Voice of the Whirlwind (12 page)

“I’m going to take a nap, philosopher,” she said. “Then, since you’re so bent on paying me back, you can take me to dinner. Maybe some dancing, like up at the South Rim. Ever dance on a glass floor above a canyon a mile deep?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe it’ll teach you something about security. And dinner there is
really
expensive. It should make you feel a lot better about paying me back.”

He grinned again and finished his wine. “D’accord,” he said.

*

Griffith’s voice was energetic, all hint of illness gone. Steward turned down the audio portion of Ardala’s cram recording. “Hey, man,” Griffith said. “I’ve got some news about Spassky.”

“Nothing good, I hope.”

The mastoid receiver seemed to be having problems adhering to Steward’s skin. Steward held it on with his thumb.

“Somebody walked up behind him on a street with a .66 caliber gauss express. Blew his spine clean out through his chest, right through his armored coat.”

“Sounds like a neat job.”

“Up to Icehawk standards, man. The little fucker’s gonna need all the Thunder he can get to grow his spine back together. And I’m not planning on selling it to him.”

“Well. Thanks for making my day a little brighter.” Steward settled onto Ardala’s couch.

“And I talked to my friend in Starbright. It’s her turn to nominate someone to the apprenticeship program, and she wants to meet you.”

Steward leaned forward. He could feel his heart speeding up. “Where is she?”

“Her shuttle landed at the Gran Sabana port yesterday morning. She’s got two weeks’ leave coming, and right now she’s in Willemstad, Curaçao. Spindrift Hotel. Her name’s Reese. Give her a call.”

“I’ll do that. I could get there tomorrow if I use the suborbital from Vandenberg to Havana.”

“Steward. By the way”—for the first time Steward heard a hesitation in Griffith’s voice—“it’s customary to, ah, offer a little present in these cases. A thousand Starbright should do it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks a lot, man.”

“What the hell. It doesn’t cost me anything to do my friends favors.”

“I’m surprised you’re not taking advantage of this yourself. Considering how badly you want to get offplanet.”

“I couldn’t pass the physical. Too many latent Sheol bugs.”

There was a moment of silence. “Oh. I’m sorry, buck.”

“Not your fault.” Griffith’s voice had lost a bit of its brightness. He made an effort to put more energy in his words. “Hey,” he said. “Call me in a few days and let me know how you and Reese got along. Here’s a number where I can be reached.”

Steward reached for the pen he’d been using to underline his study material and made a note of the number.

“Thanks, friend,” Steward said.

“No problem, buck,” Griffith said, and broke the connection.

Steward took his thumb off the mastoid receiver and felt it fall off onto his shoulder, then down his chest. He anticipated this and caught the device in his hand, reflex unsullied by conscious thought. Steward returned it to the phone rack.

He looked out the window past the terrace that was already baking in the morning sun, and peered up past the rows of condecos to the sky darkened by the window’s polarization. He looked for the bright fixed stars of orbital habitats and failed to find them. No matter, he thought.

With luck he’d be there soon enough.

*

Steward had never been to Willemstad before, but from the hydrofoil that brought him from the floating airport, the skyline looked familiar, its blue bay surrounded by blocks of reflective ice, resort condecos for those who couldn’t stand the idea of not living among a thousand strangers. The weird Nineteenth Century swinging bridge added a strange anachronistic charm. The hydrofoil slowed, settling into the waters with a distant thump, and moved into a canal whose banks echoed the whine of the foil’s turbines. Locals and tourists watched dully from the banks. Music scattered from nearby buildings. The canal led to the Schottegat, a lake chilled and darkened by the shadows of the towers that surrounded it.

The customs building was in shadow, a temporary foam structure on a pier surrounded by flags, both the Curaçao national ensign and the Freconomicist flag. Another small nation, Steward thought, adopting an ideology from space, probably by way of protecting itself from its neighbors. Curaçao was a negligible power, but the Freconomicists were not.

From the customs house Steward took a cab to the Spindrift Hotel. It was some distance out of town, removed from the clusters of condecos on the bay. In spite of the nearness and presence of the sea, the island seemed arid, filled with scrub and cactus. The air was bright and crisp, the sky a vivid blue. Steward paid his cab driver in his new Starbright dollars and walked between divi-divi trees to the hotel. It was an old stone building with a new reflective, polarizable alloy roof and a series of jagged antennas that cut the sky. The trade wind hummed through the aerials. Steward felt it plucking at his shirt.

