Gently moving Charlton to one side Dan took a swing and punched McAlister in the jaw. His hand exploded in pain but McAlister went down and stayed down, his tinny earpiece just audible as it fell out of place and flopped wormlike onto his collar.
“McAlister! Are you all right?”
Kneeling, Dan leaned down to the lapel and said, “Mr. McAlister is taking a short break. He'll be with you just as soon as he can.”
Charlton nudged him with her foot. “Thanks,” she mouthed and patted Dan's shaggy head.
“Woof woof,” he said and looked at his bloodied hand. “This Lassie thing is much tougher than I thought. Shit on a stick, I think I need the vet.”
“Come on,” she helped him up. “Let's get it sorted out.”
“I'll take that, if you don't mind.” A large military policeman roughly the size and heft of a tank was in the doorway, hands on his hips. He glanced down at McAlister and then stepped over him and clapped a pair of handcuffs over Dan's wrists.
“Mr. Connor, this way please.”
Ian Detteridge stood in the hallway of his own home and watched his wife backing away from him, her hands over her mouth. She had them clamped there quite tightly, but they didn't block the whimpering sounds.
He looked down at himself and saw a faint shimmer of light where his legs should be.
Something wasn't right. He didn't understand it. His mind was like the wind. It came and went in fits and starts. His body had become so pale and flimsy that light and air passed through it freely. All he could cling to was the firm sense of who he was, not what, but even that was shaky now, because he could see so much more than before and what he saw was changing him.
“Dervla,” he said, making an effort to be still. “It's okay. It's only me.”
He smiled and held out his arms. He longed for her to hold him and tell him it was okay. He was sure it wasn't. The feeling wouldn't go away and he was afraid. He couldn't remember how he'd got home. The will to be there and being there were the same thing. They'd occupied the same instant.
“No,” she whispered, cowering against the wall. “Oh, Mary Mother of God. Get away. Please. Go away.”
Her terror made him want to scream.
“Mummy?” Christine appeared in her bedroom doorway. “What's the matter?” She sounded very scared. She looked down the corridor at him. “It's Daddy,” she said joyfully. But then her face crumpled up at the edges into the same awful uncertainty that Ian felt. “Why isn't he real?”
“I'm right here, darling,” he whispered, crouching down, trying to put on his happiest face. “As real as can be.”
In that single moment he saw the woman she would become, tougher and more intelligent than him or his wife, resourceful, but forever low on self-esteem so that she hesitated over opportunities and lived a life that was long, yet barren, haunted by hopes and fears that kept her permanently in a state of hiding from the world. The sudden cruelty of the vision made him feel sick with pity, for himself, for her, for the whole world of people who couldn't see what he saw: the heart of nothing from which everything poured out, instant upon instant rising and vanishing as space opened before and closed after, leaving them forever stranded on the knife-edge of the present. He longed to tell her that she needn't worry about not being good enough. Anything was more than good enough, for him or the Universe.
But Christine looked at her mother, shaking and unable to talk, and wouldn't come. She said, barely audible, holding her teddy bear closely in front of her in the clutch of soft arms he'd never feel again, “Are you dead now, Daddy?”
And Ian knew that in any way that mattered, he was.
White Horse reached Jude's apartment in the evening and looked around for him. He had been back. His bags were there. But he was gone.
She cursed in every language she knew, walked straight to the kitchen, and opened the freezer, taking out the bottle of Stolichnaya that was its only inhabitant. Pouring herself a shot she drank it in one go and bit down on the cold burn with bared teeth as she poured another. She'd heard some things in the car on the way back from wherever. She wished she hadn't. They made being alone now so very hard. They made waiting for Jude a torture. Her nerves felt like each one of them was pierced and hanging on its own fish-hook, soul stretched out to dry, thinner than tissue paper.
She took the second shot in two gulps and then took the third into her brother's tight-assed white sitting room, to the sofa that enveloped her like a snowdrift, and flashed on the news channels. Her burns were about due for another pill but they didn't go well with drink and she needed that more than she needed to escape the physical pain. Despite the knockout drug that was wearing off she felt high as a kite. Got to get down. Got to spread this around so it doesn't burn a hole right through my head.
And stay sober enough to talk sense when Magpie did show up. She picked up a deck of cards that were in the magazine rack and started shuffling. She'd play patience. She'd play it real hard. She was dealing her second game when the house system went off with one of the billion stupid signals for incoming calls. The notes of Beethoven's Fifth, rendered in flat chimes that were as witless as the original was thrilling, circled her and then faded into their announcement of bad news. Wherever Jude had gone to he must have switched his Pad off and it was rerouting here.
She listened as the answering service took a message,
“Um … Jude, old chap. Dan Connor here. Well, you probably don't remember me. That is, I live with Natalie. Armstrong. There's been a bit of a do. Ah … the thing is, there was this woman from, well, it doesn't really matter, from some agency or other and she was asking about Natalie and I … I might have told her, that is, I might just have mentioned your name once. I'm not really sure. But you should know that you might get a few questions about it and, er—she's going to be fine, just fine. Going home to, you know, and staying with her father a few days and, yeah. It'll be great. Fine. I thought you should know. You know. Okay. Oh, got your number off the autologger at the hotline, but I'm erasing it now. Okay. Bye, then.”
