When I checked in, I signed the register, and then tried to push the pen back to the clerk. It bounced high from the countertop, and he looked at me with a knowing air. “Just down, eh? We have waterbeds available for those guests who suffer from gravity fatigue.” I thanked him and accepted the service. As the bellhop was showing me into my room he made a discreet suggestion concerning other services he could arrange for guests, and I laughed in his face. A full month ago I had sworn never again to have sex in a gravity field, and I was in no mood to change my mind. That dreaded old friend, lower back pain, was already back in full force, for the first time in months.
I didn’t leave that waterbed for three days, and didn’t leave my room for a week.
If you want to know what that week was like, go to hell.
That’s a kind of pun, I guess. By going to hell, you could certainly simulate that week.
Because now it was time to confront that burning question: what if it turns out you’re right?
This had bearing on both strategy and tactics.
Suppose Robert were innocent. In that case, there was no problem. I could call him up, arrange to meet somewhere, watch his eyes very carefully while I outlined my suspicions, learn that I was wrong, and apologize if I decided I wanted to bother. In any case, my biggest problem would be coming up with a good exit line; I could be back in Top Step in a matter of days.
But suppose he were guilty? I call him up…and a little while later there is an unfortunate incident, a failed Stardancer candidate commits suicide in her hotel room in San Francisco; very sad but no next of kin to push it. Or perhaps, if there really is a little nanotechnological horror hidden somewhere in my body, the whole hotel vanishes in a large mysterious explosion.
No, wait. Just because I called him wouldn’t mean the jig was up. I might well have thought things over up in Top Step and decided to follow Robert back to Earth for love. A nuisance, if he really was a high-tech assassin who cared nothing for me, but not a serious one. In that case, meeting with me somewhere for a fast brushoff would be the simplest way to get me off his back. So he agrees to meet me in a restaurant, and then he finds out the jig is up…and maybe I suffer a sudden heart attack over lunch, fall face down into the salad.
Dammit, if he was a hatchetman, it was for a large and wealthy and well-organized conspiracy. Half-assed terrorist groups don’t have access to nanotechnological weapons; if they did they wouldn’t be half-assed terrorists. If Robert was guilty, he was hotter than the fire that killed Kirra. In that case he was probably not even at his nominal address in San Francisco, but hiding in Beijing or someplace even harder to crack. Just leaving a message on his answering machine might be enough to get me snuffed by Triad hitmen.
Of course, that kind of paranoia only made sense if I assumed he was guilty. But if I didn’t at least partly believe he was guilty, what was I doing here, fighting for breath and cursing the glue of gravity?
I had never thought along these kinds of lines in my life, had never known anyone who did except characters in holothrillers and spy novels. I had to work my plans out slowly, laboriously, all the while wanting desperately to believe I was making a fool of myself.
And I kept coming to a jerk at the end of the thought-chain.
If Robert is guilty, and if you work out some clever and safe scheme to get close enough to prove that to yourself—
—then what will you do?
Kill him?
Was I capable of it?
Was I physically capable, first? The part of me that remembered his physical speed, grace and coordination raised a few questions as to how a laywoman suffering from gee fatigue went about killing a trained assassin in a public restaurant…but was willing to concede in theory that it might be done, with the element of surprise, if I didn’t care about being arrested afterward, and if I struck the instant I was sure, without any hesitation at all.
That led to: was I psychologically and emotionally capable of murder? Of anyone, or of Robert? The part of me that liked to watch old Stallone movies wanted to think so. Yo—lover or no lover, he killed my friends, he dies, end of story. The part of me that had thought of him as my last forlorn chance at human love wanted to think so too. He used me as a wartime convenience; no man does that to me and lives. The part of me that was loyal to the Starmind wanted the deaths of so many Stardancers and the ruin of so much sacred Symbiote avenged. His action was an act of war; a sneak attack must be repaid.
But the part of me that thought of itself as an ethical person questioned my right to execute a sentence of death on another human being, however monstrous his crimes…and doubted I had the guts.
But what other option did I have? Denounce him to Stardancers Incorporated and the United Nations, betray him to Interpol, charge him before the High Court and the state courts of Queensland and California? With nothing but circumstantial evidence and lover’s intuition to support the charges? I couldn’t so much as nail him for breach of promise; the son of a bitch had never promised me anything.
Nagging additional minor thought: our brief four-way sexual liaison was not scandalous in Top Step, nor in many circles on Earth nowadays—but it might seem so to Kirra’s or Ben’s surviving kin.
That put those people in my mind. So the first thing I did upon leaving that grim hotel room was to make two short side trips. Well, one short, to Sherman Oaks…and the other rather longer, to north Queensland; I decided I had to face that land again after all.
Before I left, I put the best detective agency I could find onto tracing and locating Robert, with specific warning that he might just be clever enough to spot someone checking him out, and dangerous enough to kill them. It didn’t faze them in the least. They didn’t bother asking why, just told me when and where I could go for a report—so that it need not be sent to me at any address—and how much it would cost. I was spending life savings like water, but I didn’t give a jaunting damn.
The visit to Ben’s father was too sad to recount. The old man was utterly shattered by this latest in a series of crushing disappointments; Ben had been his last surviving blood kin, and now he was alone in the world. I knew all too well how he felt. I told him what a good man his son had been, and something of what Ben had meant to me, and what I could of his last few months of life. It seemed to comfort Mr. Buckley some, but not enough. We were both crying when I left.
With a last-minute attack of the cutes, I had introduced myself to him as Glenn Christie. I’d even gotten cash before leaving San Francisco so I wouldn’t leave a digital credit trail, taken cabs so I wouldn’t have to use my credit to rent a car.
I couldn’t get to Australia that way, but I did take time to alter my appearance, by changing wardrobe, having my hair cut close to my skull and permed within an inch of its life, and darkening my complexion several shades. I paid cash for a standby seat, but had to give my right name; to compensate I made sure I was one of the last to board and sat in the wrong seat; on arrival I got in the wrong line at Customs & Immigration, with people from a different flight, and while I stood on line wedged my way into a voluble discussion in German despite knowing almost none of that language; mostly I nodded and listened alertly to whoever was speaking. Maybe it all helped; no one followed me from the airport. Or maybe I made a jerk of myself to no point—how could I tell?