Voice of the Whirlwind (2 page)

“He died. On the Ricot habitat.”

“I know that. How?”

“Does it matter to you?”

It mattered, Steward thought. But he wasn’t sure he wanted Dr. Ashraf to know just how much it mattered. So he shrugged. Felt the power in himself to suppress what he was feeling. Used it.

“I might run into people who knew him. It would be convenient to know something about what happened to him.”

Ashraf thought about it for a moment. Red LEDs gleamed in his eyes. “He was murdered, Mr. Steward.”

Steward felt electricity humming in his nerves. Not surprise—somehow he wasn’t surprised—but something else. He couldn’t be too eager here.

“How?” Trying to be casual.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Who killed him?”

“Person or persons unknown.”

Now he
was
surprised. “And he died on Ricot?”

“Yes.”

“That’s odd. Ricot has a small, controlled population. Very tight security. It shouldn’t be hard to find a killer there.”

“Apparently they didn’t. He was working in security. Maybe he got killed trying to stop a criminal.”

Maybe they know, Steward thought. Maybe they know and the information was suppressed.

He decided not to ask any more questions. Ashraf obviously didn’t want him to.

*

“You fell for their program.” Steward felt surprise at the apparent feeling in Dr. Ashraf’s voice. It was hard to remember Ashraf ever being emotional about anything.

“Coherent Light taught you martial arts and Zen,” Ashraf said. “Zen of a certain kind.”

“Mind like water,” Steward quoted. “The unmeaning of action. Union of arrow and target. The perfection of action, detached from anything except the spirit.”

“They were programming you,” Ashraf said, “with things that were useful to them. They taught you to divorce action from consequence, from context. They were turning you into a moral imbecile. A robot programmed for corporate espionage and sabotage. Theft, bomb throwing, blackmail.”

Steward was surprised by the harshness in Ashraf’s voice. He turned from the window and looked at him. The doctor’s fingers were steepled in front of his mouth, but Steward saw the anger in his eyes. “Let’s not forget murder,” Steward said.

“No,” Ashraf said. “Let’s not.”

“I’ve never pretended to be anything but what I was,” Steward said. “I’ve always been honest about what I’ve been.”

“What’s honesty got to do with my point?” Steward felt himself tense at the attack on Coherent Light, at the things that still provoked his loyalty. He forced himself to relax. Coherent Light was dead, dead in the long past.

Mind like water, he told himself.

“You’ve been programmed to divorce corporate morality from personal morality,” Ashraf said. “You’re a zombie.”

Steward frowned at him. “Perhaps,” he said, “morality is simply latent within me.” He looked at Ashraf. “You’re awfully combative for an analyst, you know.”

“I’m not here to analyze you. I’m here to give you a crash course in reality and then kick you out into the world.” Ashraf carefully flattened his hands on his desk. He looked up at Steward.

Mind like water, Steward told himself. Trying to stay calm.

It didn’t work.

*

“My wife’s still alive, correct?”

“She lives in orbit. She doesn’t want to see you.”

Steward frowned at the gray ceiling. “Why not?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“I know you have the information. I need to know. She must have given a reason.”

There was the short pause that meant Ashraf was wondering which tack would be best in getting his patient to understand and accept the situation, what Ashraf referred to as “reality.” Whether it was best to lay a ghost to rest, or pretend it didn’t exist.

“She says,” Ashraf said deliberately, “that she was used. Badly. And doesn’t want to be used again.”

Steward felt his nerves go warm. He felt, obscurely, the touch of something important. “Used? How?”

“I don’t have that information.”

“Is that what the second wife said? What’s her name, Wandis?”

Another little pause. “Yes. She said that he only manipulated her, that she doesn’t want to see you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“You must form your own attachments, Mr. Steward. The past is closed to you. And Wandis, to you, is only a name. She shouldn’t mean anything at all.”

Steward felt a little claw tugging at his mind, pointing at something significant, if only he could understand what it was.

“It wasn’t me,” he said again.

*

“I met someone,” Steward said. “Someone from before.” Inside him he felt a phantom desire for a cigarette. He had given up smoking during his internship with Coherent Light. They’d thought it would be good for him.

“Where?” asked Dr. Ashraf. “When?”

