"The people across the street, they were Pakistani or maybe Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. I'd see the wife at the service laundry. Nice professional lady, always lugging around a couple kids on their way to or from day-care. She—" Posy broke off and stared again. "I once saw her reach for her change and her sleeve rode up and there was a number tattooed there, there on her wrist. " Posy shuddered. "When they took her and her husband and their kids, she stood at the window and pounded at it and screamed for help. You could hear her from here. "
"That's terrible," Lawrence said. "But what does it have to do with the Order?"
She sat back down. "For someone who is supposed to know himself, you're not very good at connecting the dots. "
Lawrence stood up. He felt an obscure need to apologize. Instead, he thanked her and put his glass in the sink. She shook his hand solemnly.
"Take care out there," she said. "Good luck finding your escapee. "
Here's what Lawrence knew about Zbigniew Krotoski. He had been inducted into the Order four years earlier. He was a native-born New Yorker. He had spent his first two years in the Order trying to coax some of the elders into a variety of pointless flamewars about the ethics of working for the Securitat, and then had settled into being a very productive member. He spent his 20 percent time — the time when each monk had to pursue non-work-related projects — building aerial photography rigs out of box-kites and tiny cameras that the Monks installed on their systems to help them monitor their body mechanics and ergonomic posture.
Zbigkrot performed in the eighty-fifth percentile of the Order, which was respectable enough. Lawrence had started there and had crept up and down as low as 70 and as high as 88, depending on how he was doing in the rest of his life. Zbigkrot was active in the gardens, both the big ones where they grew their produce and a little allotment garden where he indulged in baroque cross-breeding experiments, which were in vogue among the monks then.
The Securitat stream to which he'd added sixty-eight bytes was long gone, but it was the kind of thing that the Order handled on a routine basis: given the timing and other characteristics, Lawrence thought it was probably a stream of purchase data from hardware and grocery stores, to be inspected for unusual patterns that might indicate someone buying bomb ingredients. Zbigkrot had worked on this kind of data thousands of times before, six times just that day. He'd added the sixty-eight bytes and then left, invoking his right to do so at the lone gate. The gatekeeper on duty remembered him carrying a little rucksack, and mentioning that he was going to see his sister in New York.
Zbigkrot once had a sister in New York — that much could be ascertained. Anja Krotoski had lived on 23rd Street in a co-op near Lexington. But that had been four years previous, when he'd joined the Order, and she wasn't there anymore. Her numbers all rang dead.
The apartment building had once been a pleasant, middle-class sort of place, with a red awning and a niche for a doorman. Now it had become more run down, the awning's edges frayed, one pane of lobby glass broken out and replaced with a sheet of cardboard. The doorman was long gone.
It seemed to Lawrence that this fate had befallen many of the City's buildings. They reminded him of the buildings he'd seen in Belgrade one time, when he'd been sent out to brief a gang of outsource programmers his boss had hired — neglected for years, indifferently patched by residents who had limited access to materials.
It was the dinner hour, and a steady trickle of people were letting themselves into Anja's old building. Lawrence watched a couple of them enter the building and noticed something wonderful and sad: as they approached the building, their faces were the hard masks of city-dwellers, not meeting anyone's eye, clipping along at a fast pace that said, "Don't screw with me. " But once they passed the threshold of their building and the door closed behind them, their whole affect changed. They slumped, they smiled at one another, they leaned against the mailboxes and set down their bags and took off their hats and fluffed their hair and turned back into people.
He remembered that feeling from his life before, the sense of having two faces: the one he showed to the world and the one that he reserved for home. In the Order, he only wore one face, one that he knew in exquisite detail.
He approached the door now, and his pan started to throb ominously, letting him know that he was enduring hostile probes. The building wanted to know who he was and what business he had there, and it was attempting to fingerprint everything about him from his pan to his gait to his face.
He took up a position by the door and dialed back the pan's response to a dull pulse. He waited for a few minutes until one of the residents came down: a middle-aged man with a dog, a little sickly-looking schnauzer with grey in its muzzle.
"Can I help you?" the man said, from the other side of the security door, not unlatching it.
"I'm looking for Anja Krotoski," he said. "I'm trying to track down her brother. "
The man looked him up and down. "Please step away from the door. "
He took a few steps back. "Does Ms. Krotoski still live here?"
The man considered. "I'm sorry, sir, I can't help you. " He waited for Lawrence to react.
"You don't know, or you can't help me?"
"Don't wait under this awning. The police come if anyone waits under this awning for more than three minutes. "
The man opened the door and walked away with his dog.
His phone rang before the next resident arrived. He cocked his head to answer it, then remembered that his lifelogger was dead and dug in his jacket for a mic. There was one at his wrist pulse-points used by the health array. He unvelcroed it and held it to his mouth.
"Hello?"
"It's Gerta, boyo. Wanted to know how your Anomaly was going. "
"Not good," he said. "I'm at the sister's place and they don't want to talk to me. "
"You're walking up to strangers and asking them about one of their neighbors, huh?"
He winced. "Put it that way, yeah, OK, I understand why this doesn't work. But Gerta, I feel like Rip Van Winkle here. I keep putting my foot in it. It's so different. "
"People are people, Lawrence. Every bad behavior and every good one lurks within us. They were all there when you were in the world — in different proportion, with different triggers. But all there. You know yourself very well. Can you observe the people around you with the same keen attention?"
He felt slightly put upon. "that's what I'm trying—"
"Then you'll get there eventually. What, you're in a hurry?"
Well, no. He didn't have any kind of timeline. Some people chased Anomalies for years. But truth be told, he wanted to get out of the City and back onto campus. "I'm thinking of coming back to Campus to sleep. "
Gerta clucked. "Don't give in to the agoraphobia, Lawrence. Hang in there. You haven't even heard my news yet, and you're already ready to give up?"
"What news? And I'm not giving up, just want to sleep in my own bed—"
"The entry checkpoints, Lawrence. You cannot do this job if you're going to spend four hours a day in security queues. Anyway, the news.