Kelley Eskridge (23 page)

“I haven't really thought about it.”

Crichton leaned back in her chair. “So
it's a year from now and you're at a party and someone says, nice to
meet you, what do you do? And you say—what? I used to kill people for
political reasons, but I gave it up a while back.”

“What difference does it make what I do
next?” Jackal said abruptly.

“None.” Crichton smiled. “Identity is an
illusion that brings comfort to the struggling mind.” And added, “It's
not polite to be too surprised.”

“I didn't mean to look surprised,” Jackal
said as convincingly as she could. “I don't know much of Chang's work,
but I recognize that one. Have you read—”

She stopped herself.

No
one here is your friend
. She was too tired to affiliate, and
she doubted that Crichton really cared. In another life she would have
jumped at the chance to talk more about Chang Yijao's theories of the
social politics of waning cultures; she might have learned something,
and it would have been fun. She wondered if there was any fun left in
the world for her.

She came back from her brief reverie to
Crichton's red gaze on her face. Right now Crichton was the world,
pushing at Jackal, waiting for an answer. But there were no answers,
only hard questions. The blessed cool distance that Jackal had
preserved throughout the day was collapsing under the pressure of all
those questions waiting to present themselves. Any moment now the
wreckage of her life would burst through the protective bubble she'd
created, and she would have to start thinking about all the answers she
didn't have.

Crichton asked abruptly, “Why didn't you
sign the contract?”

That one she could answer. “I haven't read
it yet.”

“Everyone else signed it.”

“Well, I didn't.”

“You have a better offer?” Crichton asked,
and it was a clear challenge.

There was no point getting angry, but
Jackal couldn't help it, anymore than she could help her fatigue or the
fear that was lurking just outside her shrinking composure. “I didn't
sign the contract because ever since I got out of VC I haven't been
able to give a damn what happens to me, and that tells me that I'm too
tired and too scared to be anything but stupid.” She began to shake;
the bubble was bulging now, almost ready to rupture and let in all the
unimaginable truths. “I don't have any room left to be stupid. So I
have, what, about another ninety hours according to contract law. I'll
get through whatever I have to with you and find a place where I can
sleep for ten solid hours and then I'll decide about the goddamn
contract. Gordineau asked me how I would live and I told her I don't
know, but I'm still going to read it and I still don't know if I'm
going to sign or not. If you have a problem with that, tough. It's one
of the few fucking rights I have left.”

“I see,” Crichton said, less ferociously.
“So it would solve all your problems if you had an interest-bearing NNA
Central Bank credit account with a sizeable balance.”

“Well, it would be a good start,” Jackal
retorted, still angry. And then, two beats later: “Are you…do I?”

Crichton named a figure that stunned
Jackal into silence because it was probably enough for years of careful
life.

“Are you sure it's mine?” she asked
finally. And then, “Where did it come from?”

“The original deposit was wired into the
NNA by Magister Asiae Bank in Hong Kong. Any theories?”

The bubble rent apart with a force so
explosive that Jackal was sure it must be audible; she half-expected
Crichton to ask

what was that
?
while Jackal's carefully constructed detachment imploded. She looked
up, hoping her shock didn't show. Crichton's red eyes studied her,
waiting, and Jackal remembered Neill saying
truth
is a tool
.

She answered honestly, but not completely:
“Someone from Ko. Magister is one of Ko's primary financial partners in
the Asia-Pacific region.”

“So you have a friend.”

“It looks that way. I'm surprised. And
grateful.” Which was true, in a pathetic way: she was grateful that
Arsenault had lived up to the agreement made all those years—no, she
kicked herself mentally, those few months ago. Rafe had told her,

Don't underestimate the value of some
hope of
assistance on the back end of all this
. She'd had no hope at
all, and now, pitiably, she wanted to think of Ko as still honorable
because they had given her some. That was followed by a fierce longing
to get back inside her own head, back to VC-Ko, even if she had to be
alone to go there. Maybe especially if she had to be alone; so safe,
the bare beach, the empty plazas, the open cloudless sky…

“What is it?”

