She went to the spacious bathroom and saw the tub filling with cranberry-colored aqueous gel. The towels were cranberry, too, and the robe a kind of salmon. “Well, well,” she said. “Bug makes a play for longevity.” She undressed and eased herself into the warm solution where she float-ed in darkness for an hour and let her mind drift aimlessly. She felt like talking to someone, discussing this whole thing about her sister. Victor she could handle—he was at worst a lovable louse, and she could crush him anytime she decided. But Nancy’s problems were beyond her ken. Feelings were never her strong suit. And depression, if that’s what it was, well—she wished there was someone she could consult. But though she scrolled down a mental list of everyone she knew, there was no one she cared—or dared—to call.
In the morning Zoranna tried again to ship Bug to G.G., but discovered that during the night Bug had rewritten Hounder’s tracking subroutines to fit its own architecture (a handy talent for a valet to possess) and had run credit traces. But it had come back empty-handed. The proceeds of the Hospicers of Camillus de Lellis went to a coded account in Liberia that not even Hounder would be able to crack. And the name Victor Vole—Zoranna wasn’t surprised to learn—was a relatively common alias. Thus she would require prints and specimens, and she needed Bug’s help to obtain them. So she sent Ted a message saying she wanted to keep Bug another day or so pending an ongoing investigation.
Zoranna hired a pricey, private elevator for a quick ride to the subfloors. “Bug,” she said as she threaded her way through the Sub40 corridors, “I want you to integrate Hounder’s subroutines keyed ‘forensics.’ ”
“Bug has already integrated all of the applications in all of your libraries.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
Something was different in Nancy’s apartment. The gentleman through whose bed she had been forced to walk was gone, replaced by a skeletal woman with glassy, pink-rimmed eyes. Zoranna supposed that high client turnover was normal in a business like this.
Breakfast was superlative but strained. She sat at the counter, Nancy was set up in the recliner, and Victor served them both. Although the coffee and most of the food was derived from soybimi, Victor’s preparation was so skillful, Zoranna could easily imagine she was eating real wheat cakes, maple syrup, and whipped dairy butter. But Nancy didn’t touch her food, and Victor fussed too much. Zoranna, meanwhile, instructed Bug to capture as complete a set of fingerprints as possible from the cups and plates Victor handed her, as well as a 360-degree holograph of him, a voice print, and retinal prints.
There are Jacob’s mirrors within Victor’s eyes, Bug reported, that defeat accurate retinal scanning.
This was not unexpected. Victor probably also grew epipads on his fingers to alter his prints. Technology had reduced the cost of anonymity to fit the means of even petty criminals. Zoranna excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she plucked a few strands of silver curls from his hairbrush and placed them in a specimen bag, figuring he was too vain to reseed his follicles with someone else’s hair. Emerging from the bathroom, she overheard them in a loud discussion.
“Please go with her, my darling,” Victor pleaded. “Go and take the cure. What am I to do without you?”
“Drop it, Victor. Just drop it!”
“You are behaving insanely. I will not drop it. I will not permit you to die.”
Zoranna decided it was time to remove the network from Nancy’s apartment and Victor from her life. So she stepped into the living room and said, “I know what he’ll do without you. He’ll go out and find some other old biddy to rob.”
Nancy seemed not at all surprised at this statement. She appeared pleased, in fact, that the subject had finally been broached. “You should talk!” she said with such fierceness that the hospice patients all turned to her. “This is my sister,” she told them, “my sister with the creamy skin and pearly teeth and rich clothes.” Nancy choked with emotion. “My sister who begrudges me the tenderness of a dear man. And begrudges him the crumbs—the crumbs—that AP tosses to its subfloors.”
The patients now looked at Zoranna, who blushed with embarrassment. They waited for her to speak, and she had to wonder how many of them possessed the clarity of mind to know that this was not some holovid soap opera they were watching. Then she decided that she, too, could play to this audience and said, “In her toxic condition, my sister hallucinates. I am not the issue here. That man is.” She pointed a finger at Victor. “Insinuating himself into her apartment is bad enough,” she said. “But who do you suppose AP will kick out when they discover it? My sister, that’s who.” Zoranna walked around the room and addressed individual patients as a prosecutor might a jury. “And what about the money? Yes, there’s money involved. Two years ago I sent my sister (E15,000 to have her kidneys restored. That’s fifteen thousand protectorate credits. How many of you, if you had a sister kind enough to send you Œ15,000, even now as you He on your public dole beds, how many of you would refuse it?” There was the sound of rustling as the dying shifted in their sheets. “Did my sister use the money I sent her?” Theatrically she pointed at Nancy in the recliner. “Apparently not. So where did all that money go? I’ll tell you where it went. It went into his foreign account.”
The dying now turned their attention to Victor.
“So what?” Nancy said. “You gave me that money. It was mine to spend. I spent it on him. End of discussion.”
“I see,” said Zoranna, stopping at a bed whose occupant had possibly just departed. “So my sister’s an equal partner in Victor’s hospicer scam.”
“Scam? What scam? Now you’re the one hallucinating,” said Nancy. “I work for a hospicer society.”
“Yes, I know,” Zoranna said and pointed to the shrine and picture of the saint. “The Hospicers of Camillus de Lellis. I looked it up. But do you know who owns the good Hospicers?” She turned to include the whole room. “Does anyone know? Why, Nancy dear, you do.” She paused to let these facts sink in. “Which means that when the National Police come, they’ll be coming for you, sister. Meanwhile, do any of you know where your subscription fees go?” She stepped in front of Victor. “You guessed it.”
The audience coughed and wheezed. Nancy glared at Victor, who crouched next to her recliner and tried to take her hand. She pushed him away, but he rested his head on her lap. She peered at it as though it were some strange cat, but after a while stroked it with a comforting hand. “I’m sure there were expenses,” she said at last. “Getting things set up and all. In any case, he did it for me. Because he loves me. It gave me something important to do. It kept me alive. Let them put me in prison. I won’t be staying there long.” This was Victor’s cue to begin sobbing in her lap.
Zoranna was disappointed and, frankly, a little disgusted. Now she would be forced to rescue her sister against her sister’s will. She tongued, Bug, route an emergency phone call to Nancy through my houseputer at home. Disable the caller ID. She watched Victor shower Nancy’s hand with kisses. In a moment, his head bobbed up—he had an ear implant as she had expected—and he hurried to the bedroom.
Bug is being asked to leave a message, said Bug.
“I’m going to the hotel,” Zoranna told Nancy and headed for the door. “We’ll talk later.” She let herself out.
When the apartment door slid shut, she said, “Bug, you’ve integrated all my software, right? Including holoediting?”