Probability Space (16 page)

Marbet added quietly, “And the waiting is costing her every ounce of restraint she has.”

Ann said, “Even I can feel that when I’m around her. It’s like she’s a volcano, set to blow. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to a Sensitive, Marbet.”

Marbet changed the subject. “How are the preparations for tomorrow coming?”

“Very well. Although that’s why I was looking for you two. Lyle, I want to ask your help.”

His help? Kaufman stood.

Ann looked graver than usual. “The two closest villages are coming to Confit’s flower ceremony. That’s really important, because as you know, since the Change each village has become pretty much isolated. They’re afraid of each other, because naturally they don’t know how to deal with strangers without shared reality. But Dieter and Calin and I have been trying hard to reestablish at least trading ties with Gofkit Mersoe and Gofkit Tramloe. Worlders have always been great traders, you know. And tomorrow they’re each sending visitors to Confit’s ceremony.”

Ann stopped; she seemed embarrassed. Kaufman waited. He didn’t see how he could help with this. He didn’t even speak World.

“This could be a real breakthrough, Lyle. But only if the visitors get here and back safely. The marauders at the old Voratur compound have gotten more organized in their attacks. Two groups of people traveling between villages, carrying food and presents, are natural targets. They enslave captives, you know, to work the Voratur fields to feed the warlords. They’re … never mind. Anyway, Dieter will go to Gofkit Mersoe on his bike early tomorrow and escort the visitors here. He’s got tanglefoam, laser guns … he can get them here safely.”

Kaufman said, “What have the warlords got?”

“Knives, spears, and clubs. They haven’t even invented the bow and arrow yet, thank God. But Dieter can’t be in two places at once. You’re armed, Lyle, you have to be. Will you go to Gofkit Tramloe and escort the visitors from there to here?”

He was ashamed at how glad he was to be useful again. “Of course.”

“Thank you. Do you need to get arms from your ship?”

“No.” Dieter had assured him the locked, untended ship was safe behind an electrobarrier. “But, Ann…”

“What? Look, there’s that worthless girl over there behind those bushes … Essa! You come here, Essa!”

“Ann,” Lyle said, “the ship has real weapons. I could do a fly-over Voratur’s compound and solve your warlord problem once and for all.”

He had her full attention again. The angry Ann, eyes diamond hard. “No, thank you, Lyle, we’re not trying to teach these people more violence than we’ve already brought on them. Magdalena offered to do the same thing. We refused her, too.”

Kaufman said, “Why haven’t you already asked her to escort the visitors? She’s been here much longer than we have, and you’ve been planning this ceremony for weeks.”

“I’m not going to ask Magdalena for anything,” Ann said, and Kaufman wondered if Dieter reacted to Magdalena the same way he did. Marbet, of course, would know, but Kaufman wasn’t about to ask her.

Ann continued, “She pays Gofkit Shamloe well for food and water. That’s all we want from her.”

So that’s where the beautiful embroidered pillow in Enli’s house had come from. Kaufman said, “I’ll need a villager to guide me to Gofkit Tramloe tomorrow and—” But Ann had stopped listening to him. She spoke heatedly in World to Essa, who had bounded up to them with something in her folded fist. Kaufman caught the words “Enli” and “cari.”

Essa, looking totally unrepentant, unfolded her fist. On it sat a tiny data cube and an even tinier nano housing. Kaufman said, “Where did she get that?”

Essa jabbered back at Ann. Marbet translated for Kaufman. “She figured out how to take apart the casing of her comlink. Apparently it’s mostly casing. Those are the working insides, still working.”

Kaufman didn’t look at Ann. It was he who had traded nine comlinks with the natives in the first place, on the previous expedition, over Ann’s vigorous protests. The comlinks’ range was limited to the planet, unlike Ann’s, Kaufman’s, and, presumably, Magdalena’s. Theirs could reach anything in orbit around the tunnel, with a fifty-four-minute lag.

He asked, “Who has the other eight comlinks? Who does Essa talk to on hers?”

“Nobody,” Ann said shortly. “The others belong to the marauders, they were all in Voratur’s household. If they still even have them. But even Essa knows better than to try to raise anyone with hers.”

Kaufman would have taken it away from her. An irresponsible child … Worlders had strange ideas about personal property. They tolerated stealing, but not confiscation. Maybe because it would have once violated shared reality? Apparently Ann now participated in these ideas.

