When they were gone, Anna back to the Siranui with Trent, Alan out to scrounge up food that Signy didn’t want, Signy was left alone with the neat little holo stage and console in the Tanaka suite.
Signy clutched her parka over her shoulders and powered up the console. No one’s signal showed on her wrist. Not Jimmy or Pilar, certainly not Paul. Paul had shut down all of his lines. Signy even tried the public access number, and frowned at Paul’s smiling, younger face on the answering machine.
In Lisbon, Signy found Janine sitting with her notebook in her room, the camera showing Janine’s face, tearless and intent, and the empty room behind her.
“Where’s Kazi?” Signy asked.
“Gone,” Janine said. “For the weekend. He was called back to headquarters, or so he said.”
“What are you going to do, kid?”
“Stay.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yeah. I don’t have to.” Janine did not say, There’s nobody home, nobody—“Have you heard from Pilar?” Janine stuck out her jaw, defiant, waiting.
“No, babe. I guess she’s out walking. Or something. Do you know any way we can get into Paul’s system?”
“No—Signy, I’m okay. There’s this mineral-rights stuff; I haven’t looked at it yet. I’m staying. I want to. There’s not much going on until the Monday session.”
Signy imagined Janine drifting around the emptying hotel, wandering the mazes of Lisbon streets.
“It’s not like Jared and I were lovers, Signy. I loved him, yes. But I can handle it. And if someone needs to find me, I’ll be here.”
Someone, meaning Pilar, or Paul. Paul wasn’t going to come on-line.
“Okay. I’ll let them know, if they check in.”
“Have a good flight, Signy.”
“Right.”
Janine vanished.
Signy heard a knock, and she jumped, thinking, That’s Alan, thinking, It sounds like there’s solid steel behind that wood paneling. The security camera showed a view of Alan, alone, holding foam containers and spoons. Signy keyed the door open.
Alan brought the containers to the desk, pulled off a lid, and released the scent of—chile. Chile con carne.
“I found this, poking around. A Filipino guy makes it. He says it’s too hot. It isn’t.”
Because Alan looked so worried, Signy tried a spoonful. It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t half bad, either. Signy dug under the counter for the Glenfiddich. The bottle she pulled out was new, its seals intact. She handed it to Alan.
“Am I still on the job?” Alan asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like we don’t have much to offer. We said we’d open our files on Tanaka to you. We’ll do that.” If she could get Paul’s system up and running, she’d get the files. Most of Paul’s files were duplicated in Taos, automatic download, but Signy didn’t know what Paul might have deleted. Paul’s withdrawal spoke of depression, or worse. Reclusive, dependent on Jared and the rest of the motile members of the organism that was Edges for input from the outside world, when had they last seen him in fleshtime? It had been at least a year. At least two years.
“I doubt as I’d much want to work with Tanaka myself, or let any of my people loose in one of their ships. But we could still sell them a few things, I guess. Do you have another job in mind for me? Somehow you look like you do.”
“We could be monitored.” Signy tilted her head toward the screen.
“Likely.” Alan poured Scotch for both of them and they sipped it. Signy closed her eyes and let the burn of the liquor slide down her throat. It hurt her raw stomach. Fine. Signy wasn’t at all sure that Alan would be wise to keep working with Edges, even if that’s what he wanted to do. If the company still existed. What was Edges now? A loose coalition between a psychotic recluse lawyer, a woman who had once done some fair neurochemical research, one dead doc, a media has-been, and a little blond girl who loved her.
God, what were we when we were good? As soon as I nail San-Li on this murder, I’m going to—I sent Jared to his death.
I can’t live with that.
“What are you thinking, lady?” Alan asked.
“I’m worried about Janine. I hate to leave her alone. But there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s something I’d like to show you. When I can.”
“Something that happened today. Yeah. Shame that chopper went down when it did. Damned shame.”
The look in Alan’s eyes said that he didn’t think the helo crash was pure accident.
“I just might go to Lisbon,” Alan said.
“Huh?”
“You stretch out on this futon, here, and I’ll call Gulf Coast. They can have me a rig set up in Lisbon by the time I get there. There may be something in this aquaculture business for Gulf Coast to look at.”
Signy hoped Alan would find something. It seemed he had friends that he cared about. Alan was another loyalty addict, like Signy. The poor bastard.
