Undertow (12 page)

But a few tenths of a percent, a difference almost indistinguishable from experimental error.

It was just that little bit of an edge that let one species thrive when another one perished. Black wings on a should-be-white moth, concealing it against a soot-blackened tree.

The practical application of quantum engineering made it replicable. The technological outgrowth of mojo satchels and washing the car to make it rain. A bit more than an
edge,
these days. Call it a necessity, rather.

People with both the knack for being lucky and the courage to do it right were not, in Jean’s experience, common. And they were often opportunists, because their gifts made it possible for them to do very well by living on their wits.

A certain moral flexibility had needed to be shocked out of Jean as well, when he was young.

André Deschênes might do. And if he couldn’t be salvaged, well, Jean couldn’t exactly leave him wherever he fell. But he’d execute that problem when it became unavoidable.

In the meantime, he had a frog to catch.

After André left, Jean pulled his boots on again. The leftover wax fruit went into the cooler; the peelings into Lucienne’s…into Cricket’s compost bucket under the sink. If he felt up to it, he’d turn the pile over for her tonight, aerate the rot. It was what he was good for.

The boots sealed over his pantlegs, he made sure he had a light, slung his hip pack around his waist, and locked the door behind him. He’d have been three times through the swamp from sunset to sunset, but twenty years wasn’t enough to make him a real creature of the bayou. There were men and women who’d grown up here, who could vanish among the reeds without a ripple, soft as a ranid slipping underwater. Jean knew a few: Old Mike, Sally Feathers. Both born when Greene’s World was the sort of place you went to lose the records, both stubborn and self-reliant enough that their names were what they said they were, that they’d never nursed on the crystal teat of a reality skin.

Greene’s World was
still
a new enough planet that folks mostly knew each other, and still a wild enough planet that they mostly stayed out of each other’s way. Outside of Novo Haven, anyway, where the corporate boys played politics and pretended that instantaneous communication meant they had any idea what was going on in the Core, or any influence that was heard there.

A delusion, Jean admitted with a rueful shake of his head, he was prey to himself.

Reeds cracked where he stepped, the spongy ground oozing water. The sky over the bay was streaked in seashell colors—coral, salmon, dusky clouds like the indigo lip of a mussel shell—by the time he reached the distributary nearest to his minifab, the one where the ranids came to talk.

He crouched on the riverbank, folded his arms across his knees, and waited. When the evening star—technically, the planet Endymion—shimmered ice-white on the horizon and the last pearlescent light was draining down the darkening sky, a gleaming dart-shape broke the water. One ring of ripple heralded the ranid’s arrival, so faint it smoothed before it reached the reeds.

Jean dabbed at the water. His ripples passed over where the ranid’s had been, flowing in the opposite direction, and lapped its skin below the eyes. The eyes—great light-gathering half-orbs—blinked. One stem-fingered, four-digited hand reached above the surface, the fingertip pads slightly enlarged, sticky.

Jean reached slowly to lay his waterproof wrist slate in the ranid’s grasp. It did not flinch, but rose from the water as if drawn to an anchor. The hand rotated as the eyes came level, both swiveling forward so binocular vision focused on the face of the slate. The other hand emerged from the water as the ranid climbed the bank, crouching between angled knees, its pale ridged throat swelling.

Jean did not hear what it said, but he felt it, the low-frequency words shivering his nape hairs. The ranid was deft with the slate; more literate and practiced than Jean. He thought it might even be the one called “Gourami” by humans who could not replicate its given name.

He waited until it was looking at his mouth. If this was the liaison, it could lipread. “I’m Jean Kroc,” he said. “I think we met last night.”

The ranid bobbed one fingertip, pausing in what it was doing with the slate. —
Yes
.

It was Gourami, then. He fumbled in his hip pack. The ranid didn’t draw back, but waited, curious and impassive, while another star or two slipped out of the twilight. “I have something for you,” he said, careful to lift his chin and shape the words formally. He might just have mouthed them, but it seemed to help it lipread if he put the voice behind them.

