Fairweather

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Fairweather Page 10

by Jones, Raya


  I told that we wanted passage to Sol.

  She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and picked up another slice of pizza. ‘What’s my incentive?’

  ‘We’ll pay the fare with a top-up fee for last minute booking. Why not give us a ride?’

  ‘Figure it out for yourself. Time’s up.’

  ‘Not yet. This conversation would be better in private.’

  Her expression told me that she knew about the fate of the Moonrat, the ship aboard which I had travelled from Alpha Centauri to Ronda. She waved her crew away with a motion of her hand. When they retreated out of earshot, I said, ‘If I see a serious violation, I’ll report it. But you have a good track record with the CSG, and I’m too senior for clocking minor violations just to improve my score sheet. I’m travelling privately with my friend who’s a retired professor. You can put us in the freezer for three years. But it will be a waste of opportunity for you if you do that with me.’

  Romanova glanced at me over the pizza slice she was bringing to her mouth.

  ‘I do private consultations, not as Jexu Jiu. I use many names. Three years is a long time to be out of action in my line of business. I’ll give you one free consultation. You can cash it anytime. My services are very expensive.’

  ‘Do you have a résumé?’

  ‘I’m known by word of mouth.’ I gave her the names of two companies that she did business with, and told her to ask about the ronin that some people call the Tracker. She didn’t need to. She already knew about me by word of mouth.

  When Freedom and I were about to leave the hotel, I told him that I’d given Romanova a free voucher and she gave us a ride we’re actually paying for. ‘There’s no mythical Other-capital-O, Freedom. The correct term is bribery.’

  He grinned, standing up. ‘Exactly, you always find the human factor. That’s your Method. That’s what Mythic Other does. Cheer up! You won’t have to sleep on a comfortable bed anymore, and I promise you we won’t sleep in the same tank. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  I was thinking how inside he was nothing like what he seemed on the outside.

  Aware that we might not have an opportunity to be alone for a long time, I stepped right up to him and put my hands on his cheeks, holding his face tightly so that he couldn’t avoid eye contact. My mother used to do that when she was cross with me and wanted answers. His head jerked involuntarily, but he suppressed the impulse to remove my hands. ‘Why exactly are you coming to Earth with me?’

  He swallowed, and his cheeks felt suddenly hot under my touch, but he kept steady eye contact. ‘You need my help.’

  ‘Why do I need your help?’

  Now he pushed my hands off, and moved a few paces away. ‘I’m looking out for you. That’s all.’ He folded his arms and looked me in the eye.

  ‘You were never out of politics.’

  He kept his face blank and his eyes on me, steady and hard.

  ‘I always feel safe with you, Freedom. I feel even safer when I don’t know what you’re up to.’

  He frowned. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘No. There’s something you’re so desperate to prevent me from finding out that you blew up your own home because of it. It makes me feel safe knowing that you’re going to such extreme lengths to protect me from knowing something.’

  His swore under his breath. Then he took a deep breath and threw his arms up in resignation. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘We board the ship.’

  Freedom found me in the crew canteen ten days after we boarded the Aurora. We hadn’t seen each other since boarding. There was a small crowd, noisy as usual. I ate alone at a corner with my back to the wall. The seat was strategically situated for the fullest view of the hall, but I was absorbed reading a table-top monitor, and didn’t notice him until he reached the table. I blanked the monitor. He sat down opposite me on the only other seat at that table. I wiped my mouth and told him that I thought he was in the freezer already.

  ‘No, no, I’m having too much fun.’ He looked tired. There were no passenger cabins. He had to sleep on a chair in the lounge or sleep with someone. ‘Those women are too rough for my liking. I think they’re only after babies from me.’

  ‘Some of the men will give you a bed.’

  ‘Those ones are too effeminate for me. How come you’re not in a tank already?’

