Fairweather

by Jones, Raya

  ‘Will I have to meet her in Phoenix-3?’

  ‘Over my dead body!’ he said with pathos. ‘She might come around to your way of thinking. You’ll bring down the whole social order.’

  Fred flew the yacht by himself. That’s how much he didn’t trust anyone. He was licensed to fly, but it was a two-pilot vessel. He assured me that he could manage. I went to the cabin. With the furniture stowed it was more spacious than an inn room. I rolled out the mat and caught up with tasks, all the while thinking about Fred.

  There was no evidence that he was anything but a retired professor pretending to be a master-spy. He was well connected in high places. A cousin, a schoolmate, or an ex-lover could leak hearsay information about the skiz to him. Access to a top-secret document was something else. A copy of Calvin Cray’s memo was in my Schmidt inbox as he had promised. It was untraceable to him, though I tracked it to OK. Who gets an expense account that covers a luxury yacht like this? A Cordova could afford to hire it privately, I thought. Checking my bank balance, I realised that I could afford to buy it.

  I logged out and went to sit with him. I couldn’t make sense of the route he had plotted. ‘I’m not kidnapping you,’ he assured me. ‘I’m taking you to Luna in a roundabout way so nobody can tell where we are at any given moment. Whoever spiked you might try again. Thanks to your caper in Ronda-6 the whole galaxy knows what Jexu Jiu looks like.’

  ‘Not anymore.’ I told him about the locusts.

  ‘It was all over the media. You can’t write yourself out of history written by journalists.’

  ‘That’s the easiest history to manipulate.’

  ‘Are you telling me that I’m travelling with a ghost?’

  ‘No. You travel alone.’

  ‘Too many people have seen us together. You can’t wipe out their memories.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I’m not hiding.’

  ‘Then why these locusts? What’s more intriguing, why are you telling me this? Did they devour my digital memories of you?’

  I assured him that his own records were safe from my creatures. I had put an immunity tag on him. But there will be discrepancies between some things he might share with his team and what they’d see elsewhere. ‘I’m telling you so that you hear it from me first.’

  ‘What are you after?’ he demanded, suspicious.

  ‘I want to borrow your identity permanently.’

  He almost jumped out of his seat. ‘What? You’re kidding!’

  I wasn’t.

  My specialist services are expensive because charging a lot is part of the game. Otherwise, potential clients won’t take you seriously. I don’t need the money. I spend mostly on upgrades and live on next to nothing. The rest becomes forgotten data in bank sites. It occurred to me that this wealth could help the displaced people to settle where they may live according to their ways. I had sent a message to Ricardo, and he replied. When I told him how much I could make available for a trust fund, he gasped, saying that with this much they could build a town of their own. I told him that the trust must be managed by the people and never be traced to me. Ricardo said that elders could manage the trust and keep the benefactor’s identity anonymous, but they’d feel that they themselves should know who it is. I promised him to supply an identity to give them.

  Fred listened. When I finished, he said, incredulous, ‘And you want it to look as if it’s coming from me?’

  ‘It’s better this way. They know you’re real and have met the tribe. I’ll transfer the full amount to an account in your name and erase all traces of the transaction.’

  ‘They’ll wonder why I want to help people who refuse to breed citizens for the corporations.’ He was getting worked up, his voice rising. ‘I don’t know what impression you have of me but you’re dead wrong! I don’t have an altruistic bone in my body. I’m against philanthropy on principle. It’s immoral to give money to people who don’t have any of their own! Don’t you realise it’s not my identity, it’s my whole persona you’ll be compromising?’ he ranted. I said nothing. He demanded, ‘Why do I want to help them? What’s “my” motivation in your cover story? It better be a good one!’

  ‘You’re doing it to annoy your sister.’

  ‘Ah. Right. Okay. That works for me.’

  I went back online and sorted it out.

  When I logged out, I sat down on the floor in the cabin. After a while he looked in. ‘Are you just going to sit like that?’

