Undertow (18 page)

Se thought this might be bad.

André blinked, several times, breathing more evenly now, as if consciously controlling each intake and outflow. Could humen do that? They must be able, because Gourami could see the lines that meant concentration or fear or anger—fuzzy creatures, one signal for so many things—and they were easing as he breathed. Se typed quickly, for once using the abbreviations se usually spurned.

—
u need hlp

He nodded, and mouthed
—I broke it
.
And my back is cut, I think.

The reeds, of course. Fingerpads skipped over keys. —
let tetra look

Se came beside Gourami, hanging back a little, and touched Gourami’s ankle to steady them both. André nodded again, and closed his eyes, waiting, while Tetra and Gourami quickly deflated the shelter and dragged it down beside the injured mammal. Gourami tucked what se could of it under his shoulder and hip on the side that seemed less hurt. He could help, at least. He lifted his hand and reached up into the air when she pushed the fabric under his torso, but rolling his hip up made him squeak.

His hands were already palm-flat, in the mud and on the fabric; when Gourami touched him again and made se hands tumble over and over, he nodded sharply. Se saw a taut flicker cross his face at the same time the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensed, and he levered himself up and over, falling face-first onto the tent. Tetra caught the injured leg before it could fall, but André shuddered anyway, like a dying fish, and went slack and still.

—
breathing,
Gourami said, holding fingers under André’s nose to feel the tickle of air moving.

Tetra was looking at the limb. —
This is bad.

Gourami looked at it, too, and retracted head between shoulders, an instinctive pained flinch. Thick blood dripped over Tetra’s fingers and stained se webs; something white showed through torn flesh above the lip of the humen boot. His back was cut up, too, but he hadn’t impaled himself; the bits of reed poking through his shirt were only slivers.

—
Give him to the humen? They can help.

—
Make him uplink when he wakes?
Gourami asked.
I will hide. Except.

—He’s bleeding now. How long will it take him to wake? Will he die before then?

—Yes. Those are problems. And also, if we send him back, Closs will send somebody else.
And, Gourami thought, sending André back now wouldn’t help to teach him any of the things that Jean Kroc wanted him taught. And se had promised Jean Kroc.

They had a bargain.

And anyway, André’s luck was suddenly, coincidentally, very bad, wasn’t it? As if somebody were changing it.

—We take him to the one-tree-island band. It’s not far and they will hear us if we call,
se said, deciding. And was surprised when Tetra, a far-swimmer, did not argue.

Se just said, instead,
—go call them. I will keep his limb from falling.

As Gourami wriggled toward the water, the earth began to shake again.

10

JEFFERSON WOKE TO THE SHRIEK OF AN EMERGENCY CONTACT
alarm and a blue light winking by his bed. He came up clear-headed and with his hands trembling; his headset read the coded transmission and dumped epinephrine into his system. A call waited; he swung his feet to the floor, covers tangled around his ankles, and scrubbed granules from his eyes. “What the hell is it?”

Amanda Delarossa, the god-botherer. “Chairman, we have a problem.”

He stood, turned off alarm and flasher with a thought. His wife rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head. “Fill me in,” he said, heading for the closet. “What’s going on?”

“Did you notice the earthquakes?”

“I’m afloat,” he said. “I don’t hear the tsunami siren.”

“No,” she said. “No tsunami. Here”—she hypertexted a link—“look at this.”

Once upon a time, humans had bothered to use different terms when they studied of the dynamics of different planets. Now, it was all geology; separate names get unwieldy when you’re talking about more than ten or fifteen worlds. The site Dr. Delarossa sent him to was the Greene’s World seismic and vulcanology monitoring project, usually quite heavily dotted with recent activity. Jefferson thought it had something to do with the planet’s astounding tides, but he wasn’t even remotely a scientist.

He knew where his drill platforms were, however, and the three yellow star shapes on the globe that indicated quakes in the last quarter were all centered firmly along the edge of the continental shelf, offshore of Novo Haven, where his omelite wells blossomed. “That’s unusual.”

“Dr. Gupta has a secure packet for you,” Delarossa said. “He’s produced a very unsettling hypothesis.”

“Send it,” Jefferson said. His call-waiting blinked. “Closs is on the other line. I have to go.”

In the morning, Cricket went to see a fortune-teller. She knew better, but you couldn’t always let that stop you.

Nouel had warned her to lie low before he went out, but she couldn’t stand another quarter stuck in a cabin on his barge, trying to get some work done with the clunky manual interface he’d scrounged for her. She couldn’t risk connex, even with her hard memory downloaded; whatever was leading Rim to her might not be gone. She’d have to scrub the whole thing and reformat, which she should do anyway, before she installed her new history. So she spent maybe three quarters click-clacking on the keyboard and then got up, found her shoes on their sides under the sofa, and stuffed her feet into them while she skinned. She made herself a blue-eyed blond and about a half-decimeter taller, and used the good stuff—high-grade wearez, implants she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d gotten them on Earth, after she ducked out of jail. Or sent her clone to prison in her place, to speak precisely.