  I shrugged, and picked thin noodles out of brown soup. Unidentifiable pieces floated in the broth. Freedom surveyed the place. Layers of lurid graffiti and frescos of in-house symbolism covered all the walls. There were no adverts, nothing commercial, and no surveillance. It was a self-contained world. Its only contact with corporate society was the payload. People across the canteen were looking at Freedom menacingly. ‘You are not supposed to sit here,’ I advised. ‘This is the captain’s table.’

  He rapidly jumped up to his feet and gestured apologies to the onlookers. They turned away. ‘You could’ve warned me!’ He stood next to my seat, leaning against the wall with arms folded and his eyes on crew milling about. ‘How come you’re privileged? Has she cashed in her voucher?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We need to talk, Al.’

  I drank up the soup.

  When I stood up, picking up my rucksack, he said quietly, ‘I wasn’t honest with you. I knew you were Jexu Jiu before I returned home.’

  ‘I know.’

  He didn’t move and I couldn’t get past without pushing him. ‘I’m supposed to recruit you for OK,’ he said.

  ‘I know. You’ve told me that the universe is made up of quirky coincidences. But most coincidences are manmade. It was a manmade “coincidence” that I ended up in your home, and you’re the man who had made it. Let’s go somewhere private. We need to talk.’

  It was a long descent to the bowels of the ship, where passengers were not allowed. We walked side by side along a broad catwalk with shipping containers above and below us. He raised his voice over the engines’ drone, ‘You can go anywhere. You sit at the captain’s table reading her bridge updates. Are you auditing the Aurora?’

  ‘No.’

  I threw my rucksack down a crack between two containers and climbed after it. At the end of the climb was the top of another container, where I had placed a borrowed mattress. The spot offered a good view of the hold’s interior. ‘My living quarters,’ I explained when Freedom descended.

  We sat down on the mattress surrounded by the drone of engines and clanks of metal on metal. Distant singing and yelling echoed in the hold. I offered him water, apologising that I didn’t have any chamomile tea. He smiled and drank a little. It felt good to be with him again.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Al. It’s good being with you,’ he said. ‘Really good. That’s why we must have this talk.’ His gaze drifted away, distracted. ‘Is that your mat over there?’

  ‘I leave the spare out there for the children.’

  He stared at me quizzically.

  ‘They like to play on it.’

  When Romanova found out, she came down herself to investigate. She watched the children play, then took me to the bridge and asked me to convert the simulation program they use for training their children so that it could run through the XT-Pro interface. She placed an order for several mats to await the Aurora’s arrival in Sol. After that I was allowed to use her table.

  Freedom said like coming clean. ‘Al, my loyalty has always been to OK.’

  ‘I know that. You’re a Cordova. I also know that ET became interested in Jexu Jiu only after discovering about your interest. When you realised they were interested, you sent your ex-wife the communication from Milkwood. The cloak-and-dagger scenario was like an OK spy movie because it was you who had set it up.’

  ‘Did it work?’ he inquired shamelessly.

  ‘I guess it has got them wondering, since they’ve hired Harvey Schmidt to check out your story.’

  ‘Never suspecting that Harvey Schmidt is none other than Jexu Jiu himself,’ he chuckled.


  ‘Probably not, but they too must have noticed the name Jexu Jiu cropping up in top-level inquiries, and inferred that I’m a CSG chief.’

  ‘Are you?’

  Ignoring that, I pointed out that he could know about those inquires only by being top-level himself. ‘Your career change was from Production to Intelligence. If there was a career change at all,’ I said. His face disclosed nothing. I went on, ‘Finding out things is what I do. I give what I find to my client and they draw their own conclusions. The CSG are on to you. They call you the Ringmaster.’

  ‘Ouch. I appreciate you telling me. Is my career in Intelligence as good as over?’

  ‘You can be very useful to the agency.’

  ‘Are you making me an offer?’ He didn’t wait for my denial. ‘Yeah, yeah, keep on denying you’re CSG. What the heck, I’ll come clean with you. I was going after the elusive Chief Jexu Jiu. I created the rumours of corruption in OK to pull you in.’ He left it unsaid that, obviously, he had to have an insider’s help in order to influence decisions about whom to assign to the OK corruption case—which implied corruption in the CSG. He went on, ‘My project team put together a neat package, but we couldn’t factor everything into the working model. We didn’t expect you to come to my home in person. Chiefs don’t do field missions like that.’

