Kelley Eskridge (26 page)

She thought she would go all the way to
the end this time and try to find a place to sit by the canal, a scrap
of grass or even a little park. It wasn't impossible: she'd found small
public parks scattered throughout the city, although none close by. It
would be nice to have a green space to walk to, with a bit of water to
slosh soothingly against the retaining wall when a tugboat went by. She
did not pay close attention to the buildings she passed; she had
already categorized them as warehouses or perhaps small manufacturing
operations, although now she noticed how quiet the street was, without
the mechanical rumblings and oily smells she'd expected. She passed a
blank-fronted building to her left with a large iron gate at the
entrance, and heard music, faint and muddled, somewhere inside. It made
her curious and more alert. Further along, she smelled something
baking, wheat and warm fruit and sugar, and her mouth flooded with
saliva. I want some of that, she thought, and realized with a small
shock that it was the first specific thing she'd actively hungered for
since she had come back from VC.

She followed the baking smell a third of
the way down the next block to a wooden structure of two or three
stories holding its ground between two taller buildings. The door was
propped open by a brick, and next to it was a sign framed in steel:

Solitaire

4pm to 2am

every day

Not a bakery, with those hours. A
restaurant then, or maybe a bar: there was a definite tang of hops
underneath the doughy smell that she was almost sure was

apfelstrudel
. She peered through
the
doorway, but could see nothing except a wide vestibule that led to
another door, also propped open. Through it drifted the soft echoes of
low music and muted voices.

Other people. Suddenly she wasn't so
inclined to go in. This was different from shopping conversations or
excusing herself when she bumped someone on the sidewalk; this was too
much like walking into the corporate conference room or any other place
where strangers would be noticed.

Oh, so that's what it was; being noticed.
She had been faceless since she came to the NNA. Maybe it wasn't time.
Maybe she should just go back to Shangri-La and wait a while longer
before she made herself visible in the world;

another
six years sounds about right
, her internal voice jeered. But
when she imagined herself boxed in her small safe space, it felt too
much like climbing back into her cell. She had to do better than that.

She took a deep breath and let it carry
her across the threshold and the entrance hall, shoulders back in the
old proud way, the Hope walk that had always helped when she was in a
new situation. Then she was through the doorway and inside.

It was as if she'd knocked over a bucket
and spilled Solitaire out in front of her. She stood in one corner of a
large rectangular space that flowed out over wood floors and up over
colorful walls to windows set near the ceiling. They doubtless looked
over an alleyway or the next street, but from inside they showed clean
slices of sky rather than the city that hunkered around them. She
thought the ceiling must also be glass, until she saw that the light
and clouds were painted, with the clear afternoon sky above her fading
in one direction to dusk and evening and night, and in the other to the
thin brilliant colors of summer dawn.

Small square tables were scattered across
the floor, each with a single armchair; more chairs were stacked in
tidy rows in the empty space just behind the doorway where she stood.
Several oversized booths lined up along the opposite wall, under the
windows. To her right, a dozen steps led up to a second level not quite
as long as the main floor, screened along its entire length by vertical
wooden shutters that reached high enough to give privacy without losing
the light from the windows. The louvers were open: she could see more
tables and chairs, and a padded bench running along the far wall. A
sign at the bottom of the stairs read

Private
.

The focal point for the color and light,
the trails of tables and chairs, was the bar that arced across the far
corner of the room. It had perhaps a dozen chair-backed stools fronting
it, and it pushed out into the room far enough to include a workspace
with a small grill and convection oven and refrigerator, as well as the
beer taps and the racks of bottles and glasses. Wire baskets of
drink-fruit dangled over the bar—lemons and limes, oranges,
bananas—interspersed with pin lights that pooled the long counter into
individual islands. The near end rounded into an order-and-pickup
counter; she could see a board with what she assumed was a menu, and a
datagem reader. Even empty as it was, the place felt comfortable and
welcoming. She liked it already.