Again the pulling gesture, one finger raking the words in.

“Mojo,” he answered. His hand closed on the box, protective cling-sheeting adhering to his skin. Plastics, of all things, were imported to Greene’s World. Petroleum was mined here but there was no significant manufacturing.

He pulled the box from the pack, extended his arm, and opened up his hand. Palm skyward, fingers cupped slightly, offering the plastic-wrapped object to Gourami.

It was not a gesture a ranid could make. Their arms did not rotate at the elbow.

Carefully, Gourami lifted the box from his palm. Still holding the slate, it untwisted the plastic and peeled it back, but stopped before lifting the lid of the box. Its head and shoulders canted back slightly. It wrote a word and turned the slate. —
Mojo?

“Luck,” he answered. The ranids knew about luck, although Jean could never hope to duplicate their word for it. The sounds of their language echoed through an expanded throat that served as bellows, sounding board, and voice-box all in one, and were meant to be heard through bone conduction and the vibrations of water or air on skin and tympanic membrane, not by a mammal’s seashell external ear. They knew about all sorts of things; theirs was not a material culture, but in their physical abilities made up for it. They could communicate across half a world, read each other’s physical health with pulses of ultrasound. They could build fires, forge metal if it moved them, though the activity was even more risky than it might be for a human; a ranid could not afford to dry out too much, or too often. They built their blast furnaces on rocky beaches, and tended them during short dashes up from the waves.

—
Thank you,
Gourami said, and folded the plastic back into place. It did not care to commit, Jean understood.

“You’re welcome.” Jean leaned forward, strengthening the connection with the ranid, but careful not to make eye contact. He did not wish it to feel coerced. “I’m going to bring a man to you tomorrow. He’ll go with you upriver. Protect you.”

—
Safer in the swamp
.

“You’ll be in the swamp. He’ll stay in the swamp with you.”

—
Humen are easy to track
.

“It will be all right. He’s being paid to kill you, Gourami. If they think he is chasing you, nobody else will come after.”

The ranid’s fingers didn’t twitch on the slate. They didn’t have to. Its stolid froggy regard was enough. The ranid thought it would be safer in the swamp with the savages, trading in its web belt and company housing and advanced medical care and access to connex—all the benefits of Rim technology that the ranids worked for—in return for belts of shells and pearl-and-carnelian necklaces and stories murmured in reedy backwaters through jaws that need not move to make words.

Jean let his lips pull askew, aware the expression would mean nothing to the ranid. He hunkered lower, dropped his chin against his chest. “It’s not for you,” he said. “It’s for him.” He paused; the next was hard to say. “And for Lucienne.”

The argument with Caetei took longer than the one with Jean Kroc, despite the awkwardness of communicating with the human. But humen were manageable; all Gourami had to do was keep saying no. Whereas arguing with Caetei was like arguing with the tide. And there was the small matter of Gourami owing se self’s life.

—
They killed se mate,
Caetei finally said. Which was unfair because Gourami had brought back her body, and owed weal to the human’s band. Which meant, se guessed, in humen terms, her mate, her children, if she had any. Her siblings, though se wasn’t sure how much store humen set by siblings. Their reproductive system was so
invested,
it made everything about their biology and society peculiar, locked up, committed.

A humen mate…Gourami flexed fingers in the muddy channel bottom, where se and Caetei had retired to argue. It would be like having only one endosib, se thought.

What a terrible thing to lose.

Se came back up through the water and found the human sitting cross-legged on the reedy bank, reading something on a paper book he’d folded back on itself. Stories. Humen stories, Gourami thought, mouth watering.

Se lifted a hand from the water, catching the human’s eye. He looked up from the book quickly, and se thought he held his breath. At least the rushy rasping sound it made through his air passages halted. He dropped his hands into his lap.

—
Yes,
Gourami gestured.

And the human closed his eyes.

7

HUMEN WERE TERRIBLY STRANGE. THIS WAS NOT A REVELATION.

