Kelley Eskridge (33 page)

“Oh, I'm thinking about it,” Crichton said
evenly. “But you're in no shape to negotiate with me right now. Go to
sleep.” There was a click and then nothing: Jackal listened to the

bzzz
of the open line for almost
five
seconds before she realized that Crichton was no longer there.

She'd known in her head that she was
tired, but telling Crichton had made her body realize it too. She
weighed too much, and it seemed like a very long way from her brain to
her legs. She chivvied herself into the kitchen with the promise of a
sandwich, but she could only muster the energy to gum down a slice of
turkey. Then she climbed into bed and nestled Frankenbear on the pillow
next to her, where she might see his loyal lopsided face when she woke
up. She would sleep, and then she would go to Solitaire and have some
food and tell Scully all about her interview. Perhaps Estar would be
there. They could make plans for another dinner. Jackal wanted to see
all the walls in Estar's house, all the beautiful and frightening and
unfathomable corners of Estar's brain. She wanted to stride into
Solitaire beside Estar and drink a bit too much wine, be just a little
dangerous. Maybe that was wrong to want; or maybe it would simply be
nice to have some fun for a change.

She dreamed of the investiture at Al
Iskandariyah: Stang Karlsson introduced her as the leader of projects
that would shape the future, and voices across the earth roared their
approval; she was the star of the show, the favorite daughter of the
world, and everyone loved her again.

She was more tired than she thought: she
slept well into the predawn hours, and then had to get up and eat right

now
, her hunger so sharp that she
fell on whatever came to hand in the kitchen—three slices of turkey, a
fistful of pickles, a quarter cup of leftover white rice—until she felt
able to think a bit more clearly. Then she made a cup of tea. Solitaire
would be closed, and she was too wound up to go back to sleep, so she
watched three hours of an overnight marathon video series she'd never
heard of, about a dysfunctional family running a boarding house along
the Yangtze River. Possibly because of her fatigue and the late hour,
she found the program almost unbearably funny. When she finally crawled
into bed, the sun was coming up: she dropped into sleep like a lead
sinker into still water.

She spent the morning and afternoon
weaving back and forth between deep sleep and an almost-waking state
that never loosened its grip enough for her to become fully conscious.
By the time she surfaced, it was late afternoon and she felt wrung out
and apathetic. She sent Scully an e-mail about the reference and told
him she would see him tomorrow.

She checked the web sites before she went to
the club, and indeed, there was a long article by Razorboy:

Segura Steps IN at Solitaire
.
He'd
done a
fairly objective job of describing Scully's aftershock, and he made
Jackal's response sound positively heroic as opposed to the simple
stopgap measures she'd actually taken.

He'd also posted a picture of her and
Estar on their way up the stairs to the solo level, captioned only with

Estar Borja and Jackal Segura at
Solitaire
.
It had been copied over to other sites with less flattering
descriptions:
Lady Butcher Trades Tips
With
Killer Hope!
was undoubtedly her least favorite. She should
start having a word with some of these people.

She stopped outside Estar's gate for a few
uncertain moments, shuffling in the cold air that was spiced with
jasmine and the mélange of muffled music from within. Then she
rang the bell, waited, rang again. Finally she went on.

Solitaire was unusually full, and she
wondered if she would find a place to sit. She checked upstairs: Estar
wasn't there, and she didn't want a dark corner to herself. But it
seemed that celebrity had its rewards: back downstairs, two strangers
each stood her to a beer, and someone else gave up his stool so that
she could sit and talk to Scully in half-sentences as he bustled up and
down the length of the counter. She wanted to tell him about the
interview, but the crowd made her shy, and he was busier than a grove
of grasshoppers.

“And here's another offering from a fan
who prefers to remain anonymous. They don't know whether to throw
themselves at your feet or run away,” he said, placing a third beer
before her.

“Scully, this is weird.”

“You're used to being famous.” He didn't
sound very sympathetic.

“Okay, maybe I am. But I'm not used to
being Most Admired for Casualty Rate, or whatever it is these people
are goobing on.”

