Kelley Eskridge (38 page)

Jackal said, “We really need to get going.”

Estar tipped her head to the side and
smiled up at Jackal. “Of course you do. You have serious things to
discuss with this snowflower of yours. But because we are comrades, and
because I am interesting and somewhat tragic, you will give me the
favor of fifteen minutes of your time. Besides, I have something
special for you.”

It's okay, Snow's face said.

“Fifteen minutes.”

Estar left them in a room deep within the
house, a small space, intimate rather than confining, with the usual
conglomeration of expensive furniture and fine rugs, color and scent,
and some unfortunate music with indecipherable lyrics and multiple
clashing guitars. The painting she had spoken of was another of her
wallsized murals. In it, a woman had just launched herself from a
mountain cliff over a vertical drop of brown and gray rock bordered by
greenbelt; far below her was a village, an old stone church surrounded
by slate-roofed houses. The woman's arms were spread, her face lifted,
so that it was not clear whether she was falling or flying.

“The inside of her head is very different
from mine,” Snow commented. But when Estar returned with three large
bell-bowled glasses on a tray, Snow told her, “It's beautiful. It's as
if you've painted adrenaline and something else—hope?—in with the brush
strokes.”

“Another poet. I'm glad you like it. Here,
drink this interesting wine.” She handed a glass to Jackal, and one to
Snow. “To visions,” she said. Jackal wasn't entirely sure she wanted to
drink to that, given what she knew of Estar's thoughts on the subject,
but she mentally crossed her fingers and raised the glass. The wine was
good, if a bit sharp.

“Mmm,” Snow said. “Lovely.”

“Not as nice as your wine from Scully.”

“It's different, but good. Very smooth.”

Jackal drank again.

“Sit down for a minute and let me tell you
about Mondarruego. It is a grandmother of a mountain, with many of its
bones showing. This village that cowers beneath it is Torla…”

Jackal sipped her wine and let herself
drift. The voices faded into a background hum. It was nice to relax, to
feel pleasantly heavy and calm. Her mouth was a bit dry: she drank
again, rolling the tang and the tannin around her tongue before
swallowing slowly.

She heard her own name. “Let us see how
Chacal is doing, shall we?” Estar's voice seemed far away.

So did Snow's. “We've already stayed past
time. She's tired. We should go now. Jackal? Let's go.”

She tried obligingly to raise herself from
the couch, but she couldn't seem to make her arms and legs work
properly. “What's wrong?” she heard Snow say, and then Snow

oofed
and Estar said, “Sit there
while
Chacal and I have a little chat. I need to talk with her about
something, and then you can go wherever you like. No,
stay there
.”

Snow made another, weaker noise, and was
silent.

Estar settled herself beside Jackal. The
music evolved into a single guitar seemingly searching for the highest
audible note it could find.

“What's happening?” Jackal said.

“We never finished our talk about why you
are not like other solos. It's a mystery, and I dislike mysteries.
There are enough unanswered questions in my world that I do not
willingly make room for more. So I brought you here to finish our
conversation.”

“I don't want to talk about that.”

Estar stroked Jackal's forehead; her hand
was cool and dry on Jackal's skin. “I know you don't. You're afraid.
But I have given you something to make you brave. Don't fight it, it
won't hurt you. No, don't fight.”

She wanted to, but she couldn't. All her
muscles felt as if they belonged to someone else.

“Now,” said Estar, “you were talking as
you came out of aftershock in my house two days ago. You said, ‘I found
the door.’ Explain what that means.”

Her brain no longer had control of her
mouth, which answered on its own, “I found the door back to Ko.”

“Explain.”

“Ko is a global multi-corporation with
impact on approximately seven point four percent of the world's
economy. It's based—”

“Stop,” Estar said testily. “Explain to me
what the door back to Ko is, and what it has to do with your virtual
confinement.”

As Estar leaned in, the soft green fabric
of her shirt pulled creamy and rich across her shoulders and breasts:
Jackal watched the play of light and shadow across the material while
her mouth talked easily on, not resisting at all, as if it were happy
to reveal the knowledge that Jackal had been guarding so fiercely; the
secrets that she had made the center of her world.

