by Linda Nagata
Enter the factor of willfulness: Sandor had been named by Van Ness as an accomplice. He’d escaped from the custody of the Sunda municipal police, thus avoiding arrest by the Commonwealth police. And upon his escape he’d immediately appeared in the company of Phousita, the mule Van Ness had used to carry the Maker.
Sandor’s protestations of innocence didn’t count for much against the roster of his actions. Besides, memories could be edited. Even if he couldn’t recall participating in a conspiracy, he obviously had. Willfulness elevated the case to a first-degree capital offense, in which all physical and electronic manifestations were forfeit.
Kirstin might have introduced some doubt by reporting Nikko’s confession at Summer House. But why confuse the issue? At that point, Nikko had known himself to be a condemned man, and he’d had nothing to lose by lying about his brother’s involvement. She’d thought it best to omit his testimony from her report.
With no legally acceptable proof of Sandor’s innocence, the verdict was unavoidable: execution in entirety, with sterilization of all remains.
Alone in the corridor, Kirstin’s thoughts turned to Fox, and she smiled. Thirty-one years ago he’d mocked the law, using bribery and coercion to win the research permit that allowed Nikko’s existence. Kirstin had been making him pay for that victory ever since. This was one more installment on the debt. But not the last. Oh no. The score wasn’t even yet.
The termination chamber was another cozy gray room, equipped with soft white furnishings. Six chairs had been arranged in an arc for the audience. Three of them were already occupied by uniformed police officers, chatting idly as Sandor was led into the room. Kirstin Adair was one of them. She glanced at him, then leaned over to whisper with the other two officers.
The guard who escorted Sandor nudged his elbow, indicating that he should sit in a seventh chair, one that faced the others. He obeyed numbly, pulling himself down into the chair. The pain in his ribs was excruciating. He watched as his arms and legs were strapped into place. Then the medic came and inserted an IV into his forearm.
He closed his eyes, telling himself that this was only a dream. It could not be real. Very soon now he would wake up. But the fiery pain around his lungs belied that. Why hadn’t the medic given him something for the pain? Love and Nature. Love and Nature. They’d give him something soon enough.
He tried to slow his ragged breathing, knowing he’d feel better if he could manage it. But he was too scared to concentrate. His heart fluttered unevenly. He felt nauseous. Wake up! he commanded himself. Wake up!
He heard the chamber door slide open. He looked up, to see Marevic Chun dart into the room. Immediately, his hopes fixed on her. Lovely, fragile Marevic Chun. The president of Summer House at Earth. She knew the cops. She knew the system. She could get him out of this. She had to!
She glided straight to Kirstin; touched the arm of Kirstin’s chair to stop her forward motion. “Chief Adair, you must delay this barbarous execution! Stop it at once, or I warn you, you’ll endanger your position. I have a magistrate considering this case. I’ve offered you copious notes derived from Nikko’s own files that prove Sandor had no involvement in this case. You must reconsider.”
Kirstin looked around irritably. “Marevic. Have you found a copy of Nikko’s ghost?”
Marevic froze. Her dark eyes became obsidian.
Kirstin said: “A magistrate has already ruled that the notes which you claim belong to Nikko cannot be admitted as evidence. They are as likely to be forgeries as anything else. It’s too easy to blame a dead man. Unless you can produce a ghost to testify to the validity of your evidence, it can’t be considered.”
“But a court is considering it. And you have a moral duty to delay this execution so long as that court is still perusing the issue.”
The Chief of Police gazed up, her expression annoyed. “The only issue in this case,” she said, “is whether or not the Board of Directors of Summer House—yourself included—had prior knowledge of this crime.”
Marevic’s lips met in a thin, hard line. “We had no involvement.” She sat down in one of the empty seats. Her angry gaze fixed on Sandor. “I’m sorry,” she said in a calm, cold voice. “I’ve done everything I could.”
It took a moment before he realized she was addressing him. When he did, his whole body began to shake. Marevic was giving up! She was giving up. His breath surged in and out of his lungs. He felt himself straining against the straps. “You can’t say that!” he screamed at her. “I didn’t commit any crime.”
“It’s all right,” Phousita said.
His head snapped up as if it had been yanked in a noose. His wild gaze searched the room, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“It’s all right,” she said again. “I know how to carry you now.”
He had no functioning atrium. She had no atrium. She could not be with him.
Phousita? he thought.
She didn’t respond. He tipped his head back and studied the ceiling. Odd, silent tears slipped out of his eyes. He thought of his walk through the airport terminal in Sunda, of the little girl with the begging bowl and of how much his life had changed. It seemed like magic.
Phousita believed in magic. Where was she now?
A wave of dizziness swept across him and he sagged back against the chair. “It’s all right,” Phousita whispered again. He smiled. He didn’t believe her, but it was good to hear her voice.
Someone tugged lightly on the IV line. His eyes fluttered open. He half expected to see Phousita. He blinked hard, struggling to focus his sight. But it was only the medic, adjusting the flow rate on the IV. “The pain is gone,” he told the medic. His words were slurred. She looked at him fearfully and backed away. He stared after her. Something was wrong with him, he realized. The dizziness was getting worse. It filled his ears with a roar and a rush. . . .
