The Academy (13 page)

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Rebecca said, punching mute and turning to face him again, “but you kinda lost your shit there for a minute. I don’t need you destroying my bed and my couch in the same day. You disintegrated that thing on a molecular level, you little bastard.”

“Sorry,” Alex muttered, obscurely embarrassed. “Guess I’ve been kind of a headache today, huh?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s my job.” Rebecca smirked at him. “Though I guess I should warn you that if you make a habit of destroying girl’s beds, then you’re going to have trouble scoring invites in the future.”

Alex rolled his eyes.

“So, what’s that,” Alex paused, shuddering slightly at the memory, “that thing inside me, Rebecca? The Black Door, or whatever you called it?”

“Not whatever. That’s what it is, Alex. It’s a big fucking Black Door in your head. I suggest that you try not to think about it too much. Sometime when I’m feeling better, I can do a better job of explaining your situation.”

She looked at Alex with something that looked suspiciously like pity, and for some reason, it bothered him.

“Okay, so, what does that –?”

Rebecca put one finger up to his lips without even looking, her eyes already glued to the television, her other hand hunting for the mute button on the remote.

“Shh. Survivor.”

Alex tried to watch in resentful silence, but he was too comfortable, Rebecca was too easy to be around, or maybe he was a little stoned, after all. He found himself raptly watching a bunch of strangers plot, scheme and preen for the cameras, and wondered how long it had been since he’d last watched television.

“Alex,” Rebecca said quietly, still staring at the TV, “it’s probably going to be hard on you, you know? Up until now people have treated you like you didn’t exist, or like they wished you didn’t. Now everyone will know who you are before they meet you, and they’ll probably be extra nice to you, but you’ll always have to wonder about their intentions. How does that make you feel?”

“As long as I can get a date out of it,” Alex said with a sheepish smile, “I’m cool.”

Rebecca gave him an amused looked, and then rolled her eyes.

“Boys. Hush,” she said. “TV show.”

“Director,
I must object. An Inquiry? Is all of this truly necessary? As I recall, my only crime was rescuing a boy who is now a student here, along with one of your Operators.”

“The Inquiry was deemed necessary because your answers, on the face of it, appear evasive, Mr. North. You must understand that though your motivations may be pure, the explanation you’ve provided for your proximity to the incident strains credulity.”

Mr. North crossed his legs and looked thoughtfully at Gaul.

“And yet here we are. Director, you should know by my reputation that if I wanted to deceive you, I would have at least concocted a believable story,” North offered reasonably. Gaul had only met him a few times before, at various Hegemony events where his attendance was expected; he’d thought him to be reserved and observant, but Rebecca told him that if you actually got him to talk that he was a bore. After an hour talking in circles with the somberly dressed man, he was inclined to agree. “That I simply happened to be in the area on personal business may be a wildly unlikely coincidence, but it is a coincidence that saved one of your people’s lives. What more can I offer you?”

“And the nature of the business?” Gaul asked doggedly.

“Personal, and private, and, as judged by the Committee-at-Large, nothing that I must disclose to you, having already done so to a panel of my peers.”

“You are putting me in a position, Mr. North,” Gaul said carefully, “where my only option to compel your cooperation would be to expand the scope of a potential Audit of the matter to include your private business.”

“If you feel that you must do so, then by all means Director, by all means. That I refuse to disclose private matters does not mean that I have something to hide. If you instigate an Audit into this matter, then I will be forced to lodge a complaint, and you will be called before the Committee to explain your rationale. Tell me, sir,” North said pointedly, “which part of my actions in this affair do you feel jeopardized the safety of Central, or violated a tenant of the Agreement?”

Gaul tried a cold, long silence, but Mr. North seemed unperturbed. Eventually, Gaul sighed, shuffled his papers, and moved on. Even the mention of the Committee-at-Large, Central’s own representative body and the theoretical counterweight to his own authority as Director, irked him to no end. Gaul approved of democracy, at least in theory, but only when it cooperated with him, something the Committee had never been willing to do.

“Tell me about the Weir, then.”

“Had no idea they would be there,” Mr. North said, brushing his dark brown hair back from his forehead and looking huffy. “Never would have suspected such a thing, and in such a pitiful backwater, no less.”

“And the silver Weir, Mr. North?”

“Terrifying creature,” North said sincerely, leaning forward as he spoke, “absolutely terrifying. I had thought it dead, of course, after your Operator, Aoki wasn’t it? After she shot the thing in the head, I assumed that it had been killed. I had dealt with most of the rest of the pack when the thing pulled itself up out of the mud, howled and then ran off to who-knows-where, before I could stop it.” North paused and looked contemplative. “Pity,” he said, after a brief hesitation, “the beast had a magnificent pelt. It would have made quite the trophy.”

Gaul fixed the man with his best unsettling stare. He’d actually practiced it, after reading a book on human psychology that discussed conversational gambits, and had found it quite effective on the Academy staff. It failed, however, to invoke a reaction of any kind in Mr. North’s regular, placid face.

“Have you ever encountered one previously?” Gaul asked, hoping that he didn’t sound as tired as he felt. “A silver Weir, I mean?”