At the center of the curved counter, two
people were talking. A man stood behind the bar, cloth in one hand,
busily drying and stacking glasses as he listened to the person who sat
on the stool opposite him, back turned to Jackal; she could see a very
long ivory shirt of soft flannel with a high collar under nape-length
straight dark hair, and elegant low-heeled boots under what looked like
the kind of olive-drab pants her

abuelo
had worn fishing, baggy and full of pockets, tough enough to resist
hooks and fish blood. The man nodded at something, still focused on his
work; he had a tanned, broad anglo face and blunt hands, brown hair
tied back. He turned and bent out of sight, standing up a moment later
with a bottle of wine that he used to refill the glass on the counter.

Beads of water ran from Jackal's wet head;
the man saw her when she moved her arm to wipe her face. The other
person turned; a woman, already half off the stool. “It's okay,” the
man told her calmly, holding out his left arm in a sit-down gesture.
And then, to Jackal, polite and impersonal, “I'm sorry, we're not open
yet.”

“Oh,” Jackal said. She felt the first
creeping of depression up the inside of her skull. “Okay. Um…” She
meant to ask, “What time is it now?” but what came out was, “When can I
come back?”

“An hour or so,” he answered. “Four
o'clock.”

She nodded and gathered her jacket around
her. She was about to turn and leave when she saw the wall at the far
end of the room.

“Oh,” she said, and moved forward for a
closer look, forgetting she was not welcome.

The wall was whitewashed, like a primed
canvas, with a rectangular grid laid across it. Some of the sections
were still blank; the others had been filled in different media. What
unified them was not style, but theme. One panel framed a charcoal
drawing, delicate and precise, of a human figure slumped in the corner
of an undefined space. Another panel was painted in the style of
Munch's

The Scream
, a raging swirl
of blue and green and gray and white; but this picture showed only a
head, mouth open in a howl, two ghost-gray hands plucking at the
temples and stretching the skin just to the moment of splitting. In the
second row of the grid, a clay mask of a stylized human face, features
only suggested, was trapped behind a set of gray bars. And in the lower
center of the wall, the image that had drawn Jackal forward: a crude
white shape of a face, stark against a black background, with the
contemptuous suggestion of mouth and nose, and where the eyes should
be, a broad black smudge that could be a blindfold or a window or a
wound.

It was as if someone had captured her very
worst days of VC and hung them up before her: the fear, the madness,
the despair, the stubborn endurance; the hopelessness, the inevitable
crumbling of herself. “Oh,” she said again and then she felt dizzy, the
air flashed, and the colors of the room grayed around her and there was
a terrifying wrench in her head—

—and she stood in her VC cell facing the
viewscreen as it cycled through its morphing faces. Adrenaline blasted
through her and she lost all breath and all she could do was turn,
turn, and it was as if she had never left, the larder and the bed and
the screen.

What…what
? She touched
the wall nearest her, tentatively, unbelieving. It was solid; so were
the others, and they did not give at all when she began to beat on them
with her fists, first incredulously and then in horror, whimpering
no, no
. But it was real, she was there,
with no doors, no windows, no way out and she yelled “What is happening
to me?”

—and another flash—

—and she blinked up at the man from
Solitaire who knelt over her, the painted ceiling above him like dusk
on Ko just before moonrise.

“It's okay, you're back,” he said.

“I don't…” She gulped down a breath and
started again, in a small voice, “I don't know what's real anymore.”
She felt slow tears on her cheeks.

His face twitched in sympathy. “It's all
right now. You're back. Just lie there until you get your bearings.”

When she was ready, he helped her to a
table. He gave her his bar towel to wipe her eyes, and pointed his chin
at her nose to let her know it was all right to blow it. She was
horribly confused and embarrassed. If she ever came here again, this
wasn't how she wanted to be remembered; and she wasn't even sure she'd
have the courage to return. Already she mourned the loss of this place.
“I'm sorry,” she managed. “You're closed. I'm okay now, I'll come back
later.”

“Never mind about the time, I thought you
were a tourist. You should have told me you were a solo.” He knelt down
beside her, looked at her more closely; took a breath, and his voice
changed. “Segura, right?”

She blinked.

