7

Desmond left for the south, having extracted a promise that Sax would pilfer what he could from Biotique for Hiroko. “I’ve got to go meet Nirgal.” He gave Sax a hug and was gone.

A month or so passed, during which Sax thought about all he had learned from Desmond and the videos, sifting through it slowly, getting more and more disturbed as he did. His sleep was still broken nearly every night by hours of wakefulness.

Then one morning after one of these restless, fruitless bouts of insomnia, Sax got a call on his wristpad. It was Phyllis, in town for meetings, and she wanted to get together for dinner.

Sax agreed, with his surprise and Stephen’s enthusiasm. He met her that evening, at Antonio’s. They kissed in the European style, and were led to one of the corner tables, overlooking the city. There they ate a meal that Sax scarcely noticed, talking inconsequentially about the latest events in Sheffield and Biotique.

After cheesecake they lingered over brandies. Sax was in no hurry to leave, as he was not sure what Phyllis had in mind for afterward. She had given no clear sign, and she seemed in no hurry either.

Now she leaned back in her chair, and regarded him cheerfully. “It really is you, isn’t it.”

Sax tilted his head to indicate his incomprehension.

Phyllis laughed. “It’s hard to believe, really. You were never like this in the old days, Sax Russell. I wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred years that you would be such a lover.”

Sax squinted uncomfortably and looked around. “I would hope that says more about you than me,” he said with Stephen’s insouciance. The nearby tables were all empty, and the waiters were leaving them alone. The restaurant would close in a half hour or so.

Phyllis laughed again, but her eyes had a hard look to them, and suddenly Sax saw that she was angry. Embarrassed, no doubt, at being fooled by a man she had known for some eighty years. And angry that he had decided to fool her. And why not? It showed a very fundamental lack of trust, after all, especially from someone who was sleeping with you. The bad faith of his behavior at Arena was coming back to him with a vengeance, making him quite queasy. But what to do about it?

He recalled that moment in the elevator when she had kissed him, when he had been similarly nonplussed. Taken aback first by her nonrecognition, and now by her recognition. It had a certain symmetry. And both times he had gone along with it.

“Don’t you have anything more to say?” Phyllis demanded.

He spread his hands. “What makes you think this?”

Again she laughed angrily, then regarded him with lips tight. “It’s so easy to see it now,” she said. “They just gave you a nose and a chin, I suppose. But the eyes are the same, and the head shape. It’s funny what you remember and what you forget.”

“That’s true.”

Actually it was not a matter of forgetting, but of being unable to recollect. Sax suspected the memories were still there, in storage.

“I can’t really remember your old face,” Phyllis said. “To me you were always in a lab with your nose pressing a screen. You might as well have worn a white lab coat, that’s the way I see you in my memories. A kind of giant lab rat.” Now her eyes were glittering. “But somewhere along the line you managed to learn to imitate human behavior pretty well, didn’t you? Well enough to fool an old friend who liked the way you looked.”

“We are not old friends.”

“No,” she snapped. “I guess we’re not. You and your old friends tried to kill me. And they did kill thousands of other people, and destroyed most of this planet. And obviously they’re still out there, or else you wouldn’t be here, would you. In fact they must be pretty widespread, because when I ran a DNA check on your sperm, the official TA records had you as Stephen Lindholm. That put me off the trail for a while. But there was something about you that made me wonder. When we fell in that crevasse. That did it— it reminded me of something that happened when we were in Antarctica. You and Tatiana Durova and I were up on Nussbaum Riegel when Tatiana tripped and sprained her ankle, and it got windy and late and they had to helicopter us back down to the base, and while we were waiting, you found some kind of rock lichen . . .”

Sax shook his head, truly surprised. “I don’t remember that.” And he didn’t. The year of training and evaluation in Antarctica’s dry valleys had been intense, but now the entire year was a dim blur to him, and that incident would not come back at all; it was hard to believe it had happened. He couldn’t even remember what poor Tatiana Durova had looked like.

Absorbed in his thoughts, and in a concerted push for his memories of that year, he missed a bit of what Phyllis was saying, but then he caught “. . . checked again with one of my old copies of my AI’s memory, and there you were.”

“Your AI’s memory units may be degrading,” he said absently. “They’re finding that the circuitry tends to get scrambled by cosmic radiation if it isn’t reinforced from time to time.”

She ignored that weak sally. “The point is, people who can change Transitional Authority records like that are still worth watching out for. I’m afraid I can’t just let this pass. Even if I wanted to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. It depends what you do. You could just tell me where you were hiding, and who with, and what’s going on. You just showed up at Biotique a year ago, after all. Where were you before that?”

“On Earth.”

Her smile had a bad twist to it. “If that’s the course you take, I’ll be forced to ask for help from some of my associates. There are security people in Kasei Vallis who will be able to refresh your memory.”

“Come on.”

“I don’t mean that metaphorically. They won’t beat the information out of you or anything like that. It’s more a matter of extraction. They put you under, stimulate the hippocampus and the amygdala, and ask questions. People simply answer.”

Sax considered this. The mechanisms of memory were still very poorly understood, but no doubt something crude could be applied to the areas they knew were involved. Fast MRI, point-specific ultrasound, who knew what. It would surely be dangerous, however. . . .

“Well?” Phyllis said.

He stared at her smile, so angry and triumphant. A sneer. Random thoughts flickered through his mind, images without words: Desmond, Hiroko, the kids in Zygote shouting Why, Sax, why? He had to hold his face steady to keep it from revealing his dislike for her, suddenly pouring through him in a wave. Perhaps this sort of distaste was what people called hatred.

After a time he cleared his throat. “I suppose I’d rather just tell you.”

