Solitaire, page 19
She came back from her brief reverie to Crichton's red gaze on her face. Right now Crichton was the world, pushing at Jackal, waiting for an answer. But there were no answers, only hard questions. The blessed cool distance that Jackal had preserved throughout the day was collapsing under the pressure of all those questions waiting to present themselves. Any moment now the wreckage of her life would burst through the protective bubble she'd created, and she would have to start thinking about all the answers she didn't have.
Crichton asked abruptly, “Why didn't you sign the contract?”
That one she could answer. “I haven't read it yet.”
“Everyone else signed it.”
“Well, I didn't.”
“You have a better offer?” Crichton asked, and it was a clear challenge.
There was no point getting angry, but Jackal couldn't help it, anymore than she could help her fatigue or the fear that was lurking just outside her shrinking composure. “I didn't sign the contract because ever since I got out of VC I haven't been able to give a damn what happens to me, and that tells me that I'm too tired and too scared to be anything but stupid.” She began to shake; the bubble was bulging now, almost ready to rupture and let in all the unimaginable truths. “I don't have any room left to be stupid. So I have, what, about another ninety hours according to contract law. I'll get through whatever I have to with you and find a place where I can sleep for ten solid hours and then I'll decide about the goddamn contract. Gordineau asked me how I would live and I told her I don't know, but I'm still going to read it and I still don't know if I'm going to sign or not. If you have a problem with that, tough. It's one of the few fucking rights I have left.”
“I see,” Crichton said, less ferociously. “So it would solve all your problems if you had an interest-bearing NNA Central Bank credit account with a sizeable balance.”
“Well, it would be a good start,” Jackal retorted, still angry. And then, two beats later: “Are you…do I?”
Crichton named a figure that stunned Jackal into silence because it was probably enough for years of careful life.
“Are you sure it's mine?” she asked finally. And then, “Where did it come from?”
“The original deposit was wired into the NNA by Magister Asiae Bank in Hong Kong. Any theories?”
The bubble rent apart with a force so explosive that Jackal was sure it must be audible; she half-expected Crichton to ask what was that? while Jackal's carefully constructed detachment imploded. She looked up, hoping her shock didn't show. Crichton's red eyes studied her, waiting, and Jackal remembered Neill saying truth is a tool.
She answered honestly, but not completely: “Someone from Ko. Magister is one of Ko's primary financial partners in the Asia-Pacific region.”
“So you have a friend.”
“It looks that way. I'm surprised. And grateful.” Which was true, in a pathetic way: she was grateful that Arsenault had lived up to the agreement made all those years—no, she kicked herself mentally, those few months ago. Rafe had told her,
Don't underestimate the value of some hope of assistance on the back end of all this. She'd had no hope at all, and now, pitiably, she wanted to think of Ko as still honorable because they had given her some. That was followed by a fierce longing to get back inside her own head, back to VC-Ko, even if she had to be alone to go there. Maybe especially if she had to be alone; so safe, the bare beach, the empty plazas, the open cloudless sky…
“What is it?”
She came back to the weight of Crichton's red regard, heavier now that Jackal's safe shell was blown away.
Nothing I can tell you. So she only bit her lip and said, “I wish things were different.” All the long hours fell over her like a thick blanket; she hadn't realized how tired she was. Rapid-onset fatigue, the doctor had said.
Crichton watched for another moment and then rooted through an open box on the desk and produced a palmtop with a stuck-on label that read
Segura, Ren followed by an alphanumeric string. Jackal took it: it turned out to be a cheap Ural State knockoff with a limited battery life.
Crichton said, “Courtesy of the NNA. It wipes itself in a week. Get your own before then and transfer all the preference settings. Bring that one back to your first parole meeting. The palmtop includes an auto reminder for your parole appointments, second Tuesday of every month, eleven
A.M. sharp. That's less than two weeks from now, make sure you put it on your calendar. Anything more than ten minutes late is grounds for immediate arrest. My office brick and e-mail addresses are stored in the palmtop; you have three days from today to report a permanent residence address to me with a verification e-mail address for the landlord. Failure to report residence is grounds for immediate arrest. Your datagem accesses your credit account and you can download the information anytime into your palmtop, make sure you get one with a reader. Don't overdraw your account under any circumstances. Indigents are subject to immediate arrest. Any questions so far?”
