She looked down at her lap, still smiling.
‘You’re blushing, Sarah.’
‘I am not.’
‘Yeah, you are.’ I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. ‘So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?’
She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. ‘We’re both playing for keeps, Tak. He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.’
So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?
‘That’s great,’ I say.
‘And what about you?’ she asks with arch concern. ‘Are you happy?’
I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.
‘Well, happy.’ I pull another face. ‘That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.’
‘Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?’
‘For a while.’
‘And what about now?’
I gesture vaguely. ‘Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘Are you kidding?
Her face falls. ‘You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the re-sleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with…’
She shakes her head.
‘Criminals?’ I ask.
‘Don’t laugh at me, Tak.’
I sigh. ‘I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.’
She smiled again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it was edged with pain.
‘People can change,’ she says. ‘You should try it.’
There’s an awkward pause.
‘Maybe I will.’
And another.
‘Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—’
‘No, come on.’ I gesture at our empty glasses, standing alone and apart on the scarred mirrorwood. There was a time we’d never willingly have left a bar like this one without littering the table top with drained tumblers and one-shot pipes. ‘Have you no self respect, woman? Stay for one more.’
So she does, but it doesn’t really ease the awkwardness between us. And when she’s finished her drink again, she gets up and kisses me on both cheeks and leaves me sitting there.
And I never see her again.
‘Sachilowska?’ Virginia Vidaura frowned in search of the memory. ‘Tall, right? Stupid hairstyle, like that, over one eye? Yeah. Think you brought her along to a party once, when Yaros and I were still living in that place on Ukai street.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘So she went off to the North arm, and you joined the Little Blue Bugs again what, to spite her?’
Like the sunlight and the cheap metal fittings of the coffee terrace around us, the question glinted too brightly. I looked away from it, out to sea. It didn’t work for me the way it seemed to for Brasil.
‘It wasn’t like that, Virginia. I was already plugged in with you guys by the time I saw her. I didn’t even know she’d got out. Last I heard, when I got back from Earth, she was serving the full sentence. She was a cop killer, after all.’
‘So were you.’
‘Yeah, well that’s Earth money and UN influence for you.’
‘Okay.’ Vidaura prodded at her coffee canister and frowned again. It hadn’t been very good. ‘So you got out of storage at different times, and lost each other in the differential. That’s sad, but it happens all the time.’
Behind the sound of the waves, I heard Japaridze again.
There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.
‘Yeah, that’s right. It happens all the time.’ I turned back to face her across the filtered cool of the screen-shaded table. ‘But I didn’t lose her in the differential, Virginia. I let her go. I let her go with that piece of shit, Josef, and I just walked away.’
Understanding dawned across her face. ‘Oh, okay. So that’s how come the sudden interest in Latimer and Sanction IV. You know, I always wondered back then why you changed your mind so suddenly.’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ I lied.
‘Alright.’ Her face said never mind, she wasn’t buying that one anyway. ‘So what happened to Sachilowska while you were gone that’s got you slaughtering priests?’
‘North arm of the Millsport Archipelago. Can’t you guess?’
‘They converted?’
‘He fucking converted. She just got dragged along in the wake.’
‘Really? Was she that much of a victim?’
‘Virginia, she was fucking indentured!’ I stopped myself. The table screens cut out some heat and sound, but permeability was variable. Heads turned at other tables. I groped past the searing tower of fury for some Envoy detachment. My voice came out abruptly flat. ‘Governments change as well as people. They pulled the funding on the North arm projects a couple of years after she went up there. New anti-engineering ethic to justify the cuts. Don’t interfere with the natural balance of planetary biosystems. Let the Mikuni upheaval find its own equilibrium, it’s a better, wiser solution. And a cheaper one of course. She still had another seven years of payments, and that was at the biocode consultancy rates she was earning before. Most of those villages had nothing but the Mikuni project lifting them out of poverty. Fuck knows what it was like when they all had to fall back on scratching an inshore fisherman’s living all of a sudden.’
‘She could have left.’
‘They had a fucking child, alright?’ Pause, breathe. Look out to sea. Crank it down. ‘They had a child, a daughter, only a couple of years old. They had no money, suddenly. And they were both from the North arm originally, it’s one of the reasons her name came out of the machine for parole in the first place. I don’t know, maybe they thought they’d get by somehow. From what I hear, the Mikuni funding blipped on and off a couple of times before it got shut off for good. Maybe they just kept hoping there’d be another change.’
Vidaura nodded. ‘And there was. The New Revelation kicked in.’
‘Yeah. Classic poverty dynamic, people clutch at anything. And if the choice is religion or revolution, the government’s quite happy to stand back and let the priests get on with it. All of those villages had the old base faith anyway. Austere lifestyle, rigid social order, very male-dominated. Like something out of fucking Sharya. All it took was the NewRev militants and the economic downturn to hit at the same time.’
‘So what happened? She upset some venerable male?’
‘No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable. ’ The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. ‘Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.’
The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earthbound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, pre-human, interstellar civilisation cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels; God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Re-sleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.