Woken Furies (44 page)

“Maybe for her it wasn’t.”

I thought about Koi’s description of Mari Ado’s death, and I wondered if at the end she’d pulled the trigger to escape interrogation or simply a return to the family ties she’d spent her whole life trying to sever. I wondered if her aristo blood would have been enough to save her from Aiura’s wrath and what she would have had to do to walk away from the interrogation constructs in a fresh sleeve, what she would have had to buy back into to get out intact. I wondered if in the last few moments of dimming vision, she looked at the aristo blood from her own wounds and hated it just enough.

“Jack’s talking some shit about heroic sacrifice.”

“Oh I see.”

She swiveled her gaze down to my face. “That’s not why I’m here.”

I said nothing. She went back to looking at the ceiling.

“Oh shit, yes it is.”

We listened to the snarling and the shouts outside. Vidaura sighed and sat up. She jammed the heels of both hands against her eyes and shook her head.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asked me. “If we’re really human anymore?”

“As Envoys?” I shrugged. “I try not to buy into the standard tremble-tremble-the-posthumans-are-coming crabshit, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head irritably. “Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, I know. But sometimes I talk to Jack and the others, and it’s like they’re a different fucking species to me. The things they believe. The
level
of belief they can bring to bear, with next to nothing to justify it.”

“Ah. So you’re not convinced, either.”

“I don’t.” Vidaura threw up one hand in exasperation. She twisted about in the bed to face me. “How
can
she be, right?”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one caught in that particular net. Welcome to the rational-thinking minority.”

“Koi says she checks out. All the way down.”

“Yeah. Koi wants this so badly he’d believe a fucking ripwing in a headscarf was Quellcrist Falconer. I was there for the Ascertainment, and they went easy on anything it looked like she was uncomfortable answering. Did anybody tell you about this genetic weapon she’s triggered?”

She looked away. “Yeah, I heard. Pretty extreme.”

“Pretty much in complete defiance of every fucking thing Quellcrist Falconer ever believed, I think you mean.”

“We none of us get to stay clean, Tak.” A thin smile. “You know that. Under the circumstances—”

“Virginia, you’re about to prove yourself a fully paid-up, lost-in-belief member of the old-style human race if you’re not careful. And you needn’t think I’ll still talk to you if you cross over to that shit.”

The smile powered up, became a laugh of sorts. She touched her upper lip with her tongue and glanced slantwise at me. It gave me an odd, electric sensation to watch.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s be inhumanly rational about this. But Jack says she remembers the assault on Millsport. Going for the copter at Alabardos.”

“Yeah, which kind of sinks the copy-stored-in-the-heat-of-battle-outside-Drava theory, don’t you think? Since both those events postdate any presence she might have had in New Hok.”

Vidaura spread her hands. “It also sinks the idea she’s some kind of personality casing for a datamine. Same logic applies.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“You mean where does it leave Brasil and the Vchira gang?” I asked nastily. “Easy. It leaves them scratching around desperately for some other crabshit theory that’ll hold enough water to let them go on believing. Which, for fully paid-up neoQuellists, is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.”

“No, I mean
us.
” Her eyes drilled me with the pronoun. “Where does it leave us?”

I covered for the tiny jolt in my stomach by rubbing at my eyes in an echo of the gesture she’d used earlier.

“I’ve got an idea of sorts,” I started. “Maybe an explanation.”

The door chimed.

Vidaura raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, and a guest list, looks like.”

I shot another glance at my watch and shook my head. Outside the window, the snarling of the panthers seemed to have settled down to a low grumble and an occasional cracking sound as they ripped the cartilage in their food apart. I pulled on trousers, picked up the Rapsodia from the bedside table on an impulse, and went through to open up.

The door flexed aside and gave me a view onto the quiet, dimly lit corridor outside. The woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve stood there, fully dressed, arms folded.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It was still early morning when we hit Vchira. The
haiduci
pilot Sierra Tres had gotten out of bed—her bed, in fact—was young and cocky, and the skimmer we lifted was the same contraband runner we’d come in on. No longer bound by the need to appear a standard, forgettable item of Expanse traffic and no doubt wanting to impress Tres as much as he impressed himself, the pilot opened his vessel up to the limit and we tore across to a mooring point called Sunshine Fun Jetties in less than two hours. Tres sat in the cockpit with him and made encouraging noises, while Vidaura and the woman who called herself Quell stayed below together. I sat alone on the forward deck for most of the trip, nursing my hangover in the cool flow of air from the slipstream.