  ‘How do you want me to sit?’

  ‘All we ever do is to sit in confined places. You do your thing, I watch, and if I get lucky once in a while we talk,’ he complained.

  ‘You can call it something else. Like you change from being a professor to a master spy.’

  He burst out laughing. He continued to laugh in fits whilst fetching us water from the gully. Coming back, he handed me a bottle and sat down beside me. ‘I really was a professor. Why not a spy too?’

  ‘I can’t find any evidence that you are.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of a secret service, ha-ha!’

  He drank.

  When he put his bottle down, I threw my arms around him. He sighed like giving in, and embraced me back. He mumbled, stroking my hair ever so lightly, ‘Your timing sucks. I have to be cooped up with you for weeks. This intimacy is very awkward for me, you have no idea.’

  ‘We’re like family,’ I told him. ‘I was shook up and you were there for me.’

  He stared at me, alarmed, ‘No, no way! I’m not doing the father-and-son script with you. From now on you and I are keeping our association as strictly business like the relationship I had with my own father.’

  ‘What’s our business, dad?’

  ‘Don’t push it, son! You call me that word again and you’ll see a side of me you never wish to see! Our business is your destiny and my fate.’

  A moment later he told me that it wasn’t the spiking that had spooked me. In my line of work I confront spiking situations in the virtual. The fact it happened in the physical meant that I had to take some different factors into account. Fred sensed that something else happened afterwards in the Gold Leaf private room.

  When I said nothing, he disclosed that he was the one who had suggested to Calvin Cray to hire me. He felt guilty about that, because it had put me in danger.

  ‘If you didn’t, someone else would have suggested me,’ I pointed out.

  He agreed that I was an obvious choice. But I’m too elusive and expensive. They wanted to give the corporate trackers more time. Nevertheless there was no strong resistance to hiring me. They were happy when he volunteered to provide my contact details. ‘You have no idea how cagey your clients are about being your clients.’

  ‘That’s bad news. I advertise by word of mouth.’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, we all praise you, O Nameless One. We say we know about you. It’s always someone from another corporation who’s spoken highly of you. To admit that we need your services is like telling our rivals that we can’t keep our house in order. You should have seen the glee on their faces when I admitted to knowing your address.’

  There was no evidence that such a conference ever took place. Either he made it up or his online activities were encrypted extremely well, using techniques I didn’t know about. I said, ‘Your geeks are excellent. I can’t crack the invisible wall they’ve built around you.’

  ‘Until now you didn’t know there was a wall.’

  ‘They are good.’

  ‘But you are better.’

  ‘Blade and Swift are as good as I am. When they work together it’s awesome.’

  ‘So you’ve figured out who works for me. They are my ace hackers. But they can’t conceal themselves from you.’ He sounded strangely pleased about that.

  I speculated, ‘The skiz is on the open market. Perhaps someone spiked me because they begrudge me being with you.’

  ‘Someone is jealous of you? That’s hilarious,’ he started to laugh.

  ‘Could be Wye St
an Pan.’

  ‘Jealous? Ha-ha!’

  ‘If he blames you for what happened to his wife he might want to hurt you by killing me.’

  Fred stopped laughing. ‘That doesn’t sound like him.’

  ‘He’s not vindictive?’

  ‘He is vindictive in a far crueller way. He knows that you are my punishment. I see my Suzie every time I look at you.’ He picked up his bottle, and realised it was empty. He put it down. ‘This whole business about Suzie is very personal between me and him. I don’t involve my people and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t involve his. You can cross Cyboratics Intelligence off the list of suspects. They have no tactical reason to kill you. They believe that my romantic infatuation with you is a weakness they can exploit against me. Don’t look at me like that. The gossip is in our mutual interest.’

  ‘Until someone has a tactical reason to take out your lover. Thanks a bunch.’

  He said airily, ‘You can survive anything they’d throw at you. I’ve seen you in action. But what happened to you afterwards in Sol Gate, in the room… It wasn’t the first time, was it?’

