Voice of the Whirlwind (30 page)

The room was small and neat. No floor in zero g, no ceiling, just six walls. Small tables and a desk were folded against the wall. There was a small kitchen, a computer console with straps and hooks to hold someone to the keyboard. Books and labeled data spikes were strapped into shelves. A door led to a darkened bedroom. A small robot clung to the wall, doing the cleaning. There was no sign of the boy. Steward wondered where he was. Boarding school, perhaps, offstation.

Steward’s mouth was dry. “Could I have some coffee?” he asked.

“Help yourself.” She was watching him with a thoughtful expression. He found himself surprised by it—it was uninvolved, objective. As if this didn’t matter to her.

He took coffee, rotated in place near the kitchen to face her, hung in space, and tasted the coffee. It wasn’t bad.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said. “I can smell it.”

“Yes. Japanese scotch, on the shuttle. It wasn’t good.”

“Do you drink in the morning, these days?”

“It’s a little past midnight, my time. I think.”

She opened her arms, making a gesture that indicated herself, the apartment, New Humanity. The movement was graceful, assured, as he remembered. “I hope it’s worth staying up late for,” she said.

He watched her, looked for clues, something he could touch, could hang on to. He wasn’t finding anything. “Me, too,” he said.

Natalie cocked her head at him. “I had forgotten about the intensity. It mellowed a little, with the first one. But he could always call it up when he wanted it.”

“The Alpha.”

“That makes you a Beta, I suppose?” A smile twitched at her lips. “The terminology doesn’t do much for your self-esteem, I suppose.”

“I try to work at it a little harder.”

Her green eyes gazed at him. “Work at what? Being the Alpha?”

Steward felt a spasm inside him. He looked for an answer, found nothing. He shrugged instead. “At being what I am, I guess.”

“And your coming here? Is that a part of your work?”

He looked at Natalie, held her gaze. “A part of my hope. I think.”

Her eyes slid away from his, nervous. She bit her lower lip. “That’s not a real description of me, Beta,” she said. “I don’t exist in that way.”

“You can’t know that.”

She turned from him, began to drift toward the bedroom. “I’m going to have to make myself up for work.” She waved an arm toward the door, dismissing him.

“You can’t know that,” Steward insisted. “What my hopes may be.”

Natalie’s voice was muffled as it came from the next room. “I know what’s possible between us.”

Steward rotated in place, kicked off, shot across the small room, checked himself at the door. Natalie hung next to a mirror. She flicked a switch, and bright light illuminated her face. It was merciless. Even halfway across the room Steward could see the slack skin, the blemishes. Steward remembered sand, ocean, distant song. He swallowed coffee. “Can’t you tell your people at work that you’ll be late?”

She peered at her mirror image expressionlessly and shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She closed her eyes and sprayed her face with something that darkened her complexion and gave her features a kind of relief instead of being a blob of white. She waited for the spray to dry and then began rubbing her cheeks with something that brought color to them. She took another bottle and sprayed her cheekbones with faint stripes of green.

“Don’t dismiss me so lightly,” Steward said. “I’m rich. Set up for life.”

Natalie turned to him. Artificial color bloomed on her sallow skin. “I don’t want money.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “I don’t want to know how you came by it. You don’t owe it to me. You have no responsibility in this. Any obligations died with”—a shadow crossed her face—“with someone else.”

Steward searched for words. “I feel…differently.”

Her look was direct. “I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that Etienne…your Alpha…didn’t give you the memories that would help you understand what I’m saying. But the memories—they weren’t good ones.” She turned back to the mirror.

Surprise whispered through him. “You know about my memories.”

Natalie was busy at the mirror. Her voice was distracted, spoken to her reflection. “Yes. I had a few calls from your doctor. Ashley, or whatever his name was.”

“Ashraf.”

“Right. He didn’t want me to talk to you. I agreed with him.”

Anger twisted Steward’s nerves. He felt his teeth trying to clench. “Ashraf took a lot on himself,” he said. “Somebody killed him, finally.”

Natalie’s eyes turned to him for a moment, then turned back to the mirror.

“I didn’t do it,” Steward said. “It had nothing to do with me.”

“I never said it did.”