He said, almost jovially, “You committed
the second biggest mass murder of the last forty years. You're a
six-year VC veteran. You're establishing a rapport with the most
notorious solo on the books. They wonder if you're going to turn out
like her. I wonder too.” He went on before she could respond, “And then
you turn around and perform a small-scale humanitarian act. It's the
combination that's got them excited. If I could get you to take your
clothes off and dance on a table, I'll bet my business would double for
a year. Or maybe you could punch an obnoxious tourist. Didn't you break
some guy's nose once? Blood on the floor, then we'd see some real
money. You can be my secret retirement plan.”

He chuckled and went off to serve the next
ten people in line as she stared at him, open-mouthed and dismayed. He
must have sensed it, because he turned back, pointed a just-a-moment
finger at the would-be drinkers, and leaned one arm on the counter to
say, “Jackal, either you take this stuff with a sense of humor or you
take it totally seriously—the VC, the aftershocks, the violence, the
disaffiliation from most of society, the complete fuckup of your life.
So you choose whatever you want; I've been thinking about it a lot
today, and I choose to laugh. And thanks again for talking to me, and
for listening, it really helped. Hey, do you want to have some coffee
and cheesecake after the bar closes? I promise, you don't have to do
any work. It would be nice to have the company.” He took her hand and
held it for just a moment; then he went back to the line with some
cheerful comment for the next customer.

Yeah, well, you sure weren't laughing last
night, she almost said to his back, and felt a thick, choking dislike
for him. She looked around at the crowd: the solos like matchflames,
blazing brightly but so small; the watchers, their clever knowing eyes
measuring the burn. And then there were the tourists, thrilled by a
dash of danger in their lives. She understood in a cynical flash where
the power was in this room. They make us real, she thought, it's
because of them that we're solos and mysterious and exotic. Without
them we'd just be a bunch of criminal failures with parts of our brains
turned to cottage cheese; and so they get to eat us little by little,
like moose at the salt lick. She realized that each person in the room
had positioned themselves so that if she moved, they would notice. They
had oriented themselves to her the way she'd seen them do with Estar,
with Duja McAffee who had horrible scars on his arms and neck from one
of his own napalm devices. Did that explain the odd look that Duja had
given her when she said hello? Was she in some kind of misunderstood
competition for the top slot on the solo “A” list? It made her
claustrophobic: what a miserable thing to be doing with her life.

She turned to slide off the stool and met
the eyes of one of Razorboy's retinue sitting quietly next to her, a
young latina with bad acne and shocking pink hair. “Drake, right?”
Jackal guessed, and the young woman's eyes widened with surprise and
wary delight.

“Tell me something,” Jackal said, leaning
a little too close, “when you die, are you going to look back and think
gee, I wish I'd spent more time at Solitaire watching broken people
huddle in corners trying to hold on to some semblance of a life? Or are
you smarter than that? How old are you anyway?” It was a rude question,
rudely asked, and she didn't care: she was full of heat and ready to
howl. “How old are you?”

“Um…twenty-two?”

“Twenty-two. You know how old I am?”

Drake shook her head: no.

“Yeah, I'm not sure either anymore. But
let's pretend that I'm old enough to tell you that this isn't a life
you're having here, this is just a pale reflection of something you
should run screaming from. Life is out there. Go get some.”

Drake looked at her blankly. Jackal
sighed. “Forget it.” She had one foot on the floor when Drake put out a
hand, not quite touching Jackal's arm. “What?” Jackal snapped.

Drake pulled her hand back and circled it
in front of her as if it would help her find the right words.
“I…you…no, wait. Please, I really want to say this to you.”

Oh hell, she'd said please. Jackal sat.

It seemed that Drake had used up her
courage in the one moment of eye contact; she looked at the floor and
spoke so softly that Jackal was forced once again to lean in.