  I shook my head, and finally decided to confide in him. It happened on the Moonrat too.

  He studied my face thoughtfully. ‘I’ve suspected you didn’t tell me everything about that journey. How did you and Dee Valiant survive it?’

  When things started to get ugly, I tricked her into the freezer for the rest of the journey, and used her badge to continue the audit with the other agent until he was murdered.

  ‘How come they didn’t touch you?’ asked Fred.

  ‘They did.’

  Until now I hadn’t told anyone that I too was raped. When they dragged me to the airlock, I asked them if they could cover up what we had uncovered. Dee Valiant didn’t know how to do that, I told them. So they let me live. ‘I’m not proud of what I did, Fred.’

  ‘Falsifying the audit?’

  ‘No, the audit was on live feed to the CSG. The crew didn’t know that, but the agency got the picture. That’s why the Moonrat was struck off as soon as Dee and I were safe. I’ve done the crew a terrible wrong, Fred.’

  ‘You did them wrong?’

  What they had done to me was gang war and human cruelty. What I did was something else. Those jinx caterpillars become butterflies that cause systemic storms with unpredictable consequences. Crew died in a series of accidents, and then the rest of them lost everything when the ship they’d lived on for generations was disbanded.

  ‘One thing led to another, a chain reaction of coincidences with consequences ending up with the death of a ship? Perhaps it was meant to be,’ he mused.

  ‘No, it was my doing. They let me go to the freezer when the next jump was due. I could’ve set the dial to stay out of the way for the rest of the journey. And then it hit me. This blackness…’ I shuddered at the memory and forced myself to carry on speaking. ‘I returned after every jump. I knew that I couldn’t stop them from raping me again, but I also knew they couldn’t touch me. What scares the hell out of me is that when I installed the jinx, I knew exactly how it would end. And it did. I can’t get over it.’

  ‘Good. Don’t get over it,’ said he.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me to come to terms with the trauma?’

  ‘I’m not your therapist and it’s not trauma you can’t come to terms with. You didn’t cause the fate of the Moonrat. You were its fate. You should ask yourself whose interest was served.’

  ‘Cyboratics, I guess. The Moonrat were stealing android consignments. That’s what the audit uncovered.’

  ‘Cyboratics,’ Fred echoed, ‘why doesn’t it surprise me. That blackness you felt, you’ll feel it big time when you meet Wye Stan face to face.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘If I tell you, you’ll accuse me of mythology.’

  The anger in my voice surprised me. ‘I’m not a pawn of fate. I had a choice. I jinxed the Moonrat out of my own free will. If it was their fate to lose their ship, I could have saved them. I had the choice not to jinx it. But I did. I’m really not okay with that.’

  ‘Good. Don’t ever, ever be okay with it,’ he said softly. ‘So did what happen in Sol Gate?’

  ‘That was different. You were there for me.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes of him. I couldn’t figure him out. He seemed to me like the cliffs of Ground Zero, appearing and disappearing in smog and mist. Every time you see them, they are exactly the same but somehow different, seen in a different light.

  My best memory is seeing them suddenly set aglow by the rising sun.

  Suddenly his face was aglow with a warm and genuine smile. I must have smiled back. Then I asked him what happened on my date of birth.

  ‘Here we go again,’ he moaned. ‘You were born.’

  ‘Was I?’

  He stared at me, startled.

  ‘The facts don’t add up.’

  ‘How about the fact you’re right here being a pain in the arse? If you feel the urge to ask me about it again, please do it when we are somewhere where I can walk away from you.’

  ‘We might not live long enough, Fred. There’s an alarm going on in the cockpit.’

  He sprang up to his feet and rushed there.

  The alarm was Fred’s signal for switching the yacht’s signatures. Fake signatures require specialist knowledge and take time to install. The yacht’s system had to be configured in advance. When I pointed it out, he grinned. ‘Well, master sleuth, could it be because I’m a master spy and this is a company’s vehicle?’

