by Jones, Raya
I said sharply, ‘Sit down,’ and she did. She sat down on the other sofa like shaping up for a fight. I imagined zooming on her face when analysing my surveillance later. She had beautiful green eyes. The video wouldn’t do justice to their vitality. Unsmiling, I told her, ‘It was good digging. The data checked out, but it’s not what you think it is.’
‘So why are you still working on it? I don’t mean the class exercise. Don’t take me for a fool!’
‘You’re certainly not a fool. You’ve planned this visit like an OK movie.’ I knew by now that she used to be a software designer with OK, the entertainment specialists. ‘When you enlisted with Securos you requested this sector specifically, and you’ve been with them just long enough to be trusted with an armed vehicle on your own.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘You want to see me face to face so that if I refuse you, you could kill me.’
Her hand stopped fingering the gun.
‘It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together, Haüyne. Are you sure you won’t have tea? How about soda?’ I rose and walked to the kitchen corner.
She followed me. ‘Am I in? Aren’t you curious to know how I know you’re working on my lead?’
‘No.’
‘No what?’
‘I can guess how you know, and no, I can’t take you in. I’m not my own boss, sorry. I’ve been hired to check it out. I can’t tell you who’s hired me because of their secrecy clause. But it really is a dead end. If I thought otherwise, I’d have covered my trail better and you wouldn’t have known about it.’
‘Well,’ she said triumphantly, ‘someone is taking it seriously. I’ll give you another lead that will change your mind.’ She removed a memory pearl off her earring. ‘Is this secure?’ She meant the kitchen computer. I assured her it was. She placed the pearl in the socket. The display space came to life with strings of symbols streaking grey on charcoal. The strings metamorphosed into old Japanese script. Kanji, hiragana, and katakana characters scrolled slate-grey on charcoal background.
My heart raced. Shivers ran down my spine. When I replayed the surveillance video later, I saw my face contorting into a strange smirk.
Haüyne saw the face of an archaeologist beholding the Holy Grail. She grinned broadly. ‘It says…’
‘I can read it,’ I said breathlessly. ‘It’s probably a cryptogram, nothing to do with tickets to a sumo contest.’
‘Yeah, give me some credit! It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Giants fighting for supreme power: Earth and the corporations, the Council of Nine. It all ties in. It fits with my other discovery and it comes from the Man in the Moon.’ She meant the old lunar server, a pre-Apocalypse relic kept running for sentimental reasons. ‘The only thing I can’t figure out is this bit.’ She converted the display back to the source code to show me.
But I already knew.
I had spotted it as soon as the strings started to form. It had made my heart race and shivers run down my spine. ‘Some sort of marker?’ she asked.
‘Could be,’ I muttered. It was precisely that. ‘May I copy the file?’
‘Keep the pearl. I have a string of them.’
‘Destroy all copies. Haüyne, it’s for your own safety. I’m not going to rip you off. We’re a team.’
‘We are?’
‘Yes. Nobody else must know. Give me a few days to run some checks and I’ll call you back. I’ll contact you through your Securos desk. I’ll say that I’m interested in the home defence plan you’re supposed to be selling me.’
She stared at me nonplussed, but quickly put two and two together and realised how I could know that she logged her visit as a courtesy promotion call. ‘You’ve hacked Securos!’
I didn’t have to. I had legal access to their databases through my borrowed CSG identity. But I said, ‘Don’t you think that a college professor can have hobbies? How do you think I can afford antiques and an asteroid residence on my salary?’
‘You’re a Cordova.’
I smiled as if apologising for my high birth. ‘And you trust me to expose the all-time conspiracy of my forebears?’
‘OK didn’t exist at the time. It’s ancient history.’
She was right about that. Privately I thought: if her professor is half as savvy, he’d realise that the CSG couldn’t care less about the distant past. The agency’s sole function is to ensure fair trade in the present and future. Like any organisation the CSG tags its internal communications with a distinctive marker. Why should a CSG message be masked like an ancient communication, sent long before the agency came into existence? Aloud, I reminded Haüyne that many compete to be the one who finds the definitive proof. We must be cagey.
After she left I moved the coffee table out of the way, dimmed the lights, and unrolled the portable portal. I put on the headband interface. On the dark windowpane, my reflection was superimposed on starry blackness and plumes of a distant nebula—a young Japanese man in a black biosuit and red headband, poised like surfing on a portal that looks like a mat woven of cyan light.
You may have seen an artist’s impression of this image. I suppressed memories of the artist, Fairweather, believing she was long gone in my past. I was wrong.
When Haüyne came again I had a candlelit dinner set up. Freedom liked to dine with friends in other parts of the galaxy, and his computer stored precise instructions so that everyone could sit at identical tables many light-years apart. Haüyne came in uniform but left her gun behind. She must have known that I couldn’t possibly be Freedom Cordova, the son of the clan ruling OK, whose family tree was in the public domain. She didn’t mention it. She noticed the dining table. ‘For me? Are you wooing me or trying to steal my discovery?’
‘A bit of both.’
‘Wine, wow, is it real, really real? I’ve never tasted real wine before.’ She examined the bottle. ‘From Earth! It must’ve cost a fortune!’