His head snapped up. He was awake again, alert. His gaze swept across the gallery. Kirstin was staring at him, a dark, suspicious frown on her face, as if he’d suddenly become something dangerous. Marevic looked scared, her small frame pressed into the seat as if she could hide herself there.
One of the uniformed officers sitting with Kirstin cleared his throat impatiently. Kirstin glanced at him, then nodded. “Proceed,” she said.
Sandor looked around. The medic had left the room. A stranger in surgical scrubs stood in her place. At Kirstin’s word, he plucked a syringe from a waiting tray. Calmly, methodically, he injected the contents into the tube feeding into Sandor’s arm.
Sandor’s eyes widened. He stiffened reflexively as the poison rushed down the tube. His thoughts fled home. “I’m sorry, Fox,” he whispered.
He tried to keep awake, tried to count. One, two, three, four, f—
Phousita stood swaying, just inside the lock of the little ship. Nikko stood behind her, hardly breathing, his anxiety a drug exuded into the air to keep her alert.
Phousita felt herself looking down upon towers, upon gardens. Her vision was as wide as the city. Somewhere, not far, her tiny servants steamed off Sandor like vapors off a volcanic vent. They returned to her in gusts:
She saw him walking a narrow corridor, his hands shackled to his sides, police dogs at his heels. Every breath made fierce by pain.
She saw him seated, bound, terrified.
Knew his hope; his despair.
Then she was inside him.
She became an insect, no larger than a grain of dust. On her back, like a minute pearl nestled between her wings, she carried an empty world. She set the world down and began to pray, and soon a snake wound down to her from out of the firmament, a thread of story, twisted, knotted, turning back upon itself, mile after mile of it coiling down toward her. She scuttled aside and watched the head of the snake fall into the basket of her world. The threadlike body followed, settling in neat coils. She guided it with her insect feet and watched her world fill with days, with years. More. With life. Down, down, down the thread of the snake came, until she began
to fear it would be too much, more than she could carry. Then the last link of the snake collapsed into her globe and it was full. She looked up anxiously, but the sky overhead was empty. So she rubbed her papery wings together and swallowed the world. Then she rose into the sky and flew home.
Phousita turned to Nikko. She felt as numb and cold and sterile as the air that nurtured this city. Whoever had started the rumor that Heaven could be found at the end of the Highway had been a fool. She looked into Arif’s fearful eyes, still waiting for a sense of joy, a feeling of triumph to envelop her. It didn’t come. Perhaps she was too tired to feel anything.
“Sandor’s with me now,” she said to the ghost that parasitized Arif. “We can go.”
Chapter
17
As Chief of Police it was Kirstin’s prerogative to fill all the executive positions on her staff, save one—the Director of Internal Security. Allende was a Congressional appointee; his loyalty was given to the Committee on Molecular Law and Police Matters, and not to the force itself. So it came as no surprise to Kirstin when the Congressional dog finally howled to his masters. Indeed, she’d anticipated it. The time was right to bring the matter of the Bohr Maker to the attention of a wider audience.
So she took her place willingly at the witness table in the Congressional hearing room, her expression attentively polite as the obscure senator chairing the investigation finally came round to his point.
“Chief Adair, this committee has been charged with investigating the report of a serious breach in police security. We’ve asked you to attend today to confirm or deny whether such an incident has taken place.”
Kirstin nodded slowly, still absorbing an abstract of the senator’s biography from her atrium. Congressional representatives could serve only a single, one-year term in the Commonwealth offices on Castle. They were as ephemeral as celebrities, and Kirstin rarely came to know them as individuals. According to his bio, this one was a conservative corporate member out of Julevy-On, a professed staunch supporter of molecular law enforcement who’d voted to her direction three of the last four times she’d bothered to make her opinion known in the capitol rooms. She anticipated an easy afternoon.
“Yes, Senator,” she said. “An incident has occurred.”
He nodded, as if to congratulate himself for having gone straight to the source by summoning her here. “Would you please explain the exact nature of the incident?”
“Yes, sir.” She’d be happy to do that. The raw facts would be enough to frighten these senators and buy her a free hand in the investigation. “You may be familiar with a device popularly known as the Bohr Maker. It’s an enhancing Maker that was retrieved from the body of the convicted criminal, Leander Bohr. It’s an adaptive artificial intelligence, imbued with Bohr’s talents in molecular design. It will modify the body of its host, allowing that individual to become a literal molecular factory, capable of producing Makers for nearly any function, including camouflage, espionage, and assault. Although it’s an antique, the police have never been able to devise a Maker of similar talents, because to do so would require the revocation of current statutes limiting the independence of artificial intelligences.”
The committee chair frowned, his expression one of open concern. “So in effect you’re saying the Bohr Maker is an illegal artificial intelligence.”
“That’s right. Its capacity for independent action exceeds statute limits.”
“So it’s smarter than police Makers.”
“Intelligence is a thorny issue, Senator, intelligent behavior being so dependent on natural instinct, which this Maker lacks. Let us say instead that it would be more adaptive than police Makers.”
