You almost killed my child . . . But he bit back the retort that had come to mind, closing his eyes, calming himself. "I know . . ."
There was a second silence, longer, more awkward than the first. Fei Yen broke this one too. She stood, making to leave.
He went across and held her arm, keeping her there. She looked down at his hand where it gripped her arm, then up at his face. It was a harsh, unsparing look; a look of unfeigned dislike. There was defiance in her eyes, but she made no move to take her arm away.
"We have not resolved this, Fei."
"Resolved." She poured all the scorn she could muster into the word. "I'll tell you how you could resolve this, Li Yuan." She turned to face him, glaring at him, the roundness of her stomach pressed up hard against him. "You could take this from my belly and keep it safe until its term is up! That's what you could do!" The words were hard, unfeeling. She laughed bitterly, sneering at him. "Then you could take your gun and—"
He put his hand over her mouth.
She stepped back, freeing herself from his grip. Then she looked at him, rubbing her arm where he had held it, her eyes watching him all the while, no trace of warmth in them.
"You never loved me," she said. "Never. I know that now. It was envy. Envy of your brother. You wanted everything he had. Yes, that was it, wasn't it?" She nodded, a look of triumph, a hideous smile of understanding on her lips.
It was cruel. Cruel and untrue. He had loved his brother dearly. Had loved her too. Still loved her, even now, for all she was saying. More than the world itself.
But he could not say it. His face had frozen to a mask. His mouth was dry, his tongue stilled by her anger and bitterness and scorn.
For a moment longer he watched her, knowing that it ended here, that all he had wanted was in ruins now. He had killed it in the stables that day. He turned and went to the door, determined to go, not to look back, but she called out to him, "One thing you should know before you leave."
He turned, facing her across the room. "What is it?"
"The child." She smiled, an ugly movement of the mouth that was the imperfect copy of a smile. "It isn't yours." She shook her head, still smiling. "Do you hear me, Li Yuan? I said the child isn't yours."
In the cage at the far end of the room the bird was singing. Its sweet notes filled the silence.
He turned away, moving one leg at a time until he was gone from there, keeping his face a blank, his thoughts in check. But as he walked he could hear her voice, almost kind for once. One thing, it said, then laughed. One thing.
"Is this it?" DeVore asked, studying the statue of the horse minutely, trying to discern any difference in its appearance.
The man looked across at him and smiled. "Of course. What were you expecting? Something in an old lead bottle, marked with a skull and crossbones? No, that's it, all right. It'd make arsenic seem like honeydew, yet it's as untraceable as melted snow."
DeVore stood back, looking at the man again. He was nothing like the archetypal scientist. Not in his dress, which was eccentrically Han, nor in his manner, which was that of a low-level drug dealer. Even his speech—scattered as it was with tiny bits of arcane knowledge—seemed to smack of things illicit or alchemical. Yet he was good. Very good indeed, if Ebert could be trusted on the matter.
"Well? Are you happy with it, or would you like me to explain it once more?"
DeVore laughed. "There's no need. I have it by heart."
The lexicologist laughed. "That's good. And so will your friend, eh? Whoever he is."
DeVore smiled. And if you knew exactly who that was, you would as soon sell me this as cut your own throat.
He nodded. "Shall we settle, then? My friend told me you liked cash. Bearer credits. Shall we call it fifty thousand?"
He saw the light of greed in the man's eyes and smiled inwardly. "1 thought a hundred. After all, it was a difficult job. That genetic pattern—I've not seen its like before. I'd say that was someone special. Someone well bred. It was hard finding the chemical key to break those chains down. I—well, let's say I had to improvise. To work at the very limit of my talents. I'd say that deserved rewarding, wouldn't you?"
DeVore hesitated, going through the motions of considering the matter, then bowed his head. "As you say. But if it doesn't work—"
"Oh, it will work, my friend. I'd stake my life on it. The man's as good as dead, whoever he is. As I said, it's perfectly harmless to anyone else, but as soon as he handles it the bacteria will be activated. The rest," he said, laughing, "is history." "Good." DeVore felt in his jacket pocket and took out the ten bearer credits— the slender chips identical in almost every respect to those he had given Mach a week earlier. Only in one crucial respect were they different; these had been smeared with a special bacteria—one designed to match the toxicologist's DNA. A bacteria prepared only days earlier by the man's greatest rival from skin traces DeVore had taken on his first visit here.
DeVore watched the man handle, then pocket the chips. Dead, he thought, smiling, reaching out to pick up the statue the man had treated for him. Or as good as, give a week or two.
And himself? Well, he was the last person to take such chances. He had made sure he wore a false skin over both hands before handling the things. Just in case.
Because one never knew, did one? And a poisoner was a poisoner, after all.
He smiled, holding the ancient statue to his chest, then laughed, seeing how the man joined his laughter, as if sharing the cruel joke he was about to play.
"And there's no antidote? No possible way of stopping this thing once it's begun?"
The man shook his head, then gave another bark of laughter. "Not a chance in hell."
IT WAS DARK where Chen sat. Across from him a ceiling panel flickered intermittently, as if threatening to come brightly, vividly, alive again, but never managing more than a brief, fitful glow. Chen had been nursing the same drink for more than an hour, waiting for Haavikko to come, his ill ease growing with every passing minute. More than ten years had passed since he had last sat in the Stone Dragon—years in which he had changed profoundly—yet the place remained unchanged.
Still the same shit-hole, he thought. A place you did well to escape from as quickly as you could. As he had.
But now he was back, if only briefly. Still, Haavikko could hardly have known, could he?
No. Even so, the coincidence made Chen's flesh crawl. He looked about him uncomfortably, as if the ghost of Kao Jyan or the more substantial figure of Whiskers Lu should manifest themselves from the darkness and the all-pervading fug to haunt him.
"You want wings?"
He glanced at the thin young girl who had approached him and shook his head, letting disgust and a genuine hostility shape his expression.
"You prefer I suck you? Here, at table?"
He leaned toward her slightly. "Vanish, scab, or I'll slit you throat to tail."
She made a vulgar hand sign and slipped back into the darkness, but she wasn't the first to have approached him. They were all out to sell something. Drugs or sex or worse. For a price, you could do anything you liked down here. It hadn't been so in his day, but now it was. Now the Net was little different from the Clay.
He sat back. Even the smell of the place nauseated him. But that was hardly surprising; the air filters couldn't have been changed in thirty years. The air was recycled, yes, but that meant little here. He swallowed, keeping the bile from rising. How many times had each breath he took been breathed before? How many foul and cankered mouths had sighed their last, drug-soured breath into this putrid mix?