Voice of the Whirlwind (40 page)

He nodded. Something decent had come out of this at
least. Satisfaction welled up in him.

“I released the information when your code didn’t come,” she said. “The Los Angeles cops had already found a secret hideout for some Powers on Earth, with a lot of dead aliens in it. All the Earth governments are going crazy. Demanding answers.”

Steward tried to laugh. It hurt, so he just grinned up at Weatherman
and squeezed her hand. She was smiling back at him.

“There are a lot of people wanting to see you,” Weatherman said. “Diplomats, cops. They seem to think you’ll be able to explain things to them. But they’ll have to take their turn. Bank hath its privileges, at least on Solon.”

“That’s why I like this place,” Steward whispered. “Everyone knows what’s important.” And why the Beta had bought insurance here, just before he’d gone down the gravity well for a meeting with Griffith. The whole place was security-mad, full of paranoid millionaire criminals hiding their funds, banks ever alert for breaches of security, brokers on the lookout for swindles. No one was going to see Steward whom Steward didn’t want to see.

“There are media people, too. I imagine you’ll make some money from the rights, if you want to talk to them. I can handle that for you.”

“Later.”

Weatherman’s eyes cut to one side of the room, as if there was someone there giving her a signal. She straightened. “They tell me I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you later.”

“Bye.”

She smiled, squeezed his hand, left.

Capital, Steward thought. And laughed.

*

Steward found out later what the LA police thought had happened, and he more or less agreed with them. “Why didn’t you—your Beta—just
tell us?”
their representative wanted to know. “We could have searched the damn place.”

“He wasn’t certain,” Steward said. By now he was used to talking about the Beta in the third person. “And some things were…personal. Between Icehawks. People who had been through Sheol.”

“The Beta,” the police captain said, “wasn’t on Sheol.”

“Sheol,” Steward said, “was the whirlwind.”

The police captain didn’t understand. Afterward, Steward avoided speaking to him.

*

The scansheets were telling him about “Power panic” on Earth. Ricot and Vesta were busy issuing denials that no one believed. Their stock had thundered into the basement. Steward told the diplomats and such that he was only interested in clarifying his Beta’s statement, not amplifying it, that he wanted questions in writing ahead of time. He had temporary Solon citizenship and he didn’t have to give any answers he didn’t want to.

They protested, but they played by his rules. He answered the questions he wanted to.

Janice Weatherman was going to conduct a media rights auction and collect ten percent of what promised to be a ridiculous amount of money. Steward didn’t want to think, right now, about how rich he was going to be.

He thought about Ashraf:
Nothing to do with you.
He’d been right all along. He’d just been talking about the wrong clone.

Weatherman was spending a lot of time with him, more than she really needed to. That was something else Steward didn’t want to think about, not yet anyway. He needed to get his bearings first.

Surrounded by guards, he took a trip to Solon’s hub. He went alone into a room where he could float before a perfect clear pane and look out of the metal humming world of the station. Earth dazzled his eyes, cold amid the emptiness.

His predecessor, the Beta, had twinned his brain and donated a scrap of flesh, and then he’d gone in pursuit of the Alpha. Found him, Steward thought, in the underwater Sheol that had been built in California. Finished what the Alpha had started to do. Become the whirlwind together. And then ended, blew apart.

Whatever the Alpha and Beta had done, it was finished now. Steward had lost them both. He felt the pulse of hollowness, where they had been, deep in his throat.

The Beta, Steward thought, had been created in order to finish the Alpha’s work, pay off his karmic debt. Conclude all business with de Prey, Curzon, Sheol, Andrew. He, the Gamma, was someone else. On a different wheel altogether.

He was, he thought with a laugh, a Zen saint. No karma left, no consequence, no desire. A clean slate. The Beta had done a good job.

Steward floated amid cold Earthlight that shone whitely on his skin. The vast bulk of the station revolved around and behind him.

New life
, he thought.
New arrow
.

He wondered where he was aimed.

The End

BONUS

Special Excerpt

from

Angel Station

by Walter Jon Williams

THE ELECTRON MUSIC SOOTHED MARIA, BUFFERED HER PAIN. THE touch of the current wasn’t as sharp and dangerous as when she was flaming on Red Nine, or as immediate; instead the distant background hum built lovely architectures that patterned across the ship, an invisible electronic skeleton, a lovely lacework continually transforming itself across Maria’s perceptions.

