounded.

  Oh, yes. Cricket recalled.

  She could close her eyes and see the corona of wreckage around the devastated station. She could close her eyes, and imagine she felt the thirty seconds of hard vacuum that was all you got to feel before you died. Eyeballs freezing, capillaries bursting. Thirty seconds was a long, long time.

  “Oh, her. I’d forgotten her name.”

  Jean watched her carefully, long enough to make her worry, and then licked his lips and said, “Went to work for Core, I think, after the jail sentence, and hasn’t been heard from since. She dropped out of sight completely.”

  “And you think she has something to do with Lucienne’s being killed?” Sidetrack, play dumb. Look confused. “Was it something the ranid said?”

  Not too confused, however. More’s the pity; Jean knew she wasn’t stupid.

  The ranid that had found Lucienne’s body was hunkered comfortably in the reedy mud upriver, according to Jean, and Cricket had no reason not to believe him. It was a more comfortable topic than Moon Morrow.

  “No,” Jean said. “I think if she’s not still working for Core, she’s relativistic under an assumed name, and our grandchildren will hear from her when time and scandal have forgotten her. Or she’s melting into an unmarked grave.” Jean let his fingers slide together, interlock. “It’s seventeen years body-time from Earth. At least a hundred, nonrelativistic—” he looked up, blinked his watery eyes. “But you know that, don’t you?” Cricket had never quite lost her North American accent. “Or you could be seeing how much line you can feed me before you set the hook, chérie.”

  She smiled.

  He caught her fingers sideways and gave them a squeeze. “What did you learn?”

  “I’m still looking for the key to what Lucienne managed to mail me. I’ll find that—” She rubbed at the corners of her eyes with the other hand, feeling incredibly tired. “I wish we knew who she was meeting. I wish we had the rest of the file—”

  “Do we know what Rim did with the body?”

  “If they didn’t resink it?”

  Jean gave her the raised eyebrow. She took her hand back, stood up, wishing she wasn’t at Jean’s house so she could check status on the half-dozen searches, bots, and ferrets she had running that didn’t require her constant attention—and the compiler trying to resolve the fragment of Lucienne’s deathbed message into something parseable. She wanted to walk away from Kroc, so she went to make tea, wondering if the tomatoes had ripened enough overnight to give her an excuse to walk out to the truck garden and pick some. Better than growing them in tubs on her deck, that was for sure. She liked the dirt under her fingernails.

  He said, “No, they wouldn’t have made sure it got snagged in the cables if they didn’t want it found.”

  “But did they want it found so soon?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Right. Jean didn’t know a damned thing about wetware, hard memory, or any of it. “Her hard memory would decay in something like twenty to thirty hours. Any data in her head would be irretrievable at that point. We know she was sending me something—”

  “The other half might still be queued.”

  “It probably is,” Cricket said, glancing at him. “We can’t obtain her body before we lose that data to bit-rot.”

  Jean pressed the side of his hand to his mouth. From the way the muscle in his jaw worked, he was chewing the flesh near his thumb. “What if they downloaded her?”

  Cricket shrugged, sliding the pot onto the stove. Cold water slopped over the enamel surface and wet her hand. “Whatever they killed her to keep her from bringing back to you might be in the file. Which would be in a Charter Tr
ade data hold. Blasted Rimmers.”

  Jean’s nose had been broken once and he’d never gotten it fixed. His breath whistled on the outflow. “You still think it was André, Cricket?”

  If she bit her cheek hard enough, she could keep her eyes from stinging. “The common factor linking all of my unhappy romances is me.”

  “Is that an answer?”

  “It’s what you get. I don’t ask those things. I think it must have been—”

  “I don’t have to use him.”

  The water steamed, not yet bubbling. She threw tea bags into mugs. “Use him,” she said. “I knew it was on fire when I lay down on it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I know he was on fire?”

  “No,” Jean said, very patiently. Silently he’d come up behind her; she saw his reflection in the cooktop before he laid his hand on her arm. “Why did you pick him?”

  The water boiled. She wrapped the handle in a terry rag and lifted the kettle off the heat. “Because,” she said, roughly, “he could beat up my dad.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bad men,” Cricket said. “Bad men, the badder the better. And they don’t come badder than André Deschênes. He’s so bad he can be sweet as ice cream every second, and nobody forgets for any one of those seconds that he’s the baddest man in the room. That’s what I like. Men who could beat up my dad. They make me feel safe.” She lifted her chin and set the kettle down. “I know it’s crazy. It’s why I don’t let any of them get too close. Because I know what they are.”

  She shook her head, shook Jean’s hand off, and—turning—warded him back with a cup of hot tea. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. I think…I think they wanted it to look like an accident. Or like she ran afoul of a ranid sect. Some of the savages still kill humans in the marsh, you know.”

  “Some humans.”

  She didn’t need to turn around to know he was smiling. Jean Kroc—whatever his real name was, and she didn’t ask that either—went into the marsh with impunity. Lucienne had, too. “Discredit the labor rights movement,” she continued, as if he had not interrupted. “Maybe something more complicated, but that’ll do for a surface motive.”