Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (3 page)

“Is
that
your gun?” she asked.

“I need to know whether or not you’re telling me the truth,” I said. “I don’t think that’s unreasonable, considering the circumstances.”

“I’m a whore. That doesn’t necessarily make me a thief and a liar.”

“I need something, Mikaela. More than your word.”

“I’m actually a pretty good fuck,” she said, as though it was exactly what I was waiting for her to say, and lay down on the cot. “You know, I’d wager I’m a skid better fuck than Sailor Li ever was. We could be sheba, you and me, Councilor. I’d go back to Herschel City with you, and you could forget all about her. If she wants to commit suicide, then, hell – ”

“Something you couldn’t have gotten from Jun’ko,” I pressed. She rolled her eyes, which I could see were blue. There aren’t many women on Mars with blue eyes.

“Yeah,” she said, almost managing to sound disappointed, and clicked her tongue once against the roof of her mouth. “How’s this? Sailor was with you for five years, if you count the three months after you started fucking her before you asked her to move into your flat. You lost two teeth in a fight when you were still just a kid, because someone called your birth mother an offworlder bitch, and sometimes the implants ache before a storm. The first time Sailor brought up the Fenrir, you showed her a stick from one of the containment crews and told her if she ever mentioned the temples again, you’d ask her to leave. When she
did
mention them again, you hit her so hard you almost – ”

“You’ve made your point,” I said, cutting her off. She smiled, a smug, satisfied smile, and nodded her head.

“I usually do, Dorry.” She patted the edge of the cot with her left hand. “Why don’t you come back to bed.”

“I’m not going to fuck you,” I replied and set the aluminum flask down on a shelf near the door. “I’ll pay off whatever she owes you. You’ll tell me what you know. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“Sure, if that’s the way you want it.” Mikaela shut her eyes. “Just thought I’d be polite and offer you a poke.”

“You said the freighter was headed south.”

“No. I said
Sailor
said it was headed south. And before I say more, I want half what I’m owed.”

My eyes were beginning to adjust to the dim light getting in through the window, and I had no trouble locating the hook where I’d left my jacket hanging the night before. I removed my purse from an inside pocket, unfastened the clasp, and took out my credit tab. “How do you want to do this?” I asked, checking my balance, wondering how many more months I could make the dwindling sum last.

“Subdermal,” she said. “Nobody out here carries around tabs, especially not whores.”

I keyed in the amount, setting the exchange limit at twenty, and handed Mikaela the tab. She pressed it lightly to the inside of her left forearm, and the chip beneath her flesh subtracted twenty credits from my account. Then she handed the tab back to me, and I tried not to notice how warm it was.

“So, she told you the freighter was headed south,” I said, anxious to have this over and done with and get this girl out of the sleeper.

“Yeah, that’s what she said.” Mikaela rolled over onto her right side, and her face was lost in the shadows. “The freighter’s a Shimizu-Mochizuki ship, one of the old 500-meter ore buckets. You don’t see many of those anymore. This one was hauling ice from a mine in the Chas Boreale to a refinery in Dry Lake, way the hell out on the Solis Planum.”

“I know where Dry Lake is,” I said, wondering how much of this she was inventing, and I sat down on the floor by the sleeper’s door. “You’ve got an awfully good memory.”

“Yes,” she replied. “I do, don’t I?”

“Do you also remember the freighter’s name?”

“The
Oryoku Maru,
as a matter of fact.”

“I can check these things out.”

“I fully expect you to.”

I watched her a minute or more, the angles and curves of her silhouette, wishing I had a pipe full of something strong, though I hadn’t smoked in years. The shadows and thin wash of dawn between us seemed thicker than mere light and the absence of light.

“Does she know where she’s going?” I asked, wishing I could have kept those words back.

“She
thinks
so. Anyhow, she heard there’d be a Fenrir priest on the freighter. She thought she could get it to talk with her.”

“Why did she think that?”

“Sailor can be a very persuasive woman,” Mikaela said and laughed. “Hell, I don’t know. Ask her that when you find her.”

“She thinks there’s a temple somewhere on the Solis?”

“She wouldn’t have told me that, and I never bothered to ask. I don’t have the mark,” and Mikaela held out her left arm for me to see. “She fucked me, and she liked to talk, but she’s a pilgrim now, and I’m not.”

