Kelley Eskridge (41 page)

Even though it had already happened, it
was horribly hard to hear it all laid out so coldly. “So the company
made a deal.”

“Yes, they did. They traded you to
guarantee the flow of revenues and patents and executive bonuses, and
the continued livelihood of two million people. And EarthGov got much
more direct control of what could prove to be the most lucrative
entertainment and social technology yet devised—they demanded it in
exchange for expediting your case and offering you program placement.
That was a near one for you. You should be flattered that Smith agreed:
the company believes that Garbo could change the essential social
dynamic of Western-model culture in the same way that the automobile
did, with a massive economic return to the holder of the technology.”

“And you were part of the package.”

“I was assigned to Garbo in Al
Iskandariyah. That's where I managed all my case load until we came
here. If you'd come to Al Isk as planned, we would have been working
together. You would have had to put up with me in meetings. Hah.”

“So…I don't understand. How were you
involved in the negotiations?”

“Heaven forfend,” Crichton said with a
laugh. “I'm just a storm trooper like Snow here, do what I'm told and
try to have some fun along the way.” Jackal darted a look toward Snow
to see how she took to the comparison: Snow was wearing her under-rocks
face again. Crichton continued, “I'm telling you the story as it was
told to me.”

“So this is Ko's chance to sweep the
technology out from under EarthGov.”

“I'm glad you're finally letting those
brains come out to play. You haven't been the sharpest tool in the shed
since your arrest.”

“And thank you very much for your fucking
support.”

“Now, now,” Crichton said, at the same
time that Snow put a hand on Jackal's arm. Jackal flexed her shoulders
and poured herself and Snow some more wine: she pointedly did not
refill Crichton's glass. Crichton smiled and did it herself. “At any
rate, you're correct. Ko can truthfully say that your participation
data was rejected by EarthGov's scientists as non-contributory, and we
will exercise our option to form a small subsidiary to explore
alternative applications of such data. And if we just happen to stumble
onto the editing sequence on the way, well, there's a handy bargaining
chip to renegotiate the entire contract with EarthGov.”

“And let me guess who's running the new
show.”

“Aw, shucks,” Crichton said, batting her
eyelids over her cue ball eyes to stomach-churning effect. “Little ole
me will get my chance to shine.”

“So your ability to be successful depends
on my cooperation.”

“And your ability to have a life depends
on mine.”

Jackal nodded. “As long as we know where
we stand.” She rose abruptly. “I'm going for a walk. No, by myself,”
she said as Snow pushed back her chair. To Crichton: “Do you want to
wait for me, or would you like me to come to your office tomorrow?”

“I'm fine here. Snow and I can get
acquainted. I'll bet we have tons in common.”

Snow tried to smother a smile, but it
didn't work. Jackal understood. “You really are a pain in the ass,”
Jackal said as sternly as she could.

“It's my special gift. If I'm a good pain
in the ass tonight, I get my own company tomorrow. I'm happy to wait
for you.”

Jackal wiggled her eyebrows at Snow to ask
if she was okay. Snow nodded, and did that trick of appearing to become
one with her chair. “Did you know that many people are incapable of
raising just one eyebrow?” she said conversationally, helping herself
to a corn chip. Jackal headed for the stairs.

Once outside, she turned left, toward the
canal: perhaps she would finally find that green space at the end of
the road. The street was dark, the buildings like faces with closed
eyes; there were only faint sounds of traffic behind her, and the thrum
of barge turbines in the waterway ahead, to tell her that there were
other people in the world.

The street ended abruptly in a rib-high
stone wall and a razor-wire fence along the canal bank, with an
orange-cast halogen streetlight off to one side. No park, no bench. No
place to rest. She stood at the wall and watched the water traffic with
its white and red and green lights. A half-moon was up, like a bowl
tipped sideways.

There were footsteps on the street behind
her; she turned, guessing who it was.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

They stared together at the water running
with light.

