Home Fires Read online

  “I took care of it, yes.”

  “But you didn’t buy her a ticket on this boat?”

  “Ship. No, I didn’t.”

  “Have you gone up to watch them work the sails?”

  “No.” Skip turned on the fan. “If you’ll stop asking me questions, I’ll tell you what I’ve been trying to tell you for the last five minutes.”

  “What is it?”

  He sighed. “Someone’s after her. Let me back up and explain. Mick Tooley’s a bright young guy in our firm. I told him about your mother and gave him her number. I told her about Mick, too, and gave her his number. She was to contact him if she needed anything.”

  “But if someone is after her…?”

  “This was before I knew that.” Skip sighed again. “Here I’m guessing, but I don’t believe she knew anybody was after her then either.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “I went there the day before we left. It had been broken into and searched fairly thoroughly. She wasn’t there.”

  Chelle’s eyes were wide. “You must have thought they’d gotten her.”

  “No. It seemed clear they hadn’t. For one thing, her overnight bag was gone. Her clothes were missing, too—all her personal possessions. For another, the break-in had to be quite recent. If it hadn’t been some of the other tenants would’ve reported it—you could hardly walk past the apartment without noticing that the door was broken, and it was near the elevator. I talked to the doormen, and they hadn’t seen her for at least two days.”

  “You—you should’ve canceled our trip!” Chelle’s glass slammed the table. “You should have told me. You bastard!”

  “Naturally you’re angry. What would you have done if I had?”

  “I’d have tried to help her! What the fuck do you think I’d do!”

  “Keep your voice down, please.” For a moment Skip was silent, biting his lower lip and feeling terribly, terribly old. “Your mother has your number. If she had needed your help, wouldn’t she have called you?”

  “If she could. Only if she could.” Clearly, Chelle was struggling to keep her anger under control.

  “You met her just a few minutes ago. You hugged her. Did she ask your help?”

  “You smart-ass bastard!”

  “As you like.” Skip sipped his drink. “She did not. She had my number, too. She did not call me. She may have called Mick Tooley—as I said, I gave her his number. If she did, which I doubt, he thought it better not to tell me. I’ve found him a young man of sound judgment.”

  “You didn’t tell me! You didn’t tell me one damned thing!”

  “You’re right, I didn’t. At least not until now, when it seemed to me it might do some good. We may be watched, Chelle. Both of us.”

  She stared at him, her face flushed, her mismatched hands trembling.

  “She and I traveled to Canam together to meet you. Later I found her an apartment and gave her money for furniture. Anyone who traced her recent movements would certainly have concluded that she was associated with me. You see that, don’t you?”

  “I hate to think of Mother being mixed up with a slick bastard lawyer like you.”

  “But she is. And with you, a heroic soldier. Anyone who looked into her history would quickly learn that she had one child, a daughter, and that child’s identity. The simplest search would reveal that her daughter was in the Army and had recently returned to Earth.”

  Chelle rose, trembling; she had never looked lovelier. “My mother has been risking her life for this planet. You knew that, and you left her high and dry so you could run off to screw me, a woman young enough to be your kid.”

  “Chelle! Please listen.”

  “I’m through listening. You listen to me. There’s a deadbolt on that door.” She pointed. “If you’re the first one in here tonight, you bolt it to let me know. I’ll find someplace else to sleep. If I’m first in, I’ll bolt it and you can jump in the goddamn ocean for all I care.”

  After finishing his drink and sandwich, Skip switched off the fan, carried their tray into the passageway, and left too, going up on the Main Deck to watch the working of the sails.

  And think.

  REFLECTION 3: Old Things

  I have forgotten the old man’s name; I remember everything else: his tousled gray hair and the old white shirts he always wore, threadbare shirts sometimes patched and darned but always clean, the jeans and the blue rubber-soled shoes from Eastasia.

  His shop was always clean, too. I would have expected dust, but the old lamp with the peeling bronze finish was immaculate and every chipped Dresden plate shone. He spent the hours between customers scrubbing and dusting, he told me, and thus fled depression.

