Undertow Read online

  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.”

  Lucien
ne 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.”

  “No,” Lucienne said. “Anyway, whatever you think of André, I wish you’d come with us. At least to meet them.”

  Us meant Lucienne and Jean. Them…

  Them was a temptation. Cricket dropped the pod in the pail and reached for another one. “The froggies.”

  Lucienne glanced over her shoulder, as if somebody could possibly be listening. “Tonight. Stay to dinner; come out after.” She shook the bucket. “Damned if we don’t have enough peas.”

  Some men stop believing in love as they grow older. Some simply stop expecting it to find them.

  Jean Kroc had never succumbed to the first failing, though the second had seemed likely. Whether he had any use for the emotion himself had remained an open question, one complicated because the image of happy domesticity did not fit the role of conjure he portrayed. Which was an odd thing; if people came to you for happiness, wouldn’t they expect you to be able to provide happiness for yourself?

  Which had always been the sorcerer’s secret. Knowledge might be power. But power was a long walk from joy.

  But today, there was Lucienne standing beside him, her elbow brushing his elbow, her long almost-black hair braided thick as his wrist down her back, with her high cheekbones and her almond eyes and the beauty mark in the corner of her mouth, looking like Durga come to life, without the tiger. And so, as Jean helped Lucienne shuck peas in the kitchen, and Lucienne’s slight, riverine friend Cricket boiled the salted water, the settled domesticity of the scene amused him.

  It might have been four hundred years before, some randomly selected afternoon in the first century B.G. The kitchen was gas and electric, no smart appliances, no adaptive fab. He lived off the grid, Jean Kroc did. Lucienne teased that if he could sink a well, or if the river water were halfway safe, he’d haul buckets rather than palm a tap.

  It was a pleasant kind of teasing, though; keeping the house unconnexed served her as well as him. The lives lived within it were safe from registry in any data hold, which was a necessary thing for anybody who wanted to keep a secret. Cricket’s research skills were proof enough of that. Jean had seen her generate a complete list of a Rim associate manager’s sex partners, accurate—by Cricket’s estimate—to 95 percent, simply by hacking her security monitor. Which had still been registered to one of sixty-four thousand factory presets.

  Elapsed time, thirty-five seconds.

  However, it also meant that when a hum of motors was followed by the crunch of footsteps up the clamshell path—Greene’s World bivalves, not real Earth clams, but people, Jean included, were sloppy about terminology—he couldn’t snap on a smart perimeter with a headset command and have six methods of disposal at his fingertips. Black security was illegal, which wouldn’t stop anybody who thought he needed it.

  Which was why everything Jean would have killed to protect, other than himself and Lucienne, was fifteen miles away.

  He slicked a thumbnail up the inside of the pod he still held, let the peas drop into the bowl and roll down the little pyramid there while their green musk rose, then cast the husk aside. It turned over in midair, sideslipping, and landed in the stained white sink. Jean wiped his hands on a towel and thumbed a keypad hung on his belt.

  He didn’t use connex, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have screens. The big one on the wall by the window lit up, showing a speedboat moored at the end of his rickety parawood dock. The boat was a four-seater, ivory and rust in Rim Company livery.

  “Corps?” Lucienne asked softly, cracking open another pod with her nails.

  The piping below the gunwales was jade-colored, for the Greene’s World Charter Trade Corporation. Not the Exigency Corps. Salt stains curling along the boat’s bone-colored flanks gave the incongruous appearance of medieval embroidery. A woman in a Rimmer sunshade, her clipped hair blue, sat in the back, bent over with one finger pressed to her ear and the expression of somebody in heavy connex. Two men were tromping up the white path to the door. “Local,” Jean answered, and watched Lucienne’s shoulders pull back.

  Cricket gave a quick twist of her neck to stare at him sideways, lids wide enough that white rings stood around her water-brown irises. “You sure?”

  He took the slotted spoon from her hand. “You have some reason to be scared of the Corps? Turn the stove off; I don’t think this will take too long.”

  She did what he said, silently, and went to sit on the creaking wicker sofa while he and Luci
enne went to the door. He timed it just right; the Rimmer had started to knock when he pulled the door open.

  Jean granted the medium-brown, medium-height man who leaned back so suddenly a certain amount of credit. He didn’t fall over and he recovered himself fast. “Jean Kroc?”

  “I am he.”

  The Rimmer glanced over Jean’s shoulder. His own backup stood at the bottom of the steps, off to the port, covering both his partner and the door. “And is this M~ Spivak?”

  “M~ Spivak can speak for herself,” Lucienne said. She didn’t step forward out of the shadows, however.

  The Rimmer cleared his throat. “I’m David Kountché,” he said. “My identification—”

  Which was connex, of course, and Officer Kountché colored under his café-au-lait complexion when he realized the reason for Jean’s slight, incurious smile. He dug into his hip bag and came up with a warrant card, holoplastic, chipped at one edge, with his retinal print and image indelibly recorded on the surface. He was, Jean reassessed, a Dayvid with a y.

  “If you’d like to come in, you have to take your shoes off,” Jean said, handing back the warrant card.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No shoes in the house,” Lucienne said. She pushed past Jean and came out under the awning. Kountché stepped back to give her room, without seeming to realize that he’d handed her control of the situation. Lucienne continued, “And unless you have a warrant, I’ll have to ask you both to power down. Jean has a religious objection to connex in his home. Do you want me to come out instead?”

  “We didn’t say it was you we needed to speak to, ma’am,” the Rimmer said. Jean could not fault him on politeness, anyway. Which wasn’t as rare a trait as you might expect, in cops.

  “No, but you talked around me, so I guessed. Coming in or staying out? And who might your partner be?”

  Officer Kountché cleared his throat. And, gamely, sat down on the plascrete steps and touched open the tabs on his shoes. “Officer Garnet Spencer, ma’am,” he said, and Officer Spencer tapped his sunshade just below the speckled band. Lucienne was too much of a lady to show it publicly, but Jean Kroc echoed her concealed wince. Somebody’s mother had watched too many romances.