“I told her,” Scully said. “I'm very, very
sorry. I don't expect you to forgive me. But I hope you'll take
Crichton's offer. What you can do—solos need it, Jackal. I need it. I
know it's not fair to you. But I thought, here's a chance for someone
to get that technology who'll actually do something better with it, who
will put it out there so that we can use it; and here's a way to get
Jackal out of danger. Crichton doesn't want to give you up to the
brain-slicers. She just wants to know how you do it.” He opened his
hands. “And so do I. The idea that there might be even a scrap of good
in this hole they opened in my brain.… Do you know, I've been in and
out of my cell twice just since I left the bar? I don't know if they'll
ever find a way to fix that. But maybe someday I can be in and out of
Maui instead of that damn tiny box.”

He turned to look at her directly for the
first time, smiling weakly, with affection but without hope.

She said, “I assume you've been watching
solos for her ever since the program transfer.” She didn't wait for his
nod. “I should be angry. I should shout at you or break your nose or
something. But that would be…I can't seem to drag up a whole lot of
outrage, you know? I understand doing things because you think you have
to, even when they hurt someone else. I wish you'd trusted me. But why
should you? I've been keeping my own secrets.” She sighed.

“I wish I'd trusted you too, now. But I
didn't.”

They watched the water move slow and black
under the orange fingers of the halogen light. She wondered if fish
lived here; she'd been thinking of it as industrial water, but maybe
something survived it. She thought she heard a faint

plosh
out in the dark, the sound
a
scaled
belly might make slapping the water.

“Who's minding the bar?”

“Razorboy and his friend with the pink
hair. They both look scared as rabbits, I promised I'd only be gone for
twenty minutes. But I just…I understand that you might not want to be
friends anymore, but I thought I would come out and see if there was
anything you wanted to say to me, or anything I could do to help.”

“I'm still making up my mind about
Crichton. But you've given me an idea.” She told him what it was and
watched his face smooth out and then crease into a smile.

“You'd do that?”

“Don't you think it would be a good thing?”

“It's—yes, it's great, Jackal. She'll
agree, why wouldn't she?”

“There's something else. I think you owe
me something for all this.”

His face became solemn again. “What do you
want?”

“It's fine to have Razorboy and Drake for
emergency backup, but you need real help in the bar. I want the job.”

He frowned, and asked, “You want to work
in Solitaire?” as if he thought he hadn't heard her correctly.

“We can figure out some overlapping shift
work. Maybe we could be open more hours. I think people would like
that.”

He looked thoroughly confused and,
strangely, a little scared.

“I…look, I said I would do what I could,
but I can't afford to hire anyone. I can barely take care of myself
with this place.”

“I know that. That's the point. If you
could take care of yourself better with it, maybe you wouldn't have to
be a goddamn corporate spy on the side.” He flinched, but she didn't
worry about it: he deserved it. “Anyway, I don't need the money right
now, I need the work.”

Thank you, Snow
.
“Pay me in grilled cheese sandwiches. We can figure something out.
Maybe we'll work out what it takes to run the bar and pay you a living
wage, and I'll take thirty percent of any profit above that. That way
we'd know for sure there was enough for you and the club before I got
any. I can do that for at least a couple of years, especially if I get
my working meals free.” She looked at him frankly. “No one in the real
world is ever going to give me a job. And I need to be doing. You've
made a good thing with Solitaire, a place where people can come and be
themselves, even if their self is really weird. That's a great gift.
But there are so many of us damaged people, like you said, and we need
more help. I have some ideas about that too, but first we have to get
the bar in shape and part of that means more hours. And that means more
people. Me.”

He said suspiciously, “You're not planning
to turn my bar into some kind of social services organization, are you?”

“No,” she said with a certain sense of
discovery, of dawning determination. “Into a web.”

