“Do you know,” Chelle muttered, “I’m sorry we started talking about this.”
“I’m not. It’s something I knew I’d have to tell you sooner or later, and I want to get out of the way.” Skip paused as if to study the off-white walls, the brightly patterned hangings, and the dark, stolid wood. “This was going to be our new home, Chelle. About thirty seconds ago, I realized that it won’t be. You and I, as a couple, will never live here.”
She straightened up. “What the fuck are you saying?”
“That I’ve always been a man who relied on reason, on logic, and on precedent; but there is a higher knowing, and sometimes it comes to me. You wanted to know where your biological mother is.”
“Yes! I do!” Chelle’s hands clenched. “I do, and you’d better tell me.”
“Very well. I will. Your biological mother is dead. She died, if I remember correctly, about five years after your leaving Earth. Presumably she is buried somewhere, though she may have been cremated. It shouldn’t be hard to find out.”
Chelle stared without speaking.
“You’d divorced her before you left; thus you weren’t notified.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“What Reanimation does is really pretty simple. It uploads a dead person’s last brain scan into the brain of a living volunteer.”
“That—my mother…? That’s what she is?”
“No, that is what Virginia Healy is. The package is costly. I paid to have it done because I wanted to make you happy; I hope you’ll take that into consideration.”
“But she isn’t really my mother?” Chelle looked incredulous.
“That’s a question for philosophers. She hasn’t lied to you about it, and you need to understand that. She believes that she is your mother, and in fact she’s as sure she’s Vanessa Hennessey as you are that you’re Chelle Sea Blue. Vanessa Hennessey’s memories are there, and so is her personality. The genetic heritage isn’t. Nor are the fingerprints. She couldn’t pass a retinal scan.”
“You want me to call her Virginia Healy.”
Skip nodded. “I suggest it.”
“Do you know what her name was before all this?”
“I do, but it would be nonsensical for anyone to use that name for her now. She wouldn’t even recognize it. Mentally, although not physically, she really is Vanessa Hennessey. Or at least, a very close approximation.”
“And you are a complete and total bastard!”
“For trying—”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” Chelle was on her feet and raging. “I know everything you’re going to say, you sneaky son of a bitch! Shooting me full of dope would have made me happy, too, and by God it would have been cleaner!”
The lights went out. Skip closed his eyes—but heard the door slam.
* * *
Later, after he had stacked Chelle’s luggage out by the elevator, he called his building manager. “I need the locks changed. Change them, and bring me up the new key-card.”
“Just one card, sir?”
“Yes, just one.” Skip hung up.
His next call got an answering machine.
His third, the call after that, was to his office. “This is Skip Grison, Boris. I gave the Z man a little job a few days ago. He was to check out a name I’d been given and find out whether there was any such person. I’ve called his office several times since, but there’s nobody there.”
“I see…”
“I don’t want you to start the same investigation, so I’m not going to give you that name. All I want is for you to look around for the Z man. He had a secretary, didn’t he? And a Girl Friday? Some kind of assistant?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, he did. Chrissie was the secretary. I think the other girl was Wendy something.”
There was a pause.
“Wendy Kaya. She was a criminology major just out of UCTI, but he said she was smarter than a good many people who’d been in the business for twenty years.”
“Find Zygmunt if you can.” Skip’s fingers drummed the table. “Find those girls. The second should be better but either one of them. Get the story and get back to me.”
“Yes, sir.” Boris paused. “There’s a man here who wants to see you. I know you told Dianne not to bother you today, but since you’re on the phone now, I thought I’d tell you. He … well, he doesn’t have hands, for one thing. He says he’s a friend of yours, but he won’t even give his name.”
“I understand. I know him, and he is. Tell him to wait. Say I’ll be there in an hour and I’ll see him first. Is he carrying anything?”
“Yes, sir. An old lunch bucket. I suppose it’s in case he gets hungry.”
Skip smiled. “No doubt you’re right. Tell him I’ll be there.”
After picking up his new card at the manager’s office, Skip went to the bank and left with three thousand noras in his briefcase. When he reached the offices of Burton, Grison, and Ibarra, Achille was lounging in the waiting room, his left hook through the handle of a battered black lunch box. Skip nodded, motioned to him, and led him into a small conference room.
“I bring what you give me, mon. I give him back. You got the money?”
“Right here.”
“You show him, I show you.”
“Fair enough.” Skip opened his briefcase and produced packets of bills. “Three thousand was the price we agreed on. These are fifties. There are twenty banded together in each stack, so each stack is a thousand noras. If you want to count them, go ahead.”
“I look at, mon.” Achille’s right hook drew a packet to him. His left held it down while his right tore the paper band.
“Some are new, some aren’t. The bank didn’t have sixty used fifties.”
Achille nodded—mostly, as it seemed, to himself. “Look good, mon. Look real good.” Picking up the lunch box, he put it on Skip’s desk. “You look, too. I don’ cheat you, mon.”
Opened, the lunch box revealed a soiled red rag. Skip took it out.
His gun, the sleek gray pistol he had wrenched from Rick Johnson’s dead hand, lay upon an even dirtier rag that had once been white. Skip picked the gun up, took out the magazine, and pulled back the slide far enough to see that there was a round in the chamber.
“I don’ shoot him, mon. I don’ do nothin’ to him. He is like you give him to me.”
“It’s good to see it again.”
“I got more. Open like before.”
Skip did.
“That man got shot? You got his gun. I got his bullets.”
Skip lifted the dirty white rag, finding it heavy and tightly knotted.
“I don’ want him to make no noise,” Achille explained.
“I understand. How much for the ammunition?”
Achille shook his head. “You say friends? I can be good friend, too.”
Skip felt cartridges through the rag and set it down. “I understand. You’ve earned that money. Take it.”
Achille did, inserting the still-banded packets in his pockets dexterously, before he pushed the other bills into a loose stack.
“Want some help with those?”
“I do it, mon. I drop, I get back.” He held the stack down with the side of his left hook and folded it over with his right, held it between both hooks, and bit the fold. One hook pulled his filthy shirt out; he bent his head and dropped the bills into it
“You’re amazing, Achille.”
“Got to be, mon. You know what I do now? Get new hands, the best. They got good here.”
Skip nodded.
“I clean up, first. You think I like be dirty? I don’, only I been long time. On ship I get shower. Got soap in bottle. I pour on my head, rub with arms, only I don’ wash clothes. Need woman for wash. New clothes now an’ get room.”
Skip smiled. “And after that?”