  Vanessa fled as well, and it is possible (though not, I think, probable) that she too fled inner demons. Could she not have searched her tiny apartment herself, slashing her faded pink cushions with the bone-handled shaver? She would have hated the cramped rooms I gave her and the old furniture. Could she not have avenged herself on both?

  Yes, but that is the point, or so it seems to me. When tenants vacate a place they hate, hate because of the money it snatches from their account each hundred-day, perhaps, or because their neighbors make noise or cook cabbage …

  When they truly hate the place they are leaving, they vandalize it, smearing obscenities on its walls, stealing its electrical outlets, and so on and so forth—all the rest of that long, sad catalogue; I know it only too well. Nothing of that kind had occurred. The search had been a search, and not vandalism. Vanessa had (they had thought she had) some small item, a paper or something of the sort, a thing that might have been hidden almost anywhere. What it was, I could not guess, and it may have been something that did not in fact exist.

  If it did not exist, what was it they thought she had? What made them think she had it? If it did exist, what was it and where did she get it?

  Chelle thought her mother had been a spy. She had said so in my hotel room. The walls of such rooms are notoriously thin; she may well have been overheard. Or a surveillance device may have been planted in the room. Or Chelle may have expressed the same thought on some other occasion, most probably a debriefing.

  Suppose that Chelle had brought home something she should not have, and that she had given that forbidden object to her mother. Or that someone suspected she had. That, too, was possible. In that case, Chelle herself held the answer to all the riddles—assuming that she knew what it was she had.

  Have I lost her? If I have, I am well rid of her. It should be possible to imagine a less suitable mate for a middle-aged attorney, but it might take an hour’s thinking. If I have lost her, I will be miserable—and fortunate in my misery.

  I have not. No, not yet. Or if I have, I will strain every faculty to win her back. What would be the point of boasting my advantages—the contract we signed, my wealth and position, her college memories, and the rest? All of them together will weigh less with her than my lined face and receding hairline.

  There is another: Vanessa.

  And one more: Chelle’s own good sense. She rejected my logic, but rejected it in a storm of emotion. Whatever else Chelle may be, she is no fool. Storms are powerful, but storms (like men) do not endure.

  Vanessa … What age is she? Biologically between thirty-five and forty, I would say. The woman into whom Vanessa’s every thought was uploaded was thirty-five at youngest, forty at oldest. Or so I (a poor judge) would imagine; but how old was Vanessa? How old at death, how old when she had her last scan?

  Scans can be loaded into a mainframe. How are they loaded into the brain? If her case goes to trial, I’ll need to know that.

  If she died in a hospital, she may well have been scanned just before death. Those things will be a matter of record. Boris can find them out for me.

  Vanessa wants me, and who can blame her? She needs a hold to counter the hold I have on her. She will not get that one.

  How old? She was alive when Chelle was twenty-three; I know, be
cause I saw her then. Such a woman would not have married before twenty, or so I think.

  I wish Susan were here. She is always a better judge of women. I could send for her, perhaps.

  No. Not if I judge Chelle correctly. Susan must stay where she is.

  Say that Vanessa was twenty-three when she contracted with Charles C. Blue. Forty-six when I saw her? Perhaps. If she had lived, she would be what? Sixty-six, sixty-eight, seventy. Charles was older, certainly, and is most probably dead. If not, seventy-five at least. Can I make use of a wealthy and ruthless man of that age?

  Very possibly; and if he makes use of me, he will be billed. Zygmunt could find him, certainly. Houses, cars, and all the rest.

  A new woman? That, too, is possible.

  These men on the ladder lifts, how hard they work and how desperate they must be to take such work and cling to it. How long can an athletic man do such work? I wish I had binoculars.

  4. JUST ONE OF THE GUYS

  A seat alone would have suited his mood better, but the only unoccupied seat that offered a good view of the sails was next to a lean old man whose beard and long white hair danced in the wind; Skip took it.