She came back to the weight of Crichton's
red regard, heavier now that Jackal's safe shell was blown away.

Nothing I can tell you
. So she
only
bit
her lip and said, “I wish things were different.” All the long hours
fell over her like a thick blanket; she hadn't realized how tired she
was. Rapid-onset fatigue, the doctor had said.

Crichton watched for another moment and
then rooted through an open box on the desk and produced a palmtop with
a stuck-on label that read

Segura, Ren
followed by an alphanumeric string. Jackal took it: it turned out to be
a cheap Ural State knockoff with a limited battery life.

Crichton said, “Courtesy of the NNA. It
wipes itself in a week. Get your own before then and transfer all the
preference settings. Bring that one back to your first parole meeting.
The palmtop includes an auto reminder for your parole appointments,
second Tuesday of every month, eleven

A.M.
sharp.
That's less than two weeks from now, make sure you put it on your
calendar. Anything more than ten minutes late is grounds for immediate
arrest. My office brick and e-mail addresses are stored in the palmtop;
you have three days from today to report a permanent residence address
to me with a verification e-mail address for the landlord. Failure to
report residence is grounds for immediate arrest. Your datagem accesses
your credit account and you can download the information anytime into
your palmtop, make sure you get one with a reader. Don't overdraw your
account under any circumstances. Indigents are subject to immediate
arrest. Any questions so far?”

Jackal shook her head.

“Good. The basic theme is immediate
arrest, so don't screw up. Here's list of rentals that accept convicted
criminals as tenants. Not everyone does. You try the one on Perdue
Street, the ShangriLa. The manager will probably say he doesn't have
anything available. You tell him Crichton asked how his mama is doing.
Hah. See what happens then.”

“I—”

“You have a problem taking advice from me?”

“No. No. Sure, I can try to find it.”

Crichton gave her a sharp look as she put
the file folder on a different pile. “Do it or don't do it, no tears
from my eyes either way. You're entitled to one free session with a VC
counselor, do you want it?”

Jackal blurted, “God, no.”

“No one ever does. Get to my office on
time for your appointments or find yourself in a real prison for a
change. That's all. The guard outside will tell you where to go.”

Jackal wanted to say,

Why
are you angry with me
, or
I don't
know what to do
, or
I'm afraid
.
But Crichton had already closed up her face and turned away. The chat
was over.

The guard pointed her to a processing area
where a clerk gave her a plastic-wrapped parcel of the clothes and
boots she'd worn for her transfer to VC. She was surprised to see them.
They didn't seem like hers anymore.

The clerk pointed her to a changing
cubicle and stared at her through the gaps in the curtain. It seemed to
take a long time to get dressed. Back at the counter, she thumb-printed
a handful of screens and signed her name electronically seven times.
Then she waited until the clerk said dismissively, “You're done.
There's the door.”

She began to turn and the man said, “Well,
take this with you,” and pushed over her palmtop. “Bunch of fuckin'
zombies,” he said, and someone else laughed, but she didn't care. She
almost agreed with him. Sleep seemed a remote imagining, something she
had perhaps done once a long time ago. She understood that her body
would struggle on until it could not function anymore; then in the
simple way of machines it would stop working, and she would tumble
wherever she was into a heap of broken parts until someone came to
repair or dismantle her.

She let the body-machine carry her through
the heavy steelplated door that, without warning, dumped her onto the
street and into a current of people that whirled her in a rush of color
and noise and smell off to her left. For the first moments, she saw
only an enormous blur; then the jumbled images coalesced into buildings
streaked with grease and graffiti, people on crowded stoops, and more
people in open windows, as far up as she could see, until their shapes
were lost in the shadows that the giant structures cast on each other.
It was cold: she'd worked out during the endless waiting of the day
that it must be roughly late October, and she'd expected the weather to
be warm, like home. But she wasn't home anymore.

