“Close. Pistaco’s a white man with a long knife who comes at night and chops up Indians to get at their body fat. Most likely, it’s a cultural memory from the conquistadores and the Inquisition, because they certainly weren’t averse to a bit of dismemberment in the name of Gold and Jesus Christ. But these days, up on the altiplano they’ve got a new angle on the story.”
“Which is what?”
Marsalis grinned. She was appalled at how much it reminded her of Ethan, at how it reached inside and touched her in the place he used to.
“These days,” he said, “the Andeans don’t believe the pistaco is the white man as such anymore. That’s gone. Still the same monster, still looks the same, but now the story they tell is, the pistaco’s something evil that the white man’s brought back.”
He nodded toward the dark towering webbed architecture of the nanorack.
“Brought back from Mars.”
CHAPTER 15
The sweep and swoop of the codes took hold.
Sevgi felt herself dislodged from current reality, turned away from it like a small child guided away from a TV screen by warm parental hands. The couches at COLIN Florida were clunky, thirty-year-old military surplus stock, fully enclosed and soundproofed, and now, in the deadened stillness they created, there was a low chiming that seemed to resonate deep in her guts. From long habit, she let herself home in on it. Gentle steerage to the new focus. Look at this, look at this. The colors above her seemed to mesh into significance just out of reach. The chiming was the beat of her heart, the shiver of blood along veins and arteries, a cellular awareness. The swirling ebbed and inked back, glaring out like antique celluloid film melting through. The standard desert format inked in.
She looked around. Marsalis was not with her.
“Good afternoon, ma’am.”
The Freeport PD ’face was a handsome black patrolman in his early twenties, insignia winking in the jarringly heatless Arizona sun. The fabric of his short-sleeved uniform had a perfect, factory-fresh texture to it, and so did his flawless, airbrushed skin. Muscle roped his forearms and bulked out his shoulders. He might have stepped, Sevgi thought sourly, out of the early stages of a porn experia, the storyline section before the clothes came off. She guessed the intention was to inspire confidence and respect for the symbols of Angeline law enforcement, but all it did was put her on the edge of a giggle and make her slightly warm.
Oh well, at least it isn’t another fucking body-perfect überbitch.
More than slightly warm, in fact.
“Uh, I’m waiting—”
“For a colleague.” The ’face nodded. “He’s incoming, but it’s taking some time. May I see your authorization?”
Sevgi lifted an open palm and watched as the skeins of bluish machine code fell out of it. They splashed on the ground with a faint crackling and disappeared into the dirt as if soaked up. Despite the color, it felt uncomfortably like watching herself bleed through a slashed wrist. At least, what she’d imagined it would when—
Stop that.
“Thank you, ma’am. You are cleared to proceed.” Ahead of her, the familiar adobe datahomes swam rapidly into existence. The ’face stepped aside to indicate Sevgi’s new status. “Your colleague also.”
She hadn’t noticed. Beside her, Marsalis was shading in. Looking at him as he solidified, she suddenly lost all interest in the patrolman. The attraction was in the flaws, the lines in the face, the faint and flattened scar across his left hand that looked like a burn, the barely perceptible tangles of gray in the hair. The way his mouth crimped slightly to the right when he looked at the patrolman. The way he took up space as if blocking a doorway to somewhere. The way—
She still wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly opted to join her in the virtuality.
“You took your time,” she said, a little more harshly than she’d intended.
He shrugged. “Blame the genes. Thirteens run high resistance to hypnotic technique. I knew some guys back in Osprey who had to be sedated before they could use a v-format at all. Shall we go have a look at Toni?”
The ’face led them across the sand to the closest of the datahomes. Primary crime scene hung in the air beside it in holographic blue. Unusually, the adobe structure had a door. The patrolman worked the black iron latch and pushed the raw wood surface inward. It opened incongruously onto a prissily decorated suburban front hall.
“My name is Cranston,” said the ’face as it stood back to let them pass. “If you need departmental assistance, please call me. The victim is in the dining room. Second door on the left. Feel free to touch or move anything, but if you wish the changes to be saved, you’ll need to advise me.”
They found Toni Montes sprawled on the dining room floor not far from the section of wall where her blood and brains were splashed. She’d rolled when she fell and landed on her side, head turned, displaying the soggy mess of the exit wound. Her limbs were a seemingly boneless tangle, her feet bare. The faintly shimmering white corpse outline seemed to isolate her from the surroundings of her home, as if preparatory to snipping her out of the picture. As they approached, supplementary data scrolled up over the body in neat holographic boxes. Tissue trauma, time of death. Probable causes of secondary injuries. Age, sex, race. Genetic salients.
“I hate that shit,” said Sevgi, for something to say. “Fucking convenience culture, it just gets in the way of what you’re trying to see.”
“You can probably disable it.”
“Yeah.” She made no move to summon Cranston. “Back when I started on the force, NYPD ran trials on this option where you could get the corpse to talk to you.”
“Jesus, whose fucked-up idea was that?” But it was said absently. Marsalis knelt by the body, brow creased.
“I don’t know. Some datageek with too much time on his hands, looking for a creative edge. Rationale was, it was to prevent desensitizing. Supposed to bring back to you the fact that this was once a living, breathing human being.”
“Right.” He took one of the dead woman’s hands, which had fallen cupped loosely upward, and lifted it gently. He seemed to be stroking her fingers.
Sevgi crouched beside him. “Well, they already had the models where you could get the victim to reverse from moment of death, back up, and then walk through the probable sequence of events. Guess it wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
He turned to look at her, face suddenly close. “Can we do that here?”
“You want to?”
Another shrug. “We’ve got time to kill, haven’t we?”
“All right. Cranston?”
The ’face shaded undramatically into being across the room from them, like a pre-millennial photo Sevgi had once seen developed chemically at a seminar.
“What can I do for you?”
Sevgi got up and gestured. “Can you run the crime event model for us? Last few minutes only.”
“No problem. You’ll need to come through to the front room; that’s where it seems to have started. I’ll engage the system now. Do you want sound?”
Sevgi, who’d watched a lot of this sort of thing, shook her head.
“No, just the motions.”
“Then if you’ll follow me.”
Unnervingly, the patrolman stepped directly through the wall. They left the body and took the more conventional route through the connecting door to the front room, where Cranston was waiting. As they came in, the sky outside the room’s window darkened abruptly to night and the drapes drew themselves partway closed like some cheap horror-flick effect. An unharmed edition of Toni Montes stood in for the ghost—she shaded back to life in the center of the room, feet still shod in mint-and-cream espadrilles that picked up the colors in her skirt and blouse. Her makeup was intact, and she looked impossibly composed.
A pace away from her, the system penciled in the perpetrator.
It was a black outline of a man, a figure with the smooth, characterless features and standardized body mass of an anatomical sketch, all done in shiny jet. But it breathed, and it swayed slightly, and it sprang at Toni Montes and hit her with a savage, looping backfist. The image of the woman flew silently backward, tripped, and fell on the couch. One espadrille came off, flipped ludicrously high, and landed on the other side of the room. The black figure went after Montes, seized her by the throat, and punched her in the face. She flopped and slumped. The other espadrille came off. She pushed herself away along the couch, stumbled toward upright while the black figure stood and watched with robot calm. When Montes got to her feet, it stepped in again and punched her high in the chest. She flew back into the drapes, rolled, staggered upright. She flailed with nails, got a backhand for her trouble that knocked her fully across the room. The edge of the opened door to the hall caught her in the back. This time she went down and stayed down.