“I've been coming here for nine months and
you're the first solo that ever knew my name. I'll bet you're the first
one that ever even really looked at me, you know? You probably don't
know what that's like 'cause you've been famous all your life, but it's
really hard and all. I'm not trying to get you to feel sorry for me,”
she rushed to add, with an intense, shallow dignity that Jackal
recognized from her own last confused months as a Hope. And she did
empathize, so she clamped down on the urge to say any number of
ill-tempered things like, okay, I've seen you, can I go now? Or, are we
getting to the point sometime tonight?

“It's just that you're different. So maybe
you don't know that a lot of life is really lonesome and mean. I
already get that, you know, I don't need to go back out and get some
more. It's okay here. I fit in. I'm a watcher, I know how to act with
solos, people respect me. I got a good web site. You're on it a lot. I
don't know if you ever looked at it.” Now she was shy and vulnerable.

“I've seen it. It's nice.” She was glad it
was the truth, because Drake asked eagerly, eyes up, “What did you like
best?”

“I like that you talk about what you see
but you don't make assumptions about what it means. You're really
careful to separate out the facts from your opinions about people.”

Drake thought about that. “And that's
good?”

“Yes, it is.”

Drake nodded. “Okay. Well, I'll keep doing
it then.” Then she opened her fingers and grabbed handfuls of air as if
the words she wanted were flying like moths around her. “See, this is
what I'm trying to talk about. I thought you would say how you liked
the design or the photos. But instead you talk about this other stuff.”
She was bouncing up and down in tiny bursts in her seat, trying to
catch the thoughts. “You're different. It's why I watch you all the
time now. You're not like Duja or Estar or even Jeanne Gordineau,
they're all more scary than you but it's like that's all they are. They
just walk around being scary. But you know things. Last night when
Scully went down, you knew exactly what to do. You bossed everybody
around.”

“What I did wasn't special,” Jackal said
gently. “Anybody could have done it.”

“Nobody ever has before,” Drake said
simply. “I've seen aftershock like a million times and I never knew
what to do. But next time I will. And I'll put it up on my site, too.
I'll say to get the person in a safe place and try to make it so
they'll be comfortable when they wake up, and then take over whatever
they were doing if it needs to get done. Is that right?”

“That sounds fine,” Jackal said, still
gentle, watching Drake work her way through to this new place.

“That's why I watch you most of all. You
do things. You're not mean and you're not scared.”

Jackal made a face; Drake said, firmly
enough to surprise Jackal, “If you don't act scared or mean then that's
what counts to the people watching.” Then Drake surprised her even more
by saying, “This conversation we're having, can this be private? I
mean, just between us.”

“That would be fine.”

“Cy and Razorboy will want to know what we
talked about. I'll bet they're dying over there, we don't know anyone
who's ever talked to a solo like this. But I just want to think about
it for a while.”

“I don't mind if you don't talk about it,”
Jackal said. “You should do whatever you think is right. I have to go
now, okay?” She caught Scully as he stopped to reach into a hanging
basket for a banana and a lime. “I'll be back before closing. See you
later.”

“Great,” he grinned, and she found that
she remembered how to like him. She looked back at Drake, who was
sitting up a little straighter on the stool with her pink hair blazing
like a tuft of cotton candy at the summer fairs that Jackal had dragged
her father to every year of her childhood. People are amazing, she
thought, but to Drake she only said, “Thanks for talking to me.”

Drake smiled. “Sure. Maybe…” But her
courage skittered away again and her eyes went down. Jackal was
relieved. “Well, anyway, bye,” Drake said.

“Good night.”

Marginal Way was empty. An icy sodden wind
from the canal chilled her hands and the back of her neck as she walked
south toward Perdue. She passed Estar's gate; then she stopped and
turned back to try the bell one more time. Was the music a bit louder?
She was tired and knew that staying up late was stupid; her sleep cycle
was already so far out of alignment that she would probably have to
resort to melatonin. Did they sell that here? There was so much she
still didn't know about the city, the NNA, this new universe to which
she'd been consigned. She pushed the bell again. Damn it, I know you're
there, she thought irritably, ignoring her own advice to go home and
sleep and apologize to Scully tomorrow for standing him up.