The Forever Watch Page 8

  “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.

  To watch through that lone window in his private space, I have to stay on my knees. There is not enough room to stand. For a giant such as Barrens, it must feel like a cage, terribly constricting. But he never seems to mind, and when we spend the night together, he prefers the confines of this cell to my spacious quarters. It is cozy here, I guess.

  While he sleeps, I watch the lights of the city for a while, ghostly through the mist, blurred, bright streaks of supply trucks and a few private cars along the aerial bridges flying from tall tower to tall tower. The granaries and warehouses next to the dark, hulking cubes of the vertical farms are slender towers of gossamer webs climbing up to the top of the dome, birdlike, the wings around the globular storage eggs actually part of the transport system that delivers the raw produce to the factories in the underlevels, and to the markets across the Habitat. Red and yellow spotlights stretch out into the darkness, proximity indicators to warn off the ever-present Enforcers that flit across the city skies in their glowing flight rigs, watching for who knew what, always watching. I see a handful of them shoot to the horizon, burning fireflies plunging into the dark mouth of the distant air-lock gate that leads to the far sections of the Habitat. The larger, dragonfly-like ornithopter rigs of the police patrols, slower, less agile, try to follow. It starts to rain again.

  “Wonder where they’re going in such a hurry?”

  Barrens stirs and turns onto his belly, murmurs something about a fire. He winces and twitches and bares his teeth.

  Under his threadbare blankets, it is warm enough for me, curled up against him, and I suppose that it is not the worst way for my first day of “detective work” to end. But I feel a little guilty being content. How many other Apollos are out there, wondering why someone important to them vanished?

  I think of what it would be like if I lost Barrens now, never knowing for sure what happened to him. I grab hold of a tree-trunk arm and hang on, suddenly afraid, and sleep is a long time coming.

  It’s always stories. A friend of a friend. Third-hand mention of the people who are “disappeared” by ISec. But I know it happens. I know the facilities exist; I’ve seen the power requirements for them. Much more than Mincemeat, I am afraid of those faceless figures in the gray coats.

  7

  The first downpour marks the fade of summer into fall. Weather protocols modify the lighting, heating, and humidifying procedures through the Habitat sections. It rains every evening, a product of water vapor collected at the condensers at the top of the Dome, and augmented with the condensate from the ponds, streams, lakes, and micro-oceans of the fisheries and biomes. It helps keep the air flowing through large spaces of the Dome, as well as washing the surfaces of the buildings free of the accumulated dust and salts. The luminosity of the sky is reduced during the shortened daylight hours, and to compensate, “interior” lighting is increased.

  At City Planning, everything is constantly changing, yet nothing changes. Hennessy still pokes fun at me and tries to bribe me with food. Stephen Wong, trainee, still confuses form F-33A with F-33E and makes up for such occasional mistakes with youthful enthusiasm. Julia still complains to me about how lazy Nestor is in documenting the project proposal they have been working on forever. Charles and Antonia continue their on-again, off-again almost-relationship. Lita, Erica, and Manuel still drink too much on the weekends and come in red-eyed and hungover on Mondays. Hester Merced, our tier supervisor, still looms over the whole department with her powers of approving or disapproving. It is all forgettably ordinary, the minor disagreements and fights. There are always more meetings about equilibrium and efficiency and proposals and different cliques trying to one-up each other.

  Though it has won approval, the new procedure for water treatment is still winding its way through the bureaucracy. Resources from elsewhere have to be freed up for it. Schedules need to be designed. Marcus is in Water Management and won’t have any say in it until it is time for implementation, but already he spends at least an hour a week going through the procedure and looking for possible conflicts that might arise from parallel processes in the system that also deal with the same variables.

  My job is made up of these small details, finding them, analyzing them, managing them.

  That was almost my whole world before Breeding Duty punched me loose from the Hana-shaped hole I fit into.

  When we are together, Barrens is as sweet to me as he can be. I guess we will always draw odd looks when we are out together, but I’ve stopped caring.

  My officemates still don’t understand. Except for Hennessy, who gives me these knowing grins and asks me if my man is as savage in bed as he looks. The rest look at me with disbelief when their eyes catch the static 2-D image of his face on my desk, snarling his best, fiercest smile.

  Beyond work, there is the quest for Mincemeat.

  My distributed program spreads and grows. It accumulates probable and improbable matches, and Barrens and I check through them, one by one. He is quickly picking up how to create subgroups in the swarm and specialize them to search for other possibilities, other signs of data manipulation. He finds the data-mining swarm fascinating and calls it Hunter, talks to it as he puts in his own little coding tweaks. Both of us are still required to put in our normal levels of performance at our respective jobs.

  We interview others. We find little we did not already know. A grind of weeks passing with little progress. A few moments of tension when we find others on the Web, collectors of hideous things, who sell us Mincemeat memories of a few who have come across the death scenes and are willing to find more for us. They change their access regularly and are nearly as hard to find
as we are, on the Web. They promise us more, if we have the money. Creepy people who like to experience real horror for fun, with names like Ms. Smoke or Mr. Paper.

  They sell us a handful of real memories, too unbearably vivid and bloody to be faked. But the meta-details embedded in the data are confusing and impossible, spanning too much time. All I can do is enter the new parameters into the targeting for Hunter and see how it refines the search.

  Barrens can tell that I need a break from this. He tells me not to be impatient, reminds me that Callahan spent years to accumulate what he had. It is not as if Barrens expected Mincemeat to be found in the confines of a two-hour movie.

  His birthday approaches, and we decide on a picnic.

  Still, the urge is consuming. I need to be doing something important, something larger than myself. I try to fine-tune my data-miner during every free moment. The midnight before our date, Barrens stares at me tapping away at the desk terminal in my miniature office at the apartment. He picks me up out of the chair, ignoring my protests, and carries me on his shoulder.

  “I want my present, I do. Drop that tablet and close off your developer kit already.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “You’ll get a spanking, you will.” He gets a little shriek out of me when he claps his hand against my butt.

  “I give, I give!”

  And I do. I give quite a lot.

  I can’t quite help myself though. When he falls asleep, I go back to my terminal and tablet and fiddle with the code some more. I fall asleep there.

  In the morning, Barrens groans when I insist that we do an update/download while we are out. “Fine! But you’re not analyzing nothing until after my birthday.”

  We pack up the food and he tries to keep me talking about other things. Even on the train, though, I end up talking about my program with him, in our heads, over Implant-to-Implant messaging. I would prefer a mind-to-mind link, but Barrens doesn’t have any reading at all, and my talents aren’t enough to sustain a telepathic connection with one who has none. We keep it up all the way to the Forest biome.