Voices echoed in layers from the street to
the sky; the noise spun around her as she stumbled along the edge of
the crowd, close to the road that was packed with mass transport,
commercial carriers, private cars, and even a few people on
battery-powered scooters, small and vulnerable among the heavy traffic.
The air was gray with industrial fumes, and many of the people on foot
wore filter masks. The rest trudged barefaced through the smoke,
gasping or wiping their eyes; many of them coughed openmouthed, as if
it were such an habitual reflex that they no longer noticed they were
spreading spit. Jackal thought of disease vectors, and tried to turn
her face whenever someone passed close by.

She saw a young man and woman who even to
her untrained eye were obviously misplaced tourists. Their clothes gave
them away: much too trendy, the sort of thing that suburban people who
read too many fashion magazines thought city people would wear. Jackal
had seen others like these on the streets of Hong Kong, in the terraces
of Mirabile, on the playas of Madrid. These two looked young and
uneasy; their body language broadcast

lost
and
afraid
, and the street noticed.
Already they were drawing a crowd of hustlers, and kids who yelled
hey lady let me carry ya bag
! and then
dashed away, hooting. Up ahead, a group of young men all wearing red
berets and matching earrings swiveled as a unit, scanned the crowd, and
drifted back toward the disturbance and the two bewildered people at
its center. Jackal checked her body language, tried to walk straight
and loose, to relax her face and remove herself from the scene. She
passed the tense young man, the tight-lipped woman, the cluster of red
hats and flat, interested eyes without a sideways glance or a flutter
in her pulse rate, and she tried not to hear as the trouble started
behind her.

Now what? Which way? Around her, the
buildings rose up and up, and the voices echoed, and then the sound
receded like slow water down a drain, and she was shivering against a
pillar of some cold stone, lost and too tired to find herself. The
slow-swimming schools of people eddied along the sidewalk, ignoring her
for the moment, but she thought of the tourists and knew she could not
afford to be still. The shadows were longer on the sidewalk, and she
had to be somewhere safer than this before dark. She took a deep breath
and rapped her head back against the stone behind her, hard enough to
jar what was left of her brain against her skull; it hurt, but it
didn't help. A block away, the red hats moved in her direction.

“Do you require assistance?” the pillar
said.

She blinked. The pillar repeated its
question in a pleasant mechanical voice.

“Um,” she said. “I'm lost?”

“State your destination.”

“Perdue Street, Shangri-La Apartments.”

The pillar told her that a map would print
out at the port on its other side; that she was required to recycle the
paper upon reach ing her destination; that failure to comply was
grounds for a stiff penalty; and that it had been a pleasure serving
her. The map told her that Perdue Street was two kilometers away. You
can make it, she told herself; she whispered it all the way there.

13

THE MANAGER OF THE SHANGRI-LA SPIT
ON THE STEP
two inches from Jackal's right boot when he heard
Crichton's message, but he gave her an apartment, less dismal than she
expected—four tiny rooms in the back of the building, with a few pieces
of worn furniture and a small window in the main room from which she
could see slices of the several canals that cross-hatched this part of
the city. They were industrial canals, thoroughfares for barges,
bounded by maglev train rails and huge crossdocking warehouses, and
constantly busy with the roaring backspin of diesel engines and the
bossy busy tooting of the tugboats that shoved the big vessels around
like small dogs herding sleepy hippos. When it rained, she imagined,
the window would run red and green and white with the reflected lights
of the barges and the harsh halogen spotlights of NNA customs boats.

He cleared the front door and apartment
door locks so that she could set her thumbprint and access code; then
he accepted a credit transfer of three months' rent and a hefty
security deposit. Jackal didn't argue; she added something extra, “for
your trouble.”

He snorted; and he took it, nodding once
at the amount. Then he told her, “This one's only open because the
tenant died day before yesterday, some kind of wicked infection.” He
said it with a sideways look of nasty hope, as if she might flap her
hands in horror and change her mind. She didn't she smiled and closed
the door in his face, locked it all three ways, wiggled into the most
comfortable position she could find on the sprung couch, and fell
immediately asleep.