Iron Sunrise (31 page)

"Table six. Is anyone there?" Steffi mumbled into her cuff. "I've got a situation here. Who's covering?"

A voice in her earbud: "'Lo, Steffi. I've asked Max to cover for you. Are you going to be long?"

Steffi looked at the young woman, leaning on the rim of the plant pot, and winced. "Think I'm going to miss the tail end."

"Okay, check. Banquet control over and out."

She straightened up in time to see Wednesday doing likewise, leaning against the wall with her eyes shut. "Come on. What's your room?" She prodded her guest list, still handily loaded in her cuff. "Let's get you back there."

Wednesday shambled along passively if somewhat disjointedly, like a puppet with too-loose strings. "Lying bitch," she mumbled quietly as Steffi rolled her into the nearest lift. "Lying. Through her teeth."

"You're not used to drinking this much, are you?" Steffi ventured. Wow, you're going to have a mammoth hangover, antidrunk or not!

"Not … not alcohol. Didn't wanna be there. But couldn't stay 'lone."

Heads she's maudlin, tails she's depressed. Want to bet she wants someone to talk to? Steffi punched up A deck and Wednesday's cylinder, and concentrated on keeping her upright as they passed through fluctuating tidal zones between the electrograv rings embedded in the hull.

"Any reason why not?" she asked casually.

"Mom and Dad and Jerm—lying bitch!" It was almost a snarl. I was right, Steffi realized unhappily. Got her away just in time. "Couldn't stay 'lone,"

Wednesday added for emphasis.

"What happened?" Steffi asked quietly as the elevator slowed then began to move sideways.

"They're dead an' I'm not." The kid's face was a picture of misery. "Fucking ReMastered liar!"

"They're dead? Who, your family?"

Wednesday made a sound halfway between a sob and a snort. "Who'dya think?"

The elevator stopped moving. Doors sighed open onto a corridor, opposite a blandly anonymous stateroom door. Steffi blipped it with her control override and it swung open. Wednesday knew which way to stagger. For a moment Steffi considered leaving her—then sighed and followed her in.

"Your parents are dead? Is that why you don't want to be alone?"

Wednesday turned to face her, cheeks streaked with tears. Weirdly, her heavy makeup didn't run. Chromatophores, built into her skin? "Been two days," she said, swaying. "Since they were murdered."

"Murdered—"

"By. By the. By—" Then her stomach caught up with her and Wednesday headed for the bathroom in something midway between a controlled fall and a sprint. Steffi waited outside, listening to her throw up, lost in thought.

Murdered? Well, well, how interesting …

It was 0300 hours, day-shift cycle, shortly before the starship made its first jump from point A to point A' across a couple of parsecs of flat space-time.

The comforter was a crumpled mass, spilled halfway across the floor. The ceiling was dialed down to shades of red and black, tunnels of warm dark light washing across the room.

Wednesday rubbed her forehead tiredly. The analgesics and rat's liver pills had taken care of most of the symptoms, and the liter or two of water she'd methodically chugged down had begun to combat the dehydration, but the rest of it—the shame and embarrassment and angst—wouldn't succumb so easily to chemical prophylaxis.

"I'm an ass," she muttered to herself, slouching to her feet. She headed back to the bathroom again, for the third time in an hour. "Stupid. And ugly, and a little bit dumb on the side." She looked at the bathtub speculatively.

"Guess I could always drown myself. Or cut my wrists. Or something." Let the fuckers win. She blinked at the mirror-wall on the other side of the room.

"I'm an embarrassment." The figure in the mirror stared right back, a dark-eyed tragic waif with a rat's nest of black hair and lips the color of a drowned woman's. Breasts and hips slim, waist slimmer, arms and legs too long. She stood up and stared at herself. Her mind wandered, seeking solace a few nights back. What did Blow see in me? she wondered. No way to find out now. Should have asked him when I had the chance … She was alone here, more isolated than she'd ever been. "I'm a waste of vacuum."

On her way back into the bedroom she spotted a blinking light on the writing desk. For want of anything better to do she wandered over. It was something to do with the blotter. "What's this?" she asked aloud: "Ship, what does this light mean?"

"You have voice mail," the ship replied soothingly. "Voice calls are spooled to mail while guests sleep unless an override is in force. Do you want to review your messages?"

Wednesday nodded, then snorted at her own idiocy. "Yeah. I guess."