“Did you try to stop her?”

“Not really. I told her she was fucking gowed, looking for salvation with that bunch of devils, but we’re all free out here, Councilor. We choose our own fates.”

Down on the street, something big roared and rattled past, its engines sounding just about ready for the scrapyard. Probably a harvester drone on its way to the locks and the fields beyond the dome. The sun was rising, and Hope VII was waking up around us.

“There’s something else,” Mikaela said, “something she wanted me to show you.”

“She knew that I was coming?”

“She
hoped
you were coming. I should have hated her for that, but, like I said – ”

“ – you’re all free out here.”

“Bloody straight. Free as the goddamned dust,” she replied. There was a little more light coming in the window now, morning starting to clear away the dregs of night, and I could see that Mikaela was smiling despite the bitterness in her voice.

“Did you want to go with her?”

“Are you fucking cocked? I wouldn’t have gotten on that freighter with her for a million creds, not if she was right about there being a fucking Fenny priest aboard.”

“So, what did she want you to show me?”

“Are you going after her?” Mikaela asked, ignoring my question, offering her own instead, and she sat up and turned her face towards the open window.

“Yes,” I told her. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Then you
must
be cocked. You must be mad as a wind shrake.”

“I’m starting to think so. What did she want you to show me, Mikaela?”

“Most people call me Mickie,” she said.

And I thought about paying her the other twenty and letting her go back to Jun’ko’s or wherever it was she slept. There wasn’t much of her street-smart bluster left, and it was easy enough to see that she was scared. It was just as easy to figure out why.

“My mum, she was a good left-footer,” Mikaela said. “God, Baby Jesus, the Pope and St. Teresa, all that tieg crap. And she used to tell me and my sisters that only the
evil
people have any cause to
fear
evil, but what’d she know? She never even left the dome where she was born. She never spent time out on the frontiers, never saw the crazy shit goes off out here. All the evil
she
ever imagined could be chased away with rosary beads and a few Hail Marys.”

“Is it something you’re afraid to show me, Mickie?” I asked, and she laughed and quickly hid her face in her hands. I didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat there with my back to the door of the sleeper, watching the world outside the window grow brighter by slow degrees, waiting until she stopped crying.

I wish I could say that Sailor had lied, or at least exaggerated, when she told Mikaela that I’d beaten her. I wish it with the last, stingy speck of my dignity, the last vestiges of my sense of self-loathing. But if what I’m writing down here is to be the truth, the truth as complete as I might render it, then that’s one of the things I have to admit, to myself, to whoever might someday read this. To God, if I’m so unfortunate and the universe so dicked over that she or he or it actually exists.

So, yes, I beat Sailor.

She’d been gone for several days, which wasn’t unusual. She would do that sometimes, if we seemed to be wearing on one another. And it was mid-Pisces, deep into the long season of dust storms and endless wind, and we were both on edge. That time of year, just past the summer solstice, all of Herschel seems set on edge, the air ripe with static and raw nerves. I was busy with my duties at the university and, of course, with council business, and I doubt that I even took particular notice of her absence. I’ve never minded sleeping alone or taking my meals by myself. If I missed her, then I missed the conversation, the sex, the simple contact with another human body.

She showed up just after dark one evening, and I could tell from the way she was dressed that she hadn’t been at her mothers’ or at the scholars’ hostel near the north gate, the two places she usually went when we needed time apart. She was dirty, her hair coppery and stiff with dust, and she was wearing her long coat and heavy boots. So I guessed she’d been traveling outside the dome; maybe she’d taken the tunnel sled up to Gale or all the way down to Molesworth. I was in my study, going over notes for the next day’s lectures, and she came in and kissed me. Her lips were chapped and rough, faintly gritty, and I told her she needed a shower.

“Yeah, that’d be nice,” she said. “If you stuck me right now, I think I’d bleed fucking dust.”

“You were outside?” I asked, turning back to my desk. “That’s very adventuresome of you.”

“Did you miss me?”

“They’ve had me so busy, I hardly even noticed you were gone.”

