‘Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.’
Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. ‘I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.’
‘Kristin Ortega.’ I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. ‘You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?’
She shrugged again. ‘Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grand-mother was a cop. You know how it goes.’
‘Not from experience.’
‘No.’ She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. ‘I guess not.’
I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.
This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.
We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.
In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.
What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When I awoke, she was gone.
There was sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The pitching of the boat had almost stopped but there was still enough roll to show me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them. What to tell Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink, absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.
The clinking of glasses from the door brought me round. Ortega was standing in the doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES in the same colour. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt as if they might conceivably go on for ever inside. Balanced in her hands was a large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.
So I told her everything.
‘So what are you going to do?’
I shrugged and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan’s World. Up on deck, the immensity of it sank in and the yacht was suddenly a child’s toy. ‘I’m going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft wants. What you want. What apparently everyone fucking wants. I’m going to kill the case.’
‘You think Kawahara torched Bancroft?’
‘Seems likely. Or she’s shielding someone who did. Doesn’t matter anymore. She’s got Sarah, that’s all that counts now.’
‘We could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of d.h. personality carries—’
‘Fifty to a hundred, yeah.’ I smiled faintly. ‘I was listening last night. But she won’t be holding directly, it’ll be some subsidiary.’
‘We can get warrants that—’
‘She’s a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?’
‘Couple of days, if it’s UN-expedited.’ The gloom crept across Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downwards.
‘Exactly. That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy, she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I’m not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of—’
‘OK.’ Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’
I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual dungeons I couldn’t be sure.
‘Forget it.’
‘I’m a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That’s all.’
I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. ‘I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There are no ways.’
The smile she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.
‘Look, Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to know.’
She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.
If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.