“And better armed.”
“It’s possible,” she admitted, with deliberate reluctance. She didn’t want the populace to think she lacked confidence. They would be voting for her again in a year.
“Could you explain that answer?” the senator asked.
“Of course. The Bohr Maker has no core personality and therefore it has no inherent ambitions or instincts. Its developmental direction is determined entirely by the personality of its host. If it attaches itself to a warrior, it will develop a warlike demeanor.”
“And has that happened, Chief Adair?”
“Our best evidence indicates not. On the contrary, the Maker seems to have taken up residence in the mind of an illiterate prostitute.”
There was a titter from the gallery—a small corporeal audience, mostly students come to observe government in action. Of course the electronic audience would be immensely larger.
Kirstin waited for the sounds of amusement to subside before she continued. “The lifestyle of this prostitute has led her to instinctively hide from the police. She’s used the Maker’s talents to aid her in this process, making her apprehension difficult.”
“Isn’t it true that your one attempt to arrest her resulted in disaster?”
Kirstin smiled indulgently. “Police operations are always unpredictable, sir. Our investigation led us to the location of the suspect. Because it was in territory outside the Commonwealth, it was legally necessary for us to inform the local government of our activities ahead of time. Unfortunately, a sense of nationalism afflicted the local police force. They resented our intrusion, and sought to settle the problem themselves, in their own way. Their interference prevented us from making the arrest.”
“But isn’t it true that this ‘illiterate prostitute’ incapacitated over twenty police dogs?”
There was a gasp from the gallery, and for the first time Kirstin felt a flash of annoyance. That bastard Allende hadn’t left anything out when he’d squealed to his Senate masters.
“Isn’t this true?” the Senator pressed.
“Yes, sir. It is true. The dogs were drugged into a temporary state of somnolence.”
“They were made to sleep?” Again, a titter from the audience.
“Yes.”
“And where is this illiterate prostitute now?”
“We don’t know, Senator. She could be anywhere.”
In hindsight, the flaw in the arrest procedure was obvious. They’d pushed Phousita too hard. They’d forced her to strike back. Like a game of coevolution, when predator shapes prey and prey shapes predator, they’d forced her to adopt an aggressive defense. And now that she’d become acquainted with her capacities, would she maintain her newly acquired aggressive nature? Or would she revert to her inoffensive former self?
To answer that question, Kirstin had detained Zeke Choy once again, questioning him extensively on the subject of Phousita’s personality. His final comment still haunted her: “I can tell you what she was like. But that isn’t going to mean much anymore. Because when I knew her she wasn’t a messianic healer. When I knew her, she hadn’t yet seen her family burned alive. When I knew her, she feared police dogs. I don’t know her now.”
Phousita had literally disappeared. The dogs could recover no trace of her. The Gates reported no sign of her. Even the rumor mills in the Spill were helpless, running on false, frantic tales that failed to explain the fate of their vanished sorceress.
The trail was worse than cold. It was nonexistent.
Kirstin thought of her days with Leander Bohr. Leander had always used the Maker righteously, in the service of the Goddess. He’d never used it to violate the body of the Mother, or sought to change her natural order. There’d been no harm in him. But how many people could she say that about?
She’d dreamed of Nikko this morning. In the dream she’d entered his apartment at Summer House. Not alone this time, but with a contingent of officers as backup. They’d all worn isolation suits. They’d bombed the room with assault Makers, the best in the police arsenal, programmed to destroy any Makers not bearing the latest police identity code. Nikko had been hanging by his long blue toes upside down in a tree. He’d laughed at her. Then he’d waved his hand in the air. A moment later her isolation suit began to dissolve. He waved his hand again. She felt her bod
y changing. When she raised her fist against him in a gesture of defiance, she was aghast to find it armored in enameled blue.
She did not believe Nikko was dead. Somehow, somewhere, his consciousness must still exist.
Somehow, somewhere, he must be pursuing Phousita just as she was.
She no longer believed Phousita was still in the Spill. Messiahs were notoriously difficult creatures to hide, yet Phousita could not be tracked even through rumors.
So Phousita had left the Spill, and that meant she could be anywhere, in contact with anyone.
Fear was an emotion Kirstin had not experienced in many years. It caught her by surprise when it came. When she realized what this pounding heart, this fluttering gut meant, she reacted in irritation. She was too old for fear! If she couldn’t find Phousita directly, then she’d have to do it in a roundabout way—by finding Nikko first, whatever was left of him.
To Summer House, then.
She prepared her ghost, and departed.
Over three minutes elapsed in objective time, but to her it seemed only a moment later when she arrived in the atrium of the police captain on Summer House—an undistinguished administrator who had command of a handful of on-site officers. She continued to consult his biography. The captain had been born in the EC sixty-seven years ago and so he had no natal corporate affiliation. He’d been assigned to Summer House for the past year, and was presently due to move on.
“Have you enjoyed your stay here at Summer House?” she asked him.
He seemed taken aback by the question. Several seconds passed before he came up with an answer. “It’s been a nice assignment,” he managed at last.