Recognized
,
her internal voice skreeked,
run run run
!

“It's hard to tell without the hair.
Still, I should have known you.” And then he said the most astonishing
thing of all: “You're welcome here. Can I get you something to drink?”
And before she knew it, she found herself alone at the table with an
imperial pint of cool bitter ale, a baguette with a plate of soft goat
cheese, and a box of tissues. The man was back at the bar polishing
glasses; she hoped he was using a different towel. The woman was gone.
It was quiet except for the occasional bright clink of a glass on the
counter. Silence spread smooth through the room like the afternoon
light and the smell of baking apples, heavy and comforting.

She drank the beer slowly, enjoying its
bite and the contrast with the smoky cheese. She had two swallows left
when the man came back to the table.

“Mind if I join you for a minute?”

“Please.”

He pulled a chair to face hers. Before he
sat down, he said, “I'm Scully.”

“Jackal.” He had not put out his hand, so
she did not offer hers. He nodded, sat.

“Feeling better?”

She was, although her head ached fiercely.
She drank another swallow of beer. “I'm sorry about all that, I don't
know what happened to me.”

He startled her again. “It was a virtual
technology aftershock, by the look of it. First time?”

She nodded mutely.

“Big shiny flash and poof, back in your
cell?”

She nodded.

“Yep, classic aftershock. Everybody gets
them, it's one of the little residual benefits they don't tell you
about in your debrief. Lousy pricks.” He spent a moment looking off
into the middle distance. “The first time is scary. It'll almost
certainly happen again, but you always come back. Sometimes it takes a
while. You just have to keep telling yourself that it's only been a few
minutes in the real world and that you'll wake up soon.”

“It's happened to you?”

“Lots of times.” He looked bleak as he
said it.

He's like me. The thought was too big to
digest all at once. Of course there were other VC survivors, she'd been
on a cell block with a couple hundred of them, but this was different:
a man tending bar, a real person out in the real world; and he's like
me. She put the thought away for later.

“This is really good beer, thanks.”

“Don't thank me, you're running a tab.” He
smiled.

She smiled back. “Then I hope it's not as
expensive as it tastes. Can I have another?”

“One Redhook, coming up. From here on in
you'll need to order and pick up at the bar, I don't normally do table
service. And I brought you this, I'll put it on your tab as well.”

He handed her a skin meld the size of her
thumbnail; a tiny replica of the white face with the black slash. “The
bond is reversible if you don't want to wear it in public. Just use the
switch here on the side.”

She frowned at it: it was disturbing, and
she wasn't sure why she should put it on. “What's it for?”

“It's sort of the secret funny handshake
for solos. It's specially coded, so don't lose it; it's a pain, but we
get too many people trying to pass otherwise.” He looked at her
quizzically. “Didn't they have one?”

“Who?” She could feel her blink rate
getting faster again.

“Whoever sent you here.”

“Nobody sent me, I just…I was out walking…”

It was his turn to be shocked. “Tell me
you didn't just wander in here by accident.”

“I wanted to see if there was a place to
sit by the canal and then I smelled whatever it is that's baking. It
smelled like apple strudel.”

“It is. I'll save you a piece.” He rubbed
one hand across his forehead and gave her a lopsided grin. “My, my.
What are the chances? Okay, here's the drill. The main floor's open to
everyone, it's how I pay the rent, but the upstairs is private for
solos and their friends—” and he added cryptically, “—which I'm still
waiting for, but you never know.”

“What's a solo? Is that some kind of
slang?”

“Oh, my dear, where have you been hiding?”
He said it nicely, but she could tell he was nonplussed. “You're a
solo. You've participated on an involuntary basis in the Virtual
Technology Program that's now under the full control of
god-bless-the-NNA. We come in all flavors—virtual solitary confinement,
state-sponsored drug withdrawal, schizophrenia research, social
conditioning for non-employables who have run out their aid allotment,
terraforming simulations, terror studies using prisoner populations.
Other stuff that I can't think of right off the top of my head, but
you're bound to meet someone on the network who's been through it.