Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  Cricket set the glass aside, watching it click on a checkerboard side table. When she looked up, André was still staring. She crossed to him, put her hand lightly against his chest, and balanced up to kiss him on the corner of the mouth. Warm flesh, dry lips, the small curls of his beard.

  “This doesn’t make me a better man than I was yesterday,” he said.

  Cricket shrugged and stepped back. He loved her, and she didn’t love him, but that didn’t mean they had to be assholes about it. “See you in hell,” she said cheerfully, and leaned her shoulder against his arm.

  Maurice would report to work in person the next day. He would bring Closs the final bombshell that they had been saving—the news that Lucienne Spivak had not been merely a local activist, but an agent of Unified Earth, a government agitator working for the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. That she had been operating on Greene’s World under several identities, one of which was that of Lisa Anne Angley, who had faked her own death in the process of facilitating a coincidentally engineered explosion on board the ranid recruiting ship.

  That she had, with the aid of ranid extremists, escaped underwater before the ship blew up. That she had been instrumental in the deaths of several men.

  André listened impassively as Maurice laid out the information he would deliver. Only when the archinformist was done did he speak, shifting uncomfortably on the sofa where he reclined, his healing leg propped on cushions.

  “Is that true?”

  “Tolerably,” Jean said, when Maurice didn’t answer. Cricket gave him such a look, and he shrugged. “I knew who she was working for. Unified Earth would just love a legal excuse to get the omelite monopoly away from Jeff Greene. As you can imagine.”

  We were friends, Cricket almost said. But she hadn’t told Lucienne who she had used to be either. Did that make her less a friend?

  People had secrets. You lived with it or you didn’t.

  André said it again, as if he needed to fix it in his head. “I assassinated a government agent for Jefferson Greene.”

  “Still time to change your mind,” Nouel said, hands folded together so the sinews in their backs stood out. It was obvious what he thought the best course was, and Cricket was a little startled by his loyalty.

  André shook his head. “Keep talking.”

  It was at its heart Cricket’s plan, and she thought it was a good one. Judging by their expressions, the men didn’t disagree. Jean let a faint smile deepen the lines between the corners of his nose and the corners of his mouth, and Nouel was giving Cricket that querying eyebrow. Maurice might be a bit less sanguine, but as it was his neck first on the block, Cricket couldn’t blame him. They would need an inside man.

  There were two choices. Him, or André. And André was needed elsewhere.

  To his credit, though Maurice went pale and tight-faced when Cricket made her suggestions, his only reply was a nod.

  “Maurice goes inside,” Cricket reiterated, wishing she could just flash-highlight the relevant text. Not with Jean in the conversation. She could talk much faster than she could speak, and with much greater information density. Words are hell. “The rest of us, except André, come in from the outside on a data run, and get intentionally messy. Carefully. While we distract Charter Trade’s security, André waits on his scoot for Maurice’s transmission. Maurice recovers what he can off the internal systems and makes a handoff to André. André ferries the data personally to Ziyi Zhou and stays with her until she sends it to Earth.”

  “And we vanish into the night like ninja,” Maurice said, and embarrassed himself with a karate chop.

  She glanced around the room one more time, saw tight concentration, nodding. “Maurice told us something else,” she said, looking to Nouel for permission to continue.

  Maurice took it as an invitation. “The god-botherers have a theory,” he said, “that the ranids used to have a technological civilization. That they possibly abandoned it by choice. It gives us another point of leverage against Charter Trade, if I can pull out some proof. Proof, even that Greene suspects and hasn’t reported it.”

  For once, it was Jean looking most puzzled. André’s relief was almost palpable. Cricket took pity on them both. “You know the rule about planetary colonies.”

  “Only on worlds where the natives are prespace,” Jean said.

  Cricket nodded. She knew this through her motherself. It had been her job. “There isn’t a rule for worlds that have chosen barbarism. Nobody ever thought of that. If Charter Trade is suppressing that information, the scandal could last years.”