She didn’t use them often; mere possession was illegal. She’d run light-years to stay out of prison, created a whole new person and betrayed her. Whatever self-knowledge she’d found, it wasn’t the sort that left one eager to pay for one’s mistakes.

The skin would hide her from just about anything, though. An ordinary cosmetic skin affected the perceptions of the viewer through his headset.
This
was a nanotech hack, and physically altered her fingerprints and retinal scan. She’d have to drop it to get out of Nouel’s house and back in: he’d introduced her to his expert system, which expected her to look and smell and scan like herself.

Every plan had its flaw. But sometimes, living in the future was damned cool. Even if she couldn’t get a rocket car.

She wandered through a too-warm morning, window-shopping geomancers and fortune readers. No friend of Jean Kroc’s could take a storefront tarot reader seriously, but it beat waiting by the door for Nouel to come back.

And she had never been good at waiting for men.

She picked a place at random and pushed through the half-door, which was hung with bells and chimes made of silicate shells so that a layered tinkling surrounded her. Inside, she stood in shadowy coolness; fans moved air across her skin, soothing her nape. She peeled sticky strands from her neck, rubbing fingers smearing sweat rather than relieving her discomfort. “Hello?”

A thin, stooped man came out of the back, his hair a colorless fringe against his weathered forehead. “Early riser,” he said. “What’s your pleasure, M~?”

“Tell me a story,” she said, and took the three-legged stool he gestured her toward.

“Your own or someone else’s?”

She shrugged. It didn’t matter. One lie was as good as another. “Whatever’s more interesting.” She extended her hand, in case he wanted it. He ignored it, and instead lit a candle with a gestured flame. Just a neat bit of wearez, but pretty. She wondered where he’d gotten the candle, and if it was the same place Jean Kroc went for his.

There was a mirror on the table, facedown on black silk. The fortune-teller turned it over with a flourish. Cricket was unsurprised to see nothing reflected in it but rippling black.

“Twenty,” the fortune-teller said, and Cricket chipped him the cash from an anonymous account. He blinked crystal projection contacts over his irises—checking his balance, she guessed, and not wired for connex or hard memory. A lot of mystics got fussy about things like that, though most not as hardcore as Jean. Others didn’t seem to care at all, and some had swallowed as much wire as Cricket had. “It works better if you ask a question.”

“It works better if I give you hints, you mean,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in her chair, aware how defensive her body language was and not caring at all. “Sorry. You’re on your own.”

After all, where was the entertainment if she gave it all away? Far more fun to watch him thrash.

A real conjure wouldn’t play these games. This wasn’t how the mojo worked. It wasn’t for parlor tricks.

“You’re not a believer?”

“Let’s say I’m willing to be convinced.” Jean Kroc had convinced her. Lucienne had convinced her—

Oh, hell. She sniffled as he bent over his water-dark mirror, studying the reflection of the flame. It was the only thing that showed there. A pretty good trick, Cricket thought. Probably a skin as well. Still, it was pretty.

Which made it better than half of everything in the world already. Maybe better than two thirds.

“There’s a man,” he said, after a few quiet moments. She caught the wet flicker of his eyeballs through his lashes as he glanced up to check her reaction. It was as good a starting point as any, and unless she was an orphaned lesbian, likely to provoke some kind of a response.

“Of course there is,” she answered, amused. As long as you didn’t take it seriously, you could look at these little trips as a cheap sort of psychoanalysis. And it sure beat the stuffing out of talk therapy with an idiot expert system. “Are you going to tell me that he’s tall, dark, and dangerous?”

“Actually,” the fortune-teller said, sitting back and crossing his own arms in mirror of her own, “I was going to tell you to look out for a frog to kiss. But you seem to have arrived with a narrative intact.”

It set her back on her heels, or would have, if she had been standing. Instead, she tossed her hair back and tucked her chin in, and started to laugh. “All right,” she said. “You get points for that one. I’ll quit giving you a hard time.”

“Oh, just be yourself,” he said, bending over the mirror again. “I enjoy a challenge.”

It was still bullshit, but once they decided they liked each other, he spun her a pretty good story. It even ended happily ever after, though there were trials and tribulations enough in the midgame to make the solution seem earned. Cricket left in a much better mood than when she had arrived, promising to keep an eye out for kissable frogs. She bought a cinnamon-sugarcrusted bagel from a street vendor and ate it steaming warm as she walked back to Nouel’s barge, wondering if he would even notice she had gone.

He was waiting for her in the sitting room, with a slender man she knew by reputation, a soft-cheeked archinformist with a coil of neon light up one ear like the stripped half of a DNA helix. They’d never met in the flesh before, but that didn’t mean anything to a data miner.

She hadn’t known, even, that he lived on Greene’s World. But she did know that he worked, almost exclusively, for Timothy Closs. Betrayal was a stone in her belly, and she couldn’t shift it just by swallowing, even when she told herself that she’d expected Nouel to hand her her head and had just been too fucking tired to really care.