Not just strange because they came in all sorts of pigments, but very few patterns—unless one counted the rather bland, irregular melanistic speckles displayed by a few of them. Nor strange because of their stubby supernumerary fingers, their long bodies and stubby legs, their habit of walking upright on short curved feet with almost atrophied fingers. Not even strange because they were endothermic from birth, inefficient though that seemed for a large terrene animal without any particular evolutionary strategy for coping with extremes of climate, so that even in temperate areas they hung themselves in insulating layers or smeared lotions on their hide to protect it from sunlight.

The mammals that Gourami was familiar with were small dense-furred darting things, prey to reaverbirds and redcaps. But humen were big—mostly bigger than a person, although they had a tremendous dimorphism between their reproductive subcategories, so that some of the small ones were about Gourami’s size and some of the big ones more than twice as big as anything but a great-parent—and Gourami understood, from talking with some of the friendlier ones, that on their home-world there were even bigger mammals. Some bigger than a full-grown nessie, which was the biggest living thing Gourami had personally seen.

This particular human was a large one, though not the biggest. His name, according to the humen liaison who had pleaded Gourami’s help, was André Deschênes. And despite Jean Kroc’s warning that he would be helpless, he paddled better than Gourami had dared beg luck.

Gourami was not in the skiff with André. The humen had sky-eyes, things that saw as well as any winged predator, and anyway se preferred to glide in the skiff’s shadow, directing from below. Se had rid self of every bit of Rim equipment; se slate and the other accoutrements of se trade were slagged—carried off by friends or new allies in three directions and scorched over fire. Se would not trade them; humen technology had tracking devices in it, their equivalent of the air-filled metal tongue-bell roped to the harpoon one hunted greatfish with, so that one could swim down the wounded animal by sound. Any person to whom se offered the devices would have been at risk. Se had strapped in place only a knife, a slate of the sort intended for humen offspring, se belt and carrybag, and a (cocked, locked) harpoon crossbow with five extra quarrels.

Se was a “civilized” person, having metamorphosed near Novo Haven and been around humen all se life. Se had never been without their toys and shelters before, and se kept stroking the crossbow for reassurance. If the worst happened, at least se could shoot something.

Se mottles were back to a skin-plain pattern, however, which was comforting. Se had been a little worried se would be green for half the season. It had faded with a gelpaper Caetei had given se; one that Gourami had let dissolve on se tongue, because se did not care to stay out of water long enough to adhere it to se shoulder until it melted in the mucus. So se had chosen to ingest it, though that seemed an oddly reptilian way to consume medication when one was still perfectly fit, and permeable.

The water was too fresh. Persons had euryhaline tendencies, able to tolerate ocean or river water, or the brackish regions between…but saltless water tended to osmose into a person’s body, which meant a lot of spitting and urinating as one’s body processed it back out again. It was, anyway, better than becoming waterlogged.

But Jean Kroc had asked, and his reasons had been good. And so André paddled, and Gourami glided, and the gray light of dawn pricked through the reeds and made the surface reflective as they moved upriver, divided, side-by-side.

They were not alone. Caetei and Tetra swam before and behind, an honor guard masquerading as a reconnaissance team. They were part of the disguise; André could claim that the persons accompanying him were hired guides, coolies who had agreed to bring the hunter through the bayou and help find the renegade. If they were stopped, seriously, Gourami would have to disappear. Se genetic material was on file; se could not submit to a scraping.

Se fingered the box Jean had bestowed. Inside was a waterproofed ampoule, continuing the theme of things-to-be-internalized. It held luck, the human said. Luck being one of their humen words that meant nothing, or meant four hands of things that were all importantly different. For example, they used it to mean
chance,
randomness. And they used it to mean a beneficial break in the same. And they used it to mean a repeated pattern, either for good or ill, that seemed in contravention of randomness. Which Gourami found philosophically opposed rather than allied concepts.

