Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel (v1.1) (32 page)

Dinner was basic Indian, a tandoori chicken with rice, and she shovelled it down with relish. Something about getting shot at that made her famished. Company sat about on the lounge chairs, and tried not to stare as she ate. Five of them, excluding the recently departed Doctor Singh. Ari's friends. Hackers, jackets, netsters, technogeeks, link-jockeys ... the "underground," by any multitude of names. Monitoring equipment trailed cables and hookups across the floor like a crazed North Synian climbing vine, devouring furniture, rugs and open floorboards. Racks of control boxes piled against one wall by the stereo system. Custom-rigged tech, all of it, and mostly cutting edge despite the haphazard appearance. "Watching the furball," the man named Carlo had called it. Transmission tracking on the network. The underground were busy all right. There was a lot to watch.

"Do you need to eat very much?"

Sandy glanced up at the questioner-Anita, a small Indian woman with a shaved head and butterfly tattoos on her eyelids that fluttered when she blinked. Holographic Job. Weird, Sandy thought as she chewed, savouring the delicious flavour. But then, they wouldn't be underground if they weren't weird. It came with the territory.

"Three times a day," she managed around that mouthful, ignoring the awe-struck stares focused on her from all sides. Watching her eat. She hoped the fascination did not extend to other bodily functions. "Balanced metabolism, it's not so different."

Grins and giggles from the group. Evidently they found that amusing.

"You know," called Carlo from the kitchen as he came strolling over, beer bottles in hand, "I ... I really thought you'd be taller." Tossed a beer to Tariq, who caught and opened. "I mean, you're ... you're what, one-sixty-seven/sixty-eight? I heard this guy Stommel saying you were, like, seven foot tall or something ..." Half-crazedgrin. "... so I'm like ..

"Yeah, but you know Stommel," Pushpa, the second Indian woman, complained with exasperation, "he's just an alpha2 addict, never gets off the stupid thing ..."

"Fuzz-freak," Tojo added, to more laughter and comments, seated on the floor with his back to the sofa, playing with his baby son, who looked barely a year old. And the only one of them, Sandy thought, who didn't speak in technogeek lingo. Poor kid. His first words would probably be jargon. She kept eating, watching the stubby-limbed little guy bouncing up and down in his father's broad hands, looking incredulously bewildered as only small children could. And she wondered what he was thinking.

"So ... so why didn't they make you taller?" Carlo again. She glanced up, shovelling another forkload into her mouth. Besides being famished, she loved tandoori, and wouldn't stop in mid-meal for anything less than a house fire.

"Harder to hit," she responded glibly, muffled past her mouthful. Carlo grinned, maniacally. A strange-looking guy, a drawn and angular face with close-curled hair, big teeth and bulging eyes. Like a skull, she reckoned. Obviously, she'd guessed from previous conversation, a total, unmitigated genius with infotech. And very weird.

"No," she corrected herself when she'd swallowed, "it's more just efficiency. Combat-myomer doesn't handle well in large volumes; if I were thirty centimetres taller I'd suffer chronic tension, it's bad enough now at this size."

"So how strong are you?"

A shrug, and another mouthful. "Hard to say." Muffled. "A lot of it's leverage. Strength's tough to measure objectively, ask a physicist."

"But, like, I mean, you could damage anyone here, right?" Again the crazy grin, with suggestive anticipation.

"Carlo!" Anita protested, "don't say it like that, that's rude! You sound like one of the damn Rainbow Coalition!"

"Human skull strength is actually a really objective measure, for hand power," Carlo continued unperturbed, "because the curvature of the skull combined with ..."

"Carlo!"

Sandy kept eating, enjoying the distraction, which allowed more attention to her food. And these guys interrupted and jumped all over each other at a moment's notice, launching off into all kinds of curious, odd and sometimes apparently irrelevant strings of associated thought, much of it technical and some of it not ...

"No, what she's saying," the older, Arabic man named Tariq was now saying, "is really very true from a standpoint of pure physics. I mean she may well be strong enough, hypothetically, to lift your average Telosian rhino up by the tail and swing it about her head ..."

"Painful," suggested Pushpa.

"And extremely messy for the poor bloody rhino when its tail rips off," Carlo retorted, "speaking of physics."