Marbet said reasonably, “If she doesn’t raise anybody with the comlink, how does she know it still works?”

“She doesn’t really,” Ann said. Kaufman, ex-army, looked at the intact data cube and nano housing and thought,
It still works
.

Ann took Essa off to pound cari bread. Marbet, done with her weeding, went with them. Before Kaufman could return to his own weeding, he saw Magdalena walking toward him.

“Lyle?”

“Yes?” She looked older by sunlight than by starlight. But she still walked with the spring of a young girl.

“I just wanted to tell you that I haven’t had any news yet from the tunnel. My informant on Mars had said the move against Stefanak was set for yesterday—” as if Kaufman could forget! “—but I still have no idea if it succeeded, or on what scale, or with what outcome. I thought you’d want to know.”

To know that she had nothing to report? Kaufman knew a subterfuge when he saw one. He said gravely, “Thank you.”

“Are you going to this native do-ha tomorrow?”

So that was it Magdalena hadn’t been invited. No, that wasn’t possible; villagers did things en masse, a relic of shared reality. Everyone in the village was automatically assumed to be part of the ceremony. Magdalena was in the village. Ergo.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m escorting the visitors from Gofkit Tramloe here early tomorrow morning.”

“Guard duty, um?” she said, making it sound menial. “I suppose it’s necessary. But maybe you can answer me a question. Is one supposed to give this child a present at the ceremony? I certainly don’t want to commit a social gaffe.”

Kaufman studied her. Sarcasm, and under it … more sarcasm? Or did she actually want to know? He couldn’t read her, not even after a lifetime of dealing with politicians and military and corporations with hidden agendas. No wonder she was such a formidable force. She was far more complicated than the average general. Deviousness and brains and beauty.

Beauty?

Yes. Still. Despite.

He played it straight. “I believe a gift is in order, yes. Marbet and I are giving the child something.”

“What?” she said, and Kaufman saw that she knew he didn’t have the faintest idea what Marbet planned as a present. Magdalena tossed him a knowing smile and sauntered off. Against his better judgment, Kaufman watched her until she was out of sight.

*   *   *

I could have him
, Magdalena thought. However, it would be a lot of trouble. Decent men so frequently balked at first. Or maybe she couldn’t have Kaufman, maybe he’d remain faithful to that genemod mind reader of his. Once, the mere uncertainty and challenge would have excited her. Now, it just didn’t seem worth the effort.

No one understood, not really. They thought her predatory, cold. And she worked to maintain that illusion, to keep hidden and safe her real self. Only hidden things were safe.

She wanted—had wanted all her life—to feel safe.

That’s what the money was for, what the men had been for, what the endless covert deals were for. Why couldn’t the fools understand this basic fact of life? Only power kept you safe. If you had enough of it, you could control any situation that threatened you, and then you were safe.

Growing up, she had never felt safe, not for a minute. She didn’t remember her mother except as a cloud of sickening fear, a giant who hurt her over and over. Her mother’s name could still make the back of her neck go cold.
Catalune
.

May Damroscher hadn’t even felt safe with Sualeen Harris, although Sualeen had been the only person she’d ever loved, until Laslo. Sualeen had lived down the block from May and Catalune. She noticed that six-year-old May was often in pain, and she examined the bruises and burns and cuts. She didn’t call any authorities; these people never did. She merely informed Catalune Damroscher that May lived with her now and if Catalune set foot anywhere near the kid, she was dead. Catalune knew Sualeen Harris meant it. She turned May over to her and never saw her adopted daughter again.

Sualeen Harris had a huge sprawling family of ill-defined; kin of no namable ethnicity. They were walking examples of genetic warfare: black, white, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Punjab. Some were criminal and some were not, some were marginally less impoverished than others, some were literate and some were not. They were all, under Sualeen’s energetic bullying, kind to May. When she turned twelve, Sualeen lined up all the males in her family from eleven to seventy and told them that if any of them laid a hand on May, they were dead men walking. Like Catalune six years before, they believed her, and the men who had been eyeing May’s developing breasts averted their eyes.

