The wearer of the chip, Dina Pearlman, met my gaze with a cold, defiant look of her own, her eyes transformed from the red weeping springs they had been a few minutes before to dry, reptilian marbles absent not only of fear but any human warmth. It was impossible to reconcile that look, and its dangerous intelligence with the vapid, fluttery idiot she had been pretending to be only a few moments before.
Her husband, by contrast, had deflated utterly, the cheerful confidence he’d projected replaced now with resignation and, yes, relief. There was no surprise in his eyes, just like there was no fear. He mostly looked like he just wanted to sit down.
I jerked a thumb his way. “What about him?”
“Farley? He’s who he’s supposed to be. A third-generation corporate citizen. He married her the day she entered our employ.”
The Porrinyards noted: “That sounds like a marriage of convenience.”
The woman known as Dina Pearlman expelled one brutal, explosive laugh. “Of inconvenience is more like it. The man’s useless to grown women. If I told you what age he prefers—not just single digits, but low single digits—you’d all forget your civilized scruples and kick him to death right now.”
“Possibly,” the Porrinyards said. “You might have to wait your turn.”
Farley Pearlman just hung his head, waiting for it to be over, so much a puppet of forces beyond his control that he had nothing to do or say once those strings were cut.
Dejah Shapiro placed her drink back on the bar and dabbed her lips with a napkin. “You know, Philip, every time I dare hope that your family can achieve some kind of collective redemption, new evidence wipes my face in the cold, ugly reality. I’m honestly sorry I came.”
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Philip said, his own voice just as controlled.
“Really?” she asked. “What have I done?”
“You’re married to a criminal, for starters!”
Dejah’s smile communicated disappointment that his best shot had been so pathetically feeble. “I’ve been married to a couple of different criminals, in my time. Indeed, I’ve already mentioned Ernst. Which one are you referring to right now?”
“That moron you left at home!”
“Oh, Karl.” She picked up her drink, treated herself to another drink, savored the taste, put the glass down, and replied, “You’re absolutely right. My current husband, whom I love with all my heart, has a criminal record. That’s common knowledge. He’s also of subaverage intelligence. That’s a verifiable medical fact. He was led astray by people with will greater than his own. What’s your excuse?”
For a tenth of a second or so I thought Philip was going to hurl himself at her throat. Dejah must have thought so, too, because she turned toward him, her expression calm but her chin outthrust, her arms free, and her posture transformed into a warrior’s.
Before anything could happen, the Porrinyards stepped between Philip and Dejah, positioning themselves back to back with a calm efficiency that placed any possibility of the confrontation turning violent in the distant past. They spoke, as they’d moved, as one.
“Andrea? I believe you have the subject of your first interview…”
There was another tiresome pissing match with Philip over whether I’d be permitted to speak with Mrs. Pearlman alone, or whether I’d have to bring Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers along, as Bettelhine counsel. I might have argued longer about the idiocy of suggesting that she even needed counsel when interviewed on the home soil of a power that had no interest in prosecuting her for past crimes, but I was eager to get past the preliminaries and into a room with a monster who, unlike myself, had committed her crimes as an adult. I let Brown come along.
The five of us (Paakth-Doy, Brown, Wethers, Skye, and me), escorted Mrs. Pearlman into my suite, taking seats around the outer room in what, without consultation, turned out to be a perfect circle with the defiant Mrs. Pearlman at dead center. She appropriated an ottoman for her own use and perched there with legs crossed, as comfortable in her interrogation as she would have been making arrangements for a formal party.
Most people who wore her current expression were dealing with unwanted infestations of insect life in their homes. “I didn’t kill the Bocaian. And I didn’t send those other idiot Bocaians after the bitch counselor. I’m not that stupid.”
“Exactly how stupid you are,” I told her, in a voice that reeked of loathing, “is yet to be determined.”
“Hans Bettelhine doesn’t think so,” Mrs. Pearlman sniffed. “He compensates me very well for my intelligence. If you knew the amount that gets put into my retirement fund, every year, just for sharing the fruit of that intelligence, you’d likely kill yourself. Of course, Andrea, I’ve read in your file that getting you to attempt suicide isn’t all that difficult, considering it’s been—how many? Five or six incidents over the years? So that’s not saying much.”
I found myself missing the old Mrs. Pearlman, the abrasive but essentially innocent one that had never really existed. “What’s your real name?”
She looked bored. “I’ve been called Dina Pearlman for as long as I wore the name before it, so you might as well use that one.”
“For the moment,” I agreed, aware that I didn’t want to get bogged down in this one point, and that consulting the Confederate Intelligence files on known associates of the man responsible for that chip would likely uncover her identity later. “How did you become involved with the man known to the authorities as Peter Magrison?”
“He recruited me in my youth.” She made it sound like some ancient epoch, as far removed from our own as the Cretaceous.
I asked, “Where was this?”
“On my homeworld. Ottomos. I was a student of nanopsychology, enrolled in a school known as Pastharkanak University, in a small town called Vivakiosy. Of course, I’m certain these names mean nothing to you. Would you like to know the names of my idiot professors, as well as the address of my dormitory?”
“Maybe later. How did Magrison approach you?”
For a moment her eyes went soft, seeing not the hostile faces around her, but whatever passed for blessed memory in a soul lost to darkness. “People only know him from the usual image, in the few holos that exist: that blurry, sneering face, half obscured by shadow, half washed-out by excessive light, with those knit black eyebrows and the eyes like bottomless pits. I think the powers-that-be have nicer images, in their archives, but publicize that one because it’s so easy to sell as the face of evil. In truth, he wasn’t like that at all. He had a gentle smile, the face of a saint, and the voice of a healer. Less than five minutes after he found me, sitting under a tree eating lunch between classes, I knew that I’d go anywhere with him, and do anything for him.”
“Must have been one hell of a five minutes,” Skye said.
“It was less than that. Maybe one question. I was hytexing my assignments for the next class period, and he walked right up, passing through the projection, and asked me: ‘Do you honestly think they’ll let you make a difference?’ I don’t know how he knew. But it was something I’d been asking myself all semester. Nanopsych had such potential, such possibilities for changing the way people thought and dreamed and interacted with one another, that nobody before him had thought of asking the tough questions. He—”
I waved away the rest of it. “Why would he pick you?”
“He said later that he’d been sitting in the back monitoring classes, looking for a mind capable of following where he needed to lead. It may even be true. I don’t know. I just know that I don’t remember seeing him, at all, until that moment.”