Context (80 page)

‘Cold.’ Her breath steamed as
though in evidence. ‘Damned cold.’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

— 
within patterns
—

’Ro...’

— 
and this one with
meaning.

‘Look, Zoë, I’m sorry I screwed
up, OK?’

Mortal danger.

There
had been no flash of inspiration, after all the pressure she had put on Zoë to
grant direct xeno access.

In a penrose-tiled observation
room, its glass roof revealing the dull grey sky above, Ro had sat on a
cushion, watching the elephantine moving sculpture which was the Zajinet’s
external form.

‘First test.’ She thumbed a
holopad into life. ‘What do you make of this?’

There was a secondary psych team—
sed
quis custodiet ipsos custodes?—
keeping watch on her. Or rather, on the
human—Zajinet interaction considered (in traditional psych fashion) as a third
entity, separate from the individuals involved.

Ro’s second holo—an intricate
geometry puzzle -provoked the xeno’s interest:

<<... multi-flange: the
transform ...>>

<<... rotate, translate
before inverts ...>>

<<... fond beginning,
reinforce potentiation ...>>

‘You mean’—Ro smiled at her own
intuition—‘it’s like a toy, from your childhood.’

The Zajinet’s body-granules
whirled and spun.

<<... is-is-is...>>

<<... transaction double
emit/receive ...>>

<<... standing wave for
true ...>>

Ro looked at the psych team.

‘Lucky guess,’ she said.

On the skylight above, a sudden
rattle of hailstones.

‘Christ. What about this weather?’

No! Damn it
—

Too late, she realized what she
had done.

The Zajinet was frozen.

‘Merde.’
She dragged herself upright.
‘Scheiss!’

It was totally immobile.

‘Never mind.’ One of the psych
team pushed back his chair. ‘Happens to everyone, sooner or—’

Storming from the room.

‘Not to me, it doesn’t.’

‘You
did all right,’ said Zoë. ‘Everyone falls into the rhetoric trap.’

‘Not if they do their jobs
properly.’

‘They said’—Zoë smiled to take
the edge off her words —’that you might be a perfectionist.’

Psych analysis. That’s all I
need.

‘Could it be a weapon?’ The
thought struck Ro. ‘If we ever need one against the Zajinets, I mean?’

Zoë shook her head. ‘They freeze
into analysis-catatonia only if they take the question seriously. They have the
choice of ignoring it entirely, from what anyone can tell.’

It might remain in stasis for an
hour or two; it might be longer. The record was nine and a half days without
movement, after the British ambassador to Iceland, at the Reykjavik xeno
centre, had held a hand out to a Zajinet and said: ‘How do you do, sir?’

Ro’s breath steamed.

Patterns. Always patterns—in the
cold air’s movements, in the lightly falling snow. In the games and duplicities
of human beings in general, of Zoë in particular. Finding her in Moscow had
been one coincidence too many.

‘Can I ask vow a question, Zoë,
without dire consequences?’

Zoë made an adjustment on her
cuff- turning up her coat’s thermal filaments—before answering.

‘If you like.’

‘Just how old are you, Zoë?’

‘Ah. I wondered when you’d get to
that.’

Ro’s
jumpsuit was lent a touch of European elegance by her velvet scarf, indigo on
one side and teal green on the reverse, draped casually round her throat. Her
ears, though, were freezing, for she had thrown back her heated hood.

Sounds carried badly through the
muffling snow. It was important to remain alert.

‘My husband, ex-husband’—Zoë
coughed—‘used to feel like a child molester when we went out in public. So he
said.’

It was hard to believe, but she
claimed to be forty-two years old. Up close, it was obvious only that Zoë was
too tough to be eighteen, however girlish she looked.

Hardly a grad student, then.

There was a point they had
skirted around: Zoë’s exact role. But observing—or manipulating—Ro McNamara was
obviously apart of her assignment, whoever she was working for.

Just as we’re being watched right
now.

Ro said nothing about the hidden
observers. If it was not Zoë’s people but some kind of enemy team secreted in
the snowbanks, then she would have badly miscalculated. But the tiny patterns
within patterns of Zoë’s body language, to Ro’s alert senses, suggested
knowledge of their hidden positions.

And there was tension strung
throughout Zoë’s body; it took no genius to figure out that she was expecting
some kind of action.

‘Christ,
I hate the cold. But Moscow’—another cough—‘in December, of course it’s friggin’
freezing.’

A shriek as a sled tipped up,
spilling its two riders. Other students laughed.

‘Shame the labs are off limits.’
Ro did not look in Zoë’s direction. ‘Stupid time for a shutdown.’

‘Nice to see the hills, though.’
With a sniffle: ‘At least the air’s fresher than my apartment.’

The lease on Zoë’s place, on
fashionable Strugatski Prospekt, had allegedly been arranged by a long-term
Muscovite friend whom Ro had never met.

And she’s sticking to her cover
story.

Ro’s suspicion was that the ‘friend’
was a colleague in UNtel—the UN’s covert intelligence and xenology arm—and that
Zoë herself was some kind of intelligence officer. Not that Ro had ever met a
spy ...

Another probe: ‘I haven’t seen any
security recently.’

‘They pulled off the teams.’ Zoë
shrugged, indicating a lack of worry. ‘No trouble for two months, no anti-xeno
demos. Nothing.’

That’s almost convincing.

If it weren’t for patterns in the
snow.

Seven men... No.

They were hidden superbly well.

Nine of them, and armed.

‘Are
you going home for Christmas?’

‘Home?’ Distantly, as though Zoë
hardly recognized the concept: ‘No ... No, I don’t think so.’

Snowflakes, falling heavier.