“It was an accident. I was walking in the zoo two days ago and saw her. She recognized me. She was there with her—I think she said niece.”

“Who?” asked Ashraf.

“Her name was—is Ardala. Her parents were our neighbors in the CL complex in Kingston, that time Natalie and I were both training there. She was thirteen or fourteen then, I think.”

Steward was seeing Natalie’s face, the broad white forehead that wouldn’t take a tan no matter how she tried, the dark hair that framed her strong jaw, wide cheekbones, green eyes, thick, generous lower lip.

“We met for a drink that night, after she’d returned her niece to—to whoever. Talked about things. She works in a career placement office.”

“You didn’t tell her?”

Natalie sitting on a balcony twined with wrought iron, her face obscured by cigarette smoke. While gunfire echoed from the pink stucco walls.

“I told her I was divorced. She said it made me younger.” Steward could almost taste the tobacco.

“You should have told her, Mr. Steward,” Ashraf said.

“She asked me if I wanted to come home with her.” She’d had Natalie’s eyes. “I said yes.” The rest of her had become Natalie, in the smoke, the dark, the fire.

“Mr. Steward”—Ashraf was displeased—“this is your first attachment outside the hospital.” Attachment? Steward thought.

“You cannot allow a relationship to begin with such a fundamental deception,” Ashraf said. “Furthermore, I don’t think it’s healthy that your first such relationship is based on a past that, for everyone except you, does not exist. Better to have involved yourself with a complete stranger than to have tied yourself more thoroughly to a delusion.”

“No one’s deluded,” Steward said. “No one’s unhappy.”

Ashraf’s voice was brutal. “We can’t have this woman think,” he said, “that you’re the original, can we?”

CHAPTER TWO

Molten city towers cut a darkening sky, reflected a burnished Arizona sunset that was itself invisible from where Steward walked down among the groundlings. He had his green bracelet pushed up high under a light blue cotton sleeve as he stepped across an air-conditioned pedestrian plaza whose translucent roof crawled with mutating art forms and whose floor was flecked with the droppings of pigeons. Green-eyed Ardala, her light brown hair swinging, waved from across a sea of bobbing heads. The makeup rimming her eyes was extravagant, like butterfly wings, a new fashion that had originated somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars.

She and Steward kissed hello. There was a slight shock in the realization that this woman was a stranger. Steward wondered how he’d ever managed to see Natalie in those eyes, in that smile.

They walked into the bar where they’d agreed to meet. Dark, plush seats, white plastic tabletops, waitresses in corsets and short skirts, styles from thirty years before that were supposed to seem quaint. Standing in a corner was an ornate piano/synthesizer, all gleaming black plastic with chrome trim. Steward didn’t like the place. It seemed like the sort of bar where people went to smoke hash and discuss their investments. Steward didn’t want to think about investments.

In a sense, an investment is what he was.

He ordered a trailing willow, paid for it with the allowance the insurance company would provide him for the next ten months. Little anxieties seemed to leap like sparks of static on the surface of his skin. Ardala called for a glass of wine. “I should tell you something,” he said.

She cocked her head, bright. “I’m listening.”

He told her, and she shook her head and grinned. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “No wonder you look so young. You
are
young.”

“I’m three months old,” he said.

“And you only have his memories from fifteen years ago? Before the war and everything?”

Steward nodded. “They call him the Alpha body, his memories the Alpha memories,” he said. “That’s how they’re teaching me to think of him. I’m Beta.”

“What a bitch.” Ardala’s eyes narrowed. “I thought for a minute he was killed in the war, you know, with all the others. But he couldn’t have been, right? Otherwise you’d be older.”

“He was killed about eight months ago, in the Ricot habitat. Murdered. I don’t know how. He never had the memory store updated.” A nicotine craving brushed against his nerves. “I wonder what happened to him.”

She reached out a slim brown hand and took his fingers. He could see comprehension in her look. “It didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“I feel that it does. Somehow.”

“So all you remember,” she said, “is what he knew just before he left. Still married to Natalie and everything.”

Steward took a breath. “I keep thinking…maybe he just didn’t want me to know about the war. What he went through. Maybe he just wanted to spare me the pain.”