  “Oh,” Jean said. And then, quite unnecessarily, he added, “Damn. I wish Lucienne were here.”

  Cricket snapped away. She hadn’t forgiven André, not exactly. And she wasn’t going to let him see her cry.

  Her hand caught her discarded glass on the edge of the table. It sailed into the air; she fumbled after it, felt her fingers glance off. Nobody else was close enough to catch.

  They stood and watched it fall.

  It landed upright on the floor and did not shatter. A narrow column of liquor followed it down, splashed inside, spat a thread up to catch the light, and fell into concentric ripples in the cradle of the glass. Not a drop spilled.

  “Wow,” Cricket said. “That was convenient.”

  It was Jean Kroc who murmured, “Oh, shit.”

  14

  THE PROBABILITY STORM SIMMERED THROUGH THE NIGHT, and Jean refused to let anyone travel. “Why put yourself in the way of coincidence?” he said.

  Later, as Jean was helping Nouel make up the red-upholstered couches for him and André to sleep on, Cricket asked, “Can’t you do something about it?” Cricket already had the guest room; Jean watched André visibly consider asking if he could share it and then, just as visibly, let go.

  The first answer on his tongue was sharper than she warranted. He turned it around until he found a kinder way to phrase it; this couldn’t be easy on her either. “No. Because mucking with probability now is not the best, er, possible idea.”

  Her mouth made an O. She looked at her feet and nodded. “Stupid question,” she said. But it hadn’t been, really. Just a human one, and he patted her on the arm. She moved as if he hadn’t touched her, but bent and pulled a sheet taut. Where her fingers dented the fabric, three of them went right through.

  As luck would have it.

  She looked up, startled.

  “It would have happened sooner or later. Nothing to do,” he said, “but sit tight and wait it out.”

  As it played out, none of them slept much. Nouel fired up the living room system; they got news on three walls, seven feet high. Cricket reported that Maurice had retired his connection, ostensibly to sleep. The rest of them piled onto the chairs and couches and settled in under blankets, despite the lingering warmth of the night. Jean imagined that the other three were also following newsdrips, feeds, and real-time chats.

  Jean was suddenly, unsentimentally grateful that he’d left that behind. He rested his head against the back of the couch and just watched the walls, captions on and the sound turned down. Occasionally, Cricket or Nouel read out a headline. André said almost nothing.

  It was a night of news worth staying up for, Cricket’s unspilled cup being the least of it. Broadcast stories included a roster of biblical exigencies: the death by burning of an elderly woman alone in a locked room; the spontaneous appearance of a young man in evening dress—speaking no known language—in the middle of Troutbrook Street; a rash of mysterious objects appearing in public places while no one happened to be looking. A refrigeration unit, a piece of garden statuary, a half-ton pile of whitefish.

  There was another seaquake.

  A mining platform burned.

  Those did not worry Jean as much as the teleporting objects. “Apports,” he said, drawing his knees to his chest. A sinkhole seemed to have opened in his stomach. He pressed both fists into his flesh, but his voice would not be steadied. “Oh, that’s very bad news inde
ed.”

  “Apports?” Nouel asked. He lay on the floor on his stomach, his chin propped on his hands. His eyes were closed; whether he was shutting out the news or watching a scroll on his headset, Jean was not quite sure.

  “There is a statistically small, but nonzero, chance that any given object will not be where you left it,” Jean said. “It has to do with timestreams forking and healing. It’s how the Slide works.”

  André said, “Oh.”

  “The Exigency Corps hasn’t issued a warning—”

  “Nouel,” Cricket said, “they didn’t on Patience either.” She also sat on the floor, her back to the sofa, next to André’s unbroken leg. He kept glancing down at her as if he wanted to ruffle her hair, but his hands stayed on the couch. Her fingers plucked at the fringe of the rug; she didn’t seem to notice that she was inducing it to shift color with each stroke. She looked up, across the room. Jean looked back. “How bad is this going to get?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. And then, because it seemed like a bad time to lie, he added, “worse.” He turned his attention to Nouel. “May I use your screen? I need to make an interplanetary call.”