She laughed, the way she laughed whenever she wasn’t sure that I was joking. Then I heard her unbuckling her boots, and afterwards she was quiet for a bit. Two or three minutes, maybe. When I glanced up, she’d taken off her coat and gloves and rolled her right shirt sleeve up past the elbow.

“Don’t be angry,” she said. “Please.”

“What are you on about now?” I asked, and then I saw the fevery red marks on the soft underside of her forearm. It might have only been a rash, except for the almost perfect octagon formed by the intersection of welts or the three violet pustules at the center of it all. I’d seen the mark before, and I knew exactly what it meant.

“At least hear me out,” she said. “I had to know – ”

“
What?
” I demanded, getting to my feet, pushing the chair roughly across the floor. “
What
precisely did you have to fucking
know,
Sailor?”

“If it’s true. If there’s something more – ”

“More than
what
? Jesus fucking Christ. You let them touch you. You let those sick fucks
inside
of you.”

“More than
this,
” she said, retreating a step or two towards the doorway and the hall, retreating from me. “More than night and goddamn day. More than getting old and dying and no one even giving a shit that I was ever alive.”

“How long’s it been?” I asked, and she shook her head and flashed me a look like she didn’t understand what I meant. “Since contact, Sailor. How long has it been since
contact
?”

“That doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t take the serum.”

“We’re not going to fucking argue about this.
Yes,
you’re going to take the serum. We’re going to the clinic right now, and you’re going to start the serum
tonight.
If you’re real bloody lucky, it might not be too late – ”

“
Stop it!
” she hissed. “This isn’t your decision, Dorry. It’s my body. It’s my goddamn life,” and that’s when she started crying. And that’s when I hit her.

That’s when I started hitting her.

There’s no point pretending that I remember how many times I struck her. I only stopped when I saw the blood from her broken nose, splattered on the wall of my study. I like to believe that it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t started crying, those tears like a shield, like a weapon she’d fashioned from her weakness. I’ve always loathed the sight of tears, for no sane reason, and I like to think everything would have played out some other way if she just hadn’t started crying. But that’s probably bullshit, and even if it isn’t, it wouldn’t matter, would it? So, whatever I said earlier about not being the sort of woman to interfere in another’s decisions, forget that. Remember this, instead.

Sailor left that night, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I waited for a summons to appear before the quarter magistrate on charges of assault, but the summons never came, and one day I returned home from my morning classes to find that most of her clothes were gone. I never found out if she retrieved them herself or if someone did it for her. A couple of weeks later, I learned that three Fenrir priests had been arrested near Kepler City, and that the district marshals suspected they’d passed near Molesworth and Herschel earlier in Pisces, that they’d been camped outside Mensae sometime back in Capricorn.

And that morning in Hope VII, all those months later, I sat and listened to Jun’ko’s billygirl sobbing because she was afraid, and I dug my nails into my palms until the pain was all that mattered.

“I think you must miss her,” Mikaela said, looking back over her left shoulder at me, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “To have left Herschel and come all the way out here, to go poking around Jun’ko’s place. Lady, no one comes to Heaven, not if she can help it.”

“I’ve been here before,” I said. “When I was young, about your age.”

“Yeah, that’s what Jun’ko was telling me,” she replied, and I wanted to ask what else the mechanic might have told her, but I didn’t. I was following Mikaela down a street so narrow it might as well have been an alleyway, three or four blocks over from the dome’s main thoroughfare. Far above us, sensors buried in the framework of the central span were busy calibrating the skylights to match the rising sun outside. But some servo or relay-drive bot responsible for this sector of Hope VII had been down for the last few months, according to Mikaela. So we walked together in the lingering gloom, the patchy frost crunching softly beneath our feet, while the rest of the dome brightened and warmed. Once or twice, I noticed someone watching us through a smudgy window, suspicious eyes set in wary, indistinct faces, but there was no one on the street yet. The lack of traffic added to my unease and the general sense of desolation and decay; this was hardscrabble, even by the standards of Hope’s Heaven. That far back from town center, almost everything was adobe brick and pressed sand-tile, mostly a jumble of warehouses, garages, and machine shops, with a shabby handful of old-line modular residential structures stacked about here and there. If Mikaela were leading me into an ambush, she couldn’t have chosen a better setting.