Jackal shook her head.
“Good. The basic theme is immediate arrest, so don't screw up. Here's list of rentals that accept convicted criminals as tenants. Not everyone does. You try the one on Perdue Street, the Shangri-La. The manager will probably say he doesn't have anything available. You tell him Crichton asked how his mama is doing. Hah. See what happens then.”
“I—”
“You have a problem taking advice from me?”
“No. No. Sure, I can try to find it.”
Crichton gave her a sharp look as she put the file folder on a different pile. “Do it or don't do it, no tears from my eyes either way. You're entitled to one free session with a VC counselor, do you want it?”
Jackal blurted, “God, no.”
“No one ever does. Get to my office on time for your appointments or find yourself in a real prison for a change. That's all. The guard outside will tell you where to go.”
Jackal wanted to say,
Why are you angry with me, or I don't know what to do, or I'm afraid. But Crichton had already closed up her face and turned away. The chat was over.
The guard pointed her to a processing area where a clerk gave her a plastic-wrapped parcel of the clothes and boots she'd worn for her transfer to VC. She was surprised to see them. They didn't seem like hers anymore.
The clerk pointed her to a changing cubicle and stared at her through the gaps in the curtain. It seemed to take a long time to get dressed. Back at the counter, she thumb-printed a handful of screens and signed her name electronically seven times. Then she waited until the clerk said dismissively, “You're done. There's the door.”
She began to turn and the man said, “Well, take this with you,” and pushed over her palmtop. “Bunch of fuckin' zombies,” he said, and someone else laughed, but she didn't care. She almost agreed with him. Sleep seemed a remote imagining, something she had perhaps done once a long time ago. She understood that her body would struggle on until it could not function anymore; then in the simple way of machines it would stop working, and she would tumble wherever she was into a heap of broken parts until someone came to repair or dismantle her.
She let the body-machine carry her through the heavy steelplated door that, without warning, dumped her onto the street and into a current of people that whirled her in a rush of color and noise and smell off to her left. For the first moments, she saw only an enormous blur; then the jumbled images coalesced into buildings streaked with grease and graffiti, people on crowded stoops, and more people in open windows, as far up as she could see, until their shapes were lost in the shadows that the giant structures cast on each other. It was cold: she'd worked out during the endless waiting of the day that it must be roughly late October, and she'd expected the weather to be warm, like home. But she wasn't home anymore.
Voices echoed in layers from the street to the sky; the noise spun around her as she stumbled along the edge of the crowd, close to the road that was packed with mass transport, commercial carriers, private cars, and even a few people on battery-powered scooters, small and vulnerable among the heavy traffic. The air was gray with industrial fumes, and many of the people on foot wore filter masks. The rest trudged barefaced through the smoke, gasping or wiping their eyes; many of them coughed openmouthed, as if it were such an habitual reflex that they no longer noticed they were spreading spit. Jackal thought of disease vectors, and tried to turn her face whenever someone passed close by.
She saw a young man and woman who even to her untrained eye were obviously misplaced tourists. Their clothes gave them away: much too trendy, the sort of thing that suburban people who read too many fashion magazines thought city people would wear. Jackal had seen others like these on the streets of Hong Kong, in the terraces of Mirabile, on the playas of Madrid. These two looked young and uneasy; their body language broadcast lost and afraid, and the street noticed. Already they were drawing a crowd of hustlers, and kids who yelled hey lady let me carry ya bag! and then dashed away, hooting. Up ahead, a group of young men all wearing red berets and matching earrings swiveled as a unit, scanned the crowd, and drifted back toward the disturbance and the two bewildered people at its center. Jackal checked her body language, tried to walk straight and loose, to relax her face and remove herself from the scene. She passed the tense young man, the tight-lipped woman, the cluster of red hats and flat, interested eyes without a sideways glance or a flutter in her pulse rate, and she tried not to hear as the trouble started behind her.