Mr. North scratched his head and then offered Gaul the faintest ghost of a smile.

“Odd that you should mention it, Director,” he said, looking vaguely interested for the first time since Gaul had met him, “but you are the second person to ask me that question recently. The first, since you are certain to ask, was Mr. Cruces, head of the Terrie Cartel’s operations in Asia. He asked me at the last Hegemony Executive Committee meeting,” North said, squinting with the effort of remembering. “I believe it was as an aside to anecdotes being shared regarding the Weir hill tribes. He felt strongly, as I recall, that the silver breed were not as rare as was generally thought, and that in some regions, particularly Cambodia and Vietnam, that they could still be found if you looked hard enough. I thought it odd, at the time, when he asked me if I had seen one. I got the distinct impression that he had seen one, and recently, from the way he talked about it.”

Gaul tried to digest the information, and then decided that he couldn’t stomach it. He felt like he was being fed something, and he’d never liked handouts. Still, he didn’t think that he would get any more out of North, even if he decided to push him again, so he elected against trying. He changed subjects.

“Mr. North, investigating these incidents would proceed more smoothly and, I might add, impede on your time and liberty less, were the Committee-at-Large to approve the candidates the Board submitted for the vacant Auditor positions over the last two years,” Gaul said carefully, shuffling the papers on his desk into completed and incomplete piles. “I would hope that this experience would color your thinking on the subject.”

Mr. North smiled his faint replica of a smile and folded his hands before he spoke. Gaul knew what he was going to say before he started. Rebecca was right, he thought, exasperated, the man was simply boring.

“I believe that I speak for the Committee-at-Large when I say that we would be happy to expedite approval of the candidates for the vacancies in Audits if you would be willing to review our proposal to expand the selection process for Audits personnel, Director,” North offered mildly.

“You are referring to the proposal in which we add two more Auditors, selected by the Committee-at-Large rather than the Board?”

“The very same. Surely it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement, yes? You said yourself you need more Auditors, Director.”

“An Auditor a piece for the Hegemony and the Black Sun, then?” Gaul said darkly, pausing in his paperwork to fix North with another practiced glare that was wasted on him. “That defeats the purpose of the Auditors in the first place. They are meant to be impartial, Mr. North.”

“I resent the implication that the Committee-at-Large is not capable of making an impartial selection,” Mr. North said, not looking like he resented much of anything. “On the contrary, some might be moved to call the Board less than impartial when it comes to approving your own recommendations. After all,” Mr. North continued blithely, as if he were reading the weather report, ignoring Gaul’s stormy expression, “you have managed to get two of your Auditors onto the Board itself, sir! Certainly, that is a violation of the spirit of the Agreement, if not the letter.”

Gaul held on to the glare a moment longer, and then gave up on it, helpless in the face of total apathy.

“I must say, Mr. North, that you are either an exceptionally dangerous bureaucrat or a surprisingly genteel Operator,” Gaul admitted reluctantly, returning to his paperwork.

Mr. North gave him a short, ambiguous nod, then stood up part way.

“A compliment, surely. I take it, then, that you won’t need anything further from me?”

Gaul glanced up, pen poised above the document laid out in front of him.

“Not at the moment, no,” Gaul said, looking back down at the paperwork. “You may inform the rest of the Committee-at-Large that I will consider their proposal. Please keep yourself available for potential future inquiries in this matter, Mr. North.”

Mr. North nodded again and turned for the door.

“Certainly,” he said, pausing with his hand on the door knob. “But if I may ask, Director – I was wondering about the boy. He is named Alexander Warner, if my sources are correct. I have heard that he shows some promise, and a rather unique protocol. You never told me, sir, if he turned out to be worth all the trouble.”

Gaul didn’t even look up from the document he was annotating.

“No, Mr. North. No, I did not.”

--

Traffic was light on Market Street for a weekday; the last time Mitsuru had been in San Francisco, there had been talk about banning cars on Market, and until she was passed by a battered white Dodge van turning onto Spear Street, she suspected they might have done it.

The sidewalks were moderately crowded; it was late enough in the afternoon that the luckiest of the office workers had managed to sneak out early, and they plowed eagerly through groups of tourists and teenagers on summer break on their way to the train station. The sun was bright above the Embarcadero, the clock tower of the gleaming white Port Building also considerably changed since the last time Mitsuru had seen it.

Mitsuru moved with the crowd, along Market and then across the wide pavilion that adjoined the Embarcadero, picking her way through crowds of shoppers from the nearby farmer’s market and clusters of shirtless skateboarders. It was warm, and it felt good to her to be out in the sunlight – something she had taken for granted, once. She had new priorities, these days.

At the edge of the municipal railroad tracks she reversed herself, heading back toward Justin Herman Plaza, with the strange, dry fountain at the far end, which Alistair claimed had been built by a donation from Enron. Mitsuru doubted it, but Alistair often knew strange things like that. For a moment, she considered reaching through the uplink for the answer, but then she remembered that she was on mission, and therefore rigged for monitoring. Not a good idea to let her mind drift, then, given how hard a look Central had been giving her operational logs, in light of her application to Audits.