Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“Put in your code chip.”

All right, I subvoked, fumbling it into my head. Are we scrambled?

“Yeah, we’re locked up tight. I still don’t see the point, though.” Neither do I, but we might as well do what he says. It can’t hurt anything.

I’d come early and waited for a parking place near the Horseman to open up, so I could watch for him from the car. Now I was having second thoughts about the whole plan. He’d probably counted on recognizing me from my Net-portrait, in which case we were in trouble. And there was little hope of his being unmistakable: on that sidewalk, no one could have been so outlandish as to stand out.

Or so I thought until I happened to glance in the rear-view mirror, and saw a man of about the right age, wearing a heavy black overcoat that was wildly inappropriate for the early spring sweater-weather. I half-opened the door for a better look. His head was full of sockets of every possible design, and he was not only wearing a coat, but gloves—black and lumpish. He was unmistakable, all right.

“Voskresenye?” I called out.

The man looked at me as though I were mad. “ Voistinu voskresye —but not today!”

Oh. Khristos voskresye is an old Easter greeting meaning “Christ is risen.” Voistinu voskresye is the answer—“truly he is risen”—but of course, it wasn’t Easter. Well, it wouldn’t be the last time I’d make an idiot out of myself in the name of journalism. For a moment I was afraid he’d think I was a wirehead trying to steal the car—I’ve got enough sockets to look the part—but he passed by without further comment, disappearing into the crowd.

Then the passenger door seemed to open by itself. I flipped open the cover of the Electrify switch and had my finger on the toggle when he hissed, “It’s me—Voskresenye!” and climbed into the seat with a peculiar crab-motion, still crouching down.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“No time. Pretend you’ve given up on me and drive away.”

One of the advantages of driving a car of Reconstruction vintage is that they generally put in a few concealed weapons. There was a ceramic flechette gun behind a panel just beneath the driver’s side armrest; a tap with my left hand, a quick grab with my right, and I’d have it. I would take the gun, make him get out of the car, drive away, and produce some nice boring conclusion to my series on the Calinshchina. I would take the assignments I was given, and I would die in my sleep.

Then I looked at his face, and my hand wavered. He had one of every kind of socket ever made, from the round Army standard to the tiny modern squares, but the ones at his temples were like nothing I’d ever seen before: oval, with three concentric rings of pins inside. And the jagged scar that went all the way around his head was beyond the clumsiness of even the most disreputable Moscow hack. He’d been modified by the Guardians.

I turned my sigh of resignation into one of frustration and slumped my shoulders to mime discouragement. After another thirty seconds of craning my neck I muttered, “The hell with it, then,” found a tiny chink in the wall of traffic, and threaded the car into it.

“You shouldn’t have called out my name,” he said, straightening up. “I know you didn’t know, and it can’t be helped now in any case. But I don’t think we’ve fooled anyone. We’ll have to try to lose ourselves in traffic.”

“Voskresenye, why are we acting like fugitives?”

“I know how all this must seem, Maya Tatyanichna. But I am not paranoid, nor am I being overcautious. On the contrary, it is reckless of me even to risk speaking to you. I am widely accounted a most desirable person to have at one’s tea party. Ask your screener.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Keishi said. “He’s been wanted by the Fusion of Historical Nations since before it fused.”

What for?

“Oh, treason, terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the government. Little things like that.”

I thought wistfully of the flechette gun and the chance that had evaporated when I decided not to use it.

Why didn’t you tell me this before?

“It never occurred to me to check for warrants on someone his age,” she said with chagrin.

Twenty years of good behavior, sunk by a stereotype. Now I’d get to test the old maxim about Postcop tea. The first time you drink it, they say, you soon forget it—that part I’d already proved. But the second time, the saying goes on, you remember it the rest of your life.

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t make you get out now,” I said.

“Because it’s too late. They already know we’re together. I just saw the bulletin go out.”

What are my chances if I kill him and say he tried to carjack me? I asked. No, don’t bother, I know the answer. Don’t mind me, I’m just struggling against the inevitable.

“I assure you that your reputation will not be damaged as a result of this meeting,” he said. “I have made extensive preparations to avoid endangering you. When the day shift clocks out, I will erase the information from their chips before the next shift slots them in, and purge all external records. At six o’clock this evening, you will be as clean as you were yesterday.”

“And if he doesn’t do it, I will,” Keishi said. “I’ll power-down their whole network if I have to.”

Keishi was wired beyond the Post police, but even so, it didn’t seem remotely plausible. And while they both sounded confident, I wasn’t sure how much to credit that. The overenhanced often come to believe they can hack their way out of anything. Sooner or later, life proves them all wrong.

“I’m not making this up, Maya. I can do it.”

I believe you, I subvoked without conviction.

“The first thing,” Voskresenye said, “is to lose any surveillance we may have attracted. Take a right turn up at the light.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll know when we get there.”

I wasn’t reassured, but saw no reason not to go where he suggested. As I made the turn I said, “Just so I know what I’m being disappeared for, what exactly did you do? Plant a bomb or something?”

“I planted something much more dangerous. An idea. —Here! Turn into this parking lot. —An idea, but it didn’t go off. Secondhand explosives; you can’t trust them. Park there, next to that gray car.”

I pulled in next to a car that was a perfect duplicate of mine, except for being a slightly darker shade of gray. The owner must have parked it indoors. Kruchonykh never sold a gray car, you understand; they just turn that color.

He got out, and though his movements were neither as fast nor as acrobatic as they had been when he scuttled into the car on Nevsky, they still didn’t fit with his age. For a moment I wondered if he was a younger man in some sort of make-up. But no, it was more than that. There was something inhuman about the way he moved, about its smoothness—fast precise movements with no diagonals, like a toy robot.

I followed him around to the back of the car and started to ask what he was doing, but he put his finger to his lips and looked into the sky. “There… and there…” he murmured, then said to me: “Stand over to your left a little, and keep talking.”

“What sort of idea?”

“Oh, some nonsense about human beings having inalienable rights. Or was it that the Earth is flat? At my age one begins to forget these things.”

He had removed my license plate, using a tiny electric screwdriver produced from one of his coat’s many pockets. “About a foot to your right, if you please,” he said. Then he went to the car beside us, and started switching plates.