Kelley Eskridge (4 page)

Chao said “I think you do.” It wasn't a
challenge so much as a plain acknowledgment, and a promise to return.
“But we'll leave it for now,” she continued. “We'll talk more in a day
or two. I want you to do two things: first, you need to believe that
I'm here to help you. I'm completely in your corner. I'll do whatever
is necessary to make you all that you should be. Second, no more
hitting people. I recognize that you're under stress, but today was a
very serious breach of acceptable behavior. If someone is a problem,
come to me. I'll fix them.”

“No one's a problem,” Jackal said, her
mouth dry, imagining Chao turned loose on her mother. “I'm tense about
the investiture and I drank too much and made a stupid mistake then and
another one today. I'm sorry about it. There's no excuse. It's a web
matter, we'll sort it out there.”

“Fine, if that's what you want. In the
meantime, we'll schedule a stress management refresher for you. You'll
get an e-mail.”

“Fine,” Jackal said, with an inward sigh.
She hated those classes; they were silly and obvious and only made her
more angry. But if it was the price to keep this woman off her back,
then she would pay.

After the calm of Analin Chao's office, the
lobby of the executive building seemed stuffed with people; thousands
of them, moving purposefully in their business costumes as their
footsteps and voices ricocheted off the flagstone floors and the
six-meter-tall glass windows. Home was a half-hour ride across the
island. Jackal stopped, wondering if her bike was still in the park.

“Ms. Segura.” The guard had come up in her
blind spot. His polite, professional voice matched the shuttered face
and the body armor and the Ko Security insignia. “Dr. Chao has asked
that you be given an escort to the destination of your choice. If
you'll come with me.”

By now he would have registered her
swollen eyes and the brown blotches on her shirt. He had probably even
noticed her bleeding hangnail. He did not touch her, but gestured
across the atrium to a set of doors on the far wall. “There's a shuttle
van in the west parking lot.”

He stepped back slightly to let her walk
in front of him. It was important, that difference between following
and leading. In Al Iskandariyah she would follow a security escort,
depending upon them for her sense of location until she was fully
acclimated into the structure of the Earth Government. Then the balance
of power would shift so that she would only receive guidance if she
asked for it. But Ko was already her place; on Ko, she led. If the
guard thought she needed a wedge through the crowd, he would call for
support and then wait until the way was clear before al-lowing her to
proceed. But she never had a problem finding a path on Ko. Everyone got
out of her way. They smiled politely, maybe nodded, but they never
looked too long and they always stepped aside. The problem was that she
always had to know where she wanted to go.

People eddied between elevators and
escalators and the entrances of the atrium shops, the café that
served thick coffee and beignets and never closed. Everyone moved to a
purpose, except for one person leaning against a tiled wall near the
south tower elevators. Jackal looked again.

She barely noticed as the people-stream
opened a channel for her. She simply found the straight line between
her and Snow and started walking. Snow met her halfway and pulled her
close abruptly, without a word: Jackal stood with her head in the place
where Snow's overshirt hollowed against a sharp collarbone.

“How'd you know I was here?” she said
finally.

“I always know where you are.” Snow
squeezed her shoulder. “Bear called me. Come on, let's go.”

Jackal straightened and found the guard
right behind her. “It's okay. Snow will take me home.”

“I was told to accompany you.”

She gave him a look. “And I'm telling you
that Snow will take me home.”

“Ah. Of course. I'll inform Dr. Chao.”

“You do that,” Jackal said, and took
Snow's hand.

Snow hop-stepped to catch up. “He's only
doing his job.”

“Then he should learn when to stop doing
it.”

They pushed through the south door into
the thin light of the late afternoon. “The look,” Snow said, “really
works better with just one eyebrow.”

“You always say that. I can't help it if I
don't have the single-brow gene.”

“You seem to have the martial arts
recessive.”