He bit on his anger, forced it down. It didn’t belong here. He touched the doorframe and moved toward Natalie, took hold of the sleeping bag and harness that she’d rolled up to the wall, and stopped himself behind her, so that he could see her in the mirror. She was painting verdant wings above her eyes.

“Why don’t you call work?” he said. “Tell them you have company from offstation.”

She spun in the air to face him. The painted olive face, distorted by emotion, seemed a painful caricature of Steward’s memories. It contrasted with the white neck and hands. He tried not to flinch.

“I have other things to do with my spare time,” she said. Anger crackled in her voice. “I’ll show you.” She moved hand-over-hand to the door, then pushed off for the comp terminal in the front room. Steward followed. “Here,” she said. She snapped at buttons. Synthesized chords moaned from hidden speakers. The screen flickered on. Steward followed toward it.

There was a child on the screen. He was hanging weightless in a room, a keyboard strapped to his chest. Stubby fingers made expert movements across the keys. The sounds scraped across Steward’s nerves. His heart lurched at the sight of wrongness.

The face was smooth, round, placid, smiling. Perhaps it had never held any other expression. The head seemed strangely proportioned, the eyes were rolled up, largely hidden by the lids. The legs were dwarfed, half the size they should have been.

“My son,” Natalie said. “Spinal bifida, severe retardation of the speech centers, borderline autism. A lot of his chromosomes got broken on Sheol. His name is Andrew.”

The music was discordant, slow, deliberate. Expert somehow. Steward watched the face, the inverted expression, and felt coldness touch his insides, a mixture of horror and pain. He wondered if he could love this child.

“Gravity would kill him. He’ll only survive if he stays in space,” Natalie said. “He needs special care twenty-four hours per day. This picture comes from the station hospital.”

Steward looked at Natalie, found his voice. “He’ll be all right?”

She shrugged. “He’ll never learn to talk, but the rest of his mind is undamaged. He learns fast if I can interest him in something, but getting his attention is hard. If he can find a job he can perform by remotes from his hospital room, he’ll even be able to earn part of his keep.”

“Does he know we’re looking at him?”

“There’s a red light on the camera, so he knows when he’s being observed. But he’s doing his music now and isn’t paying attention.” She turned her face to the screen. “He’ll do that for hours. He’s more interested in music than anything else.” The boy’s fingers pounced on a chord and the chord cried through the speakers. Natalie’s eyes softened. “He’s why I’m here, in New Humanity. No one else would take me, not if I came with Andrew. But New Humanity was desperate for biologists, a project to tailor a new lichen form they wanted to use for breaking down asteroid material, absorbing oxygen and water for harvesting later. The team came close.” She bit her lip. “But New Humanity couldn’t capitalize the idea. We didn’t have the resources to do it ourselves. So I have a new job now, a dead end. But Andrew still has a home. New Humanity hasn’t reneged on that. A lot of the old-style altered go wrong sooner or later—the hospital here is very good.”

Steward thought of the frog man he’d seen in the deserted complex, the strangeness, the eerie voice:
Germs, you know.
There was a pain deep in his sinus. He looked at Andrew again and tried not to shiver. His chromosomes, broken. His love, shattered. “I want to help,” Steward said.

Natalie shook her head. “It’s not your problem. Is it?”

“They’re my genes, too.”

“Wrong. Your genes and half of Andrew’s come from the same source. He’s not your son, he’s your half-brother. That’s all.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Her look was cold. “I don’t want to be your new crusade, Steward,” she said. “I’m not interested in being the object of your current war for justice. The…Alpha—he joined one crusade after another. Always trying to find an answer somewhere or other. Settling scores that were dead for everyone but him. And all along”—she nodded at the monitor—“it was
that
he couldn’t handle. He blamed himself for coming back from Sheol with his broken chromosomes. He found out being fast and hard wasn’t enough, that there were kinds of Zen he couldn’t run with. He thought maybe he should have died. And so he chased after every cause he could find, so that he didn’t have to live with what he thought he’d done to Andrew.”

She reached to the monitor and flicked it off. The music terminated in midchord. Steward looked at the empty screen and felt bits of himself—his hope, his life—dying. He remembered the voice on the video recording, the clatter of glass on glass. The raw shriek bottled up in the voice.

