‘Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as out-sourcing – NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done – dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly up.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.’
‘No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.’ Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. ‘It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.’
‘He sent you home.’
‘Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.’
‘And what did Gutierrez get?’
Carl shrugged. ‘Cash. Favours. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.’
‘But only you got to go home.’
‘Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start. I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.’
‘So.’ She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. ‘Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?’
‘Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties? Spitz, or something?’
‘Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.’
‘He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?’
‘You don’t care?’
He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. ‘There’s no point in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet. Another world, another time. What was I going to do – go back there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.’
Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. ‘Yeah,’ she whispered. ‘I guess that’s the truth.’
They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her
‘Why’d you come back, Carl?’ she asked him softly.
He made a crooked grin in the gloom. ‘Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.’
‘But you were free there.’ She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. ‘You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.’
‘Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy/thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.’ He shrugged. ‘Pretty good odds.’
‘And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?’ She craned forward in the bed, half-way to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. ‘What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?’
Another shrug, another crooked grin. ‘Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.’
She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said when she’d got her breath back. ‘All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?’
He hesitated. ‘It’s not really that important, Sevgi.’
‘It is to me.’
Feet when down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.
‘Sutherland,’ he said.
‘Your sensei.’
‘Yeah.’ He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. ‘See, there’s a point you get to with tanindo. A level where it stops being about how to do it, becomes all about why. Why you’re practising, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.’
‘You didn’t know why?’ She puffed a breathless laugh. ‘Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?’
Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.
‘Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,’ he said distantly. ‘You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.’
‘Sutherland’s a thirteen too, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So how come he managed it?’
Carl nodded. ‘Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.’
‘And that was?’
‘He told me to make a list, keep it to myself and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.’
‘You didn’t go for the round dozen?’
‘The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.’ He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. ‘Nine of those, I realised I needed to be on Earth to do.’
The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out of the window.
‘Have you done them all yet?’ she asked quietly.
‘No. Not yet.’ He cleared his throat, frowned. ‘But I’m getting through them. And it does work. Sutherland was right.’
For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched round to face him again.
‘You want to hear a secret of mine?’
‘Sure.’
‘Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide eyed and innocent.’ She coughed a little. ‘Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could have set it in motion.’