“I hope you’ll enjoy it.” Skip was looking at the snow-covered roof garden through a Changeglass window that stretched from floor to ceiling.
She joined him. “You know, you tell me a lot, but you don’t tell me everything.”
“It would bore you to tears. It would bore me just reciting it all, for that matter. I answer your questions as honestly as I can, whenever I can.”
“There was no tele on Johanna, maybe I told you.” She sounded thoughtful, and almost dreamy. “No tele, but we got to watch telefilms now and then. Long shows made for tele, that had run for an hour every night for a week back on Earth.”
“I know what they are.”
“After six weeks on line, you went back to a rest camp for a week. You could shower every day if you wanted to, and sleep and sleep with nobody to wake you up. Most of us slept ’til lunch.”
Waiting, he nodded.
“There’d be a telefilm as soon as it got dark. Hot dogs and nachos and all that, just like at home. Popcorn. Everybody missed junk food. You didn’t have to go, but everybody did.”
“Comedies?”
“Sometimes, only we laughed more at the war stuff, the propaganda ones.” Chelle fell silent, remembering, pensive and beautiful.
“Go on.”
“Only twice they had … I don’t know what you would call them. They were really lovely and terribly ugly, and the people in them were interesting. Only nothing was ever settled. Nothing in them really made sense.”
“Art shows,” Skip said.
“I guess. Only after the second one, it came to me. They were real life—it was what our lives are like. It sure as hell was what mine had been like.”
The lights flickered.
“I’d left the place where everybody tried to dominate me to come to a place where the Os were doing their level fucking best to kill me, and if I could fight way out here and live, why couldn’t I fight back there? Why go so many light-years away?”
“You’re back now.” He handed her one of the cards.
“Right. They made me go back.” Chelle dropped into a comfortable-looking, rather mannish chair, laying the card he had given her on its broad, flat arm. “When I saw that kind, I wanted to shove the director into a corner and swear to God I’d kill him unless he explained everything. I’ll shoot you in the fuckin’ head—that’s what I’d say.”
“I’ve been shot in the head already,” Skip pointed out.
“Yeah.” Chelle looked disgusted. “You’re way out in front as usual. But you’re the director.”
“Far from it. I don’t even know who runs the show.”
“Just for now you are. I just appointed you. When we were living in your place down on whatever floor it is—I mean before we got on that cruise boat—you called this building your building. When you said it, I thought you meant you lived here.”
He grinned. “I do.”
“Sure. Only it really is your building. You own it, right?”
“There are legal complications, incorporation and so on, but yes. I do.”
“There was somebody else living here then?”
Skip nodded.
“Only you kicked him out. That’s what you told me you were going to do on the boat.”
“I did not. We bought out his lease, that’s all. It had less than a year to run, and we were negotiating a new one. We dropped the negotiations and offered him a profit on his remaining time. He took it.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“The man you just met. He manages the building for me. I told him what I wanted, and he called me when he had a deal. I told him to take it, clean and fix everything, and line up a decent decorator, meaning not one of the crazy ones, to pick out furniture.”
“Your decorator will have gotten a kickback from the guy who sold him the furniture.”
“Her. Of course she will. What would you have done?”
“Picked it out myself while we lived in your old place, I guess.”
“I see. Do you know a lot about furniture?”
Chelle shook her head. “I like this. How did you know?”
“I didn’t. She did. Am I finished as director?”
“Hell, no! You’ve hardly started. You said Charlie was a double agent.”
“I didn’t.” Skip sighed and leaned against a small but sturdy table, suddenly weary. “I said he had a get-out-of-jail card of some kind. That if he hadn’t had one Captain Kain would have locked him up, that he must have told the captain to contact the Civil Intelligence Bureau or some such place. That Captain Kain had, and had been told to release him. You wanted to know how he could have gotten such a thing, and I said that he might be a double agent. That was one possibility and it seemed the most likely.”
“But you don’t know?”
“No.” Skip shook his head. “You’re quite correct. I don’t know.”
“Here’s another one. Mother said that you said Rick couldn’t have been the one who stabbed her. So who did?”
“Rick, almost certainly.”
“You were lying?” Chelle sounded incredulous. “It could have gotten her killed.”
“I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know he was the one. I still don’t, although I think it quite probable. When I said what I did, and when I outlined the evidence in his favor, I was trying to show him I didn’t suspect him.”
Chelle was looking at a desert landscape, and Skip paused to admire her profile. “Do you want the honest truth?”
She nodded.
“All right. I was trying to persuade myself. I liked him and he had gone down into the hold to rescue you. I didn’t want it to be him. So I said he wouldn’t have had to use a steak knife because he had a license for a gun, and all the rest of that folderol.”
“Well, he wouldn’t have, would he?”
“If he had his gun on him—if he carried it when he had no reason to think he would need it. But he probably didn’t—most people don’t.”
Chelle nodded reluctantly.
“Just for the sake of argument, let’s say he did. A gun attracts a lot more attention than a knife. Guns have serial numbers, too. If he had left it at the scene—”
“He wouldn’t. Nobody would.”
“Then if he came under suspicion and was searched, it would be found on him.”
“It would have been anyway, but the cops wouldn’t care. He had a license, and she’d been stabbed. You’re saying he was in the suicide ring?”
Skip nodded. “Absolutely. Has it occurred to you that he may not have wanted to kill Virginia?”
“Vannessa. Are you serious?”
“Certainly. She was the senior member.”
“Which meant the others were supposed to kill her.”
“Correct, and Rick was a member. Suppose he didn’t want to die.”
“Well, I thought…”
“Rick was a spy. Entrée to a group like that could be useful to a spy; it would give him access to a selection of unbalanced people, pathetic individuals who could be easily manipulated by a clever operator.”
“Like your secretary.”
“Exactly. Rick had taken her to lunch, hoping to learn something about me that would lead him to you, and thus to whatever may remain of Jane Sims.”
“You know about her.”
“I do.”
“I—well, I guess I didn’t want you to think I was crazy.”
“You’re not,” Skip said, “and I know it. You came out of an explosion alive, but with a lot of damage. Some of that was brain damage, and the brain tissue you lost was replaced with a transplant from Jane Sims, who had been too badly hurt to live. They would have had brain scans, of course; presumably they uploaded those into somebody else who may go looking for Don Miles. Can we get back to Rick and Susan, or are we through with that?”
“I still don’t think you’re making a lot of sense. I mean about not killing Mother. Are you saying he stabbed her just for fun?”