Her mouth said, “After a while in VC I
went mad.” Estar only shrugged; but Jackal heard Snow make a small, sad
sound. “So I had to try to fix myself as best I could, but I was
changed, and one of the changes was that I broke down the wall in my
cell and stepped out and on the other side was Ko. A virtual Ko. It was
all there. Just like the real one but with no people.” She did not need
Estar's urging to go on: now that the gate was open, the things she had
kept silent were eager to push through and have their turn in the
light. “I was there for over a year. I didn't want to come back.”

“And what did you do for a year in this Ko
of yours?” Estar's voice was soft and emotionless.

“Everything. I did everything. I rode my
bicycle. I watched the birds swoop over the ocean. I made the day and
the night. I was as big as the world.” She shook her head. “I was free.
Just being myself. Not Jackal the good web mate or Jackal the bad Hope.
Just me. Just Jackal Segura. It was amazing. It was…” She discovered
that she was crying; she blinked up at Estar through watery eyes.
Estar's face was like marble, cold and still and intent.

“It's not like that here,” Jackal said. It
was important that Estar understand. “I don't know how to be that
Jackal in the real world. And then I had that aftershock outside your
house and something clicked into place like a gear in my head, and I
knew how to get back. I made a door in my cell and I walked out.” She
smiled through her tears: her voice was thicker now. “I was on the
beach on the south end of Ko just before I woke up, it was early
evening, warm, I was barefoot and I could taste salt when I breathed
and I was big again, as big as the world…”

“And how did you make this door?”

“Big as the world. Big big big…”

“Chacal!”

“I'm tired. Let me sleep, I'm tired.”

“You can sleep as soon as you tell me how
this thing is done.”

“Wouldn't you like to know?” She felt
slyly pleased with her clever answer. “Crichton wants to know too. She
pushes and pokes but I'm not telling her. Never never. Can't tell
anyone.” She peered at Estar. “I can't tell anyone.” That was stupid;
wasn't she telling Estar? “You can't tell anyone,” she amended. There,
that would take care of it. “If they knew I was editing on-line, they'd
dig tunnels in my brain and there'd be no more me left. No more
Jackal.” Her chin trembled, and snot made a slimy trail along the
corner of her mouth. “Estar, don't make me do this.”

“Tell me how you make this door.”

“I don't know! I don't know how I do it.
If I knew, I would tell Crichton and she would tell the techs and they
wouldn't need me, they would leave me alone. Hah. That's funny, leave
me alone.”

“Chacal, you must tell me. Look at me!”

Jackal compressed her mouth into a
straight line, like she remembered doing as a child to exasperate her
mother, and shook her head exaggeratedly.

Estar looked at her for a moment. “

Muy bien
,” she said. “Then we
must
find
some other way to encourage you.”

She shifted her weight, rose from the
couch: a gust of cool air swirled in behind her. Jackal closed her
eyes. Her internal voice was locked behind a door somewhere at the back
of her brain, pounding with staccato fists, horrified at what was
happening: but that didn't matter. She had to answer Estar's questions;
it was necessary. I've always done what was necessary, she thought; I
should have been doing what was right. She suddenly understood what
Snow had been trying to tell her earlier.

And there was Snow now, standing before
her. She was more pale than Jackal had ever seen her. “You were right,”
Jackal said earnestly. “I have to stop waiting for people to give me
things. I don't need someone to give me a job. I have the money from
Ko. I can make a project myself. I can do what I want. Is that okay, to
do what I want?”

Snow's face twisted. “Yes, honey,” she
said, sounding breathless, “yes, that's okay.”

And then Jackal saw that Estar stood
behind Snow, slightly to one side; her right arm reached around Snow's
ribs, and her left arm held Snow's left wrist so that Snow's arm was
pulled back. Estar's right hand held a long knife.

“Do you love this snowflake?” Estar said.

“Oh, yes,” Jackal said.

“Can you live without her?”

“Yes.” Snow did not move, but tears began
to run down her face. Jackal went on, “If I absolutely have to, I can
live without anyone except me. I know how to do that. I learned it in
VC.” She told Snow solemnly, “I erased you and that's why you shouldn't
love me anymore.”

