“This is painless?”
“Yes. It’s from a Dutch company that specializes in such things. It will take about two minutes from injection.”
Carl stowed the package.
“If you brought this,” he said quietly, “why do you need me?”
“Because I cannot do it,” Ertekin told him simply.
“Because you’re a Muslim?”
“Because I’m a doctor.” He looked at his hands again. They hung limp in his lap. “And because even if I had not taken an oath, I do not think I would be capable of ending my own daughter’s life.”
“It’s what she wants. It’s what she’s asked for.”
“Yes.” There were tears gathering on Ertekin’s eyelids. “And now, when it most matters, I find I cannot give her what she wants.”
He took Carl’s hand suddenly. His grip was dry and powerful. The tiger-irised gaze burned into Carl’s, blinked tears aside so they trickled on the leathery skin.
“She’s chosen you. And deep in my hypocritical, doubting soul, I give thanks to Allah that you’ve come. Sevgi is getting ready once more to push the boundaries, to cross the lines drawn by others that she will not heed. And this time I will not fail her, as I did four years ago.”
He wiped away the tears with quick, impatient gestures of his hand.
“I will stand with my daughter this time,” he said. “But you must help me, thirteen, if I am not to fail her again.”
The Haag complex rips through Sevgi’s system like vacuum in a suddenly holed spacecraft. Cells rupture, leak vital fluids. Debris flies about, her immune system staggers, flushes itself desperately, clings to the antiviral boosters Stanford fed her, and still it fails. Her lungs begin to fill. Her renal functions slow and must be artificially stimulated if her kidneys are not to explode. Tubes in, tubes out. The creep of waste products through her system begins to hurt.
She finds it harder to think with clarity for any length of time.
Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.
He sat by the bed in shock.
For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.
“I look like shit,” she murmured. “Right?”
“You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?”
She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.
He sat by the bed.
He held her hand.
“Tell me a secret.”
“What?” He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds in the sheet. Her face was in shadow.
“Come on,” she croaked. “You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?”
He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. “Thought you’d already worked that out.”
“Well, you tell me. Did I?”
He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years. It’s another world, it’s another time, Sutherland had said once. Got to learn to let it go.
“You were close,” he admitted.
“How close? Come on, Marsalis.” A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. “Grant a dying woman a last wish.”
His mouth tightened.
“Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,” he said. “There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.”
“Which was?”
“Same as it always is. The human angle.”
“Oh, humans.” She laughed again, a little stronger now. “I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any farther than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?”
He smiled. “Right.”
“So which particular human did you finesse?”
“Neil Delaney.” Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. “He was Bradbury site administrator back then.”
“He’s on the oversight council now.”
“Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.” Carl found himself loosening up. Words were flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet. “Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.”
“Motherfucker!” But it was the whispered ghost of outrage; you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.
“Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as outsourcing—NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done—dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly-up.”
“Somehow I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.”
“No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.” Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. “It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.”
“He sent you home.”
“Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.”
“And what did Gutierrez get?”
Carl shrugged. “Cash. Favors. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.”
“But only you got to go home.”
“Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start. I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.”
“So.” She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips, and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. “Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?”
“Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties? Spitz, or something?”
“Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.”
“He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?”
“You don’t know?”
“I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?”
“You don’t care?”
He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. “There’s no point in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet. Another world, another time. What was I going to do—go back there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.”
Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess that’s the truth.”