Kelley Eskridge (40 page)

Scully nodded, but he looked unhappy.

“We can talk more about it later, if you
want.”

He nodded again, and then stretched to the
refrigerator for a new bottle of the chardonnay he'd poured the
previous night for Snow. “Here you go. Come back whenever you're ready
for that grilled cheese.”

They went up to the solo level and pulled
two tables together in a corner. Jackal set a screen around them, and
liberated a handful of candles from around the room.

Snow opened the wine with her little
finger, and for a moment Jackal was back on Terry's Cliff, talking
about people growing up to be themselves. She waited for Snow to pour
the wine. Then she said, “I want to tell you some things, but I don't
know how.”

“I want to hear them.” Snow looked at her
with compassion. “But I can't say them for you.”

Jackal nodded. Took a deep breath. Drank
some wine. “I'm scared,” she said finally.

“I know. But you're brave.”

“I'm not brave at all. If I was brave I
probably wouldn't be here right now.”

Snow waited.

I don't know if I can do this, Jackal
thought. She bent her head over her wine. Perhaps she should say that
she needed more time to think. They could talk tomorrow. You're a
fucking coward, she told herself; then like a clear, distant bell she
heard her internal voice say

Do better
.
The answer welled up within her immediate and urgent. “I will,” she
said out loud, “I will do better.”

And without pause, before Snow could ask
what it meant, she began.

“Halloween last year—” she did not say,
“the day with Tiger,” but both of them nodded as if she had “—my mother
and I had a fight, the worst one ever, about me being assigned to
Garbo. It was supposed to be her project, but Neill gave it to me, and
when she found out it was his idea…she's always been so competitive
about him. When I first started his workshop, she would ask what I was
learning, and she always had a story about what happened when she'd
been in that part of the training. It was all about how she'd been
there first.” She frowned. “I think she wanted me to do well, but
another part of her really minded when I did. Do you think so? Or am I
crazy?”

“No.” Snow said. “I think she minded a
lot. Your mother isn't much of a grown-up.”

“Anyway, that day she…” Jackal waved her
hands, trying to find the right words, sloshing wine on the table. “She
just went berserk. She said that I got everything I wanted, I was
spoiled, I was taking opportunities away from other people.” She drank
some wine, remembering clearly as she told it to Snow: the two of them
in the office, Donatella's face twisted, breath hitching as she shouted

they give you everything and you're
no
more a
Hope than I am
!

Snow gasped. Jackal said, “I went
completely cold. I said, what do you mean, and she told me they induced
me to have me on time, but I was too late, and so everyone had lied all
my life to give me opportunities that I didn't even deserve.”

She stopped and waited. Snow did exactly
the right thing: she blinked once, twice, and then her eyes filled and
she put her hand on Jackal's, saying, “Oh, honey, that must have hurt
all the way through.”

Jackal said quietly, “I do love you,” and
went on with the story. The complex stew of feelings that brought her
up the Needle at Mirabile; the horror of the last moments before the
screens shattered into static and the web was gone. The arrest and the
trial. When she came to the deal with Arsenault, Snow hissed fiercely,
“I knew it. I knew it was something like that. Those bastards. But
why—” She stopped herself. “Never mind, that's side trip. I'm sorry.
Please keep going.”

VC. Having told the story to Scully, she
found more coherence to it this time, and she could see its powerful
impact on Snow. She traced the first disorienting days, her systems and
rituals, and the gradual descent into the time of the crocodile;
fighting against madness; and finally crawling back from the edge of
someplace maybe not too far from where Estar lived now. Snow drank it
all in, her eyes wide.

Then it was time to talk about erasing
things.

“I don't know how to begin this part. I
don't know how to tell you this.” She gulped her wine, poured some
more, and then said, simply, “I had to protect myself. The crocodile
scared me so much. And I had to admit that my old life was over. I was
never going to be the Hope or part of the web or part of Ko. I could
either fight it or accept it. So I decided that if I was going to
survive, I would have to let go of it all. I made a list in my head of
everything that could hurt me, and I erased everything on the list.
Just like wiping a white board.”

