EPILOGUE
The tide was out at Ember, leaving a wet expanse of sand that stretched almost to the listing wreck of the Free Trade Enforcer. The rocks that the carrier had gashed herself on were exposed, gathered in shallow water at the bow like a fossilised outpouring of the ship’s guts. Seabirds were perched there, screaming shrilly at each other. A thin wind came in across the sand and made minute ripples in the puddles left by our footprints. Up on the promenade, Anchana Salomao’s face had been taken down, intensifying the bleak emptiness of the street.
“I thought you’d have gone,” said Irene Elliott beside me.
“It’s in the pipe. Harlan’s World are dragging out the needlecast authorisation. They really don’t want me back.”
“And no one wants you here.”
I shrugged. “It’s not a new situation for me.”
We walked on in silence for a while. It was a peculiar feeling, talking to Irene Elliott in her own body. In the days leading up to the Head in the Clouds gig, I’d become accustomed to looking down to her face, but this big-boned blonde sleeve was almost as tall as me, and there was an aura of gaunt competence about her that had only come through faintly in her mannerisms in the other body.
“I’ve been offered a job,” she said at length. “Security consulting for Mainline d.h.f. You heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“Quite high profile on the East Coast. They must have their headhunters on the inquiry board or something. Soon as the UN cleared me, they were knocking on the door. Exploding offer, five grand if I signed there and then.”
“Yeah, standard practice. Congratulations. You moving east, or are they going to wire the job through to you here?”
“Probably do it here, at least for a while. We’ve got Elizabeth in a virtual condo down in Bay City, and it’s a lot cheaper to wire in locally. The start-up cost us most of that five grand, and we figure it’ll be a few years before we can afford to re-sleeve her.” She turned a shy smile towards me. “We spend most of our time there at the moment. That’s where Victor went today.”
“You don’t need to make excuses for him,” I said gently. “I didn’t figure he’d want to talk to me anyway.”
She looked away. “It’s, you know, he was always so proud and—”
“Forget it. Someone walked all over my feelings the way I did over his, I wouldn’t feel like talking to them either.” I stopped and reached in my pocket. “Reminds me. I brought something for you.”
She looked down at the anonymous grey credit chip in my hand.
“What’s this?”
“About eighty thousand,” I said. “I figure with that you can afford something custom-grown for Elizabeth. If she chooses quick, you could have her sleeved before the end of the year.”
“What?” She stared at me with a smile slipping off and on her face, like someone who has been told a joke she’s not sure she understands. “You’re giving us—Why? Why are you doing this?”
This time I had an answer. I’d been thinking about it all the way up from Bay City that morning. I took Irene Elliott’s hand and pressed the chip into it.
“Because I want there to be something clean at the end of all this,” I said quietly. “Something I can feel good about.”
For a moment she went on staring at me. Then she closed the small gap between us and flung her arms around me with a cry that sent the nearest gulls wheeling up off the sand in alarm. I felt a trickle of tears smeared onto the side of my face, but she was laughing at the same time. I folded my arms round her in return and held her.
And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea.
You take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere. And that must sometimes be enough.
It took them another eleven days to authorise the needlecast returning me to Harlan’s World, most of which I spent hanging around the Hendrix watching the news and feeling oddly guilty about my impending checkout. There were very few actual facts publicly available about the demise of Reileen Kawahara, so the resulting coverage was lurid, sensational and largely inaccurate. The UN Special Inquiry remained veiled in secrecy, and when the rumours about the forthcoming adoption of Resolution 653 finally broke there was little to connect them to what had gone before. Bancroft’s name never appeared, and nor did mine.
I never spoke to Bancroft again. The needlecast authorisation and re-sleeving bond for Harlan’s World were delivered to me by Oumou Prescott who, though she was pleasant enough and assured me that the terms of my contract would be honoured to the letter, also conveyed a smoothly menacing message that I was not to attempt any further communication with any member of the Bancroft family ever again. The reason cited by Prescott was my deceit over the Jack It Up story, the breach of my much-vaunted word, but I knew better. I’d seen it in Bancroft’s face across the inquiry chamber when the facts about Miriam’s whereabouts and activities during the assault on Head in the Clouds came out. Despite all his urbane Meth bullshit, the old bastard was stabbed through with jealousy. I wondered what he would have done if he’d had to sit through the deleted Hendrix bedroom files.
Ortega rode with me to Bay City Central the day of the needlecast, the same day that Mary Lou Hinchley was downloaded into a witness stand synthetic for the opening hearing on Head in the Clouds. There were chanting crowds on the steps up to the entrance hall, faced off against a line of grim-looking black-uniformed UN Public Order police. The same crude holographic placards that I remembered from my arrival on Earth bobbed about over our heads as we forced our way through the press. The sky above was an ominous grey.
“F*cking clowns,” growled Ortega, elbowing the last of the demonstrators out of her way. “If they provoke the Pubs, they’ll be sorry. I’ve seen these boys in action before and it isn’t pretty.”
I ducked around a shaven-headed young man who was punching violently at the sky with one fist and holding one of the placard generators with the other. His voice was hoarse and he appeared to be working himself into a frenzied trance. I joined Ortega at the upper fringe of the crowd, a little out of breath.
“There isn’t enough organisation here to be a real threat,” I said, raising my voice to compete with the crowd. “They’re just making a noise.”