  ‘Maybe you didn’t factor in the fact that I’m not a CSG chief.’

  ‘And yet here you are on my case.’

  ‘Aren’t you yourself a chief on a field mission right now?’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t the original plan. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know it was you until finding out in RK-17 that you couldn’t be Dee Valiant. We couldn’t get an image of Jexu Jiu anywhere, even the academy records had mysteriously vanished, and I didn’t recognise you by sight. A glimpse of a twelve-year-old more than a decade ago isn’t much to go on.’

  ‘I was thirteen,’ I murmured. It dawned on me that he knew who I was the very first moment he saw me arriving at his home. He made the joke about me not being the milkman to hide his surprise. ‘Don’t you execs share information about the CSG?’

  ‘Only when it suits us.’

  ‘The June andronet recognised me by sight. Cyboratics must have an image of Jexu Jiu.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s Cyboratics. Not team players. Stay away from them.’

  ‘How can I? Telling me that they assassinated Suzie was a calculated move on your part to get me going after them. It succeeded.’

  ‘No, it was meant to get you blabbering about yourself. I was fishing for a weakness. Your reaction was… strange. It wasn’t that particular piece of information that got you going. Don’t have any illusions about our friendship, Al. I like you a lot, I really do. I love you dearly. But if you go through with this quest of yours, I’ll betray you in a spectacular way... Why are you smirking? You don’t believe me… or perhaps you do. That’s why you are so cheerful. You come to life on the dark side.’

  He was probably right. I said nothing.

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing about you. What you really love is the sense of power you get when exposing the hidden workings of things. Power and control. You’re a bloody executive. It’s in your genes. Oh yes, Ivana told me the legend of Yoko’s son.’ He had recognised one of Ricardo’s men in the gym, and the man took him to see Ivana. It dawned on me that he knew all along that Suzie was my mother.

  ‘You look so much like her, like a male twin,’ he continued. ‘But if you’re her son, you are at least a year younger than you say you are and I don’t know who your father is. It’s not Wye Stan. They’ve never slept together. That was part of the deal. She didn’t mention you when we met in Terminal 37.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Not much. She didn’t want to speak with me. I knew she called herself Yoko because someone greeted her. The only way she could get rid of me was to accept my gift. I hope she threw it in the nearest bin… What’s the matter?’

  Choked, I told him about my childhood avatar and the social workers tracking me down through it.

  Freedom said nothing for a long while.

  I buried my head in my knees until the need to cry was gone. When I looked up, he was standing near the edge looking at children playing on the mat. They waved to him. He waved back. Then he turned and saw me looking at him. He sat down again. ‘So what’s your plan?’

  ‘Meet Wye Stan Pan. Ask him whether he had my mother killed and whether he found her by tracking down Harvey.’

  ‘Just like that? He won’t meet with you.’

  ‘Will he meet with you?’

  ‘I’m the last person in the universe he wants anywhere near Cy City Earth.’

  ‘Because you helped my mother to escape?’

  ‘Not only that. And I’m not sure how much I helped her. I used the terrorists’ attack as a diversion for my men to get her out, but she cut loose from me and disappeared,’ he said with sadness.

  Hearing him speak of ‘his men’ and staging an operation in another corporation’s territory, I wondered whether my mother knew that he was in OK Military. I imagined her carrying the Harvey rabbit all the way home from Phoenix-3 just to throw it on the pile of junk. And then I remembered something else she told me that night. ‘May I call you Fred?’ I asked him.

  He stared at me startled. It was his childhood nickname, the name my mother used to call him. He didn’t ask how I knew. He said almost inaudibly, ‘Please do. I’d like that.’

  ‘What happened on my date of birth, Fred?’

  ‘It’s not the date on the Jexu Jiu file, I take it.’

