Conscience of the Beagle (17 page)

CAN’T GO BACK
into
the living room. Can’t look at her. I stretch out on the bed, close my eyes. So stupid, but I want to hold her again. Nothing else matters. Not the bombings. Not Vanderslice. Nothing.

* * *

Lila. At the end of a hall. Dark doors like mouths to either side. Trying to warn me about something. But she’s too far. And speaking too softly. I strain to hear. Walk toward her. But she’s going. Slipping away.

Oh, stay. Please. Can’t you stay with me just for a while? Mouth moving. But voice so soft. She needs me. Run to help her, but she retreats. Doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave me. Who’s doing this to us? Who
—

* * *

Knock at my door wakes me. Beagle.

In the living room, two of Vanderslice’s men. And Tal.

“Dyle?”

She calls my name. Too late now. Don’t look at her. Hurts too much. The men follow me outside.

I get in the limo. Watch shadowy countryside roll by. Funny, how I thought she loved me.

The car drives between two sniffer gates. Huge sprawling house that looks more grown than built. Like Vanderslice, ostentatious and whimsical. I get out of the limo, walk to the door, and thumb the speaker button. “Major Holloway.”

Security camera swings my way. Through the intercom, a congenial, “Come on in.”

The massive doors drift apart. I step into an echoing tiled hall.

“This way, Major!” Vanderslice, his voice blunted by distance.

I turn right. Round the corner. Don’t know what I expected, but the living room dazes me. Larger than Colonel Yi’s. Larger than the one in the Chicago governor’s mansion. On a field of peach carpet Vanderslice sits playing with a curly-haired toddler.

“This is Paul. We call him Poo. Say hello, Poo. Say hello to the major.”

Paul. A year old. Born about the time of the fourth bombing.

Vanderslice holds the child’s wrist. Lifts the arm up and down. Waving. The baby gives me a moronic grin.

Not sure what to do. Never been around children much. Vanderslice looks so natural there. And I’m uncomfortable. I clear my throat.

“Jenny!” Vanderslice calls.

From the depths of the house, a muffled, annoyed answer.

He shrugs. “She’s a little busy right now finishing some sort of report. Biologist, you know. Can’t get her work published here, but she’s well known off-planet. We met at a conference on Stockton. You had dinner yet?”

“No.” The room is huge, but not austere. Gaily-colored pillows piled in a corner. A wealth of toys. Nanny bot in pink and orange. The air in the room smells of sour milk and talc. A house dominated by a baby. Did Lila ever want this? I wouldn’t.

“Come on. I’ll get you something to eat.” He gets up, leaves the toddler with the nanny.

I follow him into the kitchen. “Jenny was too busy to fix dinner tonight, but I have a little of my spiced chicken in the refrigerator. A sandwich all right?”

“Sure.” The kitchen is huge and bright and cluttered.

“You don’t like me much, do you?” Vanderslice slaps two pieces of bread on a plate. He bends and peers into the refrigerator, waiting for an answer.

An awkward silence. He’s too damned young and handsome. Of course I don’t like him. He’s out of my league.

“And you still don’t trust me.” His voice is pleasant. He lifts a sealpack from the chaos. The refrigerator door slides closed. He moves to the counter. Takes out a knife. But he can’t scare me.

He starts slicing a chicken breast. “That’s all right. That’s okay. It was a long time before I trusted you.” He eyes me. Then winks. “And I had you under surveillance.”

Tongue between his teeth, he lays slices of meat on the bread. Spoons sauce onto it. “That’s why I know . . . this morning. I figured it out when you and Beagle were talking about your wife.”

He turns. Hands the plate to me. His expression is somber. “About Tal . . .”

Won’t let him see. “What’s in the chicken?”

“Oh. You’ll like that. My own recipe. Start off with a real range chicken, one that’s scratched for bugs.”

Bugs? I look at the sandwich.