‘I have permission to use it.’ I nevertheless felt guilty about pouring it.
‘Permission from whom?’
‘The family. The wine is family property.’
‘Oh, right.’ She sounded sceptical, but wasn’t going to spoil the chance of tasting real wine. ‘You grew up on Earth, didn’t you?’ she said between sips.
‘Yes, Ground Zero.’ By sheer coincidence, I had that one biographical detail in common with Freedom Cordova. He grew up in Phoenix-3, the OK town.
‘What was it like?’ asked Haüyne.
I had no idea what it’s like to live in Phoenix-3. ‘Same as anywhere,’ I muttered.
‘Did you ever see the Western Rim?’
I nodded vigorously and spoke with passion that surprised me. There’s nothing more awesome than those cliffs. Pilgrims put stones on piles like memorial mounds, which get dispersed in sandstorms and torrential rains, but the next year other pilgrims come and do it all over again.
Haüyne eyed me strangely.
She waited until after the dessert, when we sat at the alcove with the view and finished the wine, before talking business.
I told her truthfully that I set a tracer to date the cryptogram, but it could take a long time to yield any result.
‘But it’s genuine, isn’t it? It checks out, doesn’t it?’ she pressed.
‘If you mean, did it come from the Man on the Moon, then yes, without a doubt.’
‘So we’re in business! It doesn’t matter who you really are. We reinvent ourselves all the time, don’t we?’ She grinned drunkenly. ‘We must get my finding copyrighted.’
‘First I need to show you something.’ I pushed away the coffee table to make room for the mat. ‘And you must promise me to go back to OK.’
‘You can’t be serious!’
‘What good are you to our project selling home security door to door? As a designer of educational software, you can specialise in the Apocalypse. Tell them that life on space patrol didn’t turn out as exciting as you’d imagined and you want your old job back. They’ll take
you back. You’ve had good appraisals.’
‘How do you know? OK is much tighter than Securos, you couldn’t possibly hack it.’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘Oh. Right, you’re a Cordova. Look here, there’s something you don’t know about the terms of citizenship for lesser mortals.’
‘If you mean the two-year minimum service, that won’t be a problem. When you file your resignation with Securos, it will be approved without penalty. OK will take you back, no questions asked. There’s a memo recommending your instant reinstatement in Educational Product R&D.’
‘Since when?’
‘Last night, but it’s backdated to three weeks before you left.’
‘We’ll get caught!’
‘You won’t and I definitely won’t. Do you promise me you’ll do that?’
She promised.
I set up the mat for her. She stepped on, and the wastelands fanned out all around her. She was not a stranger there. I had plotted a journey through sites where her past trails were visible. She saw ghosts of avatars she used to use. Then she started to see their codes annihilated by impenetrable blackness.
She logged out, shaken, and sat back down like collapsing. She mumbled, ‘What do you want?’
‘To keep you safe.’ I sat down next to her. ‘My devourer will eliminate itself in a few minutes and won’t singe your real identity, but others won’t stop there.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I want you to go back to OK and specialise in history books. Do deep digging, but do it in the open. Don’t conceal any finding.’
‘And if I come across more evidence for you-know-what?’
‘Log it openly.’
She frowned. ‘What, even the sumo message?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t get you. One minute you’re telling me that this is so hot, someone might be out to burn me. Heck, you give me a demo of my own death. And the next minute you’re telling me to log it!’
‘Leave the dark side to me.’
‘Will I ever hear from you again?’
‘You bet.’ I meant it. I looked into her beautiful green eyes, and said, ‘It won’t be under my real name. If you contact Freedom Cordova again, I’ll deny any knowledge of this.’
‘How will I know it’s you?’
‘Only we know what is really happening here now. I’ll remind you. Yes,’ I answered her frown, ‘the camera is rolling. But from the moment we came to sit here the domestic surveillance shows something different.’
‘What?’
‘Some creative editing of a porno… ouch!’
She put force into that slap, and then stood up to leave. ‘In your dreams! Nobody will believe it.’
‘But they won’t know what actually happened. Is it so unthinkable for you to sleep with me?’
She stopped before reaching the door, grinning, ‘No, you’re cute. Sorry I slapped you. It really was a classic romantic dinner and the wine was great. Thanks. What are we doing this moment in your fantasy video?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
She came back and kissed me. ‘Maybe this?’
She left five hours later.
Afterwards I set a hound to follow her when she went digging again. I thought that the worst that could happen to her would be her identity getting wiped out. My hound was designed to watch her back in the virtual. Nothing protected her in the physical. Several months after being reinstated in OK, her employers transferred her to Proxima. She didn’t reach there alive.
I learned early in life to be economical with lies. A truth is buried deeper when it’s covered up by other truths. I lied to Haüyne about tampering with the domestic surveillance. It was more important to have evidence that she didn’t know about the CSG tag.
She was still alive when Freedom Cordova returned home.
‘Your hair’s so long!’ he exclaimed as soon as he saw me. ‘I like it like this, but it doesn’t make you look more like me, ha-ha!’ He surveyed his apartment happily. ‘Everything is in order. Well done, Special Agent Dee Valiant.’