“Thanks. For the chile.” Thansh, Signy heard herself say. The Scotch was getting to her tongue. The futon felt very soft. Signy let it take her weight, surprised by how many of her joints ached. Cold and tension had been at them. Sleep here, in the enemy’s lair? Yeah. Where else could she be safe? Here, even her sleep was recorded and transmitted to the Taos house, so that even if Signy Thomas died, the how and why would be documented. If anyone cared to look.
“You’ll watch out for Janine?” Signy enunciated the words carefully, carefully.
“Janine is my daughter’s age,” Alan said. “She only knows what she’s seen of me in the last few days, but she’s an engineer. I imagine we speak the same language, at least sometimes.”
You can help her research some background about helicopters. About why they crash. Janine is so alone and Pilar could help but she won’t, but I have to explain that to you, don’t I, and I don’t think I …
Sleep came up like black mist.
* * *
Alan was shaking her shoulder.
“Signy? Signy, the plane is here. Time to wake up, hon.”
Alan walked with her across the plastic matting, past the locked door of the Hotel California.
* * *
The limbs of the bare trees looked like screams. Charcoal screams, scratched across the geometries of white painted church steeples; the little hills rolled on forever. Signy had always felt claustrophobic in New England. She wanted horizons, distance. The sky was too low here, had always been too low.
Brown grass lay naked on the lawns, freeze-drying in wan morning sunlight. Cruel land, to be so cold with no snow; Signy huddled inside her parka, climbing down the steep grade to the door of the house, hoping Paul hadn’t changed the locks.
Hushed, dark, a feeling of nobody home. The smell of old garbage reached her on a wave of stifling heat.
Signy heard, with a dull sense of inevitability, Jared’s voice, a quiet conversation, and Paul answering him.
Jared spoke of Chaco Canyon, of a crumbling stone city and the quiet peace of a dry forgotten valley. Signy remembered when it was, Jared talking to Paul on an October evening when they had still lived in this house, a conversation in flesh-time and long past. Jared had described a network of ancient roads, and parrot feathers, bright against the sand, the living birds traded up from Central America to the high desert.
Signy had listened from the kitchen; she was the cook for the week. The hell with cholesterol, she had marinated a good hunk of sauerbraten and it simmered, happily, while she made thin, lacy potato pancakes. There was applesauce from Macs Jared had picked, his face dappled in the leaf-shadow, climbing trees like an idiot adolescent. Throwing apples. Signy had rummaged around the kitchen until she found gingersnaps to blend into the spiced gravy.
We all ate too much, Signy remembered.
Feeling muscles bunch up in her shoulders, Signy opened the door into the study.
A skeletal figure in skinthins and headset lay in a fetal curl beside the holo stage. Paul’s knees, his elbows, looked swollen and huge. He looked like a victim of some terrible arthritis—no, this was starvation, there was just so little flesh on his bones; the joints in his thin, thin hands were not swollen.
Even while Signy watched, Paul’s fingers danced, quick as spiders, on the keyboard that he held between his knees. His chest moved in a placid, everyday rhythm. Paul wore about three days’ worth of beard, and that was oddly reassuring. It meant he’d been able to get up and walk, at least within the past week.
Jared’s dead and it’s my fault. Is Paul going to die, too?
We knew this was happening, Signy told herself. We knew it, all of us, and denied it; Paul has been alone here and we just wouldn’t interfere with him, because … because we needed to believe he was okay.
The impulse to grab Paul, shake him, hold him, was almost overwhelming. Signy was afraid the shock of real-time touch would stop his heart.
Paul was oblivious of her presence. Signy walked around him, considering. She pulled on her headset and entered the space that was Paul’s present reality.
“Hello,” Signy said.
“Signy! What the hell are you doing?”
“Say hello, Paul. I’m home.”
—Signy appeared from the kitchen, dressed in a red flannel shirt that she had forgotten she had ever owned. Younger; as he had made her, Signy could see her supple hands, the smooth flesh over her knuckles as she wiped them on a dishtowel. She looked up, not wanting to, at Jared, sprawled in one of the dark leather Queen Annes Paul kept near the fireplace. Jared’s shoulders, his heavy hair tied in its familiar knot, the cuff of his chamois shirt turned back on his wrist. Jared twisted to look at her and he grinned.
Signy tried to find anger. Tried to find it in the stretch of Jared’s shirt across his shoulders, in his smile of amazement, as if he had never seen her before.
Wanting to beg, Help me with Paul. Help me, Jared.
Knowing she couldn’t ask that, not ever again.
“Is dinner ready?” Jared asked.