And, even more confusingly, they also used it to mean the
manipulation
of random chance and of probability, and the
ability
to manipulate it. Which is what Gourami would call luck. If se had to try to think in humen words.
And
they had other words that could mean some or one or several or all of these things, and which overlapped other concepts or sets of concepts as well.

The humen mind was quite incomprehensible. As if they did not recognize continuums of individual things, but rather assigned things to lumpish discrete sets and made a game of putting each one into as many sets as possible.

In any case, Gourami was certain from context that it was the last of these definitions that Jean Kroc intended.
Mojo,
that was another word for it. A better word, closer to the skin of the idea, like a bolt-hole one could just squeeze into.

Se could inject the luck, internalize what it offered, accept the contagion. Accept the mojo, choose entanglement, and accede to Jean Kroc’s influence over se fate. Just about the time that se was concluding that enfouling self in the humen world—more than se was already—was a poor sort of plan.

Se scratched the underside of the skiff to let the human know se was swimming away, and tucked the rewaterproofed box into its pouch. Se would decide later. Right now, se was going to get something better to eat than could be filtered from the reedy water. A sweet fish, which could be shared with Caetei and Tetra if it was a big one, that would be nice.

And maybe it was technically poaching. But hadn’t this been the people’s home, the people’s river first? And wasn’t se already an outlaw?

Fine then.

Upriver se would take the human. To the greatparent-self, if need be. If Jean Kroc thought it important, thought André needed to learn, then so would it be done.

For a human, Jean Kroc was nearly a civilized thing.

The next day, a little after lunchtime, Jefferson Greene went for a walk. The suspended, slat-construction streets and the canals between the barges were almost deserted in the heat of afternoon, and the creak of the city pulling at its moorings and rubbing against its bumpers almost drowned out the distant laughter of a pair of children, though what little breeze there was blew the voices across the water.

It was still enough that the city stank, though Rim’s offices were in a desirable spot on Bayside. Upwind of the bulk of Novo Haven, and with a clear view of the pale blue bay and beyond it, the long blue arc of the horizon, broken by the black slashes of drilling platforms silhouetted against the darker blue of the gulf.

Things got caught between the ships, though, ground up and trapped there, and there they rotted. Seaweed, sea animals, algae, the floating bodies of birds. Nobody was supposed to dump trash or offal in the bay, of course, but that happened, too—householders frankly more often than the crews of fishing craft. And when the city hadn’t been broken up for storm in six or twelve months, as happened coming up to the hot months after a quiet winter, the stench grew oppressive.

Jefferson wrinkled his nose and hung over the railing, resting his forearms on the top. He had a slip of silver and zinc and copper in his right hand, and he flipped it off his thumb and caught it over and over and over again. Heads, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails, heads. The sequence had only broken twice since he started experimenting the night before.

With a sigh, he folded the coin in his fist and resumed walking, elbows pulled back and hands tucked into his pockets. The street rasped under his steps, slats dipping a little. Not too much, and Rim kept its walks matted with springy white nonskid, so he couldn’t hear his footsteps, just the pivots rubbing against the office barge. The laughter came again; it must be riding on an air-current coiling one of the other barges, because there was nothing to Bayside but the butter-yellow sails of a dark-green pleasure boat, tacking to windward with silver stickle-backed torpedo shapes darting through its wake. The sails moved in the breeze, rippling, but there wasn’t enough wind to bell them out.

A cracked shell lay on the nonskid next to a pinkish stain. The remnants of some bird’s lunch, and Jefferson swept it into the bay with the instep of his shoe. Things falling into water made a satisfying plonk.

The thought made him sick after a second. He turned and kept walking.

It wasn’t that Jefferson didn’t trust Closs, exactly. But he did know Closs thought he was an idiot. That Jefferson held a 53 percent share in his grandfather’s company, as licensed from Rim, and so Closs had to do what Jefferson told him to do had no bearing on it. Closs would only protect him so far.

