She fell asleep, but I didn’t. When I thought it wouldn’t wake her, I disentangled myself and went to the bathroom, and spent a while looking in the mirror. My penis was glistening, and I didn’t wipe it off. In the dark I looked okay, my form outlined in the street light coming through the pebbled glass of the bathroom window, but I knew better than to turn on the light. I’d joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off. I didn’t need to see the veins in my eyes and the red rings around my nostrils and the bruises and welts on my hands to know they were there.
When I got tired of looking at myself, I went and peeled the covers back and had a look at Catherine, just because I was in the mood. I looked at her up close, my face a few inches from her skin, and then dropped the covers and stepped back to see her in the context of my room. She looked fine at any distance. I covered her up again, put on a robe, and went out into the living room.
Our glasses and the bottle were still on the table, and her coat was slung across my chair. Otherwise it was just my apartment, with nothing to reveal the fact of a woman asleep in my bed for the first time in years. Hell, I’ve been known to drink out of two glasses when I get confused. It was easy to imagine I was alone. I got the vial of make from the kitchen and spread what was left of it, which wasn’t much, onto the table.
The sky outside my window was warming up at the edges, and the stars were being bleached out of the picture. It was morning. I watched the night slip away from the buildings while I sucked up the last of my make and thought about my next move.
My hope didn’t lie with the Office, despite the inquisitor sleeping in my bed. Catherine didn’t swing enough weight, and anyway, she wasn’t necessarily all that sold on my theories. If Morgenlander was still on the scene, I might be able to cajole him past his distaste for me and my profession, but that was a long shot. I had a funny idea about going back to confront Phoneblum with what I knew, but in the unlikely event he capitulated I didn’t know what to ask for. If I got him to clear up my karma trouble, I’d be yet another grub squirming under his thumb, like Pansy, and Stanhunt, and Testafer, and so many others. Including, most likely, Kornfeld.
I was sure now I could solve this case. The question was who to go to once I solved it. I’d had a client once—a couple, if I counted Celeste—but they were out of the picture. I could solve the case, but for the sake of my own neck I might be better off if I didn’t.
Kornfeld entered while I was wiping up the table. He didn’t knock. He looked like he’d been up all night, but then I’d been up all night too. At least the guy was fully dressed, including a gun. I was in my robe.
“Get your clothes,” he said.
I did what he told me to do. He didn’t look in my bedroom, and if he recognized Catherine’s coat or her lipstick on my glass, he didn’t say anything, just stood and watched while I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. The sun came in the window and glinted off his gun. When I had my shoes on, he asked me for my card and my license.
I handed them over. He put my license in his pocket and ran his decoder over my card. I held out my hand to get it back but he put it in the pocket with the license, and smiled.
“That’s just a souvenir,” he said. “You’ll get a new one when you’ve done your time.”
I must have stared.
“Welcome to the world of the karma-defunct, Metcalf. Get your coat.”
We went downstairs to his car. I’ll never know for sure, of course, but I don’t think Catherine so much as tossed in her sleep.
PART II
CHAPTER 1
IT WAS SHORT, BUT IT WASN’T SWEET. I WOKE UP FEELING like I still needed the night’s sleep I‘d missed when Kornfeld took me in. They had me in a set of ugly pajamas in a room that was blank and square and white, a room a whole lot like the one I‘d been in what felt only minutes ago, with the doctors who’d readied me for the freeze.
An orderly sat in a chair in the corner, looking at a magazine. I got off the table, peeved, about to squawk about the thing not even working. Then the guy noticed that I’d come around and handed me my street clothes, all clean and folded, and I realized with a jolt that I’d done my time. The funny taste in my mouth was six years old.
I got dressed, slowly. The orderly didn’t rush me. After a while he asked me if I was ready, and I said yes, and we went out into the corridor and took the elevator up to ground level. Inside the elevator the orderly looked me over and smiled. I tried to smile back, but I was pretty confused. I wanted to feel intuitively that six years had passed, but the feeling wasn’t there.
He led me to an office where an inquisitor sat tapping something idly into a desktop console. He kept going for a minute after we came in, then he stopped and folded the screen back into the desk and smiled. I sat in a chair and waited, and while the orderly and the inquisitor initialed some paperwork and mumbled something to each other, I looked out the window at the sun glinting off the glass of the building across the street.
It was probably just a function of my newly defrosted eyes, but I swear it looked all wrong to me, the colors too bright, the outlines blurred. Like a badly retouched photo. It occurred to me that I was about to walk out the doors of the Office into that badly retouched photo forever. This was my world now, and the rest was gone. I realized that I was still all wound up inside about the case, and I had to laugh. It was pretty goddamned funny. As if there was still something to call a case.
The orderly left, and the inquisitor opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a little metal locker about the size of a shoe box, and put it on the desk in front of me. Inside was the stuff they’d taken out of my pockets six years ago, all carefully tagged and wrapped in plastic. It wasn’t much. The keys to my car and apartment, each of which had disappeared about five years and eleven months ago, when I stopped making the payments. The keys made a reassuring lump in my back pocket—I could use them to clean under my fingernails.
The rest was the ripped halves of six different hundred-dollar bills, and the anti-grav pen. I played with the money for a minute, trying to assemble something that looked like I could pass it through a bank teller’s window, or at least across a counter in a darkened bar, but apparently I’d been in the habit of pocketing the same half of each bill. Until I ran into some other guy with the opposite habit, the paper was useless. I folded it and put it into my pocket anyway.
I was pulling the tags off the keys and the pen when I noticed the inquisitor leaning across the desk and staring at me, not a little intently. I looked at him, and he grinned. He was probably in his twenties, but I got the feeling he’d already seen a lot of karmic flotsam like myself coming and going out of the freeze, and that it made him feel smug to watch me struggling with my pathetic little array of possessions.
He got up suddenly and closed the door to the hallway. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Oh, good,” I said, bewildered.
“I’ll give you fifty dollars for that pen,” he said, moving around again to behind the desk. “That’s the first of its kind.” He spoke the way you spoke to children, back when there had been children. “It’s a collector’s item,” he explained.