She nodded firmly, as if this was the decision she would have made herself. She looked around: the whole restaurant was empty now, the waiters sitting at one table, nursing glasses of grappa. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go to my offices.”

Sax nodded and rose stiffly. His right leg had gone asleep. He limped after her. They said good-night to the mobilizing waiters and left.

They got into the elevator, and Phyllis punched the button for the subway level. The door closed and they dropped. In an elevator again; Sax took a deep breath, then jerked his head down as if to look at something unusual on the control panel. Phyllis followed his gaze and with a jerky motion he slugged her on the side of the jaw. She crashed into the side of the elevator and collapsed in a heap, dazed and breathing in gasps. The two middle knuckles of his right hand hurt horribly. He hit the button for the floor two above the subway, which had a long passageway through Hunt Mesa, lined with shops that would be closed at this hour. He grabbed Phyllis by the armpits and hauled her up; she was taller than him, loose and heavy, and when the elevator door opened, he prepared himself to shout for help. But no one stood outside the door, and he pulled one of her arms over his neck and dragged her over to one of the little carts that sat by the elevator for the convenience of people who wanted to cross the mesa quickly, or with a load. He dumped her onto the backseat and she groaned, sounding as if she was coming to. He sat down ahead of her in the driver’s seat and stomped the accelerator pedal to the floor, and the little vehicle hummed down the hallway. He found he was breathing hard, and sweating.

He passed a pair of rest rooms, and stopped the cart. Phyllis rolled helplessly off the seat and onto the floor, moaning louder than ever. Soon she would regain consciousness, if she hadn’t already. He got out and ran over to see if the men’s room was unlocked. It was, so he ran to the cart and pulled Phyllis up by the shoulders, up and over his back. He staggered under her weight until he reached the men’s room door, then flopped her down; her head cracked against the concrete floor, and her moaning stopped. He opened the door and pulled her through it, then closed and locked it.

He sat on the bathroom floor beside her, gasping. She was still breathing, and her pulse was shallow but steady. She seemed okay, but knocked out even more definitively than when he had hit her. Her skin was pale and damp, and her mouth hung open. He felt sorry for her, until he remembered her threat to give him to security technicians, to tear his secrets out of him. Their methods were advanced, but still it was torture. And if they had succeeded they would know about the refuges in the south, and all the rest. Once they had a general idea of what he knew, they could coax the specifics out of him; it wouldn’t be possible to resist their combinations of drugs and behavior modification.

And even now Phyllis knew too much. The fact that he had such a good false ID implied a whole infrastructure that up until now had been hidden. Once they knew of its existence, they could probably ferret it out. Hiroko, Desmond, Spencer who was deep in the system in Kasei Vallis, all exposed . . . Nirgal and Jackie, Peter, Ann . . . all of them. Because he had not been clever enough to avoid a stupid awful woman like Phyllis.

He looked around the men’s room. It was the size of two toilet stalls, one stall with a toilet, the other with a sink, a mirror, and the usual wall of dispensers: sterility pills, recreational gases. He stared at these, catching his breath and thinking things over. As plans tumbled in his mind he whispered instructions to the AI in his wristpad. Desmond had given him some very destructive viral programs, and he plugged his wristpad into Phyllis’s, and waited for the transfers to take place. With luck he could crash her entire system: personal security measures were nothing against Desmond’s military-based viruses, or so Desmond claimed.

But there was still Phyllis. The recreational gases in the wall dispenser were mostly nitrous oxide, in individual inhalers containing about two or three cubic meters of gas. The room was, he judged, about thirty-five or forty cubic meters. The ventilation grill was next to the ceiling, and could be blocked with a strip of the towel, on its roll by the sink.

He stuck money cards in the dispenser and bought all the recreational gases in it: twenty little pocket-sized bottles, with nose-and-mouth masks. And nitrous oxide would be slightly heavier than Burroughs air.

He took the little scissors out of the key compartment on his wristpad, and cut a sheet out of the continuous roll of towel. He climbed onto the toilet tank and covered the ventilation grill, stuffing the sheet into the slits. There were still gaps, but they were small. He climbed back down and went over to the door. There was a gap at the bottom of the door, almost a centimeter tall. He cut some more strips from the towel. Phyllis was snoring. He went to the door, opened it, kicked the gas bottles out and stepped out after them. He took one last look at Phyllis, prone on the floor, and then closed the door. He stuffed the towel strips under the door, leaving only a small opening at one corner. Then, after glancing up and down the hall, he sat down and took a bottle and shaped the flexible mask to the hole he had left, and shot the contents of the bottle into the men’s room. He did that twenty times, stuffing the empty bottles in his pockets until they were full, and then making a little satchel for the remainder out of the last strip of towel. He got up and clanked over to the cart and sat down in the driver’s seat. He stepped on the accelerator and the cart jerked forward, in a movement the opposite of the sudden stop that had thrown Phyllis off the back-seat and onto the floor. That would have hurt.

He stopped the cart. He got out and ran back to the men’s room, clinking and clanking. He jerked open the door, walked in holding his breath, and grabbed Phyllis’s ankles and hauled her out into the air. She was still breathing, and had a little smile on her face. Sax resisted the impulse to kick her, and ran back to the cart.

He drove to the other side of Hunt Mesa at full speed, and then took the elevator there down to the subway level. He got on the next subway train, and waited out the trip across town to South Station. He observed that his hands were trembling, and the two big knuckles on his right hand were swollen and turning blue. They hurt a good deal.

At the station he bought a ticket south, but when he gave the ticket and his ID to the ticket-taker at the track entrance, the man’s eyes went round and he and his associates actually pulled their pistols to make the arrest, calling out nervously for help from people in another room. Apparently Phyllis had come to faster than his calculations had led him to expect.