They walked back together. He wanted to
argue about schedules and who was in charge of the menu, so she knew he
had already agreed and was just working himself up to saying so. When
they stepped back inside, Razorboy was squaring off with Duja McAffee,
looking a bit like a schnauzer nose-to-nose with a rottweiler: as
Jackal drew near to the bar, she heard Razorboy saying, “…sorry, but
Scully said only beer and house wine until—oh, here he is now. Scully,
this gentleman would like something that I have no idea what it is—”

“It's okay, I've got it. Sorry to keep you
waiting, Duja. Razorboy was just doing what I asked him. This one's on
me.” Duja's forehead unwrinkled and Razorboy visibly relaxed. At the
other end of the counter, Drake was happily plucking olives out of a
large jar and portioning them into bowls.

“Gotta go upstairs and do some business,”
Jackal said. “I'll see you later.”

“Okay. But don't hold your breath on that
deli sandwich and soup idea, we have no place to store that kind of
inventory.”

“We'll see.”

“It's my bar.”

“I know, Scully. You're the boss,” she
answered, feeling suddenly every bit as cheerful as Drake with her
bubblegum hair.

Upstairs, she found Snow and Crichton
almost exactly as she'd left them, except with less wine in the bottle
and all the corn chips gone.

“Drugs, hah,” Crichton hailed her. “I
should have thought of that.”

“I'm sure you did.”

“Nice walk?”

“It did the trick. I have some proposals
of my own to make.”

Crichton straightened herself. “Fire away.”

“I'd like to outline my entire plan before
you respond to any of the specific points.”

“Fine.”

She'd marshaled her thoughts on the way
back, with the part of her brain that wasn't trying to persuade Scully
that soup and sandwich combos would pay back on the extra refrigerator
storage investment within ten months. Now she let everything click into
order at the front of her brain.

“It's my intention to work with you on
springboarding the online editing function of virtual technology, if we
can agree to terms.

“Here's the thing. I'm aware that I'm
outside the regular research demographic subset for this study—” a
quick glance to Snow “—and I'll bet my screening records will show me
outside the psychographic subset as well. I'm guessing that you'll be
able to route my data out of the program on that basis. I'm also
guessing that there's something about my particular profile that makes
on-line editing possible for me.”

She checked to make sure that Crichton was
with her so far; the white eyes flashed

go on
.

“That means that my pattern, my profile,
is the intellectual property that I have to contribute to this
undertaking. I will agree to license that intellectual property to Ko
for a fee commensurate with its value to the company. That's the only
way I'll work a deal.

“Part of the payment for this license will
be in kind rather than in cash.” Crichton shifted and blinked; good,
she was paying a different kind of attention now. “First, if Snow wants
it, I want her to be permanently assigned to the start-up, with a
guaranteed no-recall clause.”

Snow reached her hand out and placed it
over Jackal's for just a moment.

“Second, I want only voluntary paid
contractors used in your research, at least for the first year. The
test subjects will be drawn from a program that you'll seed for that
year: if I can't make it run on its own after that, then you can get
your participants wherever you want. My program will do a couple of
things: it will offer solos an opportunity for paid employment with
recourse, and it will also offer free biofeedback training to teach
solos how to alter their patterns to match mine, and therefore give
them the ability to edit aftershock. This training will include use of
your facilities for supervised practice sessions. You'll provide the
equipment and technicians free of charge to me and program participants.

“And I want Gavin Neill and me both on
your advisory board.”

And there was the little voice inside her,
saying, Jackal, do you really want to be involved with Ko again? Look
what happened last time. And the answer was

no,
not really, not the same way. I'll have to do better this time
.

She looked across the table at Crichton,
who watched her soberly in turn. Time to close. “I don't want revenge
on Ko. I won't make unreasonable demands; if you think these are
unreasonable, you need to help me understand why. But this is more than
strictly business for me. It's a chance for me to make some good out of
something that's been almost purely bad up until now. I'm not padding
my requests and there are no giveaways in here. I don't like to
negotiate that way. All these points are deal-breakers for me.”