  The sails interested him—the complexity of their rigging, and their sheer size, great sheets of some white synthetic that seemed to fill the sky. The sailors who worked them were brawny men, many of them big, yet when they lay aloft to take in sail (as they did when he had been on deck for an hour or so) they seemed hardly larger than ants. The seven fiberglass masts were taller than many office towers.

  “We’ve a blow coming,” the old man next to Skip said; he indicated the sails with a wave of his blackthorn stick. “That’s why they’re doing that.”

  Skip nodded absently, wondering where he had seen the old man before.

  “Your first cruise?”

  “No. My third.”

  “My ex and I used to try to take a cruise every year.” The white-bearded man had begun packing tobacco into the bowl of a corncob pipe. “Some years we’d make it and some years we didn’t. I don’t mean just this cruise, there’s a hundred plus. You can never run out.”

  “I see.”

  “If you want to learn more about working the ship, there’s a class. Call the social director. She’ll sign you up.”

  “Perhaps I will.”

  “Quite a few go on these because they’re getting set to die.” The old man paused to light his pipe, but Skip did not speak.

  “It comforts ’em. The sea’s eternal. If Earth were to die, if the Os were to blow up the whole thing, there’d still be seas like this on other worlds. I think about it sometimes.” As he spoke the old man watched Skip, bright blue eyes just visible above his dark sunglasses.

  “They won’t,” Skip said. “We’re fighting for control of habitable planets, and habitable planets are rare. The Os want them, and so do we.”

  The old man’s mouth smiled, but there was no smile in his eyes. “Suppose they could get control of all the rest by blowing up this one?”

  Skip shrugged, leaned back, and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the old man had gone. Skip had not heard him leave.

  He thought—as he had so often thought through all the lonely years—of Chelle fighting on whatever godforsaken world they had sent her to. “One of the best noncoms we had turned out to be an EU spy. I killed him.” She had said that not long ago. “If you love Earth you leave it.” She had said that just before she left, and he felt he understood it a bit better now. The Os would never destroy a habitable world; there would be a negotiated settlement (however unfavorable) long before it came to that. But if millions of people believed they might …

  No doubt the government encouraged it; there would be more soldiers, more Marines.

  He used his mobile phone to call the office of the ship’s social director. “I understand there are lectures on the operation of the ship. I’d like to attend one.”

  “Certainly.” The speaker looked young and bright, and sounded the same way. “We’ll be starting tomorrow at ten. One hour, so you’ll have ample time for lunch. What’s your name, sir?”

  He gave it.

  There was a lengthy silence. Then, “There seems to be a bit of trouble about your record, Mr. Grison. Could you come to our office? We’re on I Deck, in Compartment Three Thirty-eight.”

  “Could you—” But she had hung up.

  The elevators were long-lift only, as they were in most buildings ashore. Fortunately, Main Deck to I Deck qualified, and the long walk through stifling corridors to Compartment 338 gave him ample time to wonder about the problem with his records—why it had not been discovered earlier, for example.

  “The social director would like to speak to you in person, Mr. Grison.” The girl behind the desk was indeed young and looked bright; she gestured toward the door on her left. “She’ll see you right away.”

  Vanessa smiled pertly as he came in. “You don’t look surprised, Mr. Grison. Are you?”

  “Not very, Ms. Healy. Surprised to see that I was right, if you like. Can we talk here?”

  “We could, but—come with me.”

  She led him down a passageway, around a corner to a companionway, and up to G Deck. Down more passageways to a room she unlocked; it was dark save for the watery light admitted by portholes that were scarcely higher than the tossing waves of the Atlantic.

  “We’re going to use this for lectures and classes.” She shut and bolted the door. “To be honest, I don’t think my office is bugged either. This is more exciting, though. Don’t you agree?”

  Skip said, “We’re less liable to be interrupted, at least.”

  “And I get to sit with you in the dark. If I were to switch on the lights, it would be recorded and I’d have to make up a story. It’s the energy thingy.”

  “I understand.”

  “They work the sailors like slaves. Maybe you’ve seen it?”