Natalie drank the last of her coffee, moved across the room, put the bulb in its rack. She turned to Steward. “I’ve made my peace with it all, years ago. I don’t have any emotion, any energy left to deal with him, with what he was. I don’t have any…
feeling
about it anymore. He doesn’t
mean
anything. And you don’t, either. Not to me.”

“I’m not him,” Steward said. Wondering if it was true.

Natalie gazed at him. “Then what are you doing here?”

“I can help.”

Natalie shook her head. “We don’t need it, either of us. We’re doing okay here. When the Alpha got himself killed, we found out he had some insurance. And when he was working, he sent us money. So we’ve always done all right.”

“You can do better than all right.”

She didn’t answer. Steward thought of lines of mirrored buildings reflecting people lined up in rows, each desperate for a place in the Darwinian lottery. Makeup washing away in rain, revealing faces that were new. A bottle cracking against a glass, shattering it. Chords cried in his mind like children.

“I have to go to work.” Gently.

The coffee bulb was cooling in Steward’s hands. He drifted to the kitchen, put it in its place. Drifted to the door, and out.

The great open central space was full of people changing shift. Their chatter filled the air like birdsong. Steward pushed off and moved slowly toward the hologram that marked the tube that would take him through the old housing unit and then to his hotel.

He reached out, seized a padded strut, swung around, hesitated. He remembered the dark scarred unit, the glow of blue light on white skin, a distant titter of laughter. He could feel his skin contracting as with cold.

Steward swung around, put his foot on the strut, kicked again, heading the other way.

He would take the long way home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Steward floated into his bare hotel room. On the wall, smiling children were still soaring into a bright future. Steward’s tempered tungsten need had been dulled by shock and he could feel himself fragmenting, the reaction to his few moments with Natalie urging him in a hundred different directions.

Steward hung in the room, the circulating air slowly giving impulse to his stillness, pushing him in a slow, pointless circle. He tried to calm his wailing mind. He wanted his instincts to be pure, to be right.

He closed his eyes and thought of his video totem, the invisible voice harsh with rage, the image a brilliant rainbow splintering, a flickering incarnation of chaos. He felt closer to it now, separated only by a few paces, a distance he could easily cross.

Nothing, he knew now, stood between him and the Alpha. Not even his most cherished memory.

There was nothing left to keep him alive.

*

Steward knew he couldn’t sleep and so he worked away the length of his night while New Humanity went through its bustling first shift. He was fueled by a pot of coffee he stole from the hotel restaurant after they told him they wouldn’t deliver to his room.

Knowledge, he thought, implied action. He wasn’t certain what action as yet, but he knew he was moving.

He went through everything he’d taken from Stoichko’s hotel room. The toothpaste and deodorant stick proved to hold nothing but toothpaste and deodorant, which was disappointing but expected. The data spikes had music, but on one spike the music seemed to be taking up more space than really necessary, and Steward spent three hours cracking the code and bringing the hidden data to light.

When the first charts flashed onto the screen he recognized them instantly. They were detailed plans of Ricot, with information on station security marked where known.

A warm sense of familiarity settled into Steward and he smiled at the plans on the screen. He knew Ricot well—he’d spent eight months on the Coherent Light planetoid, doing penetration and sabotage training. He looked at the plans as they came up on the screen, the IR and heat sensors, schematics of the Wolf Model 18 extermination cyberdrones that patrolled its forbidden corridors, and his sense of lightness increased, his sense of a pattern.

Ricot. It would be like coming home.

*

Zhou’s voice whispered coolly over the phone. Charter was on the other side of the moon, and there was a second’s delay as the signal was bounced off Prince Station.

“Yeah,” he said. “I looked at it. The stuff in the flask looks like a fine brown dust. What it is, buck, is a live virus contained in an inert freeze-dried medium. If the medium encounters moisture, say like a mucous membrane, the virus wakes up and starts to do its job.”

“Any idea what the job is?” Steward was in a public phone in one of New Humanity’s shopping areas. Hologram hype burned on all sides of him. Music slid like syrup through the air. Caffeine was still afire in his nerves.