The glass slid back soundlessly, and he stepped through. The motion caught her eye, or the system was wired to chime the arrival of visitors. She saw him, lifted an arm in greeting.
“Nice, isn’t it,” she called out. “No expense spared for dying COLIN executives, you know.”
“So I see.” He walked to her, stood looking down into her face. The system had allowed no trace of her illness into its imaging.
She gestured. “Come on, then. Sit down, soak it up.”
He sat.
“I guess I’m looking a lot better in here than I do for real,” she said brightly, treading on the heels of his own thoughts with an accuracy that made him blink. “Right?”
“I don’t know. They haven’t let me in to see you yet.”
“Well, they haven’t shown me a mirror yet, either. Then again, I haven’t asked. I figure the idea is to make you feel as good about yourself as possible, hope that kicks your will to live into high gear, boosts your immune system, and gets you out of their expensive acute-care unit as soon as humanly possible.” She stopped abruptly, as if unplugged, and he saw for the first time how scared she really was. She licked her lips. “Of course, that’s not a dynamic that applies to me.”
He said nothing, could think of nothing to say. A brook chuckled to itself somewhere beyond the foliage. A couple of small birds hopped about on the grass, closer to the humans than would have been likely in the real world. Sunlight struck through the surrounding trees at a high angle.
“My father’s flying in from New York,” she said, and sighed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”
“I don’t suppose he is, either.”
She ghosted a chuckle, barely louder than the brook. “No, I guess not. We haven’t been getting along all that well the last few years. Don’t see each other much, don’t really talk. Not the way we used to, anyway.” Another faint laugh. “He’s probably going to think I did this just to get his attention. Deathbed reconciliation. What a fucking drama queen, huh?”
Carl felt his mouth tighten, back teeth locking down with involuntary force. It cost him more effort than he’d thought to keep looking at her.
“Norton here?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He tried to smile. It was as if he’d forgotten which muscles to use. “I think he’s kind of hurt you asked to see me first.”
Ertekin pulled a face. “Yeah, well. Be time for everybody, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of friends.”
He took an interest in one of the brightly colored birds around his feet.
“Marsalis?”
He looked up reluctantly. “Yeah?”
“How much time have I got?”
“I don’t know,” he said quickly.
“But you know how the Haag system works.” Urgency in her voice like pleading. “You’ve used the fucking thing often enough, you must have some idea.”
“Sevgi, it depends. They’re treating you with state-of-the-art anti-virals here—”
“Yeah, just like fucking Nalan.”
“Sorry?”
She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Look, you’re not going to scare me any more than I already am. Tell me the truth. They can’t stop it, can they?”
He hesitated.
“Tell me the fucking truth, Carl.”
He met her eyes. “No. They can’t stop it.”
“Good. Now tell me how long I’ve got.”
“I don’t know, Sevgi. Honestly. They can probably back it up with what they have here, maybe model it enough to…”
He saw the look on her face and stopped.
“Weeks,” he said. “A couple of months at most.”
“Thank you.”
“Sevgi, I—”
She raised a hand, made a smile for him. She got out of the chair.
“Going to walk down to the river. Want to come? They told me I’m not supposed to exert myself, even in here. Stimulus feedback, apparently it affects the nervous system almost like the real thing. But I think I’d like to walk a little while I still can.” She held up the book. “And there’s only so much fifteenth-century poetry you can handle without a break, you know.”
He read the title off the antique russet-and-green binding. The Perfumed Garden by Ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi.
“Any good?”
“The aphrodisiac recipes are shaky, but the rest is pretty solid, yeah. Always promised myself I was going to get around to reading it one day.” Again the brief flicker of fear in her eyes, rapidly quashed. “Better late than never, right?”
Again, he had no answer, not for what she said or for what he’d seen in her eyes. He followed her across the lawn toward the sound of the water and helped her hold back the hanging branches that blocked passage. They eased through, bent-backed, and stood up in sun-dappled foliage on the bank of the shallow stream. Sevgi stared down at the flow for a while as it slipped past them.
“I need to ask you a couple of favors,” she said quietly.
“Sure.”
“I need you to stay on here. I know I said you were free to go, I know I more or less sent you away, but—”
“Don’t worry.” His voice thickened. He had to damp down the surge of fury. “I’m not going to just walk away from this. Onbekend is a dead man walking. And so is whoever sent him.”
“Good. But that’s not what I meant.”
“No?”
“No. With what’s happened now, there’s more than enough to keep the case wide open. It’d be good if you were there to help out after I’m…” She made a limp gesture at the flow of the stream. “But that’s not what I’m asking you for. This is, well, it’s more selfish.”
“I’m alive because of you, Sevgi,” he said tonelessly. “That buys you a lot of indulgence.”
She turned. She touched his hand.
There was a brief, visceral shock to it; tactile contact was one of the wrinkles the technology still hadn’t really ironed out, and format etiquette tended against it as a result. Outside of the crude and curiously unsatisfying porn virtuals he’d used on base in the military, he doubted he’d touched anyone in format more than half a dozen times in his life, and most of those would have been accidental collisions. Now he felt Sevgi Ertekin’s hand as if through gloves, and a twitching sense of frustration rose to fan the embers of his fading anger.
“I need you to stay with me,” she said. She looked down at where their hands met, as if trying to make out some detail she wasn’t sure was there. “It’s going to be hard. Murat—that’s my father—he’s going to be hurting too much. Norton’s too conflicted. Everyone else is too far off, I’ve pushed them all away anyway, since Ethan. I wouldn’t know what to say to them. That leaves you, Carl. You’re clean. I need you to help me do this.”
Clean?
“You said two favors,” he reminded her.
“Yeah.” She dropped his hand, went back to staring at the flow of the water. “I think you know what the other one’s going to be.”
He stood beside her and watched the stream flow.
“All right,” he said.
CHAPTER 44
He waited for Norton in the corridor outside the visiting station and the v-format cubicles. The COLIN exec came out puffy-eyed and blinking, as if the light in the corridor was too harsh to deal with.
“I need to talk to you,” Carl told him.
Norton’s face twitched. “And you think now’s the time?”
“She isn’t going to improve, Norton. You’d better get used to operating under these conditions.”
“What do you want?”
“Have you read the statement I gave to RimSec?”
“No, I.” Norton closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes. I skimmed it. So what?”
“Someone sent Onbekend to take me out. Probably the same someone who hired Carmen Ren to partner Merrin, the same someone who had Merrin brought back to Earth in the first place. We’re not done here, we’re not even half done.”
Norton sighed. “Yes, I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes with Sevgi telling me the same thing. I don’t need you to ram it home. COLIN will step up the inquiry, RimSec are already covering bases here. Right now, though—”