  “Certainly I saw them working hard at times.”

  “I keep thinking, give them electric what-you-call-ums to wind up their ropes, and send some of them into space to fight, the way they sent Chelle. You agree, don’t you?”

  Skip shrugged. “It costs a great deal to train and equip a soldier, and much more to get one to a contested world. Few of those men would repay the expense—or so I’d guess. Is this coincidence? Your being on our ship?”

  Vanessa tittered. “You can’t be as silly as that. I know you’re not. I checked the passenger lists.”

  “I didn’t know they were public.”

  “They’re not. Do you want the whole story?”

  “I do.” He noticed that the ship’s roll seemed more pronounced. “Very much.”

  “All right. At a dinner years and years ago, I sat next to a nice young man who worked for this line. We chatted and I was oh so charming. I can be charming when I want to.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I knew you and Chelle were going on a cruise, so I looked up this gentleman and told him what Chelle thought. I’m sure you remember. She thought I’d been out in space, too, and that was why I wasn’t an old lady now. So I said I’d been out in space for the government and I couldn’t say anything about it.” Vanessa paused. “He let me see the passenger lists and took me to dinner. I didn’t have much money, so that was very nice. I liked him, and Charlie’s history. I told you, didn’t I?”

  Skip said, “I’d think he’d be too old for you.”

  “You’re right. He was, a bit. Still he was terribly nice. Do you know who’s not too old for me? Who’s exactly the right age?”

  “I understand why you left the apartment. Still, I wish you’d told me you were going.” When Vanessa said nothing, he added, “I suppose you were afraid I’d have tried to stop you, and you’re probably correct.”

  “It wasn’t that at all. They tried … I was afraid to tell anybody. Terrified! Put your arm around me. I’m serious. Do it. I need a man’s arm around me, and you’re just right for me and—oh, damn! I’m g-going t
o c-c-cry.”

  He hugged her.

  “I was so t-terribly frightened. Horribly, horribly frightened. I—I talked it down for a few days, but now I’m frightened again. They tried to k-kill me, Skip. They did! I was going to a few places I remembered, just to see what they were like now and who was there. Oh, Lord!”

  “What was it?”

  “It seemed so funny at the time. I kept a straight face until I got away, but then I laughed until the people around me must have thought I was crazy. I laughed, and I had almost forgotten that part.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I went to Simone’s and there was a woman there eating with some man. I didn’t recognize her, but she must have been much younger. Anyway, she recognized me. Her mouth dropped open. Do you know what I mean? And she positively gawked! So I pretended I hadn’t seen her and scooted, but after that I had to laugh. And—and…”

  Vanessa had begun to tremble again. Skip tightened his grip.

  “He stabbed me. Just stabbed me in the back while I was walking down Seventy-second with hundreds of people around us. He did! I know you won’t believe me, but it’s the truth.”

  He gave her his handkerchief.

  “Women were screaming and I was on the sidewalk trying to get up, only I had this thing in my back that hurt and hurt, and nobody would pull it out, and there were police all around and people saying, ‘I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it.’ Over and over.”

  “You’re not making this up?”

  Vanessa had begun unbuttoning her sleeves. “I’m going to take off my blouse. I don’t want you to pull off the bandage, and it’s too dark for you to see the place anyway. But you can feel the bandage—it’s a little bit above my bra strap. Go right ahead and feel it. Be gentle.”

  As well as he could judge, there was pad of gauze somewhat smaller than the palm of his hand, held in place by tape. It was, or might have been, stiff with blood.

  “We’ve a doctor on board—an official doctor, I mean. Dr. Prescott. He changed the bandage for me yesterday, and he says my body will absorb the stitches as the wound heals. Do you want to hear more about Tim? That’s the nice man who got me this job. He’s president of the cruise line now. I told him which ship, and I’d take any job to get on it and be there for Chelle and all that nonsense, and he said could you be a social director, we haven’t got one for the Rani? The mandate’s five to four, you see, and every little bit helps.”