Solitaire, page 2
And then her mother gasped and put a hand to her mouth, the left hand with the old scar showing stark white: and they sat in awful silence until Jackal said, “What do you mean?”
Born too late, was what it came down to, even after all the careful planning, the induced labor, the drugs, the forceps. They had dragged her out of her mother's womb well past the first second of the new year; her birth, as with all the potential Hope births, recorded by tamperproof time-stamp technology supplied by EarthGov. Which had promptly been subverted by the technicians. “It's Ko technology, after all,” Donatella said. “We should know how to get around it.”
And so they had, and little Ren grew up and took the web name Jackal and worked and trained and prepared, the unknowing center of an enormous secret, a plan that had seemingly run itself like clockwork for twenty-two years. Until now: until her mother had lost her temper in the one way she never should. Jackal understood why Donatella's voice had changed from fury to fear at the end, why she had followed Jackal onto the front terrace saying “Ren! Ren, wait! Come back and let's hammer this out.” But Jackal hadn't gone back. Don't negotiate me, she had thought bitterly, I'm not a fucking business deal. Except she was; and that was the real problem, the bottom line. The company had wanted a Hope badly enough to take the enormous risk of creating one, and the Hope's own mother had destabilized her at this most critical juncture. Ko would crucify her mother if they knew.
And maybe they should. How dare Donatella do this to her, make her so miserable that she could sit surrounded by her web and feel so alone? She had a sudden longing to hurt her mother. Hurt her deep. She imagined herself in some vice president's office telling the story doggedly, piously, saying, “I'm completely on board with this, but I'm a little worried that my mother is so upset.” God, it's tempting, she thought.
“What is?” Tiger said, drinks in hand, startling her; she hadn't meant to speak aloud. Can't tell you, she thought, can't tell anybody, and then hoped she hadn't said that out loud as well. “This is,” she said as brightly as she could, reaching for the glass.
Around her, her web mates chattered on. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hit something. She wanted Snow to hold her. But she had come here to get centered, so best be about it. She roused herself and waded into the conversation, made herself focus and listen and smile, smile, smile. She shifted so Tiger could perch on the arm of her chair. She recounted for Bear the entire plot of a play she'd seen in Esperance Park, complete with arm-waving descriptions of the fight scenes. She fetched her own next drink from the bar, and commiserated with someone from another web about the stress of the holiday season, her voice saying agreeably, “It sounds like you have a lot on your plate right now,” while her head said you have no fucking idea, sport.
None of it worked. She knew she had only to say, “I have a problem, I need your help,” and she would get everyone's undivided attention, the benefit of the dozens of brains here and the others who were part of the web, whether a mile away or a thousand. But she couldn't do it; she didn't know how to open her mouth and say I'm not a Hope. It was like saying, I am a lie; I am not real.
“I am real,” she told herself. “I am real.”
“What?” Tiger asked, leaning in closer, smiling down at her. “What did you say?”
“I am really drunk,” she said. “And I am really tired of the whole stupid world and I just want to forget about everything for a while.”
“Then let's dance.”
“That's a great idea. I'd love to. Umm…can you help me stand up?”
He laughed. “Sure.”
She took his hand. “Don't let me fall, Tiger,” she said. “Don't let me fall.”
That night she dreamed of Terry on the cliffs.
They were seven years old, on a school trip to the south coast of Ko on an early spring day. This was one of the few natural parts of the island; the rest was human-made, a project of the company's very profitable custom land-mass construction subsidiary. Ren and Terry scrambled along the cliff's edge with the other children, examining rock formations. They were supervised by teachers and the requisite accompanying parents, including Donatella. It was already clear to Ren that these trips made her mother restless and impatient, and she wished Donatella wouldn't come; not all the parents did, even though they were supposed to take turns. But her mother always put on her best pair of walking shoes and insisted brightly that she was looking forward to it, darling Ren, of course she wouldn't miss it.
Today, Donatella was organizing the parents and teachers as easily as she ran multinational projects; she had completely rearranged the supervising teacher's safety plan and was ordering everyone about. The teacher tried to argue: Ren sighed, and pulled Terry farther along the bluff, farther than they were supposed to go. Behind them the teacher's voice grated against the rocks, and Donatella murmured soothingly.
Ren and Terry dug together for a while, saving the best rocks aside in a fiber bag, and making a game of pretending that the rejected bits were horrible criminals being forced to leap to their deaths. The adult voices buzzed behind them.
“Your mom never yells back,” Terry said, after a while. He was smaller than Ren, and even better at math, and the only person she knew beside herself who had ever stayed up all night just to see what happened to the moon.
“She doesn't need to yell,” Ren answered. “She always gets what she wants. She calls it clarifying.”
“Maybe—” Terry began, and then the cliff suddenly sighed and slid away from under his bottom, and he went down with it in a silent, surprised bundle of arms and legs, his mouth and eyes wide. He broke apart on the rocks as he fell.
The ground under Ren began to shift. Her fear was liquid silver weighing down her arms and legs.
“Ren, get away from the edge!” her mother shouted in her command voice, the voice that must be obeyed. Donatella was forty feet away, already in motion; but Ren could not move. Down below, Terry's small body lay in an impossible shape. Another large section of crust began to slide, and Donatella howled and threw herself the last ten feet, landed hard on her stomach and flung out both arms to snatch Ren's wrists as the ground under her went down in a rumble. Ren hung over the raw new edge and heard her mother's left hand crackle as one of the big rocks rolled on it. Donatella turned white and began to pant, but she didn't let go of her daughter until there were two other adults there to help lift her the rest of the way.
Surgery restored most of the function of the hand, after endless weeks of physiotherapy and a confining rehabilitative brace that made Donatella clumsy and bitter. Ren knew that she was to blame for her mother's pain, because she hadn't obeyed. And maybe it was her fault that Terry had fallen. She wasn't sure: no one had told her. But she knew that she had failed in responsibility.
She decided that she must make sure to never, never forget what she had done. She crept out to the garden and found the largest stone that she could hold with one hand, a beautiful ragged thing of gray and brown. It was a day like a painting: a hundred shades of green in the leaves and grasses and lily pads of the pond, in the vegetable tops waving from the brown grit of the soil; the sky that looked as if one of the blue colorsticks in her classroom had melted across it; the pinks and lavenders and sun-yellows of the flowers whose names she didn't know, that nodded wild and rangy on their thin stalks because her father liked them that way. The pain, when it came, was sharp and orange. She managed to hit her left hand twice before Carlos found her.
“Oh, Ren,” he said, after he'd made her an ice pack and wiped her tears. “Don't hurt yourself. That won't help. The only thing that helps is to do better next time.”
She waited for him to tell her how, but he only hugged her and said, “Okay?”
She wasn't sure, but she wanted to please him, so she told him, “I'll do better.”
2
SOMEHOW LIFE WENT ON IN THE BAD DAYS AFTER Halloween. Jackal hung on to her secret. Sometimes it felt like a soft animal biting the lining of her stomach, wanting out. At odd moments, a frightened voice in her head would whisper They're looking at me funny. Did I say something wrong? Do they know?
She only had to stay sharp, stay frosty, a little longer. The end-of-year holidays were less than a month away, with the investiture looming behind them, and she saw it as a talisman of sorts: she would be off the island, just another Hope doing Hope things, and it would not be so hard to lie to strangers.
This morning she rode her bicycle from her apartment to the center of Ko. It was a typical early-December day, the blue sky gathering clouds at the horizon, the sun warm on her back as she pedaled. Her route traveled the Ring Highway along the coast toward the south junction, where Fortaleza Road ran north and west into the center of the island and the Ko Prime corporate campus. Although the South China Sea lolled along a reef, salty and shallow, only fifty meters to her left, it was the greenland to her right that she noticed. The hundreds of acres on this part of the island would probably not be developed for decades; the company liked to plan for growth, to marshal its resources early. This wild-ness was safe for years, perhaps for her whole lifetime, and there was no risk in letting herself believe that these trees belonged to her; the rough trunks, the startling soft meat of a broken branch, the knobbled twigs rising in rows like choirs. The ground belonged to her, the human-made rises and falls of root and rock, carefully random, beautiful. The flowers were hers, stuporous in their mulch: the light and the stippled shadow, the stones and the rich rot underneath them, were all part of this place that felt like part of her. For the few minutes of passing through it, she was drawn into it like a breath.
Ahead, the treeline thinned and Fortaleza Road pulled away from the coastline into a neighbourhood of houses that muscled their way out of the rock, built with open spaces and expanses of E-glass to take full advantage of wind and solar energy. Beyond them rose clusters of angled apartment buildings, grouped around common sports and shopping areas—vertical communities, every bit as comfortable and modern as the executive homes. Lately, Jackal had begun to see this as the place where the company lifted itself from the ground like something protean raising a head full of teeth. Everything was constructed and furnished with company-made materials, tools, appliances, fixtures, textiles, electronics, entertainment equipment. The company name was everywhere: KO, the O flattened at top and bottom in the universal symbol for the map of the world. Everyone on the island ate food grown with Ko hydroponics technology, and relied on the Ko network to talk across the street or around the world. Jackal's mother had been part of the team that developed the “Kommunications” name and marketing campaign, and Jackal was certain that Donatella had much to do with the success of the project. Her mother had the temperament of a moray eel, which at first consideration did not seem a good fit with her position as an Assistant Director of Corporate Participation: but Jackal understood that biting down hard and fast was Donatella's path to success. “I'm not there to get my own way,” Donatella would say, “just to get results.” And recognition: Jackal knew her mother loved her job and the corporate pin she wore every day on her right shoulder. And her father loved her mother, and was made proud by his Dona's pride. They had given themselves to Ko long ago. And then they had given her. Riding between the apartment towers, toward the glass canyon of skyscrapers, one hundred nineteen subsidiaries' world headquarters and the twin executive towers of Ko Prime, Jackal felt two million minds turn toward her, full of Hope.
She still did not know what to do with her tension and fear. They were growing; these days, any small friction could make her cramp with anger. Carlos had called the day after the party: “Hija, your mother's very upset about the argument you had. She won't tell me what happened, but whatever it was, can't you forgive her? At least call her and tell her things are all right?” But Jackal couldn't. She wasn't much good at talking to anyone right now, not even Snow, who had been asking more and more often what was wrong. Just tense about the investiture, Jackal told her, and a fight with my mother. Nothing new. She was relieved when Snow said, “I won't push, at least not right now.”
She parked her bike and went on with her busy morning of workshops and research. In the afternoon, she went to Esperance Park for the web's monthly game day. She thought games were stupid, mostly because she rarely won. But she knew that failing at something unimportant made people more comfortable with her, so she played. Games were an easy way to fail.
But she should have known better today. Losing wasn't so easy when a person was full to the back teeth with rage, and what had she been thinking, agreeing to play machiavelli with Tiger? In just an hour he had won three consecutive rounds with a speed and a jolly, obvious contempt that humiliated her.
She said as quietly as she could, “Tiger, ease up, okay? You're really sharking me.”
“Oh, please,” he said. “You're the Hope of Ko and you can't even hold your temper over a game of machiavelli? Good thing the fate of the world didn't depend on you today. You'd have lost at least a couple of fourth-world countries.”
He spoke in his smiling, public voice, pitched with just the right tone to send the message we're only playing here to the people watching in the small plaza. He made them his audience so easily: they loved him, her web mates crowded around the table, the strangers at a respectful distance enjoying one of the last warm days of the year before the slide into January cold. Tiger was vibrant against the brushed-steel buildings that towered over this end of the park, their banks of mirrored windows washing the warm afternoon light back in dapples over the tended, careful trees: he glowed like a candle, his eyes black-bright against his golden skin. She had a moment of piercing regret that things had gone so bad between them.
“Don't they teach you anything in those process classes?” he was saying. “Feedback is an integral part of improvement, Jackal. You really ought to learn how to handle it.” There was a bite to the words, and a challenge; and then he smiled in a way she recognized, and she understood that he was picturing himself on top of her, moving his hips slowly while he held her face in his hands and said—
“Stop,” she said.
The smile deepened. “Oh, don't be like that,” he said. “I know you like to play.” And that did it. Her heart juddered hard against her breastbone once, twice, and Tiger became outlined in crimson, and she let the leash inside her slip: just this once, she thought wildly, just this one time, and lunged across the table, and broke his nose with the blade of her hand.
Ko always moved fast, particularly where Jackal was concerned: Tiger's blood was still damp on her shirt when the assistant showed her into Analin Chao's office in the Executive Two tower. Chao was short and sleek: Jackal gangled over her while they shook hands.
“Sit down.” Chao waved her to an armchair that looked large enough for two of Jackal, with an ottoman conveniently canted to one side.
“No, thank you.”
“Why not be comfortable?”
The furniture, upholstered in a deep blue fabric, looked slightly worn and indeed very comforting, as if it could cradle all her troubles away. From its corner on the far side of the office, the chair faced a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out to the east coast of the island. It was a clear day: Jackal could see the hazy bumps of the Hong Kong skyline on the horizon of the flat sea. A person could sit in this chair and be safe without being trapped; a person could be wombed here. But she wasn't falling for it. She had studied with the lead designers of Ko's consumer psychology division: they had even used last year's model of this chair as a class discussion topic.
She shook her head.
“Ah,” Chao said, “of course, you'd be aware of the subliminals. Sorry, most people don't get that training until director level, at least. How about this one?” She pulled her own chair from behind her corner desk.
Jackal ignored it. She did not like being so easily read, and she was determined not to let this Chao disconcert her. All she wanted was to go home and curl up in a hot bath and be tired of everything. She folded her arms across her stomach, smearing a brush-stroke of blood across her shirt along the underside of her left breast. She made no move to wipe it off; Chao was watching everything.
Jackal said, “Dr. Andabe is my usual counselor.” That was the right note, just casual enough but still firm. Good.
Chao smiled as if Jackal had said something clever. “Yes, he is,” she agreed. “He'll get copies of all my notes, of course. But Khofi is really more of an educational and motivational advisor, after all, and you're certainly past that now, don't you think? Your training is almost finished, Al Iskandariyah is less than a month away. You're about to be officially invested as a world Hope. It's important that any difficulties—” she smiled and opened her hands in a way that made those difficulties shared, “—be resolved efficiently before they complicate your taking up your new position.” She sat easily on the edge of the ottoman, waved again to the chair she had pulled out for Jackal.
