Undertow (2 page)

“And it’s that simple for you?”

He shrugged. Omitting wasn’t
really
lying.

It was enough to make her nod a little. But the razor lines beside her eyes didn’t soften, and it wasn’t just a squint into the sun. “Fine,” she said. “But I
am
in a precarious position.” As an unlicensed conjure, she meant. It wasn’t illegal to know how to do it. But it was illegal to try, or to own the necessary equipment. “And you do work for Rim, and for Charter Trade.”

“I’m not going to sell you to Jefferson Greene, Ziyi.”

She turned so that her shoulder was to him, her back to the sun. Their shadows stretched ahead on the decking as she started forward. He hurried two steps and caught her. “That’s not why I’m concerned. As I said: maybe one in a thousand children can handle the responsibility that comes with that gun.”

“I already carry one of those.”

“Was that a threat, André?”

As if that would get him anywhere. “It was a plea for lenience. As you very well know. Are you trying to see if you can pick a fight with me?”

The arch of her eyebrows confirmed it. “My situation is complicated by another issue. Of those thousand children, maybe five of them can actually
operate
this gun with professional skill.”

“Everybody gets lucky once in a while.”

“You can teach most people to carry a tune, but one in a thousand is born to be a singer.”

He stopped. She walked three steps more before she did likewise. She didn’t turn back to him. “So it’s no, then?”

I’m sorry, André,
he prayed for.
Maybe if you could prove to me I can trust you—

But what he got was a flat shake of her head, the glossy blunt-cut ends of her hair whisking over golden-yellow-clad shoulders. “You’re not a child I can hand a gun, André. I hope…I hope this won’t prejudice our relationship.”

“If you mean,” he said, “am I likely to respond in a manner you might regret? M~ Zhou, I don’t bring my work home.”

She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a tight little smile and a nod. “Good then, that’s settled. Come talk to me if you need some work done. Or send Cricket.”

“I will,” he answered, and watched as she walked on, until the crowd swallowed her. When she passed out of sight he turned and knotted his hands on the rail, leaning over the channel. Fish flocked to his shadow, hopeful of crumbs, wary of an opportunistic seabird that swung around to see if any would pass too high. “Shit,” he said, and kicked the upright with the instep of his shoe.

A passing businessman chuckled under his breath and rolled a sympathetic eye. André caught it and rolled one back, and they shared a rueful grin for a moment before the businessman was past him.

Women.

What are you gonna do?

But women might be the answer, too. He composed a message to Cricket, thought about it, and added a paragraph on either end. Her connex was down; either she was sleeping, blocking, or busy. So he sent it head-mail rather than instant message.

She’d get it the next time she checked in. One of the interesting things about Cricket was that Cricket knew
everyone
.

In the meantime, another one of his messages was from a man named Timothy Closs. And that one might mean a paycheck, if everything played out right.

Coincidence made Timothy Closs tired.

And it was only due to an awkward coincidence that there was more than a minimal loss of life when the barge exploded. It blew up between twelve and thirteen, the darkest time of the morning, when neither diurnal humans nor crepuscular ranids tended to be awake. The recruitment barge should have been empty except for a night watchman, who was scheduled to be on deck when it exploded—and if he had been where he was supposed to be, he would have lived.

But the evening crew had stayed behind for some impromptu overtime. The sort where “working late” was a euphemism that even the most naive spouse would be unlikely to believe, given a good whiff of the miscreant’s breath. So there were four men aboard, in the control cabin.

The rear of the barge would have been empty, too, had not one of the native affairs coordinators, insomniac and behind a deadline, also been working ridiculously late. Uneuphemistically, in her case.

She’d been in the interview room, open to the water and astern of almost everything—a sealed bathyspheric bubble accessible only via an airlock or the warm waters of Novo Haven Bay. But what exactly she was doing there three hours after midnight was a question that Closs knew would probably never be answered.

Cold, freak chance: there wouldn’t be enough recovered of Lisa Anne Angley for a decent burial. Let alone any possibility of recovering her hard memory. The Bose-Einstein condensate processor and solid-state core of her headset were so much particulate in the sea air Closs breathed.