“Yeah, well that never stopped the Pubs before. They’re likely to break a few skulls just on general principles. What a f*cking mess.”
“Price of progress, Kristin. You wanted Resolution 653.” I gestured at the sea of angry faces below. “Now you’ve got it.”
One of the masked and padded men above us broke ranks and came down the steps, riot prod fractionally lifted at his side. His jacket bore a sergeant’s crimson slash at the shoulder. Ortega flipped her badge at him and after a brief, shouted conversation, we were allowed up. The line parted for us and then the double doors into the hall beyond. It was hard to tell which was the most smoothly mechanical, the doors or the black-clad faceless figures that stood guard over them.
Inside, it was quiet and gloomy with the storm light coming through the roof panels. I looked around at the deserted benches and sighed. Whatever world it is, whatever you’ve done there for better or worse, you always leave the same way.
Alone.
“You need a minute?”
I shook my head. “Need a lifetime, Kristin. Maybe then some.”
“Stay out of trouble, maybe you’ll get it.” There was an attempt at humour floating in her voice, rather like a corpse in a swimming pool, and she must have realised how it sounded because the sentence was bitten off. An awkwardness was growing between us, something that had started as soon as they re-sleeved me in Ryker’s body for the real-time committee hearings. During the inquiry we’d been kept too busy to see much of each other and when the proceedings finally closed and we all went home, the pattern had endured. There’d been a few gusty if only superficially satisfying couplings, but even these had stopped once it became clear that Ryker would be cleared and released. Whatever shared warmth we’d been gathered in to was out of control now, unsafe, like the flames from a smashed storm lantern, and trying to hold onto it was only getting us both painfully scorched.
I turned and gave her a faint smile. “Stay out of trouble, huh? That what you told Trepp?”
It was an unkind blow, and I knew it. Against all the odds, it seemed Kawahara had missed Trepp with everything but the edge of the stun beam. The shard gun, I remembered when they told me, had been dialled down to minimum dispersal just before I went in to face Kawahara. Sheer luck I’d left it that way. By the time the rapidly summoned UN forensics team arrived on Head in the Clouds to take evidence under Ortega’s direction, Trepp had vanished, as had my grav harness from the atmosphere sampling turret where I’d come aboard. I didn’t know whether Ortega and Bautista had seen fit to let the mercenary go in view of the testimony she could give concerning the Panama Rose, or if Trepp had simply staggered off stage before the police got there. Ortega had volunteered no information and there wasn’t enough left of our previous intimacy for me to ask her outright. This was the first time we’d discussed it openly.
Ortega scowled at me. “You asking me to equate the two of you?”
“Not asking you to do anything, Kristin.” I shrugged. “But for what it’s worth, I don’t see a lot of ground between her and me.”
“Go on thinking like that, nothing’ll ever change for you.”
“Kristin, nothing ever does change.” I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. “You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll always have people like Kawahara and the Bancrofts to push their buttons and cash in on the program. People like you to make sure the game runs smoothly and the rules don’t get broken too often. And when the Meths want to break the rules themselves, they’ll send people like Trepp and me to do it. That’s the truth, Kristin. It’s been the truth since I was born a hundred and fifty years ago and from what I read in the history books, it’s never been any different. Better get used to it.”
She looked at me levelly for a moment, then nodded as if coming to an internal decision. “You always meant to kill Kawahara, didn’t you? This confession bullshit was just to get me along for the ride.”
It was a question I’d asked myself a lot, and I still didn’t have a clear answer. I shrugged again.
“She deserved to die, Kristin. To really die. That’s all I know for certain.”
Over my head, a faint pattering sounded from the roof panels. I tipped my head back and saw transparent explosions on the glass. It was starting to rain.
“Got to go,” I said quietly. “Next time you see this face, it won’t be me wearing it, so if there’s anything you want to say…”
Ortega’s face flinched almost imperceptibly as I said it. I cursed myself for the awkwardness and tried to take her hand.
“Look, if it makes it any easier, no one knows. Bautista probably suspects we got it together, but no one really knows.”
“I know,” she said sharply, not giving me her hand. “I remember.”
I sighed. “Yeah, so do I. It’s worth remembering, Kristin. But don’t let it f*ck up the rest of your life. Go get Ryker back, and get on to the next screen. That’s what counts. Oh yeah.” I reached into my coat and extracted a crumpled cigarette packet. “And you can have these back. I don’t need them any more, and nor does he, so don’t start him off again. You owe me that much, at least. Just make sure he stays quit.”
She blinked and kissed me abruptly, somewhere between mouth and cheek. It was an inaccuracy I didn’t try to correct either way. I turned away before I could see if there were going to be any tears and started for the doors at the far end of the hall. I looked back once, as I was mounting the steps. Ortega was still standing there, arms wrapped around herself, watching me leave. In the stormlight, it was too far away to see her face clearly.
For a moment something ached in me, something so deep-rooted that I knew to tear it out would be to undo the essence of what held me together. The feeling rose and splashed like the rain behind my eyes, swelling as the drumming on the roof panels grew and the glass ran with water.
Then I had it locked down.
I turned back to the next step, found a chuckle somewhere in my chest and coughed it out. The chuckle fired up and became a laugh of sorts.
Get to the next screen.
The doors were waiting at the top, the needlecast beyond.
Still trying to laugh, I went through.