‘I drank one of your bottles of wine.’
‘That was a gift. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Do you have time to crack open another bottle to celebrate my homecoming?’
‘Yes.’ I was reluctant to leave.
Bringing the wine to the alcove, he joked, ‘Did you have such good company drinking the other bottle?’
‘A woman came here.’
He stopped laughing, and fretted, ‘What if she takes it into her head to come here again? What should I do?’
‘Tell her the truth.’
‘Who should I say you are?’
‘Dee Valiant.’
‘And if she contacts me in the virtual, I’ll divert the call to you, right?’
‘If you route it to Dee Valiant, it won’t reach me.’
‘I see. Are you Dee Valiant?’
‘No.’
He looked at me expectantly. I said nothing. He gave up. ‘I guess you’re not allowed to divulge your real name. Coming undercover for an undercover mission, eh? Do you get time between missions to go home and be yourself?’
He was curious in a friendly way. I liked him. I told him that I didn’t have a place of my own. I didn’t tell him that I always lived under assumed identities. Somehow he seemed to guess. ‘Identities within identities like a Russian doll,’ he mused, picking up a pear-shaped lacquered ornament painted with the image of a peasant woman. ‘This is my Russian doll. Did you ever look inside her?’
‘I scanned it. There are no devices.’
That amused him a great deal. He showed me that inside the doll was an identical but smaller doll. Inside it, another one, and another again. Freedom arranged them in a row from the largest to the tiniest.
I smiled.
He raised his glass. ‘Here’s to your smile! This is the first time I’ve seen you smile. What shall we find inside you, I wonder, when all your aliases are removed? The name your mother used to call you?’
He wasn’t expecting a reply and I gave none.
Under all my borrowed and invented identities there isn’t a name my mother used to call me, because she changed our names several times. Your name is important only to people who are out to get you, she used to say. When all my aliases are peeled off, inside there is only a sense of place, of freedom and fate, of home.
Freedom was glad and sad to be home. He had missed his possessions and some luxuries. But after living in daily physical contact with people, he resented returning to solitary existence. When he invited me to stay, he was thinking selfishly (he said). He didn’t mind that I’d spend whole days working in the guest room. It pleased him to know that there was another soul on the asteroid.
He pointed out that he couldn’t go on calling me Dee Valiant. He heard in RK-17 that Dee Valiant was a woman.
‘You can call me Al,’ I said.
‘Al! I like that. It’s friendly and anonymous,’ he laughed. ‘You can be my nephew Al if anyone asks.’
‘You don’t have a nephew Al.’
‘Who’s to know? If anyone from the family sees you, which I doubt, you can be my friend Al.’ He kept minimal contact with his relatives, but wanted to resume live links with his friends, and they might see me at the background. If they believed I was a nephew, they wouldn’t expect me to join their circle. ‘You must wonder why I live alone on an asteroid, Al.’
‘Your relationships didn’t work out.’
‘True, but that’s not what I mean. Why I have this asteroid in the first place.’
‘It’s family property. It was passed down to you.’
‘Yes, you know every detail of my biography and probably things I’ve forgotten. But you don’t know my story.’
‘Your story for what?’
He laughed uproariously. ‘We can take you out of the CSG but can’t take the CSG out of you! I don’t mean a story as in a cover-up but a story as in my side of… Oh, I guess that’s w
hat people say when you catch them out. I mean what it means to be me. You have your story too irrespective of the names you call yourself. Your story doesn’t begin when you’re born. The conditions for your existence and mine were set in motion in the age of the kings before the Apocalypse, perhaps even earlier in the twilight of the ancient nations and the dawn of the neo-tribes…’
‘You’re reciting your own lectures.’
‘Guilty as charged, ha-ha! My point is that it’s not the chronology of events that makes your story or mine. It’s our hopes and sorrows, our fears and reasons for doing things, and those were made possible when the society we live in came into being. I’m rambling, old man philosophising, eh?’
I stared into my wineglass.
Examining the surveillance archive several months later, I saw him thoughtfully scrutinising me with intelligent seriousness that vanished the moment I glanced back at him. His face quickly rearranged itself into his usual jovial expression. He lightly intoned, ‘I see we have interesting times ahead of us. I have issues with the CSG and you probably have prejudices against my caste.’
I said stiffly, ‘I’d like to stay here because I like to work without having to watch my back.’
‘You have my word! You don’t have to watch your back with me.’
A few days later he said over lunch, ‘Odd thing, Al, ever since coming back I keep remembering my youth. Do you mind me rambling, an old man reminiscing, eh?’
I didn’t mind. The more he talked about his youth, the less he asked about mine. His privileged childhood was a cloistered life. They mixed only with their own caste. During childhood they did everything together, irrespective of clan, but when they started to be inducted into the family business in their teens, they had to become secretive with each other. ‘There was a lot I couldn’t stomach. I’m not talking corruption, Al. Just the way things are, the status quo. Teaching in a college funded by OK is the only way I could get out of the OK business. How about you? Where did you grow up?’
When he got nowhere trying to get me to talk about my childhood, he told me myths and legends.
I started paying attention to them only much, much later.