Kelley Eskridge (27 page)

“Any solo is something of a celebrity
these days, but VC is where the glam is, especially after the program
shake-up in Earth-Gov. All that publicity. No, really,” he said as she
wrinkled her nose. “Well, you'll see for yourself. I really would put
that on, it'll make a difference and you can always take it off.”

“Why ‘solos’?” She made quote marks with
her fingers, made a face: stupid word.

“Everyone goes in alone.”

“Okay, I get that, but we're out now.”

“You think?” he said gently. “Look what
just happened to you.” He eased himself out of the chair. “I'll get you
that beer.”

He had to start a new keg; it gave her
time to reflect. He set the glass on the end of the counter when it was
ready and waved her up, had her swipe her datagem through his credit
reader to set up an account. He didn't directly acknowledge the meld on
the back of her left hand: he only said, “Solos come in at all hours.
Tourists usually show up mid-evening. Anyone bothers you, deal with it
efficiently. People who start trouble or prolong it are permanently
barred, once they recover. People who stop trouble get a free grilled
cheese sandwich and I will personally escort them to the clinic if they
need attention.”

She nodded. “A first-strike rule.” She saw
his raised eyebrow, and waved a hand while she searched for the right
phrases. “You punish offense, not defense. It's not violence you're
worried about, it's escalation.”

“That's right.” She heard in his voice
interest, and the beginning of approval. She thought of Tiger in the
park, hands over his nose: her fault, that day. Her offense. She drank
more beer. He did not speak, only waited while she wrestled with
herself: so, he understood the value of silence. She was beginning to
approve of him, too. She nodded thanks for the beer and carried it back
to her table.

A few minutes later, Scully hefted a
hinged sidewalk board out to the street. The first person came in the
door five minutes later, a man with the solo meld on his hand and a
bruised right eye. Scully had a drink waiting for him, something tall
and improbably red. The man took it without a word and carried it up
the stairs, giving Jackal a narrow-eyed look but not otherwise
acknowledging her. A moment later, the louvers closed across the solo
level.

People arrived in a steady trickle over
the next half-hour while she drank her second beer. She stayed alert,
uneasy with the public identity the meld gave her, glad that her table
was out of the traffic flow. As time passed with no challenge, no
pressure, she relaxed a little. But she reached her limit when the main
floor was about half-full: she had the jitters, and her headache
worsened, so she waited for a moment when no one was at the order
counter and told Scully, “Coffee and that piece of strudel would be
great. Then I think it's time for me to go.” She didn't want to offend
him by walking out on the strudel. Consideration was a feedback loop;
good feedback built good relationships. If it worked in conference
rooms, she didn't see why it wouldn't work here.

He busied himself with the mug and the
coffee urn. “Milk and sugar on the end there. I hope you'll come in
again.”

She smiled; it was small and went quickly,
but in some important way it was the first real smile she had given
anyone since the horrible day at Mirabile. “Is tomorrow too soon?”

He smiled back. “See you then.”

She walked slowly to Shangri-La, thinking
in spirals that always led to a blank place at her center.

People like me
. Back in the
apartment,
she let herself be drawn into a movie on fiberlink, letting it unfurl
on her desktop screen while she stretched out on her chair and ottoman.
It was a thriller about a team of scientists investigating the inside
of a supposedly defunct volcano: a large number of the explorers died
in satisfyingly gruesome ways before the final sequence, a spelunking
chase through tight cave passageways in near-darkness, a monster in
pursuit. It helped take some of the edge off, and after the scenes in
the caves, her rooms didn't seem quite so small; some of her
restlessness had gone. Maybe tomorrow she could settle to those
résumés. But tonight, she had to think.

Her headache had faded. She poured herself
a glass of orange juice and took herself through the evening again, the
aftershock, Solitaire, this solo identifier that Scully had pinned on
her: she flipped the meld through her fingers like a coin. Aftershock
was worrying, no matter what Scully said. How often would it happen?
How long could it last? What catalyzed it? And would she be able to
break out of her cell again? The thought of finding herself back there,
with no warning and no control, was frightening and depressing: but it
was different to imagine being back on Ko Island. She'd been trying to
put that time away, to make herself understand that she was back in the
world now and that she would never return to Ko. But what if she could?

She needed to know more, so she spent a
couple of hours online. She didn't find much about aftershock, but the
search led her to a wealth of solo-related sites that gave her pause
because of the quasi-cult markers they contained: a crude but
consistent caste system of solo categories, with, as Scully had
promised, VC solos at the top; the elevation of individual solos to the
status of idols; and a fascination with interactions between them,
particularly solo-on-solo violence. There was a lot of personal bio
data, some of it at a level of detail that Jackal thought could only
have come from program personnel files or solos themselves. It was
morbidly interesting to read about other people who had been through
some kind of virtual technology experience; not a generally nice crowd,
but certainly a distinctive one. She resolved after reading a few of
the personal testimonials to never find herself in a confined space
with anyone who'd undergone a terror induction study.

She couldn't resist accessing a few of the
references to herself. It was believed she'd been exported to the NNA,
but no one was entirely sure. She was even-tempered; no, she was quick
to anger; she supported a dozen conflicting political causes; she
disliked dogs. She shook her head: where did people get this stuff?
Then she found selected bits of testimony transcribed from net
recordings of her trial, and a “kill list” that named all the people
who had died at Mirabile. That made her turn off her desktop and climb
into her too-small bathtub, feeling sour and unsettled again. Maybe she
shouldn't go back to the bar: she didn't want to sit around with sick
fans and talk about body counts. But the idea of Solitaire was so
appealing—a place for solos, no matter how unwelcome she might be in
the rest of the world. Those web sites might be fucked up, but they
were right: she was a killer. What was it worth to have one place where
she didn't have to be afraid of that? Just about anything, her voice
told her; she said out loud, “You're damn right,” and began to wash
herself before the water got too cold.