Snow said softly, “I don't understand.”

Jackal was so frightened: she wanted to
shout, You should understand, what's the matter with you? Why do I have
to spell it out for you? But she reached through the fear for the right
words. “I disconnected myself from everything I cared about. I couldn't
allow those things, those people, to hurt me anymore. I thought if I
rubbed everything out of me.… So I did. All of it. I cut all ties. I
put it all away. I made myself stop caring about everything because it
was all done, all gone, and I was never going to get any of it back.
And I only understood a long time afterward that I had gutted myself.
But I didn't know what else to do. It was like that old joke about
surgery, where it's successful but the patient dies. I cut away the web
and Ko and my parents and Neill and everyone else I could think of.”

She stopped. Her throat felt too thick to
talk. She stared down at the table miserably, at her own stupid hand on
the stem of the glass.

“And me,” Snow said gently.

Jackal nodded. Tears dripped down onto the
table. All I ever do is cry anymore, she thought. Boring, stupid
Jackal. “You were the hardest. You wouldn't go away. I had to scour you
out.” She sighed. “And I did. That's the thing. I did it. I scrubbed
you out. I made you disappear. I went into Ko and was so happy by
myself, without any of you. Then I came back to the real world and
suddenly things weren't so simple anymore. But I had already…”

Silence. More tears on the table.

“Already what, honey?”

“I betrayed you,” Jackal said. “You would
never have abandoned me like that. You didn't. Look at what you did for
me; you went to Neill and you came all the way here even after I sent
you that message. You fought so hard for me, and I just wiped you out
and left you behind. I didn't hold on. And I couldn't tell you because
you had come all this way, you told yourself ‘I know she loves me’ and
you came. You trusted me to be the same, but I'm not, and I did this
terrible thing and I let you go. And I still love you but there's this
distance and I don't know if I can heal it. I don't know if I can undo
what I did. And I think that makes me bad. I'm bad, Snow. How can you
trust me to love you now?”

Snow was crying too. “You aren't bad,” she
said. She shoved the wine bottle and the glasses aside so she could
reach for Jackal's hands and hold them while she said, “You listen to
me, Jackal Segura. You are not bad.” Jackal tried to pull her hands
away, but Snow held tight. “Listen to me, damn it! I will always want
you to survive. You do whatever you have to do. You hear me? Whatever
it takes. If it means you have to drop half of Ko off the cliffs, then
you do it. You were brave enough and strong enough to survive your own
fear. That's an amazing thing. Look at what happened to Estar, and then
look at you. You did fine.”

“But what I did to you—”

“Oh, bullshit. I wasn't there. You didn't
do anything to me. But that doesn't mean you have to keep doing it.
You're not alone now, and you don't have to kill me to save yourself.”

Snow let go of Jackal's hands and
repositioned the bottle and glasses carefully, precisely.

Some time later, Jackal said, “Have I told
you lately that you astonish me?”

“It's been a while.”

“How'd you get to be so smart?”

“I'm not that smart. You're just really
dumb about this kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Jackal said.

“You want to make it up to me, go get us
another bottle and some grilled cheese sandwiches.”

They devoured three sandwiches between them,
as well as half a bowl of blue corn chips and salsa, and were making
inroads on the second bottle of wine, when the screen moved and
Crichton appeared at the table.

Jackal was so surprised that she said
nothing as Crichton put down the chair and wineglass she was holding,
and sat. Her white lenses turned her eyes to stone. She grinned at
Jackal, then turned to Snow and held out her hand. Jackal saw for the
first time that Crichton's fingers were long, and her hands were
beautiful.

“I'm Crichton.”

“I guessed. I'm Snow.”

“All of you people have such appropriate
names,” Crichton said conversationally, as if it weren't completely
unnatural to be here on the solo level of Solitaire with a client.
“Close your mouth, Segura, your food is showing.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.”

Jackal said, with controlled exasperation,
“Why?”