The desk clerk was a heavyset black man with phosphorescent bacteria beads woven into his cornrows and a T-shirt proclaiming his allegiance to the Sint Kruis Conch Club. His eyes were distant. There was a receiver pasted to his mastoid, and Steward could hear faint music coming from it. Steward put his little traveling bag on the desk, took off his shades, put them in his shirt pocket. “I’m Steward,” he said. “I called.”

The desk clerk smiled. His eyes stayed a hundred miles away. “Welcome, Mr. Steward. I have put you in room number seven. There is a message on your phone from Miss Reese.”

“Thanks.”

“The dining room will be open from seventeen-thirty to twenty-thirty.” The clerk gave him orbital time, presumably because he thought that Steward, being a friend of Reese’s, had just shuttled down.

Steward took his key spike, and as he moved to pick up his traveling bag, he saw something under the clear desk top. He hesitated, then frowned. “Is that stuff what it says it is?”

“Bolivian cocaine, sir. Eight dollars per gram Lesser Antilles, or two dollars Starbright.”

“It’s real? Not synthetic? Not a substitute?”

“Direct from the mountains, sir. Two grams?”

Steward stared at the packets in their small green envelopes, sitting under glass beside compressed-air inhalers and chewing gum. “I didn’t think anyone made it anymore. Isn’t it supposed to be addictive or something?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. Personally I do not cloud my perceptions with chemicals.”

Steward looked up at the clerk’s distant eyes. “Good idea,” he said. He took his bag from the counter.

“God is love, sir,” the desk clerk affirmed.

Steward concluded, on his way to his room, that he had Curaçao figured out.

*

The room was smaller than Steward had anticipated, the walls whitewashed to make it seem larger. There was a water bed, a bureau of battered Jovian plastic, woven straw mats on the floor. A gecko splayed motionless on one wall. A crystal video was set into the ceiling in a position to be watched from the bed, with a camera pickup in case it was yourself you wanted to watch. The phone winked at him in slow red calypso tempo. He picked it up.

Reese’s voice, a deep American Midwest alto. “Hi. This is Reese. I’m going to be diving all day, but if you’re open for dinner, I’ll meet you in the dining room at six.”

Steward looked at his watch. Three hours. He looked up at the gecko on the wall, scented the breeze that gusted through the window. He remembered Port Royal, the touch of warm water, singers crying their hymns to the trades, the ziggurat across the bay sitting black above the glowing city…. He’d been doing seize and hold training then, spending weeks marching along endless alloy corridors, hot city streets, learning what was important in an urban combat zone.

Seize and hold, he thought. He thought he’d had the drill down, but somehow the things that had mattered had all slipped years away, and now he was a million miles from where he wanted to be, standing in a whitewashed room watching a gecko and hoping it might eventually move and provide some entertainment. All he was doing was picking up another man’s wreckage, hoping there might be enough of it to put together and call a life.

Reese was a means to an end, he thought, as others had been: Ashraf, Ardala, Griffith. Rungs on a ladder that would take him up out of the gravity well, beyond the reach of the Caribbean trades to where other winds were blowing, where there were people that mattered. Natalie, de Prey. And Curzon, as yet only a name. People in whom he could see a reflection of himself, and of the Alpha.

The gecko was still motionless. Steward dropped his bag on the bed and turned to the window, gazing out at the divi-divi trees, the ocean beyond. The beach looked as if it were all sand, rocks, and lizards. He decided to visit it anyway.

*

Steward had seen a video Ardala had about presenting yourself for a job interview. The vid advised what to wear, how to act, how to sit, how to smile, and featured two men in conservative dark jackets without lapels—one younger, one older. The older one wore puttees, a fashion that had come and gone during the postwar adjustment. Steward remembered that the item that clinched the younger man’s job was that he shared an interest with the interviewer in indoor tennis. The recording called this achieving rapport with the subject. To the best of Steward’s recollection the recording didn’t seem to offer any useful advice concerning how to meet the drive rigger of an in-system freighter on the terrace of a hotel/bar on a Caribbean island so as to offer a bribe for a job appointment.