You couldn’t buy loyalty. Not loyalty of the sort that Anchor Greene had commanded as the head of an explorer’s crew and then the patriarch of the initial Greene’s World Charter Trade Company, the sort of loyalty—and deference—that Jefferson had been raised to expect.

Anchor Greene had possessed that gift of leadership. And a not insignificant portion of the network of friends and associates that he had assembled was still in place. But Jefferson had never had his grandfather’s knack for inspiring loyalty, or for identifying the sorts of people in whom it could be inspired.

He chose to believe that he did not care to trade on his grandfather’s name. He had attended school offplanet, by telepresence at a Core university where his name meant as little as any Rimworlder’s. Whatever Closs thought of him, he had earned his degree, his grades, his position.

It wasn’t cloudy and the sky wasn’t growing dark in any dramatic fashion, but the temperature had begun to drop. With the awareness of those who live on the water, Jefferson thought there might be some weather coming.

He’d fire Closs if Timothy wasn’t one of his grandfather’s protégés. That might be more ill-will than the fragile remainder of Anchor’s circle could support without the vibrant presence of the man himself. And Closs knew too much, anyway. Such as, all about the decision to eliminate Lucienne Spivak once Rim’s monitoring of her connex, her contacts, and her movements indicated that they had no choice except to silence her.

Tails, heads, tails, heads.

That sailboat had found a wind Jefferson didn’t feel. The half-slack sails snapped, cupped and taut, and the little craft scudded over the bay like a symbol of freedom and self-determination. He followed it with his gaze; they were going the same way.

The sight ached under his breastbone, a lifting sensation. It didn’t matter, after all, how ugly things had gotten, what mistakes had been made. He’d find a way out of it.

The wheeling gulls followed the sailboat, but after watching it a moment longer Jefferson turned away. Closs wasn’t ruthless enough, when it came right down to it. He couldn’t see—and do—what needed to be done. And if he didn’t manage to catch up with the ranid witness, it would be up to Jefferson to field the contingency plan.

His hands were back in his pockets as he walked downtown, toward the center of the spiderweb of moored vessels that comprised most of Novo Haven. This wasn’t something he’d ever want on connex, but there were still people he could call on. And some of them were in town.

André probably shouldn’t have admitted it, as a city boy at heart, but he was enjoying the exercise. The skiff slipped through the water like a minnow, his paddle barely rippling the surface, and he only saw the froggies who were his constant silent companions when the tall one—Tetra—showed itself ahead of him to direct his route.

The work was like a meditation. Dip, dip, glide, the occasional brush of reeds against his bow as Tetra led him through a narrow gap, the sun on his shoulders and the nape of his neck beyond the shade of his hat.

He had no illusions that the trip would stay pleasant once it began to be measured in days. Or even possibly past lunchtime. And he wasn’t wrong. By afternoon, clouds piled teetering against a stiff breeze from landward, high enough that he could see them over the tops of the arching reeds. Classic thunderheads, and if the breeze failed they would tumble in off the ocean on a wave of low pressure that would make a man’s joints pop and groan.

He didn’t paddle any faster, though. He struggled toward no shelter, in fact did not even have a destination. The storm would catch him if it caught him, and if not it would slide north and make landfall at Dabrey, where the continental shelf dropped off more steeply and sharp waves pounded crumbling red cliffs.

He was going to get wet sooner or later. Though the timing was inconvenient; his freshwater stores weren’t down more than a couple of liters, and with good luck seeming to be at a premium, it would likely rain tonight and then in ten days he’d be down to purifying swamp water in the still.

It was a pessimistic thought. He didn’t want to be paddling around a swamp in ten days.

Well, if he wanted out that badly, he could always bring Closs the frog’s head on a stick. And forfeit his chance at learning from Kroc.

You paid your money and you picked your poison.

He was thinking about that, the poison and the taste of it, dipping his paddle and gliding, when not just Tetra but Tetra and one of the other two emerged from the water about ten meters upstream. The smaller one—Gourami, he thought, his proposed victim, though both of the little ones were of a size—swam forward and extended its wrist, with the slate.