“Thank you, Doctor.” Clark sat down before he did any more damage to his own case.
For a moment. Erin thought her sigh could be heard throughout the courtroom. She glanced quickly at the juror; he still wore an amused expression. He probably hadn’t even listened to the most critical testimony for their case.
The judge ended the day, and after they left the courtroom and had passed through the gauntlet of media people, Ephraim asked, “How did it go today?”
She looked at him without breaking stride. He was rubbing his shoulder, where she had squeezed him. He wasn’t stupid—he didn’t have to ask. Only Clark’s mistake had saved them from an outright dismissal. They had come in unprepared and wound up with the worst possible juror anyone could have imagined—a defense lawyer’s dream.
And it was his. fault.
She took his shoulder very deliberately, closing her hand—gently—on exactly the spot where she had gripped him before. “We are going to go to your studio,” she said. “Right now. You are going to show me what you do with your implant, and what NeuroTek has cost you. Or there is very little point in continuing.” He stiffened briefly, jaw tight, giving her a single brief glance from the corners of his eyes. Then he shrugged, his taut shoulders slumping.
“Give me an hour, okay?” A tiny muscle leaped along the side of his jaw. “I… I need some privacy, first.”
She stopped, facing him in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, struggling with her anger. “Are you going to let me in this time?”
“Yes.” Those clear gray eyes met hers without evasion. “This time I’ll let you in.” He turned on his heel and strode off down the street before she could stop him, never once looking back.
So he had been there, yesterday. Erin clenched her teeth. And now he was running away again. From what? Erin shook her head, wondering just how big a disaster this was going to be.
Slumped on one of his big floor cushions against the wall, Ephraim watched on the wall-mounted security screen as Erin rang his bell. Right on time. He glanced at his watch. One hour exactly. Anger stirred in his belly. This woman was pushy, demanding, invasive—utterly unlike Derocher. He was tempted to let her ring.
She wanted to win. Derocher had wanted the money. That’s why he had dumped the case—he wasn’t going to get paid. Ephraim wondered suddenly why winning mattered to her. He closed his eyes, his head bursting with the images he hadn’t dared to download, tempted to say the hell with it, open the interface, and finish Crusade. If he did, and the imperfect interface failed entirely, he would have no memory anymore. Crusade would no longer matter.
Suicide, he thought. Suicide of the soul, or merely of the self?
The door chime sounded again, and he pushed himself abruptly to his feet. His chin was wet. He wiped his face on his sleeve in disgust. “Enter,” he said, and watched her vanish from the camera eye as she marched into the building’s entry. He met her at the door, noticed that she was still furious, although she was hiding it well.
“Thank you for letting me in,” she said with some irony.
“I don’t normally invite people into my studio.” He leaned against the wall, watching her examine his small living space.
“This is a very expensive apartment complex,” she remarked mildly. Her gaze took in the two floor cushions on the oriental rug and the low birchwood table, the efficient kitchen wall with its built-in microwave and beverage units. It wasn’t much bigger than her office. “Real wood.” She bent to stroke the satiny grain of the table top. “Very nice. The carpet is handwoven, isn’t it?” She nodded appreciatively. “Other than that, this is a rather unpretentious room for this type of building.”
“I like real textures.” He wondered what she was getting at. “And I didn’t choose the building for its prestige.” He heard the defensive note in his voice and tried to stifle it. “It has state-of-the-art holographic and virtual capabilities built into it. I didn’t have to retrofit my studio.” He walked across the small room and palmed the studio door lock. “Would you… like some tea or something?” He wanted to delay this.
“No, thank you.” She walked through the door, her eyes sweeping the barren studio. The holo-stage took up most of the floor. Circular, it rose a bare fifteen centimeters from the polished tiles, off-white, its surface as pristine as a new snowbank. The directional speakers and scent generators were hidden in its base. She glanced at it, then walked around it to the small shelf on the far wall to stare at the single yellow rose in its cut-glass vase. “You like flowers?”
He lifted the rose by its stem, a thorn pricking his thumb. “We have yet to create something this complex and fine from scratch.” The thorn had drawn a tiny crimson bead of blood. He wiped it on his shirt and touched the delicate, creamy curve of a petal. “This keeps me humble.” He replaced the rose in its vase and turned his back on her. “System, on,” he said, and the room darkened. Light swirled and shifted above the stage, and he felt an illogical twinge of fear. “System, run Fields. Step up onto the stage,” he said as the shimmering holographic mist took on color and shape. “The system is focused on a participant. You don’t get the effect from outside.” And he climbed onto the stage without waiting to see if she would follow suit. He had meant to explain it to her—what he had attempted to convey here, how he had sorted through images of old battlefields and new ones, trying to find the echoes of violence past and present, and its segue from life to death to life—to capture the dark frivolity of human conflict against the vast landscape of racial memory.
But the words dried up inside him as the images formed—green fields where long spring grass didn’t quite hide the uniform crosses of military graves, overlaid with a young Asian man tossing a laughing child into the air, and a blonde girl giggling and wrestling with her lover, overlaid with a pool of drying blood beside a blooming dandelion. A sparrow pecked for crumbs among empty shell casings and crumpled candy wrappers. Buildings fell in static glimpses. Overlaid one on top of the other within the holographic field, the images sharpened and faded at seeming random to create a collage that drew the eye and mind from the past to the present and back into the past in startling leaps. Bleached stones tumbled amid ancient burial mounds and Ephraim smelled frost and wet wool. Trucks and tanks rolled, scented with gasoline and a whiff of peppermint, scored by percussion and bass oboes. Children played hide-and-seek beneath a summer sky marked with the white calligraphy of fighter jets and scented with new-mown grass.
Life, death, and laughter, the images came faster and faster—almost too fast for the surface mind to register, speaking to a deeper place in the human consciousness. The whine of shells falling became bird song. Someone cried in pain, overlaid with the soft flute notes of a lullaby. Then the sensory whirlwind stilled suddenly and a child emerged from a shimmering waterfall, her eyes grave in her thin face. She melted into a West African soldier who flashed a white grin even as his flesh faded from his bones and his bones crumbled, polished into pearls by the flowing water. The dark-eyed girl shook water from her hair, scooped up the gems, and laughed, and her teeth gleamed with the iridescence of the pearls. Finally the images faded, leaving only the lingering scent of rain-wet pine needles and twilight.
The room lights came on.
Erin was standing very still in the center of the stage, her eyes fixed on the child’s vanished image, her face utterly unreadable. For the space of a dozen heartbeats, she remained silent, then she turned slowly to face him. Her eyes were the color of the sea at sunset, shot through with hints of gold.