But she still had trouble sleeping, and she
couldn't settle to her work the next day. She told herself it was
excitement, nervous energy, and took herself off early to Solitaire; it
would be better to stake out a space before the crowds rolled in. She
was determined to stay longer tonight, to increase her tolerance for
being among people again. It would be useful when she began to
interview; it wouldn't do to bolt from the visitor's chair in some
sleek office in the middle of a conversation about project structure or
team norming.

She bonded the solo face to the back of
her hand as she walked up Marginal Way toward Solitaire. Scully said
hello in a friendly way and remembered that she'd liked the Redhook,
and she tried not to be shy with him. She was determined to do well, to
be accepted, to belong.

It didn't take long to suss out the ground
rules. The social dynamic defaulted to single-person activities and
minimal involuntary interpersonal contact; if you wanted to be part of
a group, you had to work at it, by bringing together tables and chairs
in configurations that would not disturb the individual areas already
staked out. The solos split half and half between the main floor and
the private zone; of those she could see, some gathered in nearly
silent groups of two or three, but most sat alone at tables or the bar.
There were no servers; the only negotiation for drink or food was with
Scully, and solos always had right of way at the counter. Every so
often, Scully dashed from behind the bar and raced through both floors
to haphazardly bus tables. As the room became more crowded, the dishes
piled up, and the wait for food and drink lengthened considerably, but
no one complained. Jackal had never seen a more quiet or patient line
in a bar. The only nervous moment came when a man who had finally
worked his way to the head of the line—Jackal was already learning to
recognize tourists—failed to give way to a solo. It was the woman in
the long shirt, and when he protested she turned on him and said a few
words in a voice too low for Jackal to hear. The man paled: there was
no room for him to step back, but he made himself very small until she
left with a wineglass in one hand and a bottle in the other, held by
the neck as if she might use it on someone. As she passed, Jackal saw
the meld on her right cheekbone; the tourist would not have seen it
until she had rounded on him.

Some time later, three young people
commandeered a triangle of tables and chairs next to Jackal, giving her
a little extra space when they noticed her meld. She ignored them, and
hoped they would behave; she tended these days to regard younger people
as more socially inept than she remembered being. And then she imagined
someone looking at this part of the room and seeing the four of them,
all about the same age. She choked slightly on her beer. How old was
she? She felt twenty-nine. But she wasn't, she was a
twenty-three-year-old who was in some weird way ahead of herself.

She rubbed her face and put the topic on
the long internal list of things to figure out. In the meantime, she
was aware of the young people trying to identify her: they were doing
their best to watch her without looking and talk about her without
being obvious. They resorted to low conversational voices and a
strained metaphorical code that was so transparent she almost felt
sorry for them, even though she wasn't inclined to help. At least she
wasn't running screaming into the night because someone was paying
attention to her. Or sending someone else out that way: belief in the
solo potential for violence was clearly widely held, whether or not it
was true, and she guessed it must account for some of the care that
people took with the solos here. She chewed on that while she went up
to the counter; and she wasn't sure whether to be delighted or appalled
at how easy it was to take the front of the line just by saying,
“Excuse me,” and waving her meld under the nose of the person in front.
He looked at her nervously, and she realized he was the same man that
had run afoul of the woman in the long shirt. She had to bite her lip
to keep herself from reaching out and saying, “I won't hurt you,
really,” and scaring him even more. It was hard to accept that she was
this man's brush with danger. She'd been watched by millions of people
all her life, but never as if she might eat them.

No one bothered her. No one spoke at all
except Scully and various people excusing themselves for being in her
way. Other solos were polite enough; some of them were the most openly
curious, which she supposed made sense given that solos set the
standards for behavior here. She understood why they had a funny
handshake to identify each other; without it, some of these people
wouldn't know whom to acknowledge and whom to ignore. As a caste
system, it wasn't so different from the corporate hierarchies she used
to navigate.

She stopped by for a couple of beers or
dessert and coffee every day for the next week, arriving at different
times and trying to sit in new places. She treated it as a sort of
acclimatization therapy. She became much more comfortable sitting by
herself in a room full of people. It was a curiously free feeling, this
sense of company without interaction. Group solitude. She didn't go
upstairs to the solo level, she didn't feel ready somehow, but at least
she could be alone with lots of other people now. That had to be some
kind of improvement. But she hadn't approached any businesses about a
contract, and the restless itch was still with her.

Every night she went home and looked at
solo web sites, which all agreed that her whereabouts were still
unknown. “Are you people blind?” she found herself saying irritably to
the screen one night. “I'm right here.”

She wasn't sleeping well at all. Everything
pissed her off: her idiotic personal publishing program that wouldn't
scale her fonts correctly, the substandard whitebread pseudo-flamenco
bubblepop that the woman next door played too loud, the rain that would
never quite stop. She went food shopping and snapped at the clerk who
miskeyed her zucchini as cucumbers; on the transport coming back, a
burly woman stepped on her foot and, when Jackal complained, replied,
“Oh, get a life.” Jackal trembled with rage; she wanted to scream out,

You have no idea who I am! You have
no
idea what I
did
! She couldn't even muster a smile for the sausage vendor.

She limped into the apartment and put away
her food, and then forced herself to return to her desk; she had
finally finished customizing résumés for each of her
target businesses, and she was determined to pick one at random and do
something, anything, to get herself through this useless, dithering
place she'd somehow got herself stuck in.

Her mail icon was blinking: a message from
Crichton.