“Well, there's no reason for you to come
to me anytime soon unless you have a convenient aftershock, and they're
never around when you need them. Hah.” Crichton pincered a chip out of
the basket and dunked it in the salsa.

“What do you want?” Jackal could feel
herself almost grinding her teeth around the words.

“I'd like to chat about what we're going
to do with this little vacation paradise you've made out of VC.”

Jackal and Snow froze; Crichton ate
another chip and leaned back in her chair, grinning. The white eyes
were the most malign effect Jackal had ever seen on her; she looked in
need of exorcism.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Crichton leaned forward so quickly that
her face simply seemed to appear inches away from Jackal's: Jackal
blinked and remembered in time not to let herself jerk away. “Just stop
this now,” Crichton said earnestly, without irony or amusement. “I know
everything. So think it through, Segura. Why am I here?”

She's here to
arrest you
! Jackal's internal voice babbled.
Slice
up your brain
! But, think it
through, Crichton had said: so Jackal set the voice aside. She stared
at the boiled-egg eyes while she worked it out, and Crichton stared
unblinking back. Jackal was aware of Snow filling everyone's wineglass,
and spared a moment of surreal appreciation for Snow's priorities.

“Okay,” Jackal said slowly, rubbing her
forehead. Nothing to lose, she thought. “You can get me to your office
anytime you want. You don't need a real reason. So you came here
because this is an off-line negotiation and you don't intend to turn me
over to the Bills of the world.”

“A for accuracy. I heard you were good at
this, I'm glad to finally see some evidence of it.”

She was feeling her way now in delicate
steps. “So let's assume for a moment that whatever you've heard is
true—”

“And I'd like to know where you heard it,”
Snow bristled.

Jackal put up a hand and then changed the
gesture so it became a touch on Snow's arm. “We can get to that in a
minute. First let's make sure that we're all playing in the same
sandbox. So, if it were true, what would you do about it?”

Crichton sat back a little and put both
hands on the table. “I would ask you to come to a private location,
enter VC through a verified link, and do your party trick for a period
not to exceed twenty-seven real-time hours so that we can get a
complete set of diurnal hormonal, brain wave and body chemistry cycle
readings. In exchange, we will arrange for your permanent removal from
the EarthGov program, and will try not to need any more participation
from you on the research side.”

“‘Try not to need’ is a little
non-specific.”

“We would negotiate a
fee-for-participation contract. We would only activate it as the final
option available to further our research. It will be a standard
contract with right of refusal.”

“And the goal of this research?”

“To bring Phase Four Garbo to market
within twenty-four months on a commercial franchise basis.”

Jackal said slowly, “And who are ‘we’?”

Crichton tilted her head and replied, “We
are Ko, Jackal. What did you think?” She picked up her wineglass for
the first time since she had come to the table, and drank.

Silence.

“You work for Ko?”

Crichton drank again.

Jackal and Snow exchanged a look.

“Perhaps you'd be kind enough to explain,”
Jackal said formally.

“Certainly,” Crichton answered, as if
surprised the need existed. “I was assigned early last year to
strategic analysis of Garbo through direct observation of participant
behavior. Emphasis on short-term and long-term effects of various
applications of the technology. We structured the study so that the
purpose of my observations was masked from participants by my function
of case officer. It's also a role that lends itself to my particular
personal style.”

“I'll say,” Jackal commented involuntarily.

Crichton grinned. “I am our teacher's
least orthodox student, but I'm very good at what I do.”

Jackal traded another look with Snow.

She means Neill
.

Crichton continued, “When the senator hit
the marble in Mirabile and you were alleged to be responsible, both
Hong Kong officials and the mainland Chinese government moved to sever
all ties with Ko. They were twenty-seven minutes away from immediate
revocation of all leasehold rights and the biggest liability suit in
the universe when Smith finally agreed that you would be stripped of
your status and offered up to EarthGov justice as an unaffiliated
individual, and that the company would not bend over backwards to
defend you. If you had chosen to be more active in your own defense,
the company might have found itself in a bind; but it was a calculated
risk. Why should you choose to reject a Ko-sponsored defense? And in
fact, you didn't.”