Downbelow Station

“I don’t know any Talley. You’re mistaken.”

“Want you to come outside for a moment. Just come to the door.”

“Who are you?”

There’s a gun on you. I suggest you move.“

It was the long expected nightmare. He thought of what he could do, which was to get himself shot. Men died in green every day, and there was no law except the troops, which he did not need either. These were not Mazianni. It was something else.

“Move.”

He rose, walked clear of the table. The second man took his arm and guided him to the door, to the brighter light of the outside.

“Look over there,” the man at his back said. “Look at the doorway directly across the corridor. Tell me if I’ve got the wrong man.”

He looked. It was the man he had seen before, the one watching him. His vision blurred and nausea hit his gut, conditioned reflex.

He knew the man. The name would not come to him, but he knew him. His escort took him by the elbow and walked him in that direction, across the corridor and as the other went inside, took him into the dark interior of Mascari’s, into the mingled effluvium of liquor and sweat and floor-jarring music. Heads turned, of those in the bar, who could see him better than his unadjusted eyes could see them for the moment, and he panicked, not alone at being recognized, but knowing that there was something in this place which he recognized, when he ought to know nothing on Pell, not after that fashion, not across the gulf he had crossed.

He was pushed to the leftmost corner of the room, to one of the closed booths. Two men stood there, one a hangdog middle-aged man who rang no alarms with him… and the other… the other…

Sickness hit him, conditioning assaulted. He groped for the back of a cheap plastic chair and leaned there.

“I knew it was you,” the man said. “Josh? It is you, isn’t it?”

“Gabriel.” The name shot out of his blocked past, and whole structures tumbled. He swayed against the chair, seeing again his ship… his ship, and his companions… and this man… this man among them…

“Jessad,” Gabriel corrected him, took his arm and looked at him strangely. “Josh, how did you get here?”

“Mazianni.” He was being drawn into the curtained alcove, a place of privacy, a trap. He half turned, found the others barring the way out, and in the shadow when he looked back he could hardly make out Gabriel’s face… as it had looked in the ship, when they had parted company — when he had transferred Gabriel to Blass, on Hammer, near Mariner. Gabriel’s hand rested gently on his shoulder, pushing him into a chair at a small circular table. Gabriel sat down opposite him and leaned forward.

“My name here is Jessad. These gentlemen — Mr. Coledy and Mr. Kressich — Mr. Kressich was a councillor on this station