The Forever Watch (10 page)

I promise myself that when the opportunity arises, I will have Cook's statue relocated to some lightless corner of one of the museum archives.

Finding my man would be easier if I had messaged the man first and actually made an appointment. The small weed of anxiety has grown larger. I avoid leaving tracks in the system as much as I can.

I do my deep-searches anonymously on public terminals, mask my accesses and queries with false trails to other nodes throughout the system. I change my pattern of purchasing groceries, no longer always picking them up from the same vendor each time. I let Barrens do his watchdog best. Just in case.

These worries arise more easily at night, or in the dark office of Long Term Investigations. Walking through the park under the bright daytime skyscape fades the misty fears, until I think of how Mincemeat might have found and eliminated Callahan, a canny veteran gifted with both
bruiser
and
touch
talents.

“Seen Cal spar with Enforcers and give them a run for their money,” Barrens once said. “Take a real monster to do that to Cal so quick, without a fight that would tear up the whole apartment block.”

Bees buzz in the air. Lavender blossoms along the pebble-textured paths through the park. Gold and orange and silver carp swim idly through the streams connecting the ponds spread out through the park. Oak trees dapple the grass with the shadows of the leaves. Children are everywhere. Some sit and laugh at the sight of a fuzzy Welsh corgi scampering and barking, and a few particularly lucky ones pet it and giggle when it licks them. It must belong to a whole team from some department—no one individual can afford a dog, other than the department chiefs and higher-ups in the chain, the ones who own actual houses as individuals, rather than renting. If any one of those top-class officers were out here in the park, an ominous escort of black-armored Enforcers would be keeping an eye on everyone around.

Finally, I spot the man I am looking for. Keepers are required to bring the children in their care out for “fresh air” and greenery a minimum number of hours of the day depending on the child's age, and this is the closest park or garden to his residence.

He is young, for a Keeper. Just twenty years old, still a bit coltish and lean, not yet come into the weight he looks as if he will put on later. His mix of looks calls to mind long-lost regions of the Mediterranean—dark hair, olive skin, sharp features. He gently rocks a baby carriage, singing something without words, slow and soothing. He has no permanent partner anymore, just a rotating series of substitutes—this, and the drop in his household leisure spending, is what drew the attention of my AI probes.

Today, he is alone, and he looks somewhat lost and unsure compared to the other Keepers, who are all older than him, watching their assigned charges, all working in pairs carefully selected for balancing personalities and psychological traits. He keeps checking his psi-tablet, as if looking through a guidebook. He stands up, checks his watch, sits again. His eyes are tired, and his ocher Keeper's apron is rumpled and spattered with globs of myriad yellow and brown hues.

“Hello? Mr. Gorovsky, right?”

“Um. Yes. Apollo.” He shakes my hand. His fingers are soft, his grip is rather limp. It does not match his listed profile.

“My name is Hana. I'm here to ask how you've been doing since your partner's Retirement.”

He looks askance at me. Not at all subtly, he is noting the emitter pattern of my Implant. “Um, you don't look like a Behavioralist.”

“I'm not.” I try to work my smile a little more, with teeth, and try to front-load my subconscious with happy, neutral thoughts of trends and graphs and statistical equations. “I am conducting a preliminary study on the cost-effectiveness of the Behavioralists' child-rearing protocols. Naturally, I am relying on your discretion—the bureau would be displeased about a lowly number cruncher trying to grade them.”

His face eases into a melancholy smile. “Since you're not with
them,
maybe I'll be willing to talk. I too will rely on your secrecy. I could get in trouble, you know.” His sighs are short and pinched and frequent, as though compressed out of him bit by bit. “I already am, kind of.”

“How so?” I have a spare tablet out and a stylus, and I'm projecting my best, trustworthy self, the facial manifestations and posture from back when I was a student interviewing random subjects in the field for a school report.

