“That’s such an ugly word,” he said. “I was thinking more… payment for services rendered.” He turned and looked at me, and I could tell by his expression that he wasn’t jerking me around. He really felt he could help me.
“How do I know if your information is worth anything?”
He shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to pay me to find out. It’s no big deal to me either way. Now, excuse me, I’ve got to take care of some chores—”
“All right, all right,” I said.
I downloaded some credit to his account. He told me he knew somebody who could take me to him. I downloaded some more credit. He told me the person was him. I downloaded an obscene amount of credit and he told me to be outside in ten minutes.
Three hours of hiking later, we pushed through a wall of blood-red Tasid vines and into a clearing. It had rained only for the first hour, and baked us in eyelid-sticking heat for the next two, but such was the humidity that my clothes still felt sopping wet. I’d even bought the best rain gear my guide’s shop had to offer, but it hadn’t made a whit of difference.
The feathery branches of the mushroom-shaped Vidi trees blocked all but a few glimmerings of sunlight, sunlight that reflected off the mirrored exterior of a tent in the center of the clearing. It was covered in solar panels, I realized, and of course that made perfect sense. Weak as the light was, it would probably provide just enough charge for a single android.
My guide—he told me his name was Asif Phoenix, and that was the only thing he’d said despite my repeated questioning—gestured to the hut. I nodded, too out of breath to answer. He, on the other hand, didn’t even look like he’d cracked a sweat. I wondered how many years he’d been trekking up and down the mountain.
“You in there, Vergon?” I said
It took a moment, but the flap in the tent opened and then there he was—Vergon Daughn, in the flesh. Or in the silicon-plastic compound, as it were. He wore a camo outfit much like my guide’s, except that Vergon’s covered every inch of his body. He was shorter and less imposing than I’d expected from his holos.
“How did you… “ he began, and then he saw Asif. “Ah, so how much did he pay you?”
“Enough,” Asif said.
“So much for loyalty,” Vergon said.
“You didn’t pay me to be loyal.”
“I see. In the end, it’s always about the money, isn’t it?”
Asif said nothing, simply standing there looking imposing. Vergon turned to me.
“Did she hire you?”
I nodded.
“I thought as much. My other thought was that you were an assassin sent by Granger Holdings, but if that were the case, I would most likely be dead by now. Who are you?”
“My name’s Dexter Duff,” I said.
“Well, Mister Duff—”
“Just Duff.”
“Duff, then. Fine. Do you have any idea why I’m here?”
I looked at him carefully. He didn’t seem insane to me, though I’d been wrong about those sorts of things before. How could you tell if an android was insane, anyway? He could have been hiding from Granger Holdings, but the most likely reason Granger Holdings was out to get him in the first place was because his own erratic behavior had allowed the company’s value to plummet. That left the conclusion I’d come to after mulling it over for a few weeks.
“I don’t know why an android would be interested in a woman like Ginger,” I said. “I don’t know why an android would be interested in any woman, to be honest. But I figure you wanted to know what it was like to love her for real. Except when you got what you wanted, maybe you realized love wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Maybe you even realized she didn’t love you so much after all. You see, I know Ginger. I’ve known her for years. I don’t know if she’s capable of loving anyone. And when you figured this out too, it left you so heartbroken you didn’t want to go on feeling that way anymore, so you went back to being android.”
He said nothing for a while, intense eyes boring into me, studying me the way a scientist might examine a specimen under a microscope.
“You’re a perceptive man, Duff,” he said finally.
“No, I just learn from experience. I fell for her once too, you know.”
He nodded. “She has a special kind of charm. Everything you said is correct, though I am not here because I am heartbroken.”
“No?”
“Of course not. I am here because I became convinced shortly after the wedding that Ginger intended to kill me.”
It was a possibility I hadn’t considered. “Why would she do that? You’re her ticket to riches and fame.”
“No, Vergon Enterprises is her ticket to riches and fame. Besides, that’s not what she wants. It’s power.”
“I don’t see why that would make a…” I began, and then I did see it. Vergon Daughn may have made Ginger rich, but Vergon Enterprises could make her rich and powerful. The problem was Vergon himself. He was the one calling the shots. But once they were married… “I get it,” I said. “Once you were married, she could bump you off and then she’d inherit the company.”
“Exactly. Of course, it would have been easier if I remained an android since so few planets grant us the same rights as biosen. She could have deactivated me any number of ways. When I became human, it made her job more difficult, which gave me just enough time to escape.”
I shook my head. As well as I’d known Ginger, I should have seen that angle long before now. “I feel like an idiot,” he said.
“Don’t feel bad,” Vergon said. “Ironically, I didn’t recognize this possibility myself until I was a human. As an android, I kept giving her the benefit of the doubt, assuming that her unusual behaviors were due to the irrationality of her human emotions. But once I myself had human emotions, I could see that she herself lacked them—or at least any beyond greed and desire.”
“I should never have come here,” I said.
“No, you shouldn’t have. It’s quite likely you were followed.”
I thought of the android who’d tailed me weeks earlier. From time to time, I’d had that feeling again that I was being followed, though I’d never seen him. “So you don’t really think Granger Holdings is after you?”
“No, I do,” he said. “That’s what complicates matters. I came here until I could figure out a way to divorce her, but my absence left an opening for Granger to move in. Now I’m in a predicament. I honestly came here to protect the more than one million people who work for me. But whether my wife gets control of the company or Granger, those employees get hurt either way.”
My wife. I felt an odd pang of jealousy and I didn’t know why. It was just a job, of course, one that paid better than any job I’d had before, but no matter how well a job paid, I never set out to hurt an innocent person if I could help it. Was Vergon Daughn innocent? Was I innocent? Both of us had stupidly pursued a woman incapable of any kind of real love, and for that, we probably deserved whatever punishment we received. But I felt a lot more empathy for him than I might have felt for someone else.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help,” I said.
He looked at me. “I’m going to speak to her. Perhaps an understanding can be reached. I have to assume there’s at least a shred of decency in her.”
“All right,” I said, skeptical.
“But I’m still concerned she’s going to try to kill me. Will you come with me?”
“Of course.”
With that, he pulled out a com-com and called for a pod to pick us up off the mountain. Twenty minutes later, we were on our way to the spaceport. Asif watched us lift off, his face as stoic and remorseless as when I’d first met him.
We figured the stepdocks would be more heavily watched than the spaceports, so the plan was to leave the planet by ship. At my suggestion, Vergon bought an evening ticket at the spaceport closest to Nelsani, and then we landed the pod and rode a bakak-pulled buggy three hours to a much larger spaceport. The concourse was crowded and noisy, packed with every life form imaginable, and we hung out in the bar until a few minutes before the flight to Palfacia Prime was scheduled to leave.