  ‘No. It’s the date I’ve asked you about for my fee.’

  He swore under his breath. ‘I’ve wondered how you knew that date.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘Get us to Wye Stan first. It’s best if he tells you. Tells both of us, the bastard.’ He seemed deeply shook up, and rose to his feet to hide it. ‘Al, whatever happens, whatever he says and whatever I end up doing, you should know one thing. You’ve touched the percentage of human soul still in me.’

  He walked to the ladder, and looked back sternly. ‘It’s a very small percentage, mind you. And Wye Stan Pan is a 100% corporate. He calls himself President but he hasn’t been elected for centuries. Do you know that he clones himself? The one who married Suzie is Wye Stan 7. He’s the one living on Earth.’

  Since my mother had hooked me to Cy-High, I knew the history that Cyboratics teach their children. Cloning isn’t mentioned. The presidential role is passed from father to son, who take the same name and use the same official portrait. But Freedom, Fred, insisted that Wye Stan has cloned himself in succession. To become the current president, the seventh clone killed his ‘brother,’ Wye Stan 6, and usurped his ‘father’ Wye Stan 5. Wye Stan 5 who lived in Tao Ceti created an eighth clone and raised him as another son. I knew that the youngest Wye Stan was about my age. He arrived in Alpha Centauri when I was testing the January prototype. Soon afterwards, Fairweather escaped, terrified and trying to save her brother from Wye Stan Pan. But which one? I wondered now.

  Freedom was saying, ‘He’s a product of technology just like his androids. He hates to hear that, that’s why he’s so secretive about it. Now I’m going to the freezer. See you in Sol Gate.’

  He disrupted his cryonic state eight times, but didn’t get in touch with me. He spent a few hours in a communication booth, checking his mail, and in the gym, and then returned to the tank. I guessed that as far as he was concerned, he had delegated to me the task of planning how to reach Wye Stan, as if he was the chief and I was the project manager. It wasn’t a relationship that I was inclined to tolerate.

  A cabin became free when an old man died six months into the journey. Romanova suggested that I moved there. I declined. There was a waiting list for crew accommodation. She snapped, her voice harsh on the internal communicator: ‘It’s not an offer, it’s an order! It’s either the cabin where we can keep an eye on yo
u or the freezer!’ The ship was due to go into warp drive for the second time. I was so sick during the first jump that she feared she might have my death on the Aurora’s record.

  The second time was just as bad. I wished I had done the sensible thing and took the cryonics. But now I lived among the crew, and people of all ages stopped by my cabin to jeer and sneer. They teased me in good humour and helped with medical care. Staying ‘warm’ became a matter of principle for me. There were seven more jumps to come.

  Before the fourth one, Romanova summoned me to her table in the canteen. Face to face, she reminded me that I was only a passenger. I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone, and I couldn’t work online when the ship is in warp. ‘It’s not going to get any better, Jexu Jiu. Some people get it bad like that, it’s a medical fact.’ I replied that I was dealing with the medical fact in my own way and she couldn’t do anything about it short of knocking me unconscious and throwing me into a tank. There were no long-term health risks as long as I took care. She asked what I’d do if they forced me into the freezer. I told her that I’d think up bogus Code violations that will take her decades to disprove. She gave in.

  After the fifth jump nobody teased me about warp sickness anymore.

  Between jumps I worked. I was winding down Schmidt Investigations, but one day something turned up which at first sight seemed like a case I could pass to Rinzler. It was a request to find out who had trashed a personal site. The anonymous caller insisted on a live interview. I activated the Harvey Schmidt shadow, and the caller reciprocated with a little brown frog.

  I recognised it with the shock of seeing a ghost. My Harvey Schmidt voice informed the caller, ‘We’re not taking any more cases at the moment.’

  ‘But it’s a simple job, anyone can do it,’ the frog croaked in a cartoon-like voice.

  ‘Then why are you coming to me?’

  ‘You are in Tao Ceti where it happened.’

 

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