Just as well, Steward thought. Bribery was a skill best learned on the job.

When Reese arrived, Steward was dressed in tropical white, sitting on the dining-room terrace with his third piña colada. Reese seemed to be in her mid-thirties, about an inch taller than Steward, wiry and small-breasted, with a long-legged stride that was all confidence. Her hair was short, a dark bronze that the sun was turning to copper. She wore white cotton drawstring trousers, sandals, and a sleeveless bright tropical shirt. Steward could see dark floss beneath her arms, silver ear cuffs dropping bangles that gleamed against her neck, fading imprints on her cheeks where the mask and gill unit had pressed into her flesh. She was carrying a tall iced drink of a mellow golden color.

“Try the grilled flying fish,” she said. “The conch salad isn’t bad, either.”

“I’ll have one of each,” Steward said. “I haven’t eaten since morning.” He stood up to shake hands. Muscle moved catlike in her upper arms as she clasped his hand.

“Are we alone in this place?” Steward asked.

Reese looked around at the rows of blank linen tablecloths. “It’s the off season,” she said. “And it’s early.”

They settled into their chairs. The sun on the terrace was bright and Steward was wearing his shades. Reese looked at him without squinting. Steward concluded the dark gray eyes were artificial implants.

“You’re pretty young to be such a good friend of Griffith’s,” Reese said.

“It’s a new body. I’m a clone.”

“Griffith ought to get a new body soon,” Reese said. “He looks worse every time I see him.”

“How did you come to know each other?”

Reese smiled. “We were dumped on the street together. After the Artifact War.”

Steward sensed himself stiffening. “You were on Sheol?”

“No. I was on Archangel. Ross 47, with Far Jewel. It wasn’t as bad there.”

Steward sipped his drink and settled back into his seat. “Griffith and I were in the same unit,” he said.

“That’s what I heard.” She put her drink on the tablecloth and frowned at it for a short minute, then looked up at him. “You’ve done vac training?”

“Yes.”

“Rad suit?”

“Yes.”

“How long ago?”

“About eight or nine months ago, in terms of my memory. Years ago, real time.”

Reese seemed startled. “Your former…personality…he didn’t update your memories?”

Steward was mildly surprised she had realized this so quickly. “I lost about fifteen years.”

“My god.” She looked at him. “I don’t suppose he told you why?”

“Afraid not.”

She shook her head. “I hope you’re not as forgetful as he was.”

“He didn’t forget. I think there were just some things he didn’t want me to know.”

“Yeah. Well.” Reese shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I guess we all have memories like that.” She took a sip of her golden drink. “I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the specifications of a Fiat-Starbright FSVII inertial drive? Because that’s what you’d be working with on the
Max Born
.”

Relief trickled into Steward. “As a matter of fact, I know the FSVII,” he said. “Some of Coherent Light’s ships used them.” The specifications he knew were mainly for purposes of sabotage, but at least they gave him a good idea of how the engines were put together.

Reese grinned. “So. That makes things easier.”

“I was afraid you’d have some fancy new system I’d never heard about.”

“A lot of ships do. But the
Born
’s
a venerable beast. Sixty years old, but they keep rebuilding it.” She sipped her drink. “I should tell you something, by the way.
Born
isn’t owned by Starbright—it’s a tramp ship, owned by a company called Taler. But the drive system is owned by Starbright and on perpetual lease to the owner of the ship. So the drive riggers are Starbright employees, and the rest of the crew are Taler people. At least
Born
owns its own computer and telemetry systems. Otherwise there’d be another group of techs on board.”

The news didn’t particularly surprise Steward. Expensive equipment on the order of large complex drive systems was often leased rather than bought, particularly by smaller freight companies operating on the margin.

“I imagine that gives the riggers a certain amount of autonomy,” Steward said.

Reese nodded. “Something like that.”

Steward rubbed the bridge of his nose where his shades were chafing him. “There’s this other thing I want to mention,” he said. “I have this investment opportunity you might be interested in.”

Reese seemed amused. She put one of her feet up on an empty chair. “What sort?”