John knocked on the connecting hatch and stepped in. "I haven't seen plumbing like that since I lived in London," he said.
"Really?" I said, distracted. I still wasn't sure whether I liked having the Teelies next door, for their sake more than mine. Time for them to start disassociating themselves from me. I had wanted at least half a ship between us, but Roland had insisted on keeping nearby.
"Don't want to lose you now, Jake. You're our ticket home." "Home? Where's that?"
He acknowledged the point. "You have me there. But our people are still important to us. We must get back somehow."
"Sorry. I understand." Maybe Roland was right. They'd be more vulnerable away from me.
Susan walked in, looking depressed. She had her shirt back on and was wearing her tan bush pants, but she was barefooted, having left her sandals in the Chevy.
"There are shops on board, Susan," I told her. "You should pick up some footwear. John has money."
"Yes, I will," she answered dully and slumped into a velvet armchair.
John went over to her. "What's wrong, Suzie?" he asked, massaging her shoulders.
"Oh, I was just thinking of Sten back there in the hospital. He's probably worried sick, wondering what happened to us." She looked at me. "We were on the way to the hospital when you…" She lowered her head and began crying softly.
It made me feel just great. Darla took her by the hand, led her to the other room, and closed the hatch.
"Does she have these mood swings often?" I asked John. "Suzie's emotional and changeable, it's true. But you must realize, Jake, this whole affair's been a nasty shock for all of us."
"Sorry, sorry…." It struck me that I'd been apologizing a lot lately. I had to reach down deep into my resources to remind myself that I had done nothing to deserve any of this, nor was any of it my fault. A sense of guilt for unspecified and probably imaginary offenses is a load that gets dumped on you early on. Most people spends lifetime looking for a place to set it down.
"John, would you excuse me for a moment? I want to talk to Sam."
"Of course." He went to the hatch and opened it, turned to say something, but thought better of it. "We'll talk later," he said, then went out and closed the hatch. He had his own guilt to deal with.
Winnie was on the couch, huddled up with her arms wrapped around her knees, looking at me with wet, questioning eyes. I winked at her, and she gave me a grimace-grin in return. Funny that she responded to a wink. I couldn't remember ever seeing her eyelids close except in sleep; she never blinked them.
"I'm copying you fine," Sam said when I keyed him. "How'd you do it?"
"Roland engineered it, but those button transponders did the trick. We have them planted all over the ship. What have you got for me?"
"Well, when I went down to the basement, I got quite a shock. There's tons of stuff from years back. I checked a list-out of that news-recording subroutine. The way it's coded is all goofed up. It tells me to erase all the junk I've kept for the last thirty days, but allows me to keep what I've recorded that day, the day I houseclean. What the subroutine does then is give everything that's left in the workfile a PROTECT tag. Then, when I erase again, all that stuff gets dumped into the reference library. As a result, there's all kinds of random crap down there from years back."
"I'll have to stop buying that cheap off-the-shelf software and do my own coding for a change. You find anything interesting?"
"Yes, very. Like this item in Pravdu from about three years ago." Sam snorted. "Never fails to amuse me that they thought the change of one letter makes a Russian word into an Inter-system one."
"Makes it easier for them. Go ahead."
"Okay. Quote, Tsiolkovskygrad, Einstein, October 10, 2103. The season premiere of the New Bolshoi was well-attended this year, as it is every year, but last night standing-room-only crowds packed the house to see a daringly innovative staging of, blah blah blah blah, etcetera. Skip six paragraphs. Among the notables attending were Kamrada Big Cheese, Kamrada Head Whatshisname, your mother's Uncle Pasha, and ― here it is, get this ― Minister of Intercolonial Affairs Dr. Van
Wyck Vance, daughter Darla Petrovsky-Vance, and some prominent friends of the Authority, including labor leader Kamrada Corey Wilkes, unquote. I'm multiplexing the 2-D image. Are you getting it?"
I put one end of the key to my eye and peered through the pinhole lens. The microscreen showed a loge full of bored faces, one of them belonging to Corey Wilkes. He was seated next to ― yes, it had to be ― the same patrician-looking gentleman I'd seen at Sonny's and thought I recognized. Van Wyck Vance. Next to him was a blond woman with her head turned, talking to the woman behind her. The face was hidden, the hair was longer and probably its natural color, but…
"Sam, zoom in on the blonde."
"How? Like this?"
"Little closer, screen right."
… But the port-wine mark on her bare right shoulder told me it was Darla.
"Now we know who 'Dar-ya' is."
"More than that, Sam. It's Darla. And I saw her dad at Sonny's."
"How can you ―? Oh, you mean the little mark on her shoulder? I missed that, but now I remember. More advantages than you'd think in women running around naked, aside from the obvious ones."
I stretched out on the silky bedspread and put the key on the nightstand, leaving the circuit open. I closed my eyes.
"What's it mean, Jake? From what you've told me, it looks like all along she's been Petrovsky's agent. Now we know she's his LC. But if she's Vance's daughter, and Vance is in cahoots with Wilkes… where does that put her?" I didn't answer right away. "Jake?"
"I don't know. We need more information."
Sam sighed. "Damn it, sometimes being a machine is hell."
I picked the key up and held it close to my mouth. "Sam, everything they've done has been to make us run. And we tucked tail and ran. The scuffle at Sonny's was to start things off, and also served the purpose of setting me up to be tracked by a method I haven't figured out. They knew exactly where we were when we hid out at Grey stoke Groves. But did they surprise us? No, they flushed us out of there and followed us, dogging our every step, somehow anticipating our every move while staying a planet or two behind. And all for one purpose: to watch us until we ducked into a potluck. We did. To them that meant we had the Roadmap. And we do. We've had it all along and didn't know it." "Uh-huh. And what is it?" "It's a who. It's Winnie." "What?"
I told him about the sand drawings, then went over my reasoning concerning why the drawings could qualify as the 'convincing forgery' Petrovsky had mentioned.
"Convincing? Who'd be convinced by scratches in the sand?" "Apparently everybody. That's the only way it figures. Remember, they might not know that Winnie's knowledge is based on myth. And furthermore, we don't know it either, for a fact. That line may be real, or they may not be. I haven't had time to find out for sure. I tried back on the beach, but Darla's the only one who seems to understand her."
"How did Wilkes and company find out about Winnie? Through Darla?" 1
"I don't know. We know she reported to Petrovsky at the station. Wilkes may have a spy in Petrovsky's intelligence unit. Another thing that isn't clear is whether Darla knew about Winnie's abilities when she reported. The drawings didn't show up until we got here, but Darla's been talking to her all along, so she may have reported on the possibility earlier. Left some kind of message, secret radio, something." "And the Reticulans?"