She was drugged lightly: Blue Three, to keep the pain at bay, not as potent as Blue Seven. Clothing hurt, so she lay naked in her rack or pillowed on the couch in the crew lounge, Maxim her only company, happy the station gravity was almost nonexistent this close to the hub. Sometimes she played keyboards or watched holo hype, more interested in the patterns of electrons in her mind than the music or in the hype-people inflicting violence on one another.

Ubu moved distantly, busily through the pattern of Maria’s perceptions, limping from place to place on torn leg muscles. She sensed the alterations he was making in the electron flow. He was calling up information, working out figures on the comp.

Ubu was working on a plan. Another plan.

The plan would involve her, of course. Maria knew well enough how his mind worked.

Maria swallowed another Blue Three, concentrated on the electron pattern.

She knew that Ubu, his plan, and her pain were all tinged with inevitability. But she wanted to keep them outside the pattern for as long as possible.

“I don’t want to ask you again,” Ubu said. “But I don’t see a way around it.”

Beautiful Maria, her fingers striking random chords on the sizer keyboard, said nothing.

“Another day,” said Ubu. “That’s our limit. Then we have to deal with OttoBanque.”

“Think of something else.” Spoken through cracked lips. Maria held one chord with the left hand while she dabbed at her lower lip with the other, looked passively at the dot of blood. The chord filled the room, strained the silence.

“I wish I
could!”
Ubu shouted, the long chord burning red in his brain. Frustration seized his throat in a taloned fist and his fury died. He turned away and limped to the door. He didn’t want to look at her naked body any more, see what his last plan had done to it. Maria’s features were a puffy discolored mask, incapable of expression. The bruises were bigger now, blooming beneath her translucent skin like bright disfiguring blossoms. The burn marks on her back and breasts were the furious bites of an animal. He couldn’t see his sister in that skin any longer.

He leaned against the doorframe of the lounge, his back to her. Chords touched his mind with violent colors, colors like flesh under assault. “I don’t want to start out my life as a loser,” he said. “This is the first chance we have to make it. The only chance. If we lose, luck gets made for us from this point on. We won’t have much to say about it.”

Maria’s voice was weary. Even Maxim’s purr was louder. “Talk to me tomorrow,” she said.

Ubu turned and left. The old ship’s joints crackled as he moved down the corridor. Facts crowded his mind. Production statistics. Effects of Consolidation policy. Bankruptcy statistics. Current prices for captured singularities. Prices on Angelica Station for heavy magnets. The facts warred with memories, with scents and sounds: Pasco weeping while red pills trailed out of his pockets; Marco de Suarez looking out at him from his skull-like face, the shine of neurojuice on his upper lip; the sharp smell of Kitten’s plastic skin as it burned; Beautiful Maria’s endless, soft cry as the glitch rod snapped against her flesh . . .

Restlessness tugged at him. He needed to get off the ship. Even if there was no money to spend, even if people laughed at his swelling and bruises. He went to his cabin, threw a caftan over his head, belted it, considered shaving, decided against it. He moved to the airlock with his practiced low-gee skip. Ubu went through the lock, down the docking tube, cycled through the lock on the other side.

As the hatch cracked open, the sounds of Angel Hub commerce flowed through: shouts, blatting horns, carryalls whining as they moved cargo. The hatch swung fully open and revealed a boy standing outside. His soft unmoned face wore a startled expression, perhaps at the door opening unexpectedly, perhaps at the sight of Ubu’s damaged face. The boy wore grip shoes, a pastel green blouse with gold metal threads— real stitching, not fake— a pair of shorts with lots of pockets. The de Suarez cast of features was plain. Ubu suppressed irritation.

“Bossrider,” the boy said.

“Shooter.” Giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“I’m—”

“Christopher de Suarez. I know.”

The boy looked at him curiously. “Have we met?”

“Years ago. A shooter meeting called to protest the Consolidation policy.” One of many. Nothing had come of any of them.

“I don’t remember,” the de Suarez said.