“Then you have to marinate it. Can’t tell you what’s in the sauce, but one of the ingredients is anchovies. Just
—
will you be careful, Major? Tal’s angry about things. Can’t blame her, really. She was always a free thinker, and Tennyson doesn’t want women to think. How about a beer?”

What does he mean, angry? I’m the one who’s angry. Who can’t forgive her. Still, how she called my name. As if
—

He leads me back to the living room. The baby’s playing on the floor. Drooling.

He pays no attention to the baby. He sits on the sofa. Looks up. “You all right?”

As if she was sorry.

“Major?”

“What?”

“Go ahead and sit down.”

I take an overstuffed chair and put the plate on the armrest.

“She’s had a series of affairs. Nothing very serious. Even during Paulie. But he didn’t mind. He loved his science. She loved her revolution. She’d see one man for awhile. Then another. It was safe with Paulie. But he wasn’t enough. Not exciting for her, I guess.”

The beer bottle has no label. Illegal. Looking for a little excitement. Nothing serious.

“Sorry. Did you need a glass?”

“No.” A foamy cold gulp. Bitter aftertaste. The beer nearly comes up again. I put the bottle on the table. Take a very small bite of sandwich. Amazed that the chicken’s so good.

“The way Pearcy was killed worries me. Not for me. Not particularly for Tennyson, but for you, Major. There’s something personal about what this murderer is doing.” His gaze wanders to my left. “Jenny! Call Dudley!”

Something heavy bumps the back of my chair. Head, large as a bowling ball, in my crotch. I push it quickly away. Dullwitted, friendly amber eyes. Mottled pelt. Pink washcloth of a tongue.

“Don’t let him get in your lap. He still thinks he’s a puppy. If he bothers you, just slap him.”

Paw the size of a salad plate on my knee.

Vanderslice says, “Down. Get down.”

The dog lowers the paw. Looks at Vanderslice.

“Down.”

Chastened, the dog pads over to the baby.

“So what do you think?”

Don’t know what to think. Spying on me. But then she called my name.

“I know Earth’s trying to get at you, but why? And they’re going about it in such an indirect way. It’s almost as though there’s some private bad blood between you and this murderer.”

Dudley lies down by the toddler. Yawns. Yellow scimitar teeth. But dull eyes. Soft eyes. Not as dangerous, not as shrewd, as the leopards.

“When I asked for an HF team, I wondered who they’d send. It’s no secret that Earth has had it in for her colonies for a long time. Earth isn’t liked here very much, Major.”

The dog holds the baby down with a powerful paw. Control. That’s what Tal wants. That’s what she’s after. She came to the house to control me. But then
—
how her face changed. It changed. Maybe she was angry this morning because I controlled her. Maybe that’s all.

“But when they sent you, I was incredulous. I had possibly the best psychic alive, the most famous investigator and one of the three constructs in existence. They rounded up the best team they could find. Now they’re trying to destroy you. Why would they do that?”

Sweater neck caught in the dog’s teeth, the baby is dragged, giggling, across the carpet. Vanderslice sniffs the air. “Jen! Poo’s got doodles!”

A muted reply.

“Jen! Please!”

Vanderslice’s wife bursts into the room. Hands on hips. Exasperated. “I’m working.” Syllables clipped. Sharp. Not sing-song Tennyson. The precise, no-nonsense cadence of Earth.

“Oh, please. Come on. I’ve got company.”

She studies me. Bonbon eyes. Fleshy, expressive lips. Wry smirk. Not at all how I imagined Vanderslice’s wife.

“Honey? This is Major Holloway.”

She walks across the carpet. Shoves a hand in my face. I take it automatically. She’s not smiling. “Heard a lot about you.”

“Jenny? I told him about the revolution and everything.”

“Jesus, John.”

“No. It’s okay. He’s okay.”

Doesn’t trust me. She drops my hand. Picks up the baby. Tosses a “Nice meeting you” over her back. Her body sways as she walks. Good ass. Straight spine. Haughty. Can understand why he loves her. An M-9 walk. Reminds me of
—

“So. When this is all over, what are you going to do?” he asks. “You surely won’t be going back to Earth.”

