"Listen," Perreault snapped, "whatever you're doing, it—"
— Can't be any worse than the way things are already…
She stopped, astonished at the thought, grateful that she'd kept it back. She felt an absurd certainly that seven hundred kilometers away, Lenie Clarke was smiling.
She tried again. "Look, I may not know what's going on but I know something is, and it revolves around you. And I bet that not everyone who knows that is on your side. Maybe you think I'm a head case. Fine. But even I wouldn't risk going through airport security with the kind of profile your implants put out. I'd get out now, and I'd forget about flying anywhere for the foreseeable future. There are other ways to get around."
She waited. Tactical constellations glimmered about her.
"Okay," Clarke said at last. "Thanks for the tip. Here's one for you. Stop trying to help me. Help whoever's trying to stamp me out, if you can find them."
"For God's sake, why?"
"For your own sake, Suzie. For everyone you ever cared about. Amitav was—he didn't deserve what happened to him."
"No, of course he didn't."
"Eight kilometers, you said?"
"Yes. Burned to bedrock."
"I think that was just the beginning," Clarke said. "Off."
Around Sou-Hon Perreault, the stars went out.
Blind Date
Interested? Reply.
It was an odd sort of caption to find on a biochemical graphic: a lopsided crucifix of Carbons and Oxygens and Hydrogens—oh wait, there was a Sulfur over there, and a Nitrogen on one side of the crossbeam, right about where they'd nail Jesus' wrist into place (of course, the way this thing was built, the savior's left arm would have to be about twice as long as his right). Methionine, the matchmaker said. An amino acid.
Only flipped. A mirror image.
Interested? Fucking right.
The file had been sitting in his morning ßehemoth-related data sweep, ticking quietly. He hadn't even had time to check it out until several hours into his shift. Supercol was burning a path through Glasgow, and some new carbon-eating bug—mutant or construct, nobody knew—had eaten a big chunk of the Bicentennial Causeway right out from under a few thousand rapitrans passengers. It had been a busy morning. But finally he'd had a few moments to come down off the accelerants and breathe.
He'd opened the file, and it had jumped out as if spring-loaded.
The matchmaker was unusually forthcoming in explaining why this file qualified for his attention. Usually, matchmakers delivered their treasures through logical chains way too twisted for humans to follow; like magic, needed information from all over the world would simply appear in your queue, unsummoned. But this file—this had come with explicit search terms attached, terms that even a human being could understand. Quarantine. Firestorm. Beebe Station. Channer Vent.
Interested?
Not enough information to be useful. Just enough to catch the attention of someone like him. Not data at all, really: bait.
Reply.
"Thanks for dropping in." Canned voice, no graphic.
Desjardins flipped his own voice filter on. "Got your message. What can I do for you?"
"We have a mutual interest in biochemistry," the voice said pleasantly. "I have information you might find useful. The reverse may also be true."
"And who are you, exactly?"
"I'm someone who shares your interest in biochemistry, and who has information you might find useful."
"Actually," Desjardins remarked, "you’re a secretarial app. Pretty basic one, too."
Nothing disagreed.
"Okay then. Pocket whatever you've got and tag it the same way you tagged your invite. I'll pick it up on my next sweep and get back to you."
"Sorry," said the app. "That doesn't work from this end."
Of course not. "So what would work for you?"
"I'd like to meet."
"Fine. Name a time, I'll clear a channel."
"Face-to-face."
"Well, as I—you mean in person?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
"I'm suspicious by nature. I don't trust digital images. I can be at your location within forty-eight hours."
"Do you know my location?"
"No."
"You know, if I wasn't also suspicious by nature, I sure as shit would be now," Desjardins said.
"Then an interest in biochemistry is not all we have in common."
Desjardins hated it when apps did that—threw in little asides and lame witticisms to appear more human. Of course, Desjardins hated it when people did that, too.
"If you'd like to choose a place and time we could meet," the app told him, "I'll be sure to show up."
"How do you know I'm not quarantined?" For that matter, how do I know you'renot? What am I getting into here?
"That won't be a problem."
"What are you really? Some kind of loyalty test Rowan's siccing on me?"
"I don't understand."
"Because it's really not necessary. A corpse of all people should know that." Whoever the app was negotiating for had to be corpse-level at least, to be so confident about travel clearances. Unless the whole thing was some kind of pointless and elaborate put-on.
"I'm not administering a loyalty test," the app replied. "I'm asking for a date."
"Okay, then. Pickering's Pile. Drink'n'drug in Sudbury, Ontario. Wednesday, 1930."
"That will be fine. How will I know you?"
"Not so fast. I think I'd rather approach you."
"That would be a problem."
"That is a problem. If you think I'm going to amble innocently into the clutches of someone who won't even give me their name, you're sadly in need of a patch."
"I'm sorry to hear that. However, it doesn't matter. We can still meet."
"Not if neither of us knows how to tag the other, we can't."
"I'll see you on Wednesday," the app told him. "Goodbye."
"Wait a second…"
No answer.
Oh, man. Someone was going to meet him on Wednesday. Someone who evidently could drop down onto any place under geosynch at 48 hours' notice. Someone who knew of a link between Channer Vent and ßehemoth, and who seemed to think they could find him without any identifiers at all.
Someone was going to meet him whether he wanted to or not.
Achilles Desjardins found that a little bit ominous.
Necrosis
There were places in the world that lived on the arteries between here and there; whatever they generated within wasn’t self-sustaining. When tourniqueted—a quarantine, a poisoned water table, the sheer indifference of citizens abandoning some industrial lost-cause—they withered and turned gangrenous.
Sometimes, eventually, the walls would come down. The quarantine would end or atrophy. Gates would open, or just rust away. But by then it was too late; the tissue was long since necrotic. No new blood flowed into the dead zone. Maybe a few intermittent flickers along underground cables, peripheral nerves where Maelstrom jumped the gap. Maybe a few people who hadn't gotten out in time, still alive; others arriving, not so much seeking this place as avoiding some other.
Lenie Clarke was in such a place now, a town full of wreckage and smashed windows and hollow eyes staring from buildings nobody had bothered to condemn. Whatever life was here did not, for the most part, take any notice of her passing. She avoided the obvious territorial boundaries: the toothless skulls of children significantly arranged along a particular curb; a half-mummified corpse, crucified upside-down beneath the cryptic phrase St. Peter the Unworthy; derelict vehicles that just happened to block this road or that—rusty barricades, herding the unwary toward some central slaughterhouse like fish in a weir.