But then there was the second page.
“…first-order identity check seemed to establish that subject’s stated identity and background were genuine; all expected records were in fact on file and no inconsistencies or alterations were noted. But since you had expressed doubt concerning subject’s bona fides, further and more stringent inquiries were instituted, as per attached statement. Second-order ID check also proved out. Third-order check however revealed that subject’s given ID is bogus.
“Subject’s true name is Chen Po Chang. He is the bastard son of Chen Hsi-Feng, who is the son of the late Premier of the People’s Republic, Chen Ten Li. His last official place of residence is Shanghai; he disappeared there four years ago in March of 2016, concurrent with his father’s disappearance during the political upheaval which followed the death of Chen Ten Li. He is not presently wanted in any jurisdiction for any crime or malfeasance. Additional information may be accessed from any public database. Please inform us if you wish any of this information communicated to relevant authorities, or if you require any further action from us. See attachments.”
The third sheet was an itemized statement that said I was a pauper. It didn’t know how right it was.
I had the evidence I had sought, right there in my hands. Not proof that Robert had murdered Kirra and Ben—but enough to throw strong suspicion on him. With that as a start, further information might possibly be found by Interpol, maybe even enough to tie him to the nanotechnological bomb. The People’s Republic had more nanotechnologists than any other nation. (Not too surprising. They had more anythings than most other nations.)
And so what?
Suppose I could tie him to the killing, with monofilament strands of evidence. Who had jurisdiction over raw space, outside the cislunar band?
Was it even against the law—any nation’s law or the UN’s—to murder a Stardancer? The subject had never come up before. Nearly all motives for a murder were irrelevant in the case of Stardancers. They had nothing to steal, no territory to conquer, made love only with other Stardancers, and were damn near impossible to find if they didn’t want to be found. The one thing generally agreed was that they were not human beings in the legal sense.
If I blew Robert’s cover skyhigh, spread it across human space via UPI or Reuters, all I’d accomplish might be merely to annoy him and his secret masters, perhaps cause them to alter slightly whatever their plans were. At most Robert himself might suffer a tragic accident, walk out into traffic, say, and then no one would ever know what those plans were.
I composed an in-the-event-of-my-death letter, and used the last of my credit to send it up to Top Step, to my own personal memory node where Interpol itself couldn’t get at it, programmed to start announcing itself to Reb, Dorothy and Phillipe Mgabi if I didn’t personally disable it within twenty-four hours.
Then I called Robert’s home.
“Morgan, is that really you? I can’t see you—where are you?”
I told him I was in a phone booth at the airport and the phone’s eye had been vandalized. He sounded so genuinely glad to hear my voice, to learn that I was really on Earth and in his city, that I was happy he could not see my face. I put great effort into controlling my voice. He offered to buy me dinner, named a restaurant. I demurred, insisting that I wanted to dine in a place I remembered from an old tour, picking the name out of the Yellow Pages as I spoke. I did vaguely remember it; mostly it was a place he had not chosen and could not have staked out already. And it was large enough and public enough to make violence awkward.
On the way I used the last of my cash to buy a Gyro model dart gun from a wirehead in a back alley off Haight Street. He claimed that the rocket-darts were tipped with lethal nerve poison, and used a passing rat the size of a raccoon to prove that at least the first one was. There were four left in the gun. He backed away from me very carefully after we’d made the exchange.
I was stone broke now. Maybe I should let Robert pick up the check for dinner before I killed him. If I was going to. I still did not honestly know whether I could.
Or even for sure that I intended to.
I deliberately got to the restaurant almost half an hour early. As the maître d’hôtel greeted me, I realized for the first time that the gravity had stopped bothering me. Even my lower back no longer ached unless I put stress on it. A little under two weeks to recover from over two months in free fall. Remarkable. I was an earthling again.
But on sudden impulse I decided to simulate gee fatigue for Robert, as though I had just landed within the past few days. He might underestimate me if he thought I was weak and logy, and I needed any edge I could get. As the maître d’ led me to my table I tried to walk as though I were strapped with heavy weights, and sank into my chair with a great sigh.
The body language part was no trouble for me; most dancers are half actor. It was actually an interesting technical challenge: instead of doing what dancers almost always did, making difficult movements look easy, I had to make easy ones look difficult. The tricky part was the intellectual details. When had the most recent shuttle landed, and at which of the three Stardancer spaceports? I could fake small talk about either Queensland or Ecuador, but I knew nothing at all of Uganda. What day of the week was this, and what was the date? Damn, this melodrama stuff was more complicated than it looked. It seemed to me that the most recent shuttle had grounded three days before, in Australia. Excellent. I had a fund of fresh trivia about that part of the world.
An adorable waiter took my order for Irish coffee with no Irish whiskey in it. “I get it,” he said archly as he set it before me, “you want him to think you’re drinking. Good luck, honey.” I winked at him, and he giggled. I sipped coffee with exaggeratedly weary gestures and looked around the restaurant, trying to spot a stakeout. There was a high percentage of tables with two or more males and no females, but perhaps not abnormally high for this town. And there was no reason why a stakeout team could not include female agents. Everyone looked normal and authentic and undangerous. Normal urban dinner crowd, Pacific Rim version. Every one of them could have been in the pay of the People’s Republic for all I knew. Half of them were Asian. The roof seemed to hover over me oppressively, a potentially destructive mass held away by four flimsy walls. A pianist with a shaky left hand was mangling “We Are in Love” in the far corner of the room. Waiters glided to and fro as smoothly as if they were jaunting. The lights had a tendency to strobe if I looked at them. I wanted Fat Humphrey to float up and tell me what I wanted to eat. I wanted Reb to come and tell me what to do.
Thinking of Reb, I straightened my spine, joined my hands in mudra on my lap, and began measuring my breath. It helped.
I spotted Robert before he saw me.
Suddenly I remembered my ex-husband telling me once that I could lie very well with my body, but not with my face. Well, a lot had happened since then.
Robert spoke with the maître d’, who pointed me out, and looked my way. Our eyes met. I concentrated on my breathing. I kept my face impassive, tried to relax every facial muscle completely. I am suffering from high-gee lethargy. He crossed the room to my table, with the graceful loping walk of a jungle cat, as I had imagined he would. No limp: his injured foot was healed. He stopped beside me, took my right hand in both of his, bent over it and kissed it. His lips lingered just an instant. He released it, sat across from me.
His expression was neutral, his eyes open and seemingly guileless. His face was different than I remembered, longer and leaner, the eyes less squinty, the wrinkles slightly more pronounced. His head appeared smaller, the hair lying close to the skull instead of fanning out. This was how he looked under gravity. I decided it made him even more attractive.