  That was worth it for the looks Cricket and André gave both him, and each other. He expected he could produce superior expressions in a moment, and yet he felt a profound reluctance.

  They had planned this. He had been a party to it. He had allowed Lucienne to choose, although he had not been in accord with her choosing. But her death had been part of the game, and he’d let her play it the way she’d intended.

  They all had debts to pay. Lucienne had her own reasons, and he’d never asked what they might be.

  It didn’t make it any easier to enter the code and call her, though, half a galaxy away.

  André had killed her. He’d laid her limp body out, turned her head, slid a cable into the access port for her headset. He’d combed his fingers through her sweat-damp, sea-salt hair, pushing aside tendrils that had snapped off too short for the braid. He’d lifted her body in his arms, held her like a sleeping child, and sunk her in hundreds of feet of water, where she’d become entangled. He’d watched the sea close over her as the weight of the water he’d piped into her lungs carried her down.

  Lucienne Spivak smiled at him and said, “André. Nice to finally meet you face to face, even if it is by transmission. I hope you’re well?”

  “Oh, fuck,” Cricket said, and ran for the bathroom.

  André tried to struggle to his feet, whether to follow Cricket or meet standing the woman he’d murdered, he wasn’t sure. He heaved and fell back, and then Jean was beside him, hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t try again. He couldn’t settle back on the cushions either, though, so he leaned forward and disregarded the twinge from his propped foot. “How did you—”

  Not the most politic of questions. Perhaps he got some consideration for shock. Lucienne smiled, and said blandly, “You killed me. No game.”

  Cricket had just emerged from the bathroom, wiping her mouth on her hand. André thought she might slump to the floor, from the way she was heeling over, but she braced herself on the doorframe and rolled her shoulders back. “How could you?” she said. “How could you let me think you were dead? How could you, how could you let me feel your death? We were friends.”

  André had heard children say the word that way, with total conviction and total betrayal. Friends. As if it were the only thing that mattered in the world.

  “Sweetheart,” Lucienne said gently, “that wasn’t me.”

  André blinked. He reached out a hand to Cricket; without seeming to look, she came and sat beside him, settling into the couch under the curve of his arm. She leaned against him, and it was all sun-warmth and bittersweet longing. Even when Lucienne winked at him like a rabbit punch, the sweet hurt, the emptiness that was Cricket curled against him for the last time, did not fade. If anything, it sharpened.

  You don’t always know, when you touch somebody for the last time. But sometimes you can tell. Sometimes, you get a chance to appreciate it in all its spiky glory. “It was you,” Cricket said. “We were friends, and—”

  “You lied to each other.”

  “We didn’t tell each other everything,” Cricket said. “That’s not the same.”

  Lucienne swallowed. André saw the ringlike shadows move under her skin. “The person you knew was my daughterself,” she said, quietly. “She—I—followed you to Greene’s World when you fled prosecution on Earth. And you turned out quite different from the Moon Morrow I’ve been hunting since she got out of prison, I might add.” She lowered her eyes. “I hope you don’t think your motherself has your scruples.”

  André squeezed her, lightly, with the embracing arm. She didn’t quite shake him off, but the stiffness in her shoulders told him he wouldn’t get another warning. “I remember,” Cricket said. “I changed.”

  “You thought you were Morrow.”

  “I—”

  “Posthypnotic suggestion,” Lucienne said. “She had a pretty clever plan; to send you on ahead, avoid the prison sentence that way, and use you to solidify a hold over Charter Trade.”

  “But I didn’t go to Charter Trade.”

  “No,” Lucienne said. “You went to ground. You didn’t do what Morrow would have. You developed a conscience.”

  “She didn’t?” This time, Cricket snugged against André’s side by herself. He let her, and didn’t try to hold onto her.

  “You grew up somewhat. You came to an understanding about Patience, among other things.”

