He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.
Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.
Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.
Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.
Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.
Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.
There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-djinn to run the Tjaden/Wasson. The images juddered and flashed and were eaten over by other screen effects. He wasn’t sure why the machine was showing it to him or what criteria it was using to select. It was the same sensation he knew from his time aboard Felipe Souza, the irritable feeling of trying to second-guess a capricious god he’d been assured—no really, it’s true, it’s in the programming—was watching over him. The feeling of sense just out of reach.
Maybe the djinn read something in him he wasn’t aware of letting show, a need he didn’t know he had. Maybe it thought this was what he wanted.
Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.
He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.
The floating blue shredded figure returned.
“There is this,” it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her—just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-djinn compensated and dragged in the sound.
“…not again,” she pleaded vaguely.
Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking—to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening—speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.
“Again, yes,” Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. “The cormorant’s legacy.”
The image froze.
“Cormorant,” said Carl, memory flexing awake.
“Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,” said the djinn. “An association suggests itself. According to data from Wells region work camp rotations on Mars, both you and Merrin were acquainted with Robert P. Danvers, sin 84437hp3535. Yaroshanko-form extrapolation from this connects you both through Danvers to the Martian familias andinas, and, integrating with the term cormorant used here, with high probability to the sin-disputed identity Franklin Gutierrez.”
Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides.
“Well, well, well,” he said at last. “Gutierrez.”
CHAPTER 21
“Never heard of him.”
Norton, preparing to be unimpressed. He was standing, close enough to Carl for it to be a challenge.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Carl agreed. He brushed past Norton, went to the office window, and stared out at the view. Smashed autumn sunlight lay across the East River in metallic patches, like some kind of chemical slick. “Franklin Gutierrez used to be a datahawk in Lima back in the mideighties. One of the best, by all accounts. In ’86, he cracked Serbanco for upward of half a billion soles. Immaculate execution. It took them nearly a month to even realize he’d done it.”
Norton grunted. “Couldn’t have been that immaculate, if he ended up on Mars.”
Carl fought down a sudden urge to remove Norton’s vocal cords with his bare hands. He summoned patience from within, Sutherland style. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead. He focused on the details of the view below. COLIN New York, perhaps in conscious locational echo of the UN territory, stood a couple of long blocks south of Jefferson Park, vaulted and cantilevered over FDR Drive and looking out across the river. It was a fractal tumbling of structure that recalled nothing so much as a handful of abandoned segments from a huge peeled orange. Thin white nanocarb spidered over curves and angles of smoked amber glass, then swept down to brace elegantly amid the multi-level array of carefully tended walkways, paths, and gardens that linked each section into the whole site. You could stand here in the vaulted open-plan office suite Ertekin and Norton shared and look down across the whole thing, the gardens, the jutting edge of the mezzanine, and the river beyond. Carl’s gaze reeled back out to the water, and he suffered a sudden resurgence of a feeling from his first days back on Earth eight years ago, a time when the sight of any large body of water came as an abrupt, visceral shock.
Time with the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn had stirred him up, left him choppy and bleak with old memories.
So much for looking beyond.
“Yeah, they caught up with Gutierrez,” he said neutrally. “But they caught him spending the money, not stealing it. Keep that in mind. This guy had his weak points, but getting away with the game wasn’t one of them.”
“So they offered him resettlement?” Ertekin asked.
“Yeah, and he took it. You ever seen the inside of a Peruvian jail?” Carl left the broad roofward sweep of the window, turned back into the office and his new colleagues. “He ended up in Wells, running atmospheric balance systems for the Uplands Initiative. When he wasn’t doing that, he handled datacrime for the Martian familias andinas. I think it paid better than the day job.”
Norton shook his head. “If this Gutierrez has links with Mars organized crime, then we’ve already run him and his association with Merrin.”
“No, you haven’t.”
A swapped glance between Norton and Sevgi Ertekin. Norton sighed. “Look, Marsalis. One of the first things this investigation did was to—”
“Contact the Colony police, and ask them to run a list of associates for Merrin on Mars. Right.” Carl nodded. “Yeah. Makes sense, I’d have done the same. Just that it wouldn’t do any good. If Gutierrez had dealings with Merrin, they’re gone now, wiped off the flow like shit off a baby’s arse. All you’ll be left with is some minor association with a low-level middleman like Danvers. And men like Danvers rub shoulders with practically everyone who’s ever worked the Wells camps anyway. In other words, your business transaction is invisible. That’s how it works when Gutierrez does something for you.”