Mainline (42 page)

She let the Fixer's hand go and turned in her seat to face the shorter man. "I don't believe you're sitting here," she said, hoping to sound matter-of-fact about it all.

"We have to talk." He sounded distressed. "You seem to know what's going on better than I do. I want to understand it, too "

"I ... I don't have all the answers."
More like a lot of ques
tions,
after what happened today.
"But I'll tell you what I can." Her vows of secrecy meant nothing if there was someone she would really share this with, this gift, this curse, of traveling the

Lines. She realized as she said it that she was eager to talk.

"Good enough," Vask said soberly, and twined his fingers through hers. She let his grasp stay, for it was not a suggestive or a sensual touch. It was reassuring, like the handclasp shared by two children lost very far from home, and afraid of what they might find there.

"Victims of circumstance owe it to fate. Victims of choice owe it to themselves."

Reva had forgotten
how it hurt, to lose the sense of the familiar. How jarring it was, to become a secret outcast amid places and people grown alien in subtle, disturbing ways.

Amasl's skyline had changed in a way she could not define. The beacon pylons that guided air car traffic were a different color, dark steeloy with green lights strobing instead of blue. The occasional security mecho on street patrol was of matte-browned steel, not the buffed white metal of Mainline. A holovert on a sign showed an androgynous couple embracing in an ad for "Breathless"—an aphrodisiac Reva had never heard of before.

Subtle changes but significant ones. The more visible the differences between Lines, the farther she had traveled. If this was anything like other times, she was nearly as far off Main as she could get and have the same bank account.

Off Main. That distant Timeline remained her reference point. This was a ghost-world, a shadow place full of people who were incorrect imitations of the ones she knew and had reluctantly grown to care for.

Yet even ghosts live out their lives, and in this Realtime, however incorrect it seemed to Reva, the analogs of people from Mainline went about their business like it was just another day.

Behaving like—but not exactly like—their counterparts across the Lines.

"Aawwwrrrrrrrrrr!''

The Dorleoni called Okorr stumbled out the door of Storage Unit B, Lairdome 38, in the backwater suburbs of Amasl's neighboring Saleks Bay. He staggered like a blind man, bumping against the door frame, doddering to a halt at street's edge.

"Aawwwrrrrrrrrrr!" He repeated his heartfelt cry, back-arched and braying toward the afternoon sky.

Passersby walked a little faster, and Karuu closed his eyes to their indifference. He stood swaying, a furred and disconsolate figure, deciding whether the anguish in his heart warranted another outcry or not.

He decided not. He could not risk the attention he might draw to himself and so forced his eyes back open, liquid brown orbs turning to the warehouse door, drawn by the tragedy that lay beyond. His feet followed the magnet of disaster and led him back into the security-locked haven, where a wealth of stolen cargo containers had once awaited him.

There was nothing there now. The yawning expanse of empty plascrete offended his eyes as he scanned the vacant unit once again. Nothing was left, not a crate, not a packing strap. Nothing. Of hundreds of items, carefully chosen, each worth their weight in andorium in the offworld markets, especially tariff-free as only he could move them—

All gone.

Where could the goods be? Stolen? No. The security codes showed authorized entry only. Someone had come in his absence and cleaned out his stash. And this was not the first, but the last place he had checked. The best of his caches, all six of them, gone. Someone had methodically and thoroughly emptied his emergency reserves, the security Karuu had counted on to gain financial independence from Gerick's stranglehold. There was only one person it could be. Or could have been. Daribi, the only one who knew of all the Holdout's personal caches. Daribi the backstabber, now dead and irrevocably beyond Karuu's reach. 

I'm ruined, Karuu fretted. I have no resources. What am I going to do?

The Dorleoni followed up the thought with another ear-piercing shriek, though it didn't help him feel any better. He needed to come up with answers, not wail about his fate. To get out from under Gerick's thumb was going to take money and cleverness. He had thought he had both, until this tour of his secret reserves proved him wrong.

Now I'm as reliant on Adahn as that MazeRat offal thought I was, he fretted. What am I going to do?

Karuu gnashed his teeth at the thought and left the warehouse, slamming the door shut behind him.

Reva
punched up
the vidnews and left the volume loud.

"... Also this late-breaking word from Rinoco Park, where disaster has struck the waterland and forced the park to close..."

She listened with half an ear as she walked about the apartment, checking out the space she shared with Vask in this Line. The Fixer stood inside the doorway of the apartment suite looking lost while she investigated their rooms. Neutral upscale furnishings, nothing very personal, but cluttered with the detritus that collects after weeks of residence. A jacket slung on the couch arm; holonovels stacked by a float-chair, and one on the kitchen counter by a crumb-speckled plate.

"... portion of the ring dome is damaged and leaking ..."

She went on down the hallway, opening cabinet doors, inspecting contents, stepping into the bedroom to see what clothes she had accumulated in this Line. Men's clothing hung in the closet, too, of a size to fit Vask, and she frowned at the only bed—ample enough for two—as if it willfully refused to tell its tale.

They had skipped across many Lines indeed, if her self in this Realtime had something going on with the Fixer. How drastically had other relationships changed? Well, Lish was probably a good indicator of that....