  “If I’m her,” Cricket said, “then how can I have changed when she didn’t?”

  Jean cleared his throat. André had been so focused on Cricket, and on Lucienne—who, he was thankful, was not staring at him with that particular expectant expression—that he had almost forgotten that Jean and Nouel were in the room. “It could have gone either way,” he said, with a self-effacing shrug.

  Nouel cleared his throat, leaned forward, and said, “Doesn’t this all seem a little coincidental to you?”

  Cricket frowned. “Don’t be silly, I can’t possibly be entangled. I’ve never ever worked for Rim—” Her eyes widened.

  “What?” André’s plan had been to stay silent. He should have remembered that plans never survived contact.

  Cricket stood, stepped away, and turned back long enough to give him an accusing look. He spread his hands. The couch was too hot and too moist against his back. He wished he could just stand up and follow her.

  She tweaked her hair behind her shoulders, and looked back at Lucienne. “When they…made me. But Morrow must have hidden that? I mean, if everybody knew—”

  “I work for Unified Earth,” Lucienne said. “I’m sorry, Cricket. Lucienne was my quantum clone, as you were Morrow’s. There’s…an awareness that we have. When you were scared or hurt, she could find you. We knew Morrow wouldn’t let you get too far out of sight. So you were our ticket for taking the whole filthy Greene’s World Charter Trade cabal down.”

  “But you had Maurice.”

  “Not then.” She tilted her head. “There’s another issue; there has to be enough of a public scandal to discredit Rim before UE wades in. When Morrow did what she did, she was our problem. Us going after her could look vindictive.”

  Oh, André thought. And that had nothing to do with it, of course. “So you’re telling us to trust the government?”

  “I’m asking you to consider the alternatives. Also, we needed people who could testify. Personally. We needed a bulletproof case.”

  “You’ve got it.” Cricket turned her head and looked at André. Looked through André, the brown flecks swimming in her tea-colored eyes. “Don’t you?”

  There are moments, he understood, when your life changed in front of your eyes. Sometimes you knew it. You pulled a trigger. You kissed a girl.

  Other times, you only caught it in the receding view.

  He could walk away now. He didn’t have to go to the wall for them. Jean an
d Lucienne had just admitted they’d set him up.

  He deserved it. But Cricket didn’t, and they’d fucking conjured her. And convinced her that he’d killed her best friend. He had killed her best friend.

  That was something of an unpatchable betrayal.

  And she was still standing there.

  And he didn’t, he realized, have to decide right now.

  “That’s why you took me on?” He stared past Cricket, at Jean Kroc, and Jean Kroc nodded. He’d been expecting the question; he didn’t have to pause to think.

  “Son of a bitch,” André said. “I thought it was my talent.”

  “No,” Jean said. “All the talent in forty worlds doesn’t make you not a killer, André.”

  And there it was, held up for him. Something he could look at square, through the filter of the mud and the violet blood and the scent of sugar and the poor damned froggies stupidly trying to bury their dead. “No,” he said, with Jean and Cricket and Nouel all looking at him, and the projected image of Lucienne carefully looking away. “I guess it doesn’t. So why did you take me on?”

  Jean shrugged. He got up, came over to André, and helped him to his feet. André balanced unsteadily, and Jean brought him his crutch. He leaned on it and watched, as Jean stepped back, as Cricket silently withdrew to sit again, this time beside Nouel and not looking at Lucienne at all.

  Jean cleared his throat, drawing André’s attention again. “Because you’re not the only killer in the room.”

  Nouel lifted one finger, breaking a waiting silence. “Maurice has just been called into work,” he said.

  “We’re on a little early, friends.”

  By the fourth quarter, Closs knew he was looking at the end of the world. He’d spent the evening in crisis management, but for each one he passed off to a capable subordinate or handed down the chain of command with a resolution plan, two more bloomed in its place. His office became a virtual situation room, the view through the tall windows obscured by projections, icons showing his night-shift troubleshooters working, heads down, eyes moving restlessly.