Jackal sighed.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

And she did, desperately: wanted to open
her mouth and let the words fall out,
Hope
and
Ko
and
lies
.
And
I'm afraid
. Instead she looked
up to the daytime moon blooming over Esperance Park. “Not right now,”
she said.

“Do you want to go home?”

Jackal shook her head helplessly. “Don't
know what I want.”

“Doesn't matter,” Snow answered. “When we
start doing something you don't like, you can tell me.”

Jackal stayed quiet and let herself be led
to the parking lot. Snow bundled her into the passenger seat of a
dormitory car parked in the No Stop zone; Jackal's bike was wedged into
the trunk. Snow said, “Don't step on the bag,” and in a canvas backpack
on the floor, Jackal found two bottles of red wine and four messy
sandwiches clumsily wrapped in a kitchen towel.

“Mmm. Where are we going?”

“Well, I thought, it's a lovely December
afternoon. You just punched out a web mate and got yourself a
ten-second segment on twenty thousand Who's News broadcasts around the
world. We have corned beef sandwiches and some not-very-good Australian
cabernet.” Snow shrugged and looked at Jackal sideways. “There's really
no point in trying to do anything sensible. Beach okay with you?”

Jackal felt her shoulders drop
fractionally and she grinned, the fierce show of teeth that went with
the name and her wild dark hair and eyes. Snow drove silently, her eyes
colorless and remote in her pale face. Jackal thought, she's so
beautiful.

“Did we just choose our web names
brilliantly, or did we all grow into them, do you think?”

That earned her a quick look, and Snow's
eyes narrowed as she turned her face back to the road, but Jackal knew
that only half her attention was on driving now. Good: she liked making
Snow think. She watched through the windshield as the car pushed the
road ahead of itself like a dog nosing a ball, unrolling the way to the
end of Ko, while Snow tapped a complicated rhythm on the steering wheel
and shook her head every so often.

Snow stopped the car on a patch of gravel
close to the place where the dunes began their slow hump to the sea.
The air was cooler here, slow and full of salt, dark brine on the back
of Jackal's tongue. She hoisted the carrybag and Snow pulled a blanket
from the trunk, and they turned automatically toward the path that led
up to the cliffs.

They spread the blanket by a stagger of
boulders that deflected some of the breeze. The sun was setting
quickly; Snow dialed her portable lamp to low, so there was just enough
light to see the cliff edge fifteen feet away. Jackal ignored the
sandwiches and went straight for the wine, then fumbled in the bottom
of the bag. “Corkscrew?”

Snow snorted, took the bottle and held it
in the crook of her right arm while she tweezered her thumb and index
finger around the nail of her left little finger. She tugged hard: the
nail extruded a half inch and then folded out of her fingertip like an
accordion. She pulled it out to a three inch length and twisted; the
sections locked into a smooth spike that she used to slit the foil
covering and skewer the cork. She handed Jackal the bottle and worked
the cork slowly off her nail, watching Jackal watch her. “It's never
too late to be your own best tool,” she said.

Jackal raised both eyebrows again. “I
don't need a corkscrew that badly.”

“It's more than a corkscrew. Anyway,
that's not the point.”

Jackal turned up her hands in a way that
said
Fine, we've had this discussion before
.
She drank: the wine made the inside of her mouth feel hollow and large.
She settled as best she could against a rock, drank again, rolling the
tannin around her tongue and enjoying the warmth of the wine in her
chest. They traded the bottle back and forth in silence for a longish
time.

“I feel differently about it than I used
to,” Snow said after a while. She sat opposite Jackal with her back
against a squat pillar of stone, her knees drawn up and her head bent.
Long fingers of hair had worked themselves loose from the clip she
always wore, that looked like carved ivory, the same pale yellow as the
hair it bound. Snow didn't care that it shocked people; having assured
herself the ivory wasn't real, she had no need to reassure anyone else.
Jackal had seen Snow leave people in mid-sentence, or tasks not quite
finished, or holomovies just before the final scene, if it occurred to
her that there was something else she should be doing. Where her mind
leapt, her body followed with a singleness of purpose that had at some
point upset almost everyone who knew her. Except for Carlos, who told
Jackal, “It's not true that Snow is easily distracted. In fact, I'd say
she was the most focused person I've ever met. It just bothers people
when she is so clearly not focused on them.”