Snow continued to cry without movement or
noise, a weeping statue with steel at her heart. Something's not right
here, Jackal thought; it was hard to work things out when she was so
tired.

Estar's hands shook, and the knife tip
wavered over Snow's diaphragm. She said, “I was in my cell for longer
than any of you and I know what it is to go mad from facing oneself.”
Her eyes rolled back slightly and she laughed, a terrible tight noise.
“Did you ever truly come face to face with yourself,

chacalita
? Did you ever turn one
day
with
an apple in your hand and meet yourself covered in blood from the knees
to the teeth, looking much as you might have done on a particular day
in your past? Do you know what it is to fall asleep with your
doppelganger hunched in the corner, to wake with her bloody voice
gurgling in your ear?”

“That's the crocodile,” Jackal said. “You
have to fight it, or it will eat you.”

“Too late,” Estar said, and smiled.

Jackal said, “I'm sorry the crocodile got
you, Estar. You are so beautiful and so much yourself. But that's how
it works. It's really not fair, you know.” She wished that she could
speak more clearly.

“It's not fair,” she said again. “After
everything, after the crocodile, when I was alone on Ko, I was so
happy. I liked myself there more than I ever have, more than I do now.…
But the real world is different.…” She tried to find the right way to
say it. “The world is full of people. We bang into each other like
beads in a bowl.” Estar made an impatient sound. “We have to learn to
make it all fit together. I have to find a way to be myself and still
let other people leave marks on me.”

That was sad, but it was true. “It's not
fair,” she repeated. She shook her head. “But there it is.”

“You find the way if you must,” Estar
said. “You are the fighter. You are the one who struggles against fate.
You are a light in our shadowy little corner of the world, Chacal, and
you do not even know that you shine. And you have what I need. I need a
world where even my crocodile cannot follow me. I want—oh, Chacal, I
want to walk on the beach while the motherwave gathers herself on the
horizon, and stand on the sand while she howls into shore and throws
herself over me. I want to sink and sink and never drown. I want to
make all my visions real and then tear them down and make them over
again. I want to be all the things I see within me. But I cannot do
that here. I try to remember that you other people are as real as me,
but often I forget and then it is too easy to hurt you. And then the
crocodile returns.” She made a shrugging gesture with the knife in her
hand as if to say,

You see
?

You don't want to hurt me, Jackal wanted
to say in fond exasperation, and then the drug loosened its grip
slightly, pulled one finger back from inside her brain, and she
thought, it isn't me she'll hurt. Snow is in terrible trouble.

“So you must tell me how you opened the
door,” Estar said, and pulled Snow's wrist higher behind her back; Snow
gasped.

“I broke myself open,” Jackal said
harshly. “I turned over every single rock inside myself and found all
the worms. And then I ate them. I took it all back in and then I took
it with me into the sunlight. And you can't do that. You don't have the
guts.”

There was silence.

“You may be right,” Estar said finally, in
a voice that was almost completely sane, without any overtones of
performance. “You may indeed be right. And if you are, then you have
made my point for me. If I cannot do it for myself, then you must. Now
tell me how to open the door before I disjoint this person that you
love.” She jerked Snow's arm up and Snow shrieked.

“Stop!” Jackal yelled as best she could in
her drug-roughened voice.

“Tell me!”

“Don't hurt her!”

“

Tell me
!”

Snow screamed and sagged to her knees. Her
arm looked wrong, and she was gasping, short shallow gulps of pain.
Estar let go, and the arm dropped: Snow screamed again, as much as she
could with no breath.

“It's only dislocated,” Estar said mildly.
“Now tell me what I want to know,

mi amiga
Segura, or I will cut it off.”

Jackal tried to think of what to say, and
she braced her weight against her hands to launch herself off the
couch. A shape appeared in the doorway behind Estar: Jane mouthed

Keep talking
as she moved slowly
into the
room.

“All right, Estar. All right. I'll tell
you. Please don't hurt Snow anymore. I'm sorry, I should have trusted
you. I want you to have your visions too. I understand. So here's what
you have to do. When you are in VC, you have to face the viewscreen,
and then you have to jump up and down and say, Door, door, open wide,
let my body go outside—”