Message received, thirty-six minutes ago. From: Frank Johnson. "Hi, Wednesday? Guess you're asleep. Should have checked the time—I keep weird hours. Listen, the story went out okay. Sorry I missed supper, but those social things don't work for me real well. Ping me if you feel like hitting one of the bars sometime. Bye."

"Huh. Ship, is Frank Johnson still awake?" she asked.

"Frank Johnson is awake and accepting calls," the liaison network replied.

"Oh, oh." Suddenly it mattered to her very much that someone else was awake and keeping crazy hours. "Voice call to Frank Johnson."

There was a brief pause, then a chime. "Hello?" He sounded surprised.

"Frank?"

"Hello, Wednesday. What's up?"

"Oh, nothing," she said tiredly. "Just, I couldn't sleep. Bad thoughts. You mentioned a bar. Is it, like, too late for you?"

A pause. "No, not too late. You want to meet up now?"

Her turn to pause. "Yeah. If you want."

"Well, we could meet at—"

"Can you come round here?" she asked impulsively. "I don't want to go out on my own."

"Uh-huh." He sounded amused. "Okay, I'll be round in about ten minutes."

She cut the call. "Gods and pests!" She looked around at the discarded clothes, suddenly realizing that she was naked and what it must look like.

"Damn! damn!" She bounced to her feet and grabbed her leggings and top.

She paused for a moment, then wrapped the sarong around her waist, dialed her jacket to a many-layered lacy thing, threw the other stuff in the closet for sorting out later, and ran back to the bathroom to dial the lights up. "My hair!" It was a mess. "Well, what the fuck. I'm not planning on dragging him into bed, am I?" She stuck her tongue out at the mirror, then went to work on the wet bar in the corner of the main room.

When he arrived Frank was carrying a bag. He put it down on the carpet as he looked around, bemused. "You said your friends were paying, but this is ridiculous," he rumbled.

"It is, isn't it?" She looked up at him, challenging.

He grinned, then stifled a yawn. "I guess so." He nudged the bag with his foot. "You said you didn't want to go out so I bought some stuff along just in case—" Suddenly he looked awkward.

"That's okay." She took his arm and dragged him over to the huge floppy sofa that filled one side of the main room. "What you got in there?"

He pulled out a bottle. "Sambuca. From Bolivar. And, let's see, a genuine single malt from Speyside. That's on Old Earth, you know. And here's a disgusting chocolate liqueur from somewhere about which the less said the better. Got any glasses?"

"Yep." She walked over to the bar and came back with glasses and a jug of ice. She sat down cross-legged at the other side of the sofa and poured a glassful of chocolate liqueur for herself, pretending not to notice Frank's mock shudder. "You weren't at dinner."

"Those fake formal feast clusterfucks don't do anything for me," he announced. "They're there to make the rich passengers think they're getting a valuable service—more valuable than traveling deadhead in steerage, anyway. I guess if you do business or are in shipping, you can make a lot of contacts that way, but in general the kind of people I'd like to talk to over a meal don't travel by liner." He looked at her sharply. "Enjoy yourself?"

She nearly took the question at face value, although his tone suggested irony. "I nearly threw up in a plant pot after making a fool of myself." She winced. "She asked for it, though."

"Who did?" Frank raised his glass: "Your health."

"Bottoms up. Poisonous toy bitch kept going on about how great being ReMastered was—" She stopped. Frank looked stricken. "Did I say something wrong?" she asked.

"Was she a blonde? Head half-shaved at one side to show off a tattoo?"

Wednesday stared at him through a haze of conflicting emotions. "Yes,"

she said. "Why?"

He put his glass down, rattling on the tabletop. "You could have been killed," he said shakily.

"What do you—" She leaned toward him. "You said they run Newpeace.

Concentration camps, secret police shit. Do you think they're that dangerous here, though?"

"They're dangerous everywhere!" Frank straightened up and picked up his glass, took a hefty mouthful, and coughed for a while. "Never, never, push a Re-Mastered button. Please? Tell me you won't do it again?"

"I was drunk." Wednesday flushed. His concern was immediate and clear, cutting through the fog of worry. "Hey, I'm not crazy."

"Not crazy." He chuckled edgily. "Is that why you didn't want to go out on your own?"

"No. Yes." She peered at him, wondering why she trusted him. Alone with a gorilla after midnight and he wonders if I'm crazy? "I don't know. Should I?"

"You should always know why you do things," Frank said seriously.

"Inviting strange men for a late-night drink, for example." He picked up the liqueur bottle. "Want a refill? Or should I fuck off now before we both end up with hangovers tomorrow?"

