“You’re jumping to conclusions,” she said sternly.
Look, Mirabara, I’ve been a camera for about as long as you’ve been multicellular, and every instant of that experience tells me that this man is not for real. I’m going to try to find out why he’s doing this. Meanwhile, you put together some contingency plans, OK? See if you can find me another interview.
“All right, but I still say—no, never mind, I’m going.”
Since I no longer had to worry how any of this looked on disk, I might as well satisfy my hunger. I took a bite of sandwich and said with my mouth full, “So, what kind of whale is it exactly?”
Voskresenye looked up from his teacup, which he had been staring into as if trying to read a message in the leaves. “Oh, come now, Andreyeva. Don’t humor me. Ask what you really want to ask.”
“All right, then. Instead of pouring water in your socket, why didn’t you just signal the mother ship to pick you up?”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose exhaustedly. “This bubble shows signs of degrading, and I can only go so long without recharging my exoskeleton, so I have no time for games. This will demonstrate the truth of what I say.” He set a vial of red fluid on the table.
“What’s that?”
“A blood sample.”
“Yours?”
“No. The whale’s.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have an overwhelming desire to tell me why you’re doing this, would—will you stop that?” He was chorusing every word I said, with no perceptible delay. “You don’t really think you can make me believe you with a parlor trick, do you?”
“Of course not; I would not so insult your intelligence. Good day, Andreyeva.” He stood abruptly and began to leave. Then, just before he reached the sidewalk, he turned and said pensively, “Consider this, however. If it is true… well, it’s the story of the year, isn’t it? To let someone else get it would indeed be a shame.” He shrugged slightly and vanished into the crowd.
I paid the bill and started to leave.
“You forgot the blood,” Keishi said.
What’s the point? It’s not whale. There’s no point checking. It’s just not.
“Maybe not. But if you had it analyzed, you might be able to figure out what Voskresenye’s game is.”
I don’t think we’re going to have time to worry about that, I said.
But then again, you can’t just leave blood lying around on tables. You might frighten people. So, hating myself for doing it, I picked up the vial. I put it in my pocket and tried to forget it, but it pressed against my leg, a cold accusatory finger, all the way from the Horseman home.
Eleven
A PROPERTY OF EASINESS
This, of course, you can see on your moistdisk, but you will find strange gaps, and paths of memory that lead to nothing—remnants of an erasure Keishi never finished. I would rather complete the job she started, but if the story must be known—and it is known—then it is better it be known fully.
I was sitting in the kitchen, with moistdisks strewn across the pitted tabletop and lengths of cable hanging from the backs of empty chairs. I had split my field of vision into quadrants, and was trying to splice together a conclusion to my series on the Guardians. I was hoping to give them a prefabricated segment, already in the can. It would mean a fight; News One hates it when you don’t go live. But they’d never wanted to do this series anyway, so maybe they’d let me get away with it this once.
When the phone rang, I switched off my fourfold vision. I hate those first few moments coming out of a sightsplit, when your head feels like it’s breaking up and you develop a deep sympathy for honeybees. Blinking heavily, I stared up at the ceiling and walked to the vidphone by memory. When the walls finally started to look real to me again, I touched the plate.
“Hey, Maya? It’s Terentev. Forensics.”
“Even if I hadn’t recognized your face,” I said, still blinking, “I think the bodies in the background might have tipped me off.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” As he fiddled with the controls on his phone to hide the tableau of the dissecting room, I caught a glimpse of a bone-white face being wheeled past.
“My God—how long’s that one been dead?”
He looked around, then laughed. “Oh, him? I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes.” Terentev dabbed at imaginary make-up on his flat Asiatic cheekbone. “It’s face paint. He’s a mime.”
“Trying to find out who the medal goes to?”
The creases of laughter around his eyes disappeared into seriousness. “You know, Andreyeva, you’re colder than anything I’ve seen wheeled in here.”
“It was just a joke,” I said. “You don’t have to take everything so literally.”
He kept his eyes on mine a moment, then averted them and shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”
“So what do you have for me?”
“Oh, your paternity suit?” His face was jovial again. “Unless the kid has scales, you’d better settle.”
“It’s a fish?”
“It’s a dolphin.”
Well, that made sense. Dolphin blood would not be hard to find, and Voskresenye might have hoped that it would pass a cursory inspection. A simple hoax. I would have preferred to know why, but for the moment, I’d just have to set aside my curiosity.
“Okay, Terentev. Like I said before, I owe you one.”
“What’s your rush, Andreyeva? Don’t you even want to know what kind of dolphin?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Good. Because we can’t tell.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t match up with anything. It’s in the general neighborhood, but we can’t quite pin down the address.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Hey, it’s not that big a deal. It’s probably some microspecies that got stranded in a river somewhere. Nothing to write home about, unless you’re a marine biologist. What is this, anyway? New gig for you, Andreyeva? ‘Maya on biotech’?”
“Can you check it against whale DNA?”
“What did you say?”
I realized I’d whispered. “Can you check it against whale DNA?” I repeated.
He lifted his eyebrows. “Whale?”
“Just humor me, all right?”
“Well…” His eyes unfocused as he consulted the Net. “There were a few sequences mapped before they went extinct. I can give it a try. It would help if I knew what I was trying to prove, though.”
“Ask me afterward.”
He frowned. “What does this have to do with that Calinshchina thing of yours? Or did News One pull the plug on that? After all, it’s not their sort of thing—”
“Just run it,” I said. “Then if I’m right, I’ll tell you.”
He frowned. “OK, if that’s the way you want it. This’ll take a while.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
He signed off. I stood by the phone for a while, drumming my fingers against the coffee table. Then I went back into the kitchen and swept all the moistdisks into the recycling bin. When the phone chimed I ran for it.
“Tell me,” I said.
“You know, my granddaughter carries a stuffed whale everywhere she goes? When I was a kid it was horses, before that it was tigers, dinosaurs come around again every twenty years—she’s got a whale. She’s got whale T-shirts, whale pajamas, a whole goddamn whale ensemble. This is way beyond owing me a favor. This is going to cost.”