The Mimicking of Known Successes, page 10
Chapter 18
I woke up in bed.
It was not my bed.
The clinic. I was aching and pained, but I did not feel anxious. I had been cared for, and my body knew it before I thought to ask the question.
No, I observed some time later, it was not the clinic. The furnishings, though plain, were too personal. The room was small, but when I moved my eyes from the ceiling I could see several shelves of books, their tabs sticking out somewhat haphazardly. The blanket tucked around me was warm and comfortingly soft. I was still drowsy. Then my eyes wandered down to the engraving on the wall by the slightly open door. It was an engraving of Io, based on an astronomical photograph taken by an uncrewed spacecraft during the Classical Era, and I knew every curve of it, for I had seen it often when—when Mossa and I shared rooms at university!
I was in Mossa’s home.
I must have made some sound, as in my sudden energy I turned on the bed to look around, for a moment later the door swung quietly open and Mossa’s peaked face leaned in. “Pleiti.” She said it very quietly. “You’re awake. I’m so glad.” She stepped in, closed the door, and sat on the chair beside the bed—placed there and angled towards my pillow, I noticed, as if she had expected to sit there, or as if she already had.
“Have I been unconscious long?” I croaked, uncertain. I remembered the compression factory, the attack.
“Nearly a full day,” she said. “But that is not from your injury, or not from your injury alone; I gave you stasis pills at the factory. I was afraid,” she paused very slightly, her face seemed to waver in my vision, “I was afraid I would not be able to stop the bleeding in time, and we were far from any assistance.”
“You carry stasis pills?”
“I am an Investigator,” Moss reminded me austerely. “It is not such an uncommon need for me.”
I let that disturbing acknowledgment pass. “Where are we?”
“In my rooms.” She looked around, as though they were new to her too, although I was confident she could have told me the title of every book on that shelf, in whatever order I wished. “On Sembla.”
I hadn’t known where she lived. “We’re not so far from Valdegeld,” I said, attempting to sit up. “You could have…” Nausea accosted me and I hesitated, fighting the urge to vomit. Mossa offered a small basin, but I held up a hand—I could not afford to shake my head—and breathed as I had learned in my adaptation class, and it passed. “Could you—” I started, but she had already caught the meaning of my gesture and was arranging the pillows so that I could sit up more comfortably.
“I did not think Valdegeld would be wise,” Mossa said, when I had settled. “We know of at least one conspirator there. Here we can recoup our energies and consider our next move.”
“Mm,” I said, because I had not meant to suggest that she could have brought me back to my own rooms; rather, I had been wondering why she hadn’t visited me before. I swallowed the inadvisable question and covered by adjusting myself against the pillows. Terrible things, pillows: so soft and accommodating that they won’t stay the way you want them for more than a few minutes. “What happened at the factory, after I—” I stopped, not sure how to convey proved to be a weakness.
“After you saved my life?” Mossa asked, and continued over my objection. “The attacker turned on you, but I was able to use that focus to take control of the situation. Once I had ascertained that you were not going to bleed to death immediately, I restrained our assailant.”
I had expected something so different, it took me a moment to understand what she was saying. “You captured the person?”
“I did.” Her tone was calm, but there might have been the faint suggestion of a crease at the corner of her mouth.
“Well?” I struggled to rise again, and the nausea was less this time. “What news?”
“I have not yet interrogated him. I was seeing to you first, and to my own needs, and in any case I thought the wait might be useful.”
“Wait—he’s here?”
“In the other room.” Mossa blinked at me. “What did you expect?”
“Oh, I don’t know, that you might hand the dangerous criminal over to the Investigators?”
“I am an Investigator.”
“Well, yes, but…” I gestured helplessly. “I was under the impression that you—that Investigators, at least—sometimes worked with each other.” That there were official places for interrogations to take place and prisoners to be held; that one might want some semblance of distinction between such work and one’s privacy. Mossa, evidently, did not cherish her rooms as I did mine.
Although of course I worked in my rooms all the time.
Mossa raised a shoulder. She had changed her clothes—the ones she had been wearing at the factory must have been bloodstained, after she had dragged me all this way, including at least one railcar change. And with a prisoner. Had she given him a stasis pill too? “I will deposit him with my bureau once we know what we need to know. It seemed counterproductive to do so beforehand.”
I decided not to question her office politics, which sounded like they must rival those of the university. “Well then,” I said, with an effort towards robustness. “Shall we get started?”
That time I was sure I saw a smile. “You need some food first. I’ll bring soup.”
I wondered if she was enjoying the opportunity to offer me the same comfort I had given her. I rather thought so, and submitted with contentment to the careful palm on my forehead, the solicitous serving of the thick warming broth.
Chapter 19
I was much restored by the soup, and when Mossa offered me some clothes—my own, from her satchel—and stepped outside the room (on her own account; I wouldn’t have asked it), I moved to dress myself without hesitation. I did have a moment of unease when I stood, but the stasis pill had done its work, along with the broth (I wondered then if perhaps she had dosed that with something as well). My arm was sore, and showed a long red streak from the knife, and it would probably take some time for the muscle to fully knit, but my head was clear and the rest of my body felt almost normally strong.
