“Where’s your partner?” someone asked him.
He slitted his eyes open, lifted his head so far as he had strength to do. He saw a white coat, a man writing on a slate.
“Where’s your partner?” the med asked him. “Do you remember?”
Black. An alarm screaming. The ship jolted and spun—he struggled against the weight of his own arm to reach the controls, wondering whether the autopilot could possibly straighten them out or if it had engaged already. He didn’t know. He hit the switch. Something jolted the ship, threw him against the workstation—
“Mr. Dekker. Do you recall what happened?”
Green-walled shower. The watch showed March 12.
“What day is it?” he asked. But they didn’t answer him. He tried to see his watch, but he couldn’t move his arms. “Bird, what time is it? For God’s sake, what time?”
The man in white wrote on his slate and said, “What time do you think it is?”
“Give me my watch. Where’s my watch?” It wasn’t on his wrist. It had lied to him. Or it was his only way back. “Where’s my watch, dammit!—I want my watch!”
The man left. Others came in and shot something into his arm. After that he could hear his heart beating heavier and heavier, and he was slipping into dark.
“Bird?” he asked, thinking Ben must have something to do with this. “Bird, wake up—Bird, help me— Bird, wake up and help me!”
CHAPTER 6
GLASS touched glass, in the Liberty Bell, on 6. “Here’s to friends,” Sal said, and Bird, telling himself it was far too soon to plan on anything, had made up his mind not to tell Meg and Sal a thing.
But that had gone by the side the minute they’d seen Ben’s smugly cheerful face.
“You got it!” Meg said, before they even got their drink orders in.
“We’re at least tracking,” Ben said. “We’re gaining on it. They’re going to expedite the claim.”
For the life of him, Bird couldn’t figure how Ben managed to get around people in offices. But he did.
So here they were, on their way to feeling no pain at all, .7 gbe damned.
It wasn’t as if Meg and Sal would leave them cold tomorrow if the deal fell through. They weren’t that kind. But they sure as hell enjoyed the party tonight.
They enjoyed it afterward too, piled into two adjacent rooms in the Bell—actually the party traveled and they had to throw this one pair of tender-jocks out twice, who complained they’d been invited.
“No, you weren’t!” Sal Aboujib said. And shut the door and slid down it, laughing. Meg was laughing too much to help her, so they hauled her up and picked her up, Sal yelling that they were going to drop her on her head.
So they fell on the bed—which at low gmeant a slow bouncing, all of them, while up and down went sort of alcoholically crazed for a moment.
“God,” Bird said, falling back on what he thought was mattress. “I’m zee’d.”
Meg fell on him with a vaporous kiss and he stopped caring which way was up.
Turned out when they waked it was Ben and Sal’s bunk they were in, but that was no matter, Ben and Sal had just gone off next door. But they had last night’s sins to pay for—a hangover in low g, with your sinuses and your ears playing tricks, was hell’s own reward.
“Cory?” Dekker asked. “Cory?” But he was not in the ship, he was inside white walls with white-coated medics who asked him over and over “What happened to Cory?” and he couldn’t altogether remember what their truth was, or what they wanted him to say. He asked for Bird, and they asked him who that was, but someone said in his hearing that that was the man who’d brought him in.
From where? He tried to remember where he had left Bird, or what had happened, but it always went back to that shower stall, the watch showing him the time… March 12. And it was his choice what would happen that day…
He slept again. He was more comfortable when he waked. His hands were free and they let him sit up and gave him fruit drink. A man came and sat down by his bed with a slate and started asking him questions—How old are you? Have you any relatives? all rapid-fire. It was the sort of thing they asked if you’d had an accident, something about next of kin. It scared him. The shower in this room wasn’t the shower he remembered, he could see the white walls through the door. He’d jumped ahead. Cory wasn’t with him, and he was in a hospital having to go through these questions like some actor in a vid. It couldn’t be real. God, he didn’t want his mother to hear he was lying in a hospital somewhere she couldn’t help, he’d screwed up enough: he just said he was from Sol Station and shut up.
“What was your relationship with Corazon Salazar?” they asked him then, cold and impersonal. He said, going through the ritual, “She’s my partner.”
But if he went on answering, they’d write it down as true and he’d be here, he couldn’t go back to the shower, he’d be out of the loop and he’d have no chance to fix it: Cory would be dead then. No way back.
The man asked, “Did you have relations with her?”
That made him mad. “That’s not your business.”
The man asked: “Did you ever quarrel?”
“No.”
The man made a mark on his slate. “What did you invest in that ship?”
He didn’t understand that question. He shook his head.
“Did you put any money into it?”
He shook his head again. “That wasn’t the way it worked. Cory was the money.” Cory was the brains too, but he didn’t admit that to a stranger. Cory was the one who had no question what she wanted. But the man didn’t ask that. The man said, “What happened out there?”
He couldn’t go back to the shower now. No green walls. White. He thought, What should I tell them? And the man said, “Does that upset you? You said Ms. Salazar was working outside the ship. Why?”
He said, not sure what he might have changed, “We were working a tag.”
“Did Ms. Salazar regularly do the outside work?”
“I’m the pilot.” Two answers right. He felt surer now.
“I see. So she hired you. And gave you half interest in her ship. For nothing.”
He nodded.
“Where did you meet?”
“We wrote letters back and forth. We’d been writing a long time. Since we were kids.”
Another note on the slate. “Then it was more than a business relationship.”
“Friends.”
“You didn’t have a falling-out, did you?”
He looked at his watch. But it wasn’t there. They’d taken it.
The man said, “Did you quarrel?”
“We never quarreled.”
“She always did what you wanted? Or didn’t she, this time?”
He didn’t understand. He shook his head. He thought about the shower, but it wasn’t vivid this time. Even the green seemed faded.
The man asked: “Why did you cross the line? To cover what you’d done?”
He didn’t understand what they were getting at. He shook his head again, looked furtively at his wrist, remembered he mustn’t do that. It upset people. Like Ben. It upset Ben a lot…
“Tell me the truth,” the man said. “What were you doing out there?”
“We had a tag,” he said. “We were working it.”
He lost the room of a sudden. It was dark and there were the boards lighting and blinking. He tried to find the safe white wall again.