Sorry, Lucienne.

“Fuck,” she said, as the door hissed shut behind her. “I should have gone out looking for that fucking frog prince instead.”

André woke mostly dry, mostly clean, and muzzy-headed. Before he opened his eyes, he let himself lie still, breathing, assessing the place in which he found himself. He was pin-and-needle prickles from the waist down, which was both reassuring and unsettling; if he was badly enough hurt to need a neural block, he was badly hurt indeed.

Except—

Whatever he was lying on smelled more like compost than a hospital bed. Green and sour-sweet and heavy, and so when he opened his eyes he wasn’t expecting the papery green of trauma wards. It
was
green, green and fawn, and he jerked reflexively when he saw the reed-woven roof overhead, thatched with feathertree leaves.

Whatever numbed him, it wasn’t narcotics. His movement brought sharper pain, an agonizing twist up his leg that he felt in his eye sockets and across the bridge of his nose. His hands curled into the bedding he lay on; a rank scent arose. It was moist and soft, and it wasn’t at all the sort of thing he would normally sleep on.

The pain was vast. He lay back, balling his fists against his eyes, and concentrated on breathing. His leg throbbed; the pain paled and ebbed while he out-waited it.

He opened his eyes again. Everything was flat—undetailed, unaugmented—and real. The colors were off, the sounds muddy. This was a disconnect beyond merely shutting down his connex. Visual detail was sparse and undefined: he could not see the fronds of the feathertree thatch stirring in the breeze. Rather, a general sense of movement told him what must be happening, two meters over his head. He caught motion, and some part of his brain extrapolated it into an image.

Peculiar as all hell. It left him feeling half blind.

And unable to call for rescue. His headset was as useless as a pair of empty seashells strapped to his ears, as useless as his leg and his goose-egged, aching head. He didn’t know how long he’d lain unconscious, but it was awhile, if the froggies had managed to throw a shelter over him.

But it was still daylight. Unless it was daylight again.

The leg was splinted uncomfortably, the padded ends of flat restraints pressing André’s thigh above the knee. When he stretched even slightly, nauseating ripples of heat rolled up his leg from his shin again. Definitely broken. He grunted and closed his eyes until the pain subsided, then cautiously lifted himself onto his elbow.

The shelter had no walls. By the sun, he guessed it was late morning or early afternoon, and he could see enough mud to know that he was on a different island. If a mud spit in a swamp could be dignified with the term.

This one was larger and dryer and taller, though it still bore signs of periodic submersion. Half a dozen ranids clustered before the reeds, crouched or sprawled, their green and yellow mottles almost invisible against green and yellow leaves.

André couldn’t tell them apart. Except maybe the tall one, draped in a net vest hung with old treasures, pierced trophies, jingling shells. That might be Tetra. Beside it huddled a crippled ranid, missing an arm from long ago, one side a ragged mess of scar tissue and proud flesh. André wondered if it had caught up with the wrong end of a nessie.

Another ranid bobbed forward, not as strikingly long and lean-limbed as the one he thought might be Tetra. If he could get a good look at the mottles on its back he might be able to tell, but for the meantime, as it extended a slate, he decided to risk it. “Gourami?”

It had to repeat that peculiar hand-puppet-like motion of its body before he realized it was imitating a human headshake. Pain dropped from his immediate awareness, replaced by an uncharacteristic spike of worry. “Is it safe?”

A scritchy-looking affirmative, from its free hand. André let his breath out slowly, wobbly with dumped adrenaline. Everything seemed muted, gray.
And what were you going to do if it wasn’t?

Panic, obviously. He did
not
want to be the one who explained to Jean Kroc that he had lost Jean’s froggie. And anyway, the frog was…kind of engaging.

Not that he needed to be getting paternalistic about alien amphibians. Getting soft wasn’t a good way to succeed in André’s line of work, or even a good way to stay alive. He spared a moment to picture Timothy Closs or Jefferson Greene worrying about a coolie, and shook his head to clear it.

Getting soft wasn’t the way to get ahead in anybody’s line of work.

A moment’s thought lead him to the obvious conclusion: “Caetei?”

And that was better: this time, it scritched affirmation with one hand, then thrust the slate at him again. It hurt even more to prop himself on one elbow and accept the device, so he dropped his shoulders back against the pallet. It was surprisingly comfortable, if a bit moist. His shirt adhered to his shoulders and his trousers—with one leg cut away midthigh—adhered to his buttocks and legs. He didn’t think it was all blood or sweat or swampwater. Whatever the ranids used for bedding, on the other hand…

—Good u wake,
the ranid’s slate said, as he raised it in front of his eyes.
—Tide rsng.

They couldn’t be too far upriver, then. The New Nile boasted only a shallow gradient, and as far as André knew, if it hadn’t been for the mitigating effects of the rushy bayou and the paramangrove, the tides might roll miles up the broad, placid river. But those features existed, and even Greene’s World’s embarrassment of lunar influences couldn’t quite push the ocean through them. The New Nile remained an outflow channel.