As befit the name, Sunshine Fun Jetties was a place frequented mostly by tour-bus skimmers from Newpest and the odd rich kid’s garishly finned Expansemobile. At this time of day, there was a lot of mooring space to choose from. More importantly, it put us less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep at a pace that allowed for Sierra Tres and her limp. They were just opening when we arrived at the door.

“I’m not sure,” said the underling whose job it evidently was to get up earlier than any of the partners and man the offices until they arrived. “I’m not sure that—”

“Yeah, well, I am,” Sierra Tres told him impatiently.

She’d belted on an ankle-length skirt to cover her rapidly healing leg, and there was no way of knowing from her voice and stance that she was still damaged. We’d left the pilot back at Sunshine Fun Jetties with the skimmer, but Tres didn’t need him. She played the
haiduci
arrogance card to perfection. The underling flinched.

“Look,” he began.

“No,
you
look. We were in here less than two weeks ago. You know that. Now you want to call Tudjman, you can. But I doubt he’ll thank you for getting him out of bed at this time of the morning just to confirm we can have access to the same stuff we used last time we were here.”

In the end it took the call to Tudjman and some shouting to clear it, but we got what we wanted. They powered up the virtual systems and showed us to the couches. Sierra Tres and Virginia Vidaura stood by while the woman in Oshima’s sleeve attached the electrodes to herself. She held up the hypnophones to me.

“What’s this meant to be?”

“High-powered modern technology.” I put on a grin I didn’t much feel. On top of my hangover, anticipation was building a queasy, not-quite-real sensation that I could have done without. “Only been around a couple of centuries. They activate like this. Makes the ride in easier.”

When Oshima was settled, I lay down in the couch next to her and fitted myself with phones and ’trodes. I glanced up at Tres.

“So we’re all clear on what you do to pull me out if it starts to come apart?”

She nodded, expressionless. I still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d agreed to help us without running it by Koi or Brasil first. It seemed a little early in the scheme of things to be taking unqualified orders from the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

“All right then. Let’s get in the pipe.”

The sonocodes had a harder time than usual dragging me under, but finally I felt the couch chamber blur out; the walls of the off-the-rack hotel suite scribbled into painfully sharp focus in its place. Memory of Vidaura in the suite down the corridor pricked at me unexpectedly.

Get a grip, Tak.

At least the hangover was gone.

The construct had decanted me on my feet, over by a window that looked out onto unlikely vistas of rolling green pasture. At the other side of the room by the door, a sketch of a long-haired woman similarly upright sharpened into Oshima’s sleeve.

We stood looking at each other for a moment, then I nodded. Something about it must have rung false, because she frowned.

“You’re sure about this? You don’t have to go through with it, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t expect—”

“Nadia, it’s okay. I’m trained to arrive on alien planets in new sleeves and start slaughtering the natives immediately. How hard can this be?”

She shrugged. “All right.”

“All right then.”

She crossed the room toward me and halted less than a meter away. Her head tipped so that the mane of silver-gray slipped slowly forward and covered her face. The central cord skidded sideways down one side of her skull and hung like a stunted scorpion tail, cobwebbed with finer filaments. She looked in that moment like every archetype of haunting my ancestors had brought with them across the gulfs from Earth. She looked like a ghost.

Her posture locked up.

I drew a deep breath and reached out. My fingers parted the hair across her face like curtains.

Behind, there was nothing. No features, no structure, only a gap of dark warmth that seemed to expand out toward me like negative torchglow. I leaned closer and the darkness opened at her throat, peeling gently back along the vertical axis of her frozen figure. It split her to the crotch and then beyond, opening the same rent in the air between her legs. I could feel balance tipping away from me in tiny increments as it happened. The floor of the hotel room followed, then the room itself, shriveling like a used wipe in a beach bonfire. The warmth came up around me, smelling faintly of static. Below was unrelieved black. The iron tresses in my left hand plaited about and thickened to a restless snake-like cable. I hung from it over the void.

Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.

I blinked, possibly in defiance, and stowed the recollection.

Grimaced and let go.

• • •

If it was falling, it didn’t feel like it.