White Horse looked down at the face of the Queen of Spades she'd just turned up. She wondered who Natalie Armstrong was and what she had to do with it. And what hotline? She dealt three more cards and took off the Ace of Diamonds. She kept on playing, watching the deal, lining up the suits.
Calum Armstrong was on a flight back to England already. He drank black coffees and listened to the engine sound change and the vibration echo in his body as they reached sufficient altitude to go super-sonic. The tremor in his hands wouldn't die down. He kept thinking of Charlotte, his wife. She'd be cursing him now from her grave, for allowing Natalie to become fouled in this mire, letting Guskov take control of the situation with his persuasiveness. He didn't even recall now what had made the arguments seem so powerful.
He rubbed his shoulders against the seat where his back rested against it, as if he was trying to scour them. But nothing relieved the sensation that he was coated in filth. Of course it wouldn't, and wasn't that so interesting, knowing so much about psychology but still being its plaything?
He took two aspirin. They didn't touch his headache. He knew they wouldn't. He knew so goddamned much, but he wasn't the one to save her. That sly, fop-haired fool had done it. Dan, whom Natalie liked so much and kept in employment when no other lab on Earth would have him. It set him to thinking that maybe her judgement wasn't so bad after all and he smiled with unstoppable pride.
My girl.
What have I done?
But the accident was totally unforeseeable, that was true. As to its cause and the results of the Selfware run on Bobby X—he didn't believe the reports. They didn't add up to anything except hysteria and the accounts of eyewitnesses too confused to make sense. Human beings did not vanish into thin air. Any explanation claiming such a thing was pure wish fulfilment.
Calum ground his coffee cup down on its saucer and gripped the handrests beside his seat until he could feel the struts beneath the soft padding.
They didn't. It was a fact.
She wouldn't.
Would she?
Jude walked home the nine blocks from the bar, trying not to breathe too deeply of the city's late-night humid air. Kitchens vented odours of Thai, Mexican, Indian, and Chinese cooking, one after the other. The popular Arabic coffee houses strung veils of smoke around his face on the next street. From windows above the scentsations of the evening's mellow legal highs drooped to road level in soft, invisible blooms. At times like this he remembered the high, clean air of Montana with the wind from the north, sweeping off Canada and its uninhabited vastnesses. The sophistication and choice of the city paled by comparison with that prairie air, even if the Arctic blasts did enjoy tearing warmth out of his skin and coating his hair with fine sheens of ice so that he could hear the strands chiming faintly against each other.
He was looking at his feet, not stepping on a crack, thinking about Fort Detrick and his suspicion that every face in the stolen file had at some time belonged to the same man. From his left pocket the ten dollars he'd put aside in change for the panhandlers went without his seeing a single one of their faces as they oiled up from the shadows, murmuring. Perhaps they were the same person, too, doubling back on the easy marks and relying on their desire not to look too closely to get away with it. He wouldn't have been surprised. There was nowhere like a city for learning how to see properly; what you had to notice and what you shouldn't, under any circumstances, allow to exist. It was an ability of the middle class that was ripe for exploitation.
Was it possible that Yuri Ivanov, Mikhail Guskov, and the list of other identities belonged to one man? What did that mean? Why had it happened? If they were, physically, the same person who had been cosmetically or otherwise altered that was one thing. But he'd read the entries more closely since the first night and there were far bigger differences involved than that. Nationality, mother tongue, qualifications, skills, and psychological profiles: all of these were unique. It was not as though switching them was as easy as changing clothes. Anyone could change a name or a passport or a face. But could anyone be so versatile that they were capable of moving from one life to the next in such a complete way—new job, new associates, new everything?
Jude was wondering what it added up to, and again why and, horribly, how he had obtained the information, when he was startled by the apartment messaging his Pad to tell him that White Horse had returned.
He ran up the steps two at a time and burst through the half-open door. He could hear music and there she was, sitting on the floor, playing cards and looking up at him as though she'd never left. He got down on his knees to hug her.
“Where the hell have you been?”
For the first time in an age she didn't immediately wriggle away and cool-stare him. He could feel a lot of tension in her that wouldn't yield, either. When he drew back and sat by her she shrugged.
“I got your message about the machine. I went to get rid of it.”
“And and and? C'mon, that isn't it. You didn't go to Fort Detrick on your own.” He sat back on his heels and scrutinized her face. As with many of the People hers was no easy giveaway of her feelings. But she was pale, there were dark circles under her eyes, and he could see her struggling to hold in what was on her mind.
“Is that it?” She nodded slowly and turned up another three cards, looking down at her Patience game. “I wondered where it was.”
“Who was it?” Jude tried to look her over unobtrusively. She didn't seem hurt—no more than she had been when she left, anyway. Her rat's-tail dreadlocks were tied back with a bandanna and the burns on her jawline and neck shone hot pink and oily with medication.
White Horse thought a while and turned over more cards.