I have on my old clothes from then too—a blouse that is, perhaps, too tight across the chest now, and a skirt that was not as short then as it has become. I have youthful, flirty, cherry-shaped earrings dangling and swinging, and my hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Put together, I had hoped it might take a few years off my appearance, or at least distract this young fellow out of his caution. Barrens had been rather amused at my go-getter fashion choices and said so, before I took off on the day's venture.

Maybe it was working, or maybe it would not have made a difference. Gorovsky seems to have been waiting for a chance to unburden himself because I barely have to prompt him to get a flood of complaints and woe-is-me.

“If only they did not retire Sasha so soon! It is overwhelming, doing this alone when I am still learning. The substitutes, they mean well, but since they are rotated through, there isn't a chance to bond.” He goes on. The baby keeps waking him up at odd hours. He forgets which formula to use at which time of day. He makes mistakes balancing the protein profile of the milk. “It would not be so terrible if I was just allowed to message Sasha to, you know, ask for advice, to get a pep talk. That sort of thing. But contact with Retirees is prohibited for everybody.

“What's worse is I had no chance to prepare for her Retirement. Behavioralist Central just tells me I must have missed the notice. And in a week, I am being assigned two more babies to raise.… I don't know if I can do this alone!”

The bell in the bell tower rings, announcing that it is noon.

White-walled compounds open their gates, releasing children seven to nine years old from their morning classes, and they amble along the roads and paths back to their homes, where their Keepers are waiting for them. The noon sun is high overhead and warmer; it makes the brilliant blue-glazed tiles atop the pagodas of the archways and towers of the school centers glitter like the sea.

In the distance, the towering black cubes of the vertical farms hiss as hundreds of exterior panels close or open as needed to get the proper amount of light on the various crops being raised within them and to regulate the humidity and the temperature. Green cracks appear and disappear across the black surfaces, and white mist and foam sprays out of the different-salinity ocean, lake, and river tanks on the fishery floors. I can hear a few of the other Keepers in the park explaining this to their wards, and about how all our food is raised in those buildings.

Gorovsky is still unburdening. “My requests for a new permanent partner just get automated responses. I don't understand at all—everyone else tells me that a Keeper's Retirement is planned for months ahead, so that there's no problem getting children prepped, and so that a proper replacement can be phased in. Sasha was gone so quick, and the baby, little Zaide here, does not sleep soundly without her.”

Zaide starts to cry and Gorovsky pops in and cradles him carefully, rocking him and murmuring soothing syllables statistically determined to calm a majority of babies. He focuses power, a pale green glow around his silvery lips, and
writes
sleep onto the baby until it takes effect and he can return the boy to the carriage.

“Does he need a diaper change? Is he hungry?”

Gorovsky sighs and shakes his head. “No, and no. I think it's because I mentioned, you know, that name. He is bright, and very sociable. I think he will be quite the
reader
—he formed the bond with, well, with her, very quickly.”

“Tell me about her last few weeks. Was there anything strange at that time?”

He is puzzled. “Strange?”

“Was there perhaps an unannounced evaluation? Was there anyone new that joined your circle, and then left just as she did?”

Those chrome lips twist. “You think central was watching us and found something … wrong … with her?”

“I'm not suggesting—”

“Because that would just, just be so unfair! Sasha”—with that, the baby was awake and crying again, and Gorovsky had him up in his arms once more—“Sasha was good to me, and to Zaide. She was so devoted! She did everything like the manuals and our training suggest. It is not her fault her crèche-sister got sick. She just did what any crèche-mate would do, helping out. She didn't spend that many hours away from us.” His eyes roll back in their sockets. The baby wakes again, upset as Gorovsky goes stiff and unresponsive.

Is this a mistake? Should Barrens be asking the questions?

Gorovsky returns from his memory scan. “No, I'm sorry, there was nothing out of the ordinary. I wish there was. Maybe I would understand it better if there was some reason. One Tuesday, Sasha went out to pick up our allocation of protein powders. And she never came back. Just a message from Central telling us that she was Retired on schedule as previously announced. Retired! She's only been a Keeper for a year. I wish I could just talk to her.…”

He is crying, and the Keepers around us look on incredulously. I take Zaide from him and warble out a few, clumsy notes. The boy places both hands on my jaw and peers up at me. It is like being tested. I suppose Zaide does not disapprove too much, as he does calm down, eventually, curling up in my arms.