Snow was studying her hand, the little
finger and the white oval face of the digital display set into her
wrist, that could be programmed to tell her the time and temperature
and emergency call numbers for any city in the world. “It was a
practical thing,” she said. “They're tools, they're useful.” She
lowered her knees into a tailor's seat and braced her hands on them,
fingers splayed, unusually gold in the light of the lamp. “But it turns
out it's more than that,” she continued slowly, turning her hands in
the light. “They make me feel, I don't know…elegant, enhanced. Like
Jaoli on my team who wears silk panties under her coveralls when she's
out installing the power grid in a manufacturing plant. I'm starting to
think they make me feel closer to some ideas I have about myself, that
I'm competent and also…” She frowned, rubbed her fingers together as if
she could snap the thought into coherence. “I don't think I'd want
something I couldn't use some-how. The cosmetic stuff doesn't work for
me. But maybe being able to screw a steel horn into your forehead does
the same thing for those folks that my polymer nail does for me. Maybe
it gets them closer to themselves.”

They had drunk the bottle dry. Snow opened
the other; Jackal watched her face, the quiet satisfaction as she made
short work of the cork and collapsed the nail back into the bone and
steel pocket built inside her fingertip.

“How do you know that's who you really
are?” Jackal asked finally.

Snow nodded. “That's the same question as
the one you asked before, about names.” Jackal blinked: she had
forgotten. She was struck again by Snow's ability to connect one idea
to another: she imagined Snow's mind as an Escher construct, like the
series of waterfalls that flowed back up into themselves, nothing ever
lost.

“It's funny that we don't talk about names
in the web,” Snow said. “Maybe they're just so much a part of who we
are that we don't wonder about them. You've always been Jackal to me. I
can barely remember a time when you were Ren.” She peered at Jackal.
“Why did you choose Jackal? You could've had any name you wanted, why
that one?”

It was full dark now; still early, but the
black sky and full moon and the phosphorescent surf had the feeling of
late night, remote and slightly out of tune. It reminded her of a day
she had come unexpectedly upon Donatella in one of the corporate
offices, and the dislocating instant before her mother recognized her.
The night world looked on her with the same blankness she had seen in
her mother's eyes.

“It'll start getting cold soon,” she told
Snow. “Can you feel it coming on? I hated being cold when I was little.
I didn't understand how other people could bear it. Then I figured out
that they couldn't—that's why they put on a hundred layers of clothes
and drank hot soup all the time. And I don't like being bundled up, I
can't move with so many layers under my arms, and anything tight around
my neck makes me feel like I can't breathe. So now being cold is really
a choice to not wrap myself up like something that's been rolled in too
much dough.

“But I didn't know that when I was little.
I just spent months being angry with the weather and with my parents
for making me go out in it.” She shook her head, remembering.

Snow smiled and passed her the bottle. “I
can picture it. Grumpy little Jackal.”

“Grumpy little Ren. Jackal came later.”

“You didn't have the name, but you were
still the person who hated being cold.”

Jackal considered this. “Okay,” she
answered finally. “But it did make a difference about the name. In
February after I turned twelve, when it was decided that our web names
would be nature-based, my mother started dragging in all the books and
holomovies she could find. We went to the zoo and the arboretum seven
times that month so that I could make an informed decision.”

“Your mother likes to have a plan,” Snow
said dryly.

“You have no idea. She researched nature
symbology in world religions. She dug up information on the way that
various animals are regarded culturally by the member countries of the
Earth Government Permanent Council. She said that it was important that
my name be a symbol that everyone in the world could relate to, could
draw some measure of hope from. She even got one of the Jungians from
Educational Games to talk to her about the iconic roles of elements and
weather descriptives in the unconscious.”