“If they told you not to tell me…”
“No,” she said, interrupting him. She put up a Jack and two tens. “They want me to tell you to keep on investigating. They said if I didn't that we would lose Deer Ridge to the mineral development proposal.” She'd got her cool back now. She finished her dealing and tidied the deck in her hands. “Can they do that?”
Jude's mind reeled. He didn't understand the connection at all, “You mean, can they influence the judge's decision?”
White Horse nodded and began another round. She waited for his answer, the cards moving with metronomic accuracy in her hands.
“I guess that goes a way to telling me who they are if they can. Why say it if they can't? Did you believe them?”
She nodded without looking up.
“Fuck.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Are you okay?”
“Mmn hmmn.” She took out a nine and another Jack. “They want me to get a case together like I planned. Find a big-time lawyer. Go to court. Stage demonstrations. Get AIM on the case.”
Jude's mind felt like it had been blown out. He couldn't think. He'd already had enough to drink but he wanted another one. Instead of going to get it he leaned against the sofa and closed his eyes tight, listening to the insistent drum White Horse had chosen to listen to and the snap, snap of the cards as she dealt.
Deer Ridge. The oil exploration. The mindware test. The threat of eviction from the reservation. White Horse's abduction to Fort Detrick. How did they all add up together?
The coal and oil thing had been going on for over two years now. As domestic reserves had started to dwindle, following the boom development of India and the African Allegiance nations who had imported so much at such vast expense to fuel their industries and their motors, the search for new supplies had become more urgent. Having exhausted all its own land the government had begun to legislate so that search and development was permitted on private land.
Any contractor could go to the county courthouse, apply for a search permit in a limited area, and begin tests. People whose properties were affected had to be compensated and, if the search was successful, their cooperation with any subsequent extraction was rewarded with large cash handouts and substantial share options in their own “microcompany” that would be a subsidiary of the contractor's. Most people were glad to become overnight millionaires. Those who objected were allowed an appeal. If they were turned down they were evicted and compensated at the market rate for their land and homes.
Deer Ridge had fought and sabotaged its way through site testing by Thomson Cushener, a large consortium that had located some small oil and mineral deposits on the reservation. They were now at the appeal stage. Thanks to White Horse's vigorous lobbying, nobody on the land wanted to move out of their home, no matter how attractive the price. They knew that if they did then their land would become part of the USA in perpetuity—and that they would not tolerate.
Deer Ridge's appeal proceedings were in adjournment at the moment, pending further investigations on the “findings” of Thomson Cushener, but they were due to be heard in another couple of months. Oil prices from the Arabic suppliers weren't too bad right now, so it hadn't seemed like they would lose; other places had a lot more to offer. Jude had considered it a safe bet that the appeal court would find for the People. Considering the political blowback of not doing so when the Native American issue was a sympathetic cause for a wide range of voters, he didn't see it happening. He had certainly never connected it with this bizarre “test” of a corrupt medical system. Could they be linked? The oil wealth involved didn't seem nearly high enough. It couldn't be the money side. It just couldn't.
“I don't get it,” he said finally and opened his eyes. White Horse's game was nearly completed.
“It isn't the oil,” she said, looking down at the last five cards. “It's because of the FBI test. And it isn't just the Feds. The army, too.” She turned her head and looked him in the eye. “I heard them say they had support everywhere. People who are against Micromedica being used as a Perfection tool. They want to stop the work. They made Deer Ridge happen so that you and I would start to ask questions about the government's research plans. They thought you would be high up and safe enough to cause tr
ouble before the others found you. They want it in the media. A trial on TV and the newsnets. They want the Democrats out, too.” She made a hand waggle that showed that last part was chickenfeed by comparison.
“They?” Jude wondered aloud.
“Christian Right. Conservatives on both sides. Worried minorities. Moral majority. Lots of people are afraid of Micromedica,” White Horse said. “Like gene therapy. They don't want anyone to have it, unless they can control it.”
Jude wasn't sure he agreed with her but he said nothing. It was true that people feared Micromedica as one of the “supertechnologies” that seemed to promise humanity, a godlike power over natural events, but most people were as yet unaware that there was an application for the mind as well as the body—NervePath. But he didn't think that a scare story about that would be enough to cause a public outcry—too technical and remote from ordinary affairs—although all those who'd complained for years about government mind control would have a field day. First he'd need proof of misuse and the willingness of the authorities to use it without individual permission.
“Will you?” she asked.
“Will I what?”
“Investigate.”
And save Deer Ridge, he finished in his own mind. And probably save you and me. I'd be surprised if that wasn't part of the deal, too. And save the free world.
Jude felt once again the sensation of branching paths and set destinies as he looked into his sister's face; sensed that he was walking into something there was only one way out of. One way or another it would be a nightmare. A mess. It would chew him up and spit him out and he might never get anywhere with it at all. She would see it as him paying his dues to their roots and all the time he would be doing it because he would anyway. For no reason except that it was the Thing That Jude Does. What did it matter how you reasoned about your reasons? You were a list of habits recycling themselves or you were on a great quest in your own head. Who the hell knew the difference?
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