A weight is inside me, sinking deeper. I remember again the hollowness. It is not something Barrens can fill, however much affection he gives me.

Long minutes pass, but Gorovsky does recover himself before another Keeper can approach and offer assistance. He takes Zaide back and sighs and kisses the boy.

“You would have made a decent Keeper yourself,” Gorovsky says to me, and now I am the one grappling with my emotions. That is exactly the worst thing he could have said.

We talk some more about this and that and nothing, and for the form of it, I get some numbers out of him about how many hours Sasha spent at which locations, about how Zaide's metrics charted before her “Retirement” and how the little devil is testing now.

It has not been a waste of time, but I wanted more than this. The urge to stamp my feet and vanish into a memory of a cat that loves playing in boxes strikes. It is not nothing. This man's grief, his misery, is as real as my own. He just does not know all there is to know, all the things that might make it worse.

Would it help him if he knew that it was possible Sasha died a violent, gruesome end?

I am getting all twisted up inside. Are we fooling ourselves, seeing more than there is to see? Self-important, ordinary people who want to believe we see a deeper reality than there is? But Barrens's memory is real, and the legend of Mincemeat in the dark reaches of the Nth Web has been around since before Callahan's death. I believe in this society; I have to, it is the only human society left. I cannot have it be tainted by the thought of some twisted creature preying on us with impunity.

The park's gardeners tromp out for their midday duties. They are low-level
touch
talents, men and women in brown with passable telekinesis but not much of a head for anything. So they spend the majority of their productive lives wearing dun jumpsuits and pushing amplifier carts along, using their power with nearly automated scripts that others programmed for them. In their wake, grass is automatically cut with a dim crackle and gathered up in the holding bags on their carts, together with dead leaves and assorted litter from inconsiderate crewmates. The carts also scan the soil and surrounding plants and trees and, as required, deposit micro-pellets that maintain the desired soil chemistry. Once a week the gardeners wear backpacks with trimmer amplifiers to touch up the bushes and prune the trees, and once in a while, they plant seedlings.

TKs of slightly greater ability work in the vertical farms.

I drift along, thinking of those men and women working the farms, barely paying attention to Gorovsky by the time I wrap up my first interrogation and leave the park.

Twenty minutes later, Barrens slides through the crowd to my side when I am halfway up Yamato 3Street.

“Great chowder place at the corner, partner.”

“You look cheery.”

“Every piece is another piece of the puzzle. Not all that was useless, right?”

Just most of it. “Chowder? With clams?”

He laughs and puts an arm around me. “With some imagination, guess you can tell that the bits of compressed bean curd are supposed to taste clam-ish. It's good anyway, creamy, thick. Didn't really think you'd get talk about some mysterious, scary guy following his Keeper partner around, did you?”

No, but I hoped for it. My grumbling amuses Barrens, changes the character of his smile, but from the way the other customers in the little corner restaurant back away from us, this expression looks even more dangerous on him than his default, stony impassiveness. This is the patient side of him, the waiting predator, scenting out the prey's trail. While I think about whatever this is out there, possibly only days or weeks away from vanishing someone else, Barrens keeps his mind on what it is we can do next. He does not get distracted by what we have no control over.

We have chowder and it is good. A crackle of false thunder carries through the air, and rushing, we make it back to his place just as the rain starts to pour.

His apartment is part of a complex of tiny sleeping chambers. The kitchens, showers, and locker rooms are shared facilities.

The wind sweeps the rain in waves that splash hard against the lone porthole in his coffin apartment that looks out on the city. It calms my frustrations, as do the hours Barrens spends at my side, sometimes touching, sometimes kissing, mostly just listening to the tinny voices and old classics on his half-size Nth Web terminal.