Now what? Which way? Around her, the buildings rose up and up, and the voices echoed, and then the sound receded like slow water down a drain, and she was shivering against a pillar of some cold stone, lost and too tired to find herself. The slow-swimming schools of people eddied along the sidewalk, ignoring her for the moment, but she thought of the tourists and knew she could not afford to be still. The shadows were longer on the sidewalk, and she had to be somewhere safer than this before dark. She took a deep breath and rapped her head back against the stone behind her, hard enough to jar what was left of her brain against her skull; it hurt, but it didn't help. A block away, the red hats moved in her direction.
“Do you require assistance?” the pillar said.
She blinked. The pillar repeated its question in a pleasant mechanical voice.
“Um,” she said. “I'm lost?”
“State your destination.”
“Perdue Street, Shangri-La Apartments.”
The pillar told her that a map would print out at the port on its other side; that she was required to recycle the paper upon reaching her destination; that failure to comply was grounds for a stiff penalty; and that it had been a pleasure serving her. The map told her that Perdue Street was two kilometers away. You can make it, she told herself; she whispered it all the way there.
13
THE MANAGER OF THE SHANGRI-LA SPIT ON THE STEP two inches from Jackal's right boot when he heard Crichton's message, but he gave her an apartment, less dismal than she expected—four tiny rooms in the back of the building, with a few pieces of worn furniture and a small window in the main room from which she could see slices of the several canals that cross-hatched this part of the city. They were industrial canals, thoroughfares for barges, bounded by maglev train rails and huge crossdocking warehouses, and constantly busy with the roaring backspin of diesel engines and the bossy busy tooting of the tugboats that shoved the big vessels around like small dogs herding sleepy hippos. When it rained, she imagined, the window would run red and green and white with the reflected lights of the barges and the harsh halogen spotlights of NNA customs boats.
He cleared the front door and apartment door locks so that she could set her thumbprint and access code; then he accepted a credit transfer of three months' rent and a hefty security deposit. Jackal didn't argue; she added something extra, “for your trouble.”
He snorted; and he took it, nodding once at the amount. Then he told her, “This one's only open because the tenant died day before yesterday, some kind of wicked infection.” He said it with a sideways look of nasty hope, as if she might flap her hands in horror and change her mind. She didn't she smiled and closed the door in his face, locked it all three ways, wiggled into the most comfortable position she could find on the sprung couch, and fell immediately asleep.
Later, she roused muzzily to the clangor of raised voices in the hall, and wondered if she had in fact poached someone else's deal. She didn't care. Let them find another place. She was safe. She turned over and went back down into the dark.
She woke alert and hungry in the small hours after midnight, and propelled herself into a marathon of activity. The first street vendor she found taught her how to use her datagem in the credit reader, and she bought a steaming sausage on a sourdough roll, slathered it with mustard, and ate it where she stood, not bothering to catch the brown drips that spattered her and the sidewalk. She carried a second back inside and ate more slowly while she plugged Crichton's palmtop into the apartment's network port and puzzled out the unfamiliar operating system; then she began locating city services on the net to arrange for utilities and e-mail. She wasn't surprised to find that the net service provider for her zone was Ko, but she didn't like it. The only surprise was her own hesitation over her choice of e-mail address: finally, she shrugged and requested jackalsegura; and smiled wryly to herself when the database told her that she was Accepted.
She registered her apartment and virtual address with Crichton. She sent Irene Miller the most rigorously formal e-mail she could devise, declining the program's employment contract; she had to rewrite it four times to filter out the obvious fuck-you subtext, and she was remotely interested to find herself still weighing these sorts of concerns.
She saved the most difficult transaction for last. She located the web site of a nearby storage facility, negotiated a month's rental; then she took a deep breath and, still in her most formal style, sent a request to Ko Facilities Management to release and ship her personal goods. She shouldn't waste the money on storage—she didn't intend to leave anything in it—but she couldn't bear to give Ko her actual address. It was an odd contrast, her physical secrecy and her open, almost contemptuous presence on the net; she didn't understand it and decided not to try. When she'd worked up the nerve to send the message, she became aware that it was full day, and she was hungry again.
She ventured a little farther from the building this time, and found a small grocery shop relentlessly stocked with prepackaged meals and processed foods. “Vegetables?” she asked, and was pointed to the row of cans and vacuum-sealed plastic bags in the middle aisle. The combination of low availability and high prices told her a lot about her new situation. She knew that as she explored her immediate territory she would find it a mosaic: determinedly proud neighborhoods, worn and tired but well-scrubbed and inching toward economic security in two or three generations, divided along inexplicable sudden lines from hardscrabble angry poverty and areas of aggressive despair. There would be a large, crumbling public clinic somewhere in a five-mile radius, the only one that would offer public health services. There would be two or three trendy clubs where locals served upper-class patrons who parked their cars in guarded lots while they enjoyed the frisson of the danger zone. There would be some really good ethnic restaurants where she might or might not be welcome. Power outages would happen here first and be repaired last. The police would always ride in pairs; and, indeed, she saw her first matched set cruise by as she returned to her apartment with two carrybags of provisions and the most expensive can opener she had ever owned.
She had messages waiting, and that was a tremulous moment. It made her too aware of where she was: sitting on a rickety chair in a room that smelled wrong and was still her only place in the world. All the energy she'd generated from being brave about the shopping, competent about the apartment and the utilities, vanished utterly and left her deflated and sad. Accepting the messages meant accepting it all: that life had turned around and broken her when she wasn't paying attention, and that these e-mails were for some new Jackal who had to find a different shape from the pieces.
She stared at nothing for several heartbeats; then she heard a particularly insistent tugboat toot-toot-tooting on a near canal, and it sounded so like a harassed caretaker saying no no no! to a maniacal two-year-old that she had to smile, in spite of everything. And then she saw that the drab room was speckled with sunlight, and she pulled herself out of the chair and opened the window. The air smelled faintly of sausages, and there was enough breeze to stir the flap of one of the carrybags. She could paint the room a pale yellow to catch and hold the light; she could put a small desk there in the corner; when they sent her things, she would have music again, and her set of wooden spoons, and maybe even the thick wool socks that she had always worn in place of slippers. Everything did not have to be different; she did not have to be entirely new. Okay, she thought, okay; and sat down to read the mail.
There was a confirmation from Crichton that her address information had been recorded; no arrest today, Jackal thought almost cheerfully, and saved the message to a folder she labeled Stay Out Of Jail. There was a return message from Ko, which she opened before she had time to get too scared. It was unsigned and generic, and told her that her request for retrieval of stored material would be granted upon receipt of advance packing and shipping charges, as quoted, and that her goods would arrive at her location within two weeks of payment verification. She paid the bill. That wasn't so bad, she thought, she could deal with Ko; but maybe that was only because for her, Ko was now an empty place. She had rubbed out all the people while she was in VC. Snow and the web and her parents were gone. No more people for Jackal. Don't think about it, she told herself, and felt like crying again, so she made herself get up and put away her food. Then she heated some vacuum-packed fettuccine alfredo and ate it with a roll; she didn't like the taste, but the carbohydrates steadied her. She'd have an hour or so before she got tired again. She should have bought some beer, and she needed to get back on a protein-rich diet if she didn't want her blood sugar freewheeling. And she had to get a new palmtop, and maybe a low-end desktop. She'd have to find other places to shop if she wanted to have any money left. That meant transport schedules and city maps. She needed paint. A phone. Newsnet access. A microwave. A budget. She made herself a cup of tea and started a list.