Haven’t thought about it. Time runs in days. The next. And the next. Eighteen months of short futures.

“I have a job for you here.”

But he forgets. Colonial Security is after us. There is no next week. No tomorrow. Just hours.

“Come on. I want to show you something.”

I follow him back into the kitchen. Vanderslice touches a wall. It slides open. We walk out onto the patio together. And my heart stops. His backyard is full of stars.

The meadow is a vast dark sea. Far away the twinkling, jeweled shore of Hebron. At my feet lights shine in the sweet-smelling lawn.

Like a trip I took once. That’s right. My mother’s sister’s funeral. The wide sweep of the Russian steppes, white around me. Like the black around me now. The pregnant, humid smell of snow. How I wished the cabin behind me out of existence, until I was a warm pulsing dot in the void.

Dizzy, I turn. Beside me the black silhouette of Vanderslice. He drops to the ground. For a heartbeat I think he’s been shot. But then he swings his arms, his legs. And laughs. When he stands, he’s glowing. A black snow-angel his shadow.

He strokes light down my sleeve. My hand. I lift phosphorescent fingers.

“We used to do this when I was a kid.”

If I had grown up here, I’d be so different. Quiet clear stars above, moist stars below.

Pale ghost of Vanderslice floats the lawn. Black footprints in its wake. I follow. We sit on humpbacked boulders, islands in a night-reflected sea.

“I don’t know what Earth is after,” he says.

“Battle and Popek. What were they working on?”

The dog trots through the golden square of the kitchen doorway. In the yard, in the stars, it tumbles and rolls.

“Viable pairs.”

A phantom dog lopes over. Nuzzles at Vanderslice’s feet. He reaches down a radiant hand to stroke it.

“And Golden Thompson?” I ask.

“The construction of space.”

Where sky meets earth, the lights of Hebron wink. “I don’t understand.”

“About viable pairs? Or why that would be important to the bombings?”

“Both.”

Such peace here. Nothing deadly moving in the dark. How can he think about murder?

“See, particles have opposites. They’re created out of nothingness that way. It’s always going on, you know, viable pairs materializing in and out of existence like popcorn or something. Then some particles get enough energy to stick around. But when they do, they’re always linked.”

The phosphorescence of the yard. Thick and teeming as the subatomic world.

“If one ceases to exist, the other does, too.”

A knot in my throat. “What?”

“Born together. Die together. If one particle is swallowed by a black hole, for example, the other is destroyed. See? It all goes back to the nature of particles. Aharanov
—
he was an Earther
—
thought that particles behave haphazardly because no two systems have identical futures. I don’t know how else to explain it, but time is a macrocosmic thing. It doesn’t exist on the subatomic level. So. That’s the premise we’ve been working with for three centuries. Battle appears to have expanded beyond Aharanov.”

The dog leaps up, dashes aross the lawn. This time it comes to me, a glowing moon in its mouth.

“He wants to play fetch.”

I grab the moon. Foam ball. Very chewed. Slightly damp. I toss it.

“Battle figured that viable pairs emerge from a place where there is no time. So far, so good. But when the pairs burst into existence, that link to timelessness is never broken. Those particles are always joined, even though there may be a universe between them. They’re joined at the hip by a timelessness he called null-space.”

I must not have played the game right. The dog trots around the edge of a boulder. Black swallows him. “Is he right?”

“I’m not sure. He and Popek were working on their proofs to null-space, but they were paranoid about theft. When I got into their DEEPs, their programs self-destructed.”

Something materializes on the rock. A pillar of moonlight. The dog. “What if you could travel through null-space?”

“Oh, in theory you could, of course. It’s all on the subatomic level, Major.”

“Battle and Popek’s peer reviewer was Golden Thompson. A cosmologist. Think about that. If you could step into a space that was timeless, you could walk from one planet to another instantly. Couldn’t you? And if Battle and Popek discovered another way to travel, that would be something for Earth to kill them for. Wouldn’t it?”