It was more likely, Steward knew, that the Alpha just didn’t care anymore, or had forgotten that, before everything he cared about was destroyed, he’d recorded his memories on thread and deposited a bit of flesh in a cryogenic vault, the both to be awakened if he died on Sheol. So that Natalie wouldn’t be a widow, wouldn’t go without the comforts that went with being married to an Icehawk.

The drinks came. Ardala pulled a credit spike from her bracelet and gave it to the waitress. Steward sipped his Chinese willow. Fire burned deep in his throat.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked.

“Look for a job.”

“What sort?”

“I don’t know. Coherent Light gave me some very specific skills. I imagine they’d be unsuitable in today’s job market.”

“Security work?”

“That’s what…the other one did. The Alpha. It didn’t work out for him.”

Ardala gnawed her generous lower lip. “Let me think about it. I’ll bet I can place you somewhere.”

Steward looked uneasily left and right. “I don’t like this place,” Steward said. “Any second now somebody’s going to start playing old favorites on that piano, and they’re going to be favorites from ten years ago and I won’t remember them. Can we finish our drinks and go somewhere else?”

A smile tugged at her lips. “My apartment?”

He felt, deep in the pit of his stomach, an anxiety dissolve.

“D’accord,” he said.

She looked up at him, touched her tongue to her teeth. “Before last night, I never made it with a clone.”

The willow trailed fire down his throat. “Fortunately,” he said, “they’ve given me the right memories for all that.”

*

When he returned to the hospital in the morning, the police were waiting for him.

The walls in the interrogation room were pink, trimmed with chestnut brown and marred with graffiti that no one had bothered to wash away. Steward remembered somebody telling him once that pink walls subliminally soothed the violent. There was a portable recorder/computer, an institutional bunk bed, a pair of detectives. Lemercier was a short young man, aggressive, who made many sudden, angry gestures. When he gestured, he often bared his teeth. Hikita was older, gray-haired, with a little toothbrush mustache and a weary air. They had tried to run good cop/bad cop on him earlier, but neither of them seemed to have his heart in it, not after he told them where he’d spent the night.

Hikita was drinking coffee out of a foam cup. “Your alibi checks,” he said.

“Thank you,” Steward said. “We agree on that.”

“You seemed an obvious suspect. Being a trained killer. Not being where you were supposed to be.”

Steward shrugged. He didn’t like cops, whether they agreed with him or not. Call it an old reflex. Lemercier looked at him and sucked in his lips, his mouth becoming a thin, angry line.

“You have no idea who would want to kill Dr. Ashraf?” he asked. “Just for the record?”

“I only saw the man between five and ten hours per week, and even then I did all the talking. I don’t know who else he knew. Check his records.”

“He didn’t die in a nice way, Mr. Steward.” Lemercier was showing his teeth again. “He was tied into his office chair and tortured. First with something very sharp, like a scalpel. Then with pliers. Then they garroted him. Almost took his head off. Would you like to see the pictures?”

Steward looked at him. “No.”

Lemercier leaned closer. Steward was thinking about the soundproofing in Ashraf’s office and how no one could have heard anything. The doctor’s screams wouldn’t even have been as loud as the bullet train. Someone knew that.

“Field interrogation,” Lemercier said. “That’s what they called it, right? When they taught you about how to do things like that. You learn anything about the use of pliers?”

Steward gazed into Lemercier’s eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I remember the lecture on pliers. They made us take notes.” His eyes moved from one detective to another, then back. “You still trying to make this case, or what? My alibi checks, remember?”

Hikita and Lemercier exchanged featureless glances. Hikita turned to Steward. “We can’t check Ashraf’s records,” he said, mumbling into his coffee cup. “Somebody broke into the hospital main computer and wiped them. We only have his appointment book.”

“Did they teach you to wipe computers in the Icehawks, Mr. Steward?” Lemercier, of course.

“I imagine anything I know is out of date,” Steward said.

He looked at the graffiti on the pink walls,
lounge lizards rule. manx man was here
. Dates.
écrasez l’infâme.

The last was his own, drawn two hours ago while he was being observed through the two-way glass set in the wall. It had been the motto of the Canards. He said, “Did he have an appointment scheduled for last night?”