Mossa had packed me a selection of possible clothes. I decided that for interrogating a dangerous criminal the dressing gown was lacking in protection, and donned an ensemble I could have worn to my office.
Mossa was waiting for me in the hall. “Ready?”
I squirmed a little. “I’m not sure. Mossa, are we really about to … take this into our own hands, so to speak?”
She looked at me, face impassive, probably trying to understand what I was objecting to. “Whose hands would be better?”
I could only shrug at that, and after waiting for any other objection she led me into the next room.
As we walked in I was well into a meditation on the permissive uses of violence or restraint, and how the Classical World had differed on these points from our lives here on Giant; whether the professional fetters on the ankles of the man lying tied on the undyed rug were better or worse than something appropriated from another use. These philosophical thoughts were largely, though not completely, dispersed by the identity of the prisoner. I crouched by his head. “Bolien Trewl.”
He raised his head to look at me and almost spat. “You! I should have known you were involved.”
That seemed nonsensical, since I had been drawn in largely by the happenstance of knowing Mossa. “Involved?”
But he was still talking. “Wait, was that you in the factory? I should have hit you harder.” Then he really did spit. “Conservative that you are! You’re too late, anyway.”
I couldn’t help flinching a little at the slur; it was not something I had ever been called or accused of being before. “You think I’m afraid of change because I want to keep the Preservation Institute open? You’ve done enough research there, Trewl, how could you sell them out?”
He just laughed at me, mouth twisted in scorn and hate. Mossa’s hand came down on my shoulder, reminding me not to let him distract me from our purpose. “Who are you working with?” I asked.
His eyes flashed at me. “Working with?” It was an expression of disdain more than a question.
“Working with,” I repeated. “Who met you at the factory? Where are the biological samples you stole?” Though I knew the samples were inert, I could not help hoping he had not simply tipped them off a platform somewhere.
He started to splutter again. Mossa leaned in over my shoulder. “Your confederate killed Rechaure.”
Bolien started at that. “Re—Someone killed Rechaure?” He had started to say something else first, I was certain of it, but had caught it so quickly that I couldn’t have sworn to whether it had been the beginning of an oath or the initial sound in a name. “Why would anyone do that? Old fellow wasn’t a threat to anyone.”
“You should think very carefully about whom you’ve chosen to work with.” Mossa’s voice was heavy with the prediction of betrayal and disaster, but Bolien didn’t seem to notice.
“Nothing to do with me, and I’m sorry for it, but it’s nothing to do with me and you can’t possibly connect it. Rechaure was alive and ranting on his corner last time I left Valdegeld, and I’ve been pretty far away ever since.” He smirked.
“And what exactly were you doing on the other side of the globe?”
He didn’t seem surprised that we knew about his long journey, shrugging his shoulders against the rug. “Seeing the planet. Haven’t you ever wanted to go around Giant?”
“It must have been a very shaky trip in a suspended railcar,” I commented.
“What good is an adventure if it’s not a little uncomfortable?”
I was getting very tired of his smirk. I started naming the people I had found who seemed likely to undermine the Preservation Institute, but he only laughed harder at each name, until he was coughing and choking on his spite. At last Mossa drew me gently out of the way. She tipped Bolien up into a sitting position until he had stopped choking, then kicked him down to the rug again and led me from the room with a nod.
“We’ll give him some time,” she said, in the hall. “A promenade, perhaps, Pleiti?”
She took her bag from a hook on the wall and, seeing my satchel beside it, I slung it on as well. I did not expect we’d be going far, but with Mossa I had learned to distrust my expectations.
Chapter 20
From the door of Mossa’s rooms we proceeded down two stories of long ramp, and onto the street. “Radiation,” I swore, as we stepped away from the building. “I’m terrible at interrogation.”
“You’re not expected to be good at it,” Mossa replied, “with no training and no practice. But that’s not the problem. I believe we’re missing something from our theoretical narrative.” It occurred to me, belatedly, that her fierce glower was a sign of intense concentration rather than a reflection of ire at my ineptitude. “Even accounting for bravado and an unusual level of arrogance and self-involvement, his lack of reaction at our questioning suggests that we are not threatening the core of whatever secret he is protecting.” She was silent for a few moments, doubtless in an attempt to perceive the shape of this absent understanding, then, apparently recalling my existence, added, “I find that a stroll can be helpful—” She stopped suddenly, peered at me anxiously, “If you’re not too tired? Or hurting? How is your arm?”
“I don’t mind a walk,” I said, and I didn’t. I was looking around with interest. I had not spent much time in Sembla, for one thing, though I always enjoyed the newer city as a contrast to Valdegeld; and then again, I was interested to see the neighborhood where Mossa had decided to live.
Unlike Valdegeld, with its precipitous walls and tight streets, the remnants of a time when platforms—when any surface area at all—were desperately scarce, Sembla offered low buildings, accessible and spaced out. This platform was known for its gardens, little squares interspersed with the buildings, bedded with fine volcanic soil laboriously shuttled in from Io, and so every few minutes unexpected trees peeked at us through the early morning mist with flashes of beleaguered green.