"... but without the proper leverage," Tariq continued with forced patience, "her own relatively low mass would not allow ..."

Etc, etc. Tojo's little son was going for a walk, on short, uncertain little legs. She watched as he pottered several steps, wavered, then fell on his arse. His dad lay on his stomach behind him, watching, hands ready to assist. A big, shave-headed African man with tattoos and piercings. He was the only adult in the room not totally fixated upon her. The toddler tried again, and Sandy lost track of the conversation, watching with intrigue as she ate.

"His mother is Chinese?" she asked Tojo after a moment. Tojo looked up at her, surprised.

"Um ... Chinese, Vietnamese, and a little touch of Thai." He had the nice, deep voice of many Africans, but the manner was different. Sensitive and expressive. If she hadn't known he had a wife, she'd have guessed he might be gay. Most civilian hereto men his size seemed to like the "macho thing" ..... She's a bitsa-bitsa this, bitsa that. I'm second generation Botswanan, parents straight off the ship from Africa two years before I was born. And Mac ... he's a little mongrel, aren't cha'? Aren't cha' a little mongrel?" Affectionately patting his son on the backside.

The kid stopped pottering, and stared about wide-eyed, chewing a finger with indecision. Sandy smiled. The conversation had stopped, her fascination matched by theirs with her. She ignored them.

"I'd ask if I could hold him," Sandy said around her final mouthful, "but I'd understand if you said no. I mean, considering."

Tojo blinked. "Oh no, no," he protested, getting to his feet, "don't be silly, we all know what you are, we're not thick." Lifted his son quickly under the armpits, and handed him to Sandy. Sandy smiled broadly, with real pleasure, and placed her empty plate aside on the table. Took the dangling child out of Tojo's broad hands, giving Tojo a thankful smile. He crouched alongside.

"Who's that?" In hushed baby talk, as the toddler stared at this new adult person into whose charge he had been unexpectedly deposited. "I wonder who that is? Who's this pretty blonde woman? Who is it?"

Not a clue, Sandy thought, smiling at the little boy, holding him upright in her lap. He was the only person in the room who didn't know. And therefore probably the only person from whom she could expect a totally straight response. Up to and including piddling on her leg. Mac. Short for Macintosh ... apparently significant, among underground computer-philes, for reasons she didn't understand. She thought it a terrible waste, though, and an inappropriate name for a person with such an interesting ethnic background. But a lot of techno types were like that. Certainly the League was full of them. Had built an entire collective ideology upon them, disregarding old concepts of ethnicity, gender and other "increasingly meaningless" cultural affectations. Some of these guys were League sympathisers, no question. She certainly guessed Tojo was. It explained why he trusted her with his son, where others would turn pale, sweaty and fidgety at the mere suggestion.

"Hi, bubs," she said to him. "You know, I've got a friend who used to be as big as you." In a fair approximation of baby talk, she thought. "In fact, everyone used to be as big as you, once. Except me."

Playing for the audience, she chided herself. All about her, faces were staring, smiling or grinning. There was supposed to be some kind of huge, emotional, revelatory moment, she guessed, when a person of artificial construction held a child for one of the rare times in her life, and realised with great, dramatic force the true difference between herself and every other straight, biological human. But she felt nothing like that. It didn't even feel strange.

Mac nearly smiled, then stared again. Sandy imitated his smile, exaggeratedly. Mac stared in astonishment, pulling at gums with a gooey forefinger. Then grinned delightedly, and gurgled. About the room, everyone laughed. As if that reaction were somehow significant. Sandy pulled a face. He gurgled again, and bounced with excitement, arms flapping.

She supposed it was just that she knew what she was, and was at peace with it. She couldn't really think of a time when she hadn't been. It was the other "GI cliche," she supposed-a desperate yearning for humanity. Which was pathetic, and aroused her deepest indignation. It supposed that humanity was somehow lacking in the first place. Humanity had nothing to do with what she was made of. It was who she was, and what she did. Bouncing a baby boy upon her knee, she felt affection, and intrigue, and ... and something else, indefinable and warm and pleasant. She didn't need some team of damn shrinks or academic philosophers to put names to what she felt, or how she felt it, or why ... she didn't care. And they could call her whatever they liked-GI, artificial human, android (though that grated, as Motherworld residents had been known to steam at the tag of "Earthling") ... none of that mattered either, in the end. Human, by any other name. The details didn't matter. She was Sandy. That was enough.