His sunrise came on like war. Recovery teams were already moving over the wreckage, illuminated under the glare of sodium-vapor lights. The gray dawn couldn’t compete.

Closs watched from the deck of a Charter Trade cruiser a half-kilometer off, shoulders squared in a smart-fabric wind-cheater. The day should heat up later, but for now the morning was cold, and suppressant foam dotting the water had quenched the floating fires.

Technically speaking, Closs didn’t have to be here. He curled his gloved hands on the rail, steel conducting heat from his palms. Technically speaking, he’d probably get a better view of the proceedings on the screen wall of his office.

But technicalities weren’t going to boost shattered morale the way having an officer on scene would. An officer of the corporation, rather than a real officer, these days, but Closs still had enough sense to stay the hell out of the incident commander’s way. And it didn’t hurt to show up and look interested and confident. It was good when the team was comfortable with the boss, knew how to respond around him, knew that the chain of command was strong. It saved on time and precision lost to panicked errors when one wandered down from the ivory tower and startled those who weren’t accustomed to one’s majestic propinquity.

His headset plinked, the reserved code for his staff archinformist, Maurice Sadowski.

“Hello, Maurice.” There was visual. He must be calling from a desk.

“Hello, Major.” Maurice was fortyish, square-jawed, his hair ponytailed at the nape of the neck. He wore a lightcoil spiraled through the rim of his left ear, but he’d deactivated it in observance of the tragedy. It shone dull bronze. He picked at it with a thumbnail, frowning. “Nobody’s claimed responsibility.”

“Well, the forensic team says the night watch was fucking around belowdecks, so anybody could have sailed up and tossed a grenade. But that isn’t what happened.”

“The bomb was placed?”

Closs leaned his elbows on the rail and steepled his fingers. Maurice’s translucent image floated before him, projected into his brain because that was a less complex feat than projecting it onto his retinas. “The blast originated in the engine compartment,” Closs said. “There wasn’t any bomb.”

“Mechanical failure?”

“Anything’s possible,” Closs said. “The barge was serviced three weeks ago.”

Maurice flinched. “Freak accident,” he said. “A freak accident that somebody engineered.”

“Yeah,” Closs said. “I think we’ve got an unlicensed conjure on our hands.”

It wasn’t earth, the stuff Cricket Earl Murphy spaded through, that gritted under her fingernails and left damp brown patches on the knees of her trousers. It wasn’t earth that she scratched clawed fingers into, raked up moist and crumbling, black as the void between stars and redolent of rotting. It wasn’t earth; Earth was on the other side of a long irrevocable relativistic slide, her old life receding like a missed train station.

It wasn’t
earth
. But people used the word anyway.

Cricket found it—alien was an ironic word, when she was already on another planet—but alien to work so with her hands, unskinned and unconnected, only sensing the texture of the soil with her fingertips. At home, she gardened, but she did it with all her skins and augments intact. She could zoom in to examine the fine grains of sand among the loam, check chemical composition, gather data effortlessly.

Here, in Lucienne’s garden, she did not use connex. She felt, and smelled, and cocked her head to listen to the sound the grains made when she rubbed them together. A different kind of parsing, almost medieval.

She was getting the hang of it. But she still couldn’t quite get used to it.

It was almost pointless to compost such soil as this, but she didn’t let that stop her, folding the crumbled dark mixture into earth that was no lighter, aerating the soil, laying it down in soft beds, ready for the hungry roots. She never would have done this in her old life, deep in the chaotic, elegant Core. Where houseplants were tended by hired gardeners or service bots, and were lacy froths of greenery or slick broad-leaved, jade-colored exotics, orchids hung with flowers that looked like they would bruise in a strong breath—things that were toxic to gnawing children and unwary pets.

Not tomatoes, leeks, ramps, radishes. Not maize, red and white and golden, single kernels pushed down in their mounds with a thumb, the hole closed and scattered round with bean and squash seeds. Not marigolds, just as effective against the native pests of Greene’s World as they were against those of Earth, and which Cricket was planting now, seating each one in its carefully dug hole amid the vegetables, a scatter of compost under the roots. She pressed each one into place with the side of her thumbs and smiled. Not much in the way of tomatoes, but the early peas were almost ready, their billowing pink and white flowers faded. She should pick some now, while they were sweet.

As if reading her mind—which might, in fairness, have been possible if both of them hadn’t had their headsets and connex shut down—Lucienne came out of the minifab with a bucket in her hand. It was Lucienne’s garden, though not Lucienne’s house. Or, more precisely, Lucienne stayed there. But the house belonged to her lover, Jean.

The garden, however, he stayed out of, except for purposes of rambling through—and, when they were ripe, picking the occasional tomato. It was Lucienne’s, and Lucienne shared it with Cricket.

And that was pretty good.

Lucienne crouched beside Cricket and held out a damp rag. “Is that the last of the marigolds?”

Cricket, wiping her hands, nodded. “It should be all in.”

“Good.” Lucienne Spivak rattled the bucket as she rose to her feet. “Let’s take some back out again.”

Lucienne was a tall, curvy sort of woman, the skin of her brown thighs slightly dimpled below the ragged hems of her white shorts. She wore real cloth, old-fashioned, which was a side effect of living with Jean as well. He liked to talk about mature technologies, the redundancy and robustness of biological systems over technological ones.
A human being is more than just a biomechanical machine
.

Cricket was never exactly sure if she believed him, or if all the world really was predetermined, and consciousness some cruel joke of the wide ironic universe. Jean had to disagree: he was a conjure man, and changing the future was his livelihood. But Cricket knew a fair number of scientists who would swear that even the measurable statistical effects of coincidence engineering meant nothing about free will, because the act of the engineering and its outcomes had already been determined.

Of course, as far as Cricket was concerned, it didn’t make any real difference. You were still stuck not knowing one way or the other until it happened, and even if it didn’t matter what you did, when the anxiety hit, it sure felt like it.

She picked up the watering can and watered the last marigold, then stood, pushing herself off her knees flat-handed. Lucienne caught her under the elbow and gave her a boost. Lucienne’s thick, dark-brown braid fell over her shoulder, banging Cricket on the ear. Lucienne’s first name was French and her last name was Ukrainian, but she herself looked Indian or Pakistani. And Cricket still had to keep reminding herself that none of that mattered on the Rim, where there were no nationalities.

Or rather, there were. There were the
important
nationalities. Like, Rim company man, and alien, and colonial, and Coreworlder, and criminal. By which the Rim meant people like Lucienne. Revolutionaries, Greens, fair-trade activists, native-rights agitators.

But not like Cricket. No matter what Cricket had done in her other life.

Though if Lucienne kept asking, you never knew. She might become a criminal again. Of a better sort, this time.

They moved along the row of peas in stooped, companionable silence. Pods pattered into the bucket, first a thin layer and then handfuls. Some plants still held sprays of blossom among the nearly ripe legumes and their curling tendrils. Cricket snapped one off and tucked it into her thin creepery hair; Lucienne, laughing silently, copied. The flowers were baby-pink, breath-white. They smelled so sweet that Cricket kept looking around for the lilies.

“Did you know your boyfriend sent a message to Jean?” Bluntly, without games or preamble. That was Lucienne.

Cricket, on the other hand, was a liar. But maybe not to Lucienne. Well, not often. “André’s not my boyfriend.”

“So you knew, in other words.”

She nodded. She slipped her hand among the leaves, found a spray of round, firm pods. They cracked off the stems when she twisted them. The surfaces were not quite as smooth as they looked, and stuck to her fingers slightly when she shook them off into the pail. “You’re not granting me any great revelations.”

“Do you think—”

Cricket shook her head. “He told me, actually. And I—”

Lucienne pressed both fists into the small of her back, the bucket swinging against her hip. She arched, stretched, stooped again. “He wanted you to put in a word for him, did he?”

Cricket shook her head. “I wouldn’t trust him. He’s not like you. Not an idealist.”

“I trust you.”

“And I sleep with him, so he must be okay?” When Lucienne looked up, Cricket was smiling at her, worrying the string out of a pea pod with her thumbnail. “You realize that doesn’t follow.”