She pushed her glass toward him. "Stay," she said impulsively. "I feel safer while you're around. Couldn't sleep, anyway." A faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. "Do you think I'm crazy?"

Aas days passed the boredom subsided somewhat. She'd stayed in her room for the whole of the next day, playing with the ship's extensive games library, but most of the other online players were old hands who had forgotten more about strategy than the entire Magna tournament team.

After a while she ventured out, first to see if there really wasn't anything she could find to wear, then to visit a public bar with Frank. Who introduced her to fresh zero-gee farmed seafood and single malts. Then she'd spent some time with Steffi, who had hastily introduced her to her old friend Sven the clown and made her excuses. Sven, it turned out, also knew Frank: it was a small world aboard ship.

"So what's the thing with the face paint about?" she asked Svengali, one late-shift afternoon.

The clown frowned thoughtfully. "Think caricature. Think parody. Think emphasis on nonverbal communications cues, okay? If this was a virtual, I'd be an avatar with a homunculus-shaped head and body, bright blue nose, and huge kawaii eyes. But it isn't, and I'm not a surgical basket case, so you have to settle for programmable grease. It's amazing what it can do to someone's perception of you—you'd be really surprised."

"Probably." Wednesday took a swig from her glass—something fluorescent green, with red bubbles in it, and about the same alcohol concentration as a strong beer—and pointed at his jacket. "But the double seam—"

"Not going to leave me any tricks, are you?" Svengali sighed.

"No," Wednesday agreed, and the clown pulled a ferocious face. "You're very good at this," she said, trying to be conciliatory. "Does it pay a lot?"

"It pays"—Svengali caught himself—"hey, that's enough about me. Why don't we talk about you, for a change?"

"Uh-huh, you don't get off the hook that easily." Wednesday grinned.

"Yeah, well, it gets hard when the audience is old enough to look behind the mirror. Mutter—"

"What?"

Svengali reached toward her head fast, then pulled his hand back to reveal a butterfly fluttering white-and-blue wings inside the cage of his fingers: "—hear me better, now? Or, oh dear, did I just disconnect your brain?" He stared at the butterfly thoughtfully, then blew on it, transforming it into a white mouse.

"Wow," said Wednesday sarcastically. "That was really convincing."

"Really? Hold out your hand."

Wednesday held out her hand, slightly reluctantly, and Svengali released the mouse. "Hey, it's real!" The mouse, terrified, demonstrated precisely how real it was with a highly accurate rendition of poor bladder control. "Ick.

Is that—"

"Yes." Before she could drop it, Svengali picked it up by its tail and hid it in his cupped hands. When he opened them a moment later, a butterfly fluttered away.

"Wow!" Wednesday did a little double take, then frowned at her hand. "Uh.

s'cuse me.

"Take your time," Svengali said magnanimously, leaning back in his chair as she hastily stood up and vanished toward the nearest restroom. His smile widened. "Homing override on," he told the air in front of him. "Return to base." The butterfly/mouse 'bot was stowed carefully away in the small case in his pocket long before she returned.

"Are you going to tell me how you did that?"

"Nope."

"Lawyer!"

"Am not." Svengali crossed his arms stubbornly. "Now you tell me how you did that."

"What, this?" Her face slowly brightened from turquoise to sky-blue.

"Yeah, that's pretty good."

"Programmable cosmetic chromatophores." Her face faded back toward its normal color, except for a touch of ruby on her lips and midnight blue lining on her eyelids. "I had them installed when we moved to Magna."

"Uh-huh. Want to take a walk?" asked Svengali, seeing that her glass was nearly empty.

"Hmm." She stared at him, then grinned again. "Trying not to let me get too drunk?"

"It's my job to look after passengers, not line the sick-bay's pockets. We can come back for another drink later."

"Okay." She was on her feet. "Where to?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said carelessly. "Let's just walk. Have you explored the ship yet?"

Her grin widened. "That would be telling."

Gods, but she's sharp, he told himself. If she's got the stomach for it, she might even make it in my field. "You're right—this job doesn't pay nearly enough," he grumbled. "I'm supposed to keep you all amused, not be the amusement myself. They should have put an upper age limit on the clientele. Big kids, all of you." They were already out in the corridor, another high-class hotel passage with sound-deadening carpet, expensively carved wooden paneling, and indirect lights shining on brightly meaningless abstract art installations every few meters. "Nine days. I hate to think what you're like when you're bored."