Paul could work so damned fast. He’d built this simulacrum in two days.
Jared got up from the chair, kicked out his right knee, the one that tended to bother him, and was there, close to Signy as she stood frozen, her hands trapped in a virtual dishtowel so that she couldn’t reach Paul’s controls. Warm, solid, Jared’s arms around her, the soft feel of his chamois shirt against her cheek. Signy smelled his living scent, earthy loam, healthy male, musk.
“Stop it, Paul!”
“Paul needs this, Signy. For a while,” Jared said. Jared’s wistful look, his shy grin. “Death is a concept.” His voice made slight vibrations in his chest; Signy could sense them. Perfect. “Entropy, seen in the right perspective, is only a set of equations. My continued presence wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, I know. The aesthetics might prove bothersome to timid souls. But you aren’t timid. And I miss you.”
Paul’s words. These were Paul’s words, mouthed in Jared’s voice, but Jared’s touch felt real, was unmistakable, Jared’s touch that she wanted so desperately.
Ugly, ugly. Signy jerked her head back and fought her hands out of their imagined restraints. She found the controls, the reassuring touch of plastic keys, frantic, shuddering as she hurried through sequences, shutting down.
Jared vanished, the virtual study vanished, leaving the real-time, dusty room, and Paul, sitting up now, his face still hidden behind his headset.
Paul sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
He sat there, unresisting, while Signy lifted his headset away. His bloodshot eyes looked through her, looked past her.
“Oh, Paul. It’s a bit sick, you know?”
Paul blinked, and Signy left him there while she got to the bathroom, yanked back the slimy white plastic of the shower curtain, found a clean towel buried in the linen closet. She turned on the shower, hot, and went back to the study. She tugged Paul to his feet and helped him peel out of his skinthins.
Paul had hollows between every rib, but there was some flesh on him, a little muscle, and his hands, holding Signy’s shoulders, were strong.
He didn’t protest. He even tried to help, a little. Signy shoved him into the shower.
“There isn’t any soap,” Paul said.
In the medicine chest, Signy found a hotel bar wrapped in yellowed paper.
“Here.” She tossed it over the shower curtain, into the steam. “I’ll pack for you. We need to hurry, Paul.”
She left him, listening to make sure that the shower still ran, that she could hear him. Signy plugged in the public line to Seattle.
[Signy] I need help with Paul. I need you in Taos. Now.
She sent the message and got back to the bathroom. Paul rolled a towel under his scrotum, standing full-faced to her, as unaware of her real presence as if she had been blind to him, as if she had been in virtual and far away.
“You’re taking me to Taos.” Paul raised his arm and dried the dripping tangle of black hair under his armpit.
“You got that right, buddy.”
“I need…”
“Whatever it is you need, you can pull it off the net.”
* * *
Not half as resistant as Signy had feared, even with a sort of bemused docility, Paul tolerated her leading him onto the flights west. He walked well enough. Signy had thought she might have to carry him. Paul followed her, meekly, through the crowds of vacant-faced travelers in the terminals. They didn’t seem to exist for him.
Coming north from Albuquerque, Paul actually smiled, seeing for the first time in fleshtime the curve of the Rio Grande gorge, the gentle bulk of Taos Mountain sheltering the little town, chalky sunset pastels staining the wind-drifted snow on the mesa.
* * *
Signy got a couple of vitamin pills and a cup of sugared tea into Paul before he turned on the console, the one Jared usually used, and settled his headset on. Signy didn’t fight him about it.
The house still felt like no one was home. Even with the fires lighted, the house was shadows, was empty space. Signy paced back and forth, searching aimlessly. She straightened the rumpled bedding in the big bedroom. The room smelled stale, old. Signy left it and closed the door.
* * *
Just watching, Signy sprawled on the banco in the virtual room, her hands around a cup of tea that grew cold. Just watching. Paul worked, his thin shoulders jerking as he fought some construct. He could tear down the whole edifice, destroy the Lisbon productions, bring up multiple ghosts of Jared to walk through this house. Join Paul, that was one answer. Climb in, create a Jared to please them both, a personality less frustrating than the living one had ever been. Signy could damned sure do a better job with Jared’s dialogue; Paul wasn’t half close to accuracy in phrasing or rhythm. Paul didn’t have the lilt of Jared’s voice quite right, the minute hesitations Jared used when he wanted to say something he thought was important. Signy knew she could make Jared’s speech get up and walk.
Why the hell not?