“Wasn’t very memorable.” Ubu’s lips twisted in a knowing smile, then belated pain stabbed him from lips and jaw and neck. He winced. “What you need, shooter man?”

“I’d like to see Beautiful Maria.” Ubu already knew this: the boy had been leaving messages for Maria all over
Runaway’s
computer.
This,
he thought, was what Maria had been shacking with?

“She’s not well,” Ubu said. He didn’t want a de Suarez aboard his ship, in a position to report to Marco on its shabby condition, its battered crew and empty holds.

“Oh.” The boy fidgeted. “Is it serious?”

“Depends on what you call serious.”

“I’d like to see her.”

The de Suarez seemed to be getting stubborn. Ubu pressed the button that would cycle the hatch shut in his face. “I’ll call her,” he said through the narrowing crack. “Wait here.”

He considered not calling Maria, just telling the de Suarez she wasn’t able to see him, but he was irritated, not so much by the thought of lying as by the pointlessness of lying about something so trivial. He pressed the intercom button.

“There’s a Christopher de Suarez here to see you,” he said. There was a short silence before Maria answered. Her voice had lost some of its weariness.

“Kit. I know him. You can let him in.”

Annoyance sparked in Ubu’s nerves. He suppressed it. “You sure you want a de Suarez in our ship? I don’t want Marco knowing things.”

“Kit
hates
Marco. He wouldn’t tell him anything.”

Ubu was dubious. “Okay,” he said. “It’s your shoot.” Kit, he thought. What a stupid name.

He opened the hatch again and walked out, making the de Suarez step aside. “The centrifuge is locked down,” he said. “Don’t bother with the climb to the ship’s hub, you can open the double hatch and walk in. Maria’s in the crew lounge, second on the right past the command cage.”

The de Suarez gave a hesitant smile. “Thanks, bossrider.”

“My pleasure, Kit.” Grinning insolently.

Kit, Ubu thought again as he skipped away. What a stupid name.

Sitting on the cracked old couch in the lounge, Beautiful Maria leaned her bare back against Kit’s warm shoulder and took his hand in her own. Turned away from him this way, she didn’t have to watch the continued disturbance in his eyes as he looked at her disfigured face. The cat hopped from the sizer keyboard to her lap, then sprawled across her thighs. A distant wave of Blue Three eddied through her.

She gave him the agreed-upon explanation, that she and Ubu had won big in the Monte Carlo, then been beaten and robbed by a bunch of downside thugs.

“Have you talked to the cops?” he asked.

“Sure.” The lie came easily. “Haven’t heard from them since.”

“The groundlice probably paid them off. Angel Station’s that kind of place. So long as no one bothers Biagra-Exeter personnel they don’t care what happens to anyone else. I didn’t even see it in the station newsfax.” He squeezed her hand. “I wish I could touch you. Really touch you. But it would hurt you, wouldn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t be comfortable. I’m sorry.”

“I wish I could help somehow. But
Abrazo
’s leaving in just a few weeks. We’re waiting for one more shipment to arrive, then we’re gone.”

Maria felt a long throb of sorrow and was surprised at its strength. She turned her head, saw Kit with his eyes turned stubbornly away, and she touched his cheek with her fingers. “I wish you didn’t have to leave. Have you thought about the apprenticeship thing?”

Kit gave a heavy sigh. “I don’t think Marco would go for it. And if he did, he’d want constant reports on what you and your brother were doing, what kind of deals you were cutting. And then he’d use the information to try to undermine you.”

She shook her head. Blue Three made it more difficult than usual to comprehend Marco’s behavior. “He’s so awful,” she said.

“We’re surviving. We’re even making a good profit. I just wish he wouldn’t do it this way.”

Beautiful Maria closed her eyes and let the unfocused sadness drift through her. Kit would desert her. it wasn’t his fault, but he would. And then it would be Maria and Ubu again, together and alone and fighting alone against Consolidation again, a fight as constant and as hopeless as that of a ship caught in the coils of a singularity, the shooters trying every maneuver they knew but falling ever nearer, ending as a last forlorn burst of radiation crying from the heart of a lightless sun . . .

“Maria,” Kit said. “Maybe there’s a way.”