“And what, Tom?” Sevgi shook her head irritably. “They meet, they have a few beers, and Merrin heads out for urban pacification duties in the Rim. Six years later he goes to Mars, and twelve years after that some Mars-end familia head cooks up some crackpot revenge assassination plan, chooses Merrin for the job, and Merrin turns around and says, Oh hey, I’ve got a half brother back on Earth who can help out with that. Come on, that’s not it. There has to be something else, something that ties it in tighter than that.”
“There probably is,” Carl told them. “I said there were a couple of reasons why your n-djinns failed and my researcher didn’t. Well, the second reason is that there’s been a whole lot more datafogging, and it dates from a lot more recently than all this ancient history. Someone out there is still very much concerned to keep this whole thing under wraps.”
“Someone who’s using Carmen Ren,” mused Sevgi. “Keeping her deployed.”
“That’s an angle,” Carl admitted.
“Did they destroy your pinhead bug?”
“No, still holding it. We could try to put it back in play, I guess. See if we can draw Ren in. But I don’t see it working, she’s too sharp for that. This much silence, she’ll know she’s been blown.”
“So where does that leave us?” Norton asked.
“It leaves us with Bambarén,” Carl said grimly. “We go down there and we stamp on him until he tells us what we want to know.”
“And Onbekend?” Sevgi asked, with a strange light in her eye.
Silence. Norton hurried in to fill it. “Checked that yesterday. I talked to Coyle. No record that fits with the descriptions you both gave. But Onbekend’s a name from the Netherlands, apparently it was Dutch bureaucracy’s get-out for anyone who didn’t have a fixed family name to go on their identity documents.” He grimaced. “It means ‘unknown.’”
Sevgi coughed out a laugh. “Oh very good.”
“Yeah, seems quite a few Indonesians ended up with it in the last century, because they didn’t have family names in the sense the Dutch understand the concept. It’s pretty common all over the Pacific Rim these—”
He stopped, because Sevgi’s cough hadn’t died away. It picked up, intensified until it shook her, feedback from the stimulus in the format triggering the real thing back in her hospital bed. The force of it bent her almost double in the chair, and then she flickered in and out of existence as her mental focus slipped. Carl and Norton exchanged a silent glance.
Sevgi’s presence flickered once more, then settled. She wheezed and seemed to get control.
“Are you okay, Sev?”
“No, Tom, I’m not fucking okay.” She drew a hard breath. “I’m fucking dying, all right? Sorry if it’s causing problems.”
Carl looked at Norton again, surprising himself with the sudden jolt of sympathy he felt for the other man.
“Maybe we’d better take a break,” he said quietly.
“No, it’s…” Sevgi closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Tom. That was unforgivable. I had no call to snap at you like that. I’m fine now. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”
They did, after a fashion, but the incident sat among them like another presence. The conversation ran slow, grew diffident, finally fell apart. Sevgi wouldn’t meet Norton’s eyes, just sat and twisted her fingers in her lap until finally the COLIN exec cleared his throat and excused himself with the pretext of calling New York. He blinked out with obvious relief. Carl sat and waited.
The twisted fingers again. Finally, she looked up at him.
“Thanks for staying,” she said softly.
He nodded at the surroundings. “It beats the garden they’ve got outside. Too arid, too stylized. This is very British, makes me feel at home.”
It got a short laugh, but carefully deployed this time.
“Has your father arrived?”
“Yeah.” Jerky nod. “He came in to see me this morning, before you and Tom got here. For real, in the hospital. They’re giving him a suite over in the staff dorms. Professional courtesy.”
“Or COLIN influence.”
“Well, yeah. That, too.”
“So how’d you get on with him?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He, you know, he cried a lot. We both did. He apologized for all the fights about Ethan, the distance. A lot of other stuff. But—”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him. “I’m really scared, Carl.”
“I think you’re entitled to be.”
“I, I mean, I keep having these dreams where it’s all been a mistake. It’s not really a Haag slug. Or it’s not as bad as they thought, they’ve got an antiviral that can keep up. Or the whole thing was just a dream and I’ve woken up back in New York, I can hear the market outside.” Tears leaked out of her eyes. Her voice took on a desperate, grinding edge. “And then I wake up for real, and I’m here, in that fucking bed with the drips and the monitors and all the fucking equipment around me like relatives I don’t want to fucking see. And I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, Carl.”
“I know,” he said hollowly, voice stupid in his own ears. Numb for something to say, to meet her with.
She gulped. “I always thought it’d be like a doorway, like standing in front of a door you’ve got to go through. But it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s like a fucking wall coming at me and I’m strapped in my seat, can’t fucking move, can’t touch the controls or get out. I’m just going to fucking lie there and die.”
Her teeth clenched on the last word. She looked emptily out across the garden at the foliage on the fringes of the lawn. Her hands tightened to fists in her lap. Loosened, tightened again. He watched her and waited.
“I don’t want you to go down there after Bambarén and Onbekend,” she said quietly. She was still staring away into the sun-splashed foliage. “I don’t want you to end up like me, like this.”
“Sevgi, we all end up like this sooner or later. I’d just be catching you up.”
“Yeah, well there are ways and ways of catching up. I don’t recommend the Haag shell method.”
“I can handle Onbekend.”
“Sure, you can.” Her gaze switched back to him. “Last time you went up against him, as I recall, I had to bust in and save your life for you.”
“Well, I’ll be more careful this time.”
She made a compressed sound that might have been another laugh. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not scared that Onbekend might kill you down there. This is selfish, Carl. I’m scared that you won’t come back. I’m scared you’ll leave me here, dying by fucking increments with no one to help.”
“I already told you’d I’d stay.”
She wasn’t listening. Wasn’t looking at him anymore. “Saw my cousin die that way, back when I was still a kid. Sex virus, one of the hyperevolved ones, she caught it off a soldier in the East. Nothing they could do. I’m not going to go through that. Not the way she went.”
“Okay, Sevgi. Okay. I won’t go anywhere. I’m right here. But I think it’s time you let me in to see you for real. In the ward.”
She shivered. Shook her head. “No, not yet. I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Staying in v-format is going to put a lot of strain on your nervous system. A lot of stress.”
Sevgi snorted. “That’s all you fucking know. You want to know what the strain is? I’ll tell you. Strain is lying back there in that fucking bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the machines they’ve got me hooked up to, feeling my lungs clogging up and all the needles they’ve stuck in me, aching every fucking place I can feel and no way to move unless someone comes to do it for me. Compared with that”—she gestured weakly at the garden—“this is fucking paradise.”
She looked at the hanging branches in silence for a while.
“They say it is a garden,” she muttered. “Paradise, you know. Garden full of fruits and the sound of water.”