Sualeen’s great regret in a life filled with hunger and cold and death was that she could not afford carved, real-granite headstones for her family’s graves. She tried to save for these, but always the money was needed for something: a new baby, bail money, payoffs to cops, something. Often Sualeen visited the great sprawling public cemetery a four hours’ train ride from the city and mourned that her loved ones’ graves were marked only by anonymous numbers on cheap foamcast. When the tumors finally got her, unchecked by any medicine, she knew that foamcast was all she would get, too.

Two days before she died, lying in a fetid sweltering room in great pain, she called May to her. “Go … May, go…”

“Where, Sualeen?” May said.

“Go … where the rich men are. It gonna come to you, honey … however. Get what you can out … out of it.”

May didn’t ask what “it” meant. She knew.

“Money … backyard … buried under tree…”

“I love you,” May said, for the first and last time in her life.

“Go…”

May didn’t go. She stayed for the coma, holding Sualeen’s hand, and the death, and the funeral. At the graveyard there was only a foamcast marker with an anonymous number. Two days later, alone in Sualeen’s house, a Harris uncle raped her.

May lay quietly, not struggling, knowing it would be futile. Penetration hurt her, and blood stained the floor. Afterward the uncle, caught somewhere between defiance and shame, didn’t look at her as he pulled up his pants and swaggered out the door. She was sixteen years old.

May pulled up her own pants, Her body shrieked, from vagina to the base of her spine. Leaving the blood unwiped on the floor, she stumbled out to the backyard tree—there was only one, dying of some blight—and dug with a fork until she found the box with the pathetically small number of money chips. But it was enough for a train ticket to North Carolina and a monokini when she got there.

She walked up to a guard outside the elite enclave she had seen simulated in holomovies. The guard’s eyes widened, then narrowed. May smiled. Despite her vaginal pain, she let him do what he wanted in exchange for entrance to the beach. She noted, with detachment, that afterward he wore the same look of mingled defiance and shame as the Harris uncle.

May went onto the beach and slowly walked up and down the water’s edge, looking for shells. That was how she met Amerigo Dalton, who became the third man to penetrate her in twenty-four hours. May bit her lip and endured it. She needed Amerigo Dalton, and even then she’d known that he was going to be only the first of many.

But not, she decided, Lyle Kaufman. At least, not right now.

Walking into her pathetic primitive hut, Magdalena batted at a flying insect. The two bodyguards, whom she noticed less than she noticed air, trailed her and took up their posts at the door. She sat down on one of the laughable native cushions and tried, yet again, to fight off the daily despair.

Laslo. Where was he? Who had taken him? What effect would the coup d’etat on Mars—assuming that fuckhole Pierce actually brought it off—have on the capture of Laslo and Capelo?

She knew very well that Laslo was her … what had that professor called it, so many years ago? Somebody’s heel. Some Greek. The place she could be hurt.

So many sweet memories. Laslo clambering onto her lap with a toy: “See, Mommy!” Laslo laughing at a puppy. Laslo saying, with a four-year-old’s artless pleasure, “What a pretty day today!”

Laslo, in later years … No. Not those memories. All adolescents were difficult, look at that alien terror Essa. Laslo was just going through a normal rocky phase, he’d grow out of it. This was no more than another of Laslo’s maddening, cruel “escapes” from his mother. But maybe this time he’d learn a real lesson from his misadventure, kidnapped and cooped up with a famous physicist for months. Laslo hated being cooped up and he wasn’t much good at science.

When his captors came to move both him and Thomas Capelo to a more secure location—exactly what Magdalena would have done in their place—Laslo must have thought they were letting him go. Time he learned better. Only his mother could release him, and maybe after she had, he’d have a greater appreciation of the life she worked so hard to give him. Yes, this whole thing might have a beneficial effect on Laslo.

Cheered, Magdalena rose gracefully from her pillow. She had to find some sort of suitable gift for that alien brat of Enli’s. What did you give a primitive native child? It wasn’t like she could just order a toy from F.A.O. Schwartz-Mars. Well, there had to be something suitable in her ship. Time to check it out anyway.

She snapped her fingers to summon the bodyguards to her skimmer.

THIRTEEN

GOFKIT SHAMLOE

T
he next morning, Kaufman bicycled to Gofkit Tramloe in the company of Enli’s mate, Calin, to escort the visitors back to Gofkit Shamloe for the flower ceremony.