There was no rush of air, and nothing lit to judge movement by. Even my own body was invisible. The cable seemed to have vanished as soon as I took my hand off it. I could have been floating motionless in a grav chamber no bigger than the spread of my arms, except that all around me, somehow, my senses signaled the existence of vast, unused space. It was like being a spindrizzle bug, drifting about in the air of one of the emptied warehouses on Belacotton Kohei Nine.

I cleared my throat.

Lightning flickered jaggedly above me, and stayed there. Reflexively, I reached up; my fingers brushed delicate filaments. Perspective slammed into place—the light wasn’t fire in a sky unfathomably high up, it was a tiny branching of twigs a handful of centimeters over my head. I took it gently in my hand and turned it over. The light smudged from it where my fingers pressed. I let go and it hung there, at chest height in front of me.

“Sylvie? You there?”

That got me a surface under my feet and a bedroom steeped in late-afternoon light. From the fittings, the place looked as if it might have belonged to a child of about ten. There were holos on the walls of Micky Nozawa, Rili Tsuchiya, and a host of other pinups I didn’t recognize, a desk and datacoil under a window, and a narrow bed. A mirrorwood panel on one wall made the limited space seem larger; a walk-in cupboard opposite opened onto a badly hung mass of clothing that included court-style dressing-up gowns. There was a Renouncer creed tacked to the back of the door, but it was coming away at one corner.

I peered out of the window and saw a classic temperate-latitude small town sloping down to a harbor and the outlying arm of a bay. Tinge of belaweed in the water, crescent slices of Hotei and Daikoku thinly visible in a hard blue sky. Could have been anywhere. Boats and human figures moved about in dispersal patterns close to real.

I moved to the door with the poorly attached creed and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but when I tried to step out into the corridor beyond, a teenage boy appeared in front of me and shoved me back.

“Mum says you have to stay in your room,” he said obnoxiously. “Mum
says.
”

The door slammed in my face.

I stared at it for a long moment, then opened it again.

“Mum says you have—”

The punch broke his nose and knocked him back into the opposite wall. I held my fist loosely curled, waiting to see if he’d come back at me, but he just slid down the wall, gaping and bleeding. His eyes glazed over with shock. I stepped carefully over his body and set off along the corridor.

Less than ten paces, and I felt her behind me.

It was minute and fundamental, a rustling in the texture of the construct, the scratch of crepe-edged shadows reaching along the walls at my back. I stopped dead and waited. Something curled like fingers over my head and around my neck.

“Hello, Sylvie.”

Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whiskey I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colors washed out to gray, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high-capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.

“Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,” Sylvie Oshima said evenly, “it seems to have fallen apart.”

“It didn’t start here, Sylvie.”

She looked sideways at me. “Oh, I know. I said
seems.
But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.”

“Not this me.”

“No, so I understand.” She lifted the whiskey to her lips. “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.

Change the subject.

“So what she hears up there filters down here?”

“To an extent.” The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct. First the reflected image, from top to bottom, and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it somberly. “But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.”

“How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?”

“I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.”

“Is she real?”

A harsh laugh. “You’re asking me that? In here?”

“All right, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?”

“She escaped.” Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. “That’s what she kept saying,
I escaped.
Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.”

Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.

“That was a holding cell?”

“Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.”

“It wasn’t very hard to get out of.”

“Well, what language were you using?”

“Uh—Amanglic.”

“Yeah—in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.”

“But did you really expect me to stay put?”

“Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic.”

“All right, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?”

“If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,” she said, rather bitterly, “you
would
have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behavior, they just recognize and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.”

“So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old-time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?”

“Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.”

“And she’d have gotten out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.”

“More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough . . .”

“Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?”

A brief nod. “She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.”

“Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?”

Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. “It’s hard to see how she could be.”

“But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?”

Another shrug. “I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a
virus
for all you know.”

“Yeah, well, from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement?
A viral poison in the body of society
?”

“I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.”

“Neither am I.” She tipped back her glass, emptied it again, and set it down. “Look, Micky, I’m not an activist and I’m not a soldier. I’m strictly a datarat. Mimints and code, that’s me. Put me in New Hok with a crew and there’s no one to touch me. But that’s not where we are right now, and you and I both know I’m not going back to Drava anytime soon. So given the current climate, I think I’m going to bow out to this Nadia. Because whoever or whatever she really is, she stands a far better chance of navigating the waters than I do.”