She shoved that line of thought to the back of her mind, into the category of issues to deal with later. The first order of business Was to get the lay of the land, see if the extreme timeshift had left her with any big surprises or problems to deal with. She needed to know how far from Main they'd come.

That thought brought her situation home once more, and she clamped her jaw shut on a grimace that threatened to dissolve into tears. She concentrated on the news instead, where live coverage from Rinoco showed the continuing exodus of park visitors and a heavy security presence at the gates.
"... claim to have seen the mythical Sea Father of R'debh, a monstrous creature 'of solid water' which grabbed a borgbeast and then disappeared. These incredible reports are unconfirmed—"

The words sank in, and Reva took long-legged strides back into the room where the news was on.

"What are we—" Vask began.

"Not now." She grabbed his arm, pulled him down beside her on the couch. "Listen."

The news cut to a handcam image, a stolen interview with injured water-breathers in the back of a care-van. The camera closed with the least-bloodied man, blinking with nictitating eyelids against shock.

"What happened down there?" The reporter's insistent voice came from off-camera. "How did you get injured?"

The water-breather answered unthinkingly, dazed. "Borgbeast slammed into us, trying to get away ... was an accident. Frightened by ... the Sea Father."

"Sea Father? What do you mean?"

"He came. He was there. Gigantic ... took one away. Just vanished in the water, like that...."

"Here, now. Get out of here. Go on!" A security escort pushed between camera eye and prisoner-patient. The lens caught an anger-furrowed brow, then jumbled impressions as the guard pulled the door shut in the face of the intruding camera.

The scene cut back to studio coverage. The exodus from the Park had slowed to a trickle, and guards were locking off gateways.
"There you have it,"
came the voice-over.
"An eyewitness report. The Sea Father of R 'debh is said to have materialized in Rinoco Park, along with borgbeasts. Simply amazing! A creature of legend, and the tools of terrorism, working together for what ends? More on this within the hour."

"Reva, what is it?" Vask put a hand on her arm, a touch he would not have dared a week before. But everything was different now, everything....

"You alright?"

She heard the worry in his voice, realized she was staring blindly at the news screen. "News off," she snapped, and the room fell silent. She turned to Vask and threaded her fingers together to keep them from trembling.

"That must be it," she said. "What happened to us."

"What is?"

"The Sea Father."

The Fixer gave her a confused look. "You're not making any sense."

"No. I suppose not." She drew in a deep, shaky breath. "Look. Let's start at the start. First, I want to know this. How did you come along with me? Can you ... shift, like I do? Move Lines?" The question came hard. It was the first time she'd ever mentioned her own ability to another.

Vask heaved a sigh. "I don't know what you mean by Lines, but shift—yes, I can do that."

"How?" Her question was urgent, the look in her eyes like a dagger.

"I'm a ..." He hesitated. "I have a wild psi talent," he spoke confidentially. "I can do a thing called sideslipping—an upward shift in the energy frequency of my molecular state. It makes me Invisible, lets me move through solid matter."

Keva stiffened. "Wait a minute. You're a Mutate?"

It was slang from Sa'adani space, and hit Vask uncomfortably close to home. He swallowed. Mutate implied a mutant identified and, by law, trained to control the psi powers that might otherwise endanger those around them.

"Not exactly," he said. "Not officially."

Reva studied his forehead. No
rus
was visible, the label imposed on formally trained adepts. "A wild talent, you say."

Vask rubbed his forehead self-consciously. "They never caught and marked me." It sounded almost like a boast.

Reva's brow creased, her thoughts in a whirl. Her natural caution was alerted, and in other circumstances she would have abandoned him that very moment. A Fixer who could walk through walls made the perfect spy.

But given the circumstances, did it matter after all?

Not right now, she had to admit to herself. Back in Mainline, maybe, but not Now.

"I saw you disappear in the water," Vask said, easing back into their original conversation, "and guessed you could do the same as me. Then with Yavobo turning to me like I was his next target, it seemed like a good idea to disappear, too. That's when I saw you, in that other space, between the physical and the not. You saw me there, too."

She nodded slowly. "And when we came out of it we ended up here. In this Line."

"Line?"

She knew she had to tell him, and shifted on the couch uneasily "Look, Vask. This is a long story, alright? And I've never told it to anyone, not anyone who would believe me."

He gestured her to continue, and she did. She told him about her own wild talent, her ability that had cost her family and friends, that had driven her finally into work that kept her separate from any one Timeline. She knew what she said must sound wildly improbable, yet Vask had already seen the proof: a Lish who was not the Lish he knew, a Devin who was as coolly distant as any Rus'karfa high-caste, an apartment he had never seen before, keyed to his and Reva's voice-codes.

The Fixer listened in silence as her tale unfolded. She held some things back: how she could stay present in Realtime, for instance, yet split her attention to survey nearby Nows with her timesense. Vask didn't need to know everything, after all.

She caught the Fixer's uncertain expression. "Do you know
,
about the Sea Father?"

Kastlin had heard rumors. She told him more. For R'debh natives, those who lived under the ocean waves, there was little doubt that something large and immaterial and alien was out there, something that brushed the edges of their lives from time to time.

"So, you see ..." Reva struggled to articulate an idea just dawning upon her, "if the ghost-ray is real—"