Though if some fat newspaper prick editorialised her as a "robot" one more time, she was going to take a stroll to his big, highrise office, up to the eightieth floor, where all such media importances surely resided, and lob him gently out the window.

And she handed Mac back to his father, not wanting to stretch that generosity too far ... the kid flailed wantingly at her in the process, and Tojo decided that he liked her blonde hair. Held him close enough to grab a few handfuls, which Sandy tolerated with a grin until he began dribbling on her jacket. Then she heaved herself reluctantly to her feet.

"Okay ... I gotta ask a favour. I badly need a massage before I stiffen up like a plank. Who's got strong hands?"

"Not me, I'm afraid," Tariq replied, hands warding, "my darling wife would kill me."

"No she would not," Pushpa corrected, "she would inflict great pain and suffering, but leave you horribly alive and dripping gruesomely at the end." Pushpa was apparently calm and mostly sensible by comparison to the rest of them.

"How badly?" Carlo asked, predictably. "What'll happen if you don't get one?"

"I told you, I'll stiffen up like a plank."

"For God's sake," said Anita, "don't let him do it, he hasn't set hands on a woman as attractive as you in his life, he'll barely be able to reach you past the enormous erection."

"Thank you, Madam," Carlo said with a madly grinning bow in his seat, "for the compliment."

"You've just spoiled my dinner," Tariq complained.

"No, that's your fourth beer," Pushpa told him.

Sandy stood in the middle of the rapid exchange and blinked from side to side. Beginning, she realised, to enjoy these weird, misfit, super-intelligent people, and their utterly un-hip, uncool, un-fad-ish ways. Ari came from here, she realised. This was his society. His home. His politics. God ... he was an escapee, a misfit among the misfits. Handsome, athletic, broad-minded ... he'd run away to the CSA, to officialdom, to operational expense accounts, cool wardrobes and nonregulation sunglasses. To politics. To bureaucracy.

The ultimate sin among the anti-officialdom-he'd taken a side. And she wished, suddenly, that she had longer to stay and question these people, and learn more of Ari's politics, and theirs, and where they saw it all going in the near future. Well, there was still the massage ...

"Come on," she said as she pulled off her jacket and lay face down on the floor before the sofa, "I don't care who, just someone screw up some courage and volunteer." Carlo leapt forward, but Anita beat him to it. Stuck her tongue out at him, and Carlo retreated, grinning, to his seat. Carlo seemed to grin at everything. A compulsive grinner. Weird, weird, weird.

"So someone tell me about Ari," she said, as Anita knelt alongside and grabbed firmly at her tight shoulders, kneading deep. "Who is he, where did he come from, and what's the guy's problem?"

"Bloody hell," Tariq retorted, with the tired exasperation of an older man who had seen and done it all before, "how many years do you have to spare?"

"You sure I can't drop you there directly?" Pushpa asked her, with the anxiousness of someone very keen to assist. The car rolled into the drive-through stop off, a slow pace in the queue as cars arrived and departed further up amid a flow of commuters.

"The fewer people who know my exact movements, the safer I feel," Sandy replied.

"You ... you really think they could trace you from that?" Anita gasped from the backseat. Anita and Pushpa were a team, friends since school, they said. And unpossessed, at that time, of the standard obsessions for youthful Indian girls in Tanusha, like parties and dancing, and like clothes, jewellery and the money to buy them. Tech-science majors, they now made more money from their network consultancy than most of their high school class combined-but still dressed like struggling artists or philosophy majors. Or in Anita's case, a fringecult punk. Weird again. Sandy liked them.

"I've no idea," she told Anita. "It just makes me happier. No point taking risks."

"Hey look, security," Pushpa said, nodding toward the maglev station entrance. Sandy looked at the four uniforms on standby before the doors, and the van parked nearby. And remembered a security procedural tidbit she remembered reading from her review file.

"In the event of terrorist threat or perceived threat to vital public infrastructure ..." she trailed off ... probably shouldn't recite the entire passage and verse before these two.

"Wow," said Anita, leaning forward between the two front seats, they must really be running low on manpower, there's only four, it should be eight of them for a maglev."