“I suppose, if he tipped the cells into the planet, it’s not like he has much to lose,” I said at last. “And not much we can do about it in any case.”
“I don’t believe he did,” Mossa said. “It is a lot of trouble to go for something so indirect as ruining the Preservation Institute. Surely there would be other ways? And even if there were not, if he was paid to do that, a man like that would not throw away anything potentially valuable. He would try to sell it, even with the risk. Or, I don’t know, use them for his research.”
“Perhaps you’re right.”
“More than that, though,” Mossa went on, slipping her arm through mine to guide me into the next garden, “consider the suspended railcar.”
I could consider nothing at that moment but the delicate pressure of the crook of her elbow against mine. “The suspended railcar?”
Mossa had always hated senseless repetition of phrases, but she answered without irritation. “The one Bolien traveled around Giant on. It wasn’t waiting in the station below.”
“It took someone else off, then! Of course, you had suggested something of the sort when we saw the empty andén.” I turned to her, then regretted it when she removed her arm. “But how was he going to leave?”
“I imagine on the railcar we came in on. I must have frightened him off when I disembarked so quickly. Why else would he have been hiding in that factory?”
“Of course,” I said, chagrined not to have seen it myself.
Mossa smiled at me. “I did have a head start in considering these questions while you were unconscious.”
The park we were in was walled, to better protect the foliage from storms, and though it was probably little larger than my set of rooms at Valdegeld, the dense shrubbery and twisting paths made it seem obscure and mysterious, as though we could lose ourselves, and between the thorny tangles it was almost warm.
“It’s lovely here,” I said, inconsequentially but honestly.
Mossa made a little huffing sound. “It’s not Valdegeld.”
Again, I turned to look at her; she was scowling. “It’s far more pleasant than Valdegeld in many ways.”
“Yes, it’s convenient here, and there are—” She indicated the foliage with a sharp wave of the hand. “But it doesn’t have, oh, the craggy plenitude of history in its glorious variegation of architectural styles or the august air of academia pervading its atmoshield—”
“I don’t know which guidebooks you’re quoting,” I sputtered, laughing, “but they’re terrible! And yes, I’m very fond of Valdegeld, but—” I intended to say something like Sembla is also wonderful or it’s pleasant to have a change now and again. But I looked at her face, eager and frowning, and instead I said, “But I’m also very fond of you.”
Mossa’s expression was like the one she had worn in theoretical forestry class when the professor had offered successively more difficult elimination problems until Mossa, alone, had comprehended the final paradigm: as though I were as fascinating and satisfying to grasp as her most difficult questions. But then she shook her head.
“Pleiti,” she said. “I haven’t changed.”
“Haven’t changed? What do you mean you haven’t changed?” She hadn’t changed her mind about me? About Valdegeld and my work and …
“Since university.”
I laughed. I think at the same time I took her hand, or perhaps I already had. “Mossa. You have certainly changed since university.”
“When we … when you … said you didn’t want a romantic relationship with me any more. In university.” As though I could have forgotten when we were together. “You said that I was oblivious, and hard-hearted, and put too much value on personal attachment to work and not enough on the greater good, and—”
“I—” I couldn’t think how to answer that.
“And it’s true, that’s still all true! And you’re a scholar at Valdegeld just like you always dreamed of being and you are doing important work about getting us back to Earth—” Something pinged in the back of my mind at that, but I had no time for the back of my mind in that moment.
“Mossa. Mossa. You are doing important work. And—and—I don’t know anything about Investigator culture, but I could tell your colleagues respect you, admire you even. And you have your own home in this beautiful city. You have changed since university, even if not exactly in the way I—And mostly—mostly I don’t care.”
“You don’t?”
I should have, I knew that, but I couldn’t. “I don’t.”
“Does that mean—do you mean—Pleiti, might I kiss you?”
“Yes,” I said in a rush, and threw my arms around her.
Chapter 21
We had arrived, somehow, in a small sward (as such places used to be called) in the interior of the garden, where the vegetation was not encouraged to grow above knee level and a small bench, to one side, suggested quiet contemplation of the remnants of another planet’s nature.
I contemplated Mossa (who was also, after all, a remnant of another planet’s nature). This gambit was, I knew, foolish. As she said, she had not changed, not in the ways that had made our relationship impossible so many years ago. She was unromantic, focused on her own unusual intellect, distant, and uninterested in the issues I was passionate about. And I was a scholar at Valdegeld, a situation both privileged and precarious, with the hope of contributing, in some marginal, probably not even footnoted way, to the grand project that was the resettlement of Earth …
Mossa’s lips found a sensitive spot on the side of my neck, and with a shiver of delight I folded away those uncomfortable vectors of thought for the moment.
In the next pause, however, they returned. I had little idea of the work schedule of an Investigator, although these past few days she had certainly seemed mistress of her own time. Was it possible she might—I cut off the thought, and returned my attention to her delectable ear, the softness of her hair …