  I went to fix us some food. He had the yacht stocked with enough provisions for a month, mostly pot noodles. There was nothing to prepare. The pots self-heat when the seal is broken. I pulled the dining unit out of the wall, placed two unopened pots on it, and sat down waiting for him.

  ‘Hold on!’ he said, seeing me reach for a pot as soon as he came in. ‘We need to get something straight first.’ He sat down and spoke business-like father to son. ‘If you die never knowing the truth about your date of birth, nobody will be any worse off for it. If you die not finding out who’s behind the skiz, more people will be killed. If you don’t get a result by the time we get to Luna, we’ll orbit the moon and the sun in a figure of eight until you do.’

  ‘You are kidnapping me.’

  ‘Call it protecting my investment. Do you actually know how much you’re charging Mu Tashi? Calvin Cray can’t afford it. I dipped into my departmental petty cash to help him.’

  I folded my arms. ‘You need to get something straight. I don’t take orders from you. I decide how to prioritise my jobs.’

  ‘And what priority are you giving this?’

  ‘Top.’

  ‘At least we are on the same page.’

  ‘We are not even in the same book.’

  ‘Forget playing by your book, they don’t.’ He meant the skiz dealers. They used an exceptionally nasty aggressive marketing. Their unsolicited demo involved spiking a field operative, contacting the victim’s firm, and offering to supply the virus. If the firm declined, they demonstrated upon another operative. By the time Calvin Cray circulated the memo, most firms had put their orders in.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I mobilised the Council of Nine.’

  He paused for my reaction.

  I gave him none. I watched the animation on the pot: cartoon fish swam endlessly around the pot of noodles. Small fish were swallowed by big fish, big fish were swallowed by bigger fish, and the biggest fish faded out when the smallest fish reappeared.

  Fred couldn’t bear it anymore. ‘Go on. Eat.’

  I peeled off the seal, and the pot started to hiss, warming up. It smelled good. The cartoon fish stood on their tails, jumped up in a happy dance and vanished one by one.

  He complained, ‘I drop a bombshell like giving you a map to the Holy Grail, and all you’re interested in is pot noodles animation? Honestly, I don’t know why I bother!’

  ‘What do you want me to say? Everyone knows
about the Council of Nine. It’s the most famous secret committee of all time.’

  ‘I give up!’ He unsealed his pot.

  I asked him whether there was a pattern in how the dealers chose their victims.

  ‘They choose easy targets. You should ask yourself how they know where to find them, who has access to the database of an intelligence firm.’

  ‘All the other intelligence firms.’

  He agreed. ‘Industrial espionage is such a sloppy business.’

  ‘But you love it?’

  ‘Me? Is that what you think my firm is about, stealing trade secrets?’

  ‘I don’t want to think about the other option.’

  ‘I’m glad you are thinking it,’ he said grimly.

  We ate in silence, occasionally glancing at each other. I tried to figure out why he told me so much, and I guess he tried to figure out what I was figuring out. I wondered whether getting me tied up with the skiz inquiry was another ploy to divert me from meeting Wye Stan. When we nearly finished, he spoke plainly. ‘My firm looks after OK’s interests against the other corporations. We don’t do industrial espionage. This contest, the one your agency has nicknamed sumo, is not about marketplace competition.’

  I said nothing. I was speechless.

  ‘It’s about power. Power for power’s sake.’

  He was telling me without saying it aloud that the corporations are run by their militaries. The CSG can’t intervene, since this power struggle is not about consumer rights. It’s the ancient game of empires at war. ‘Are you getting what I’m saying, Al? I don’t mean recording it.’

  Silent, I got up and cleared the table, which took seconds. I felt ill at ease. It was as if he had spiked me with deadly information and I didn’t see it coming.

  Out of habit, I picked up my mat. There wasn’t enough room to roll it. Fred started to stow away the dining unit so as to make room, saying, ‘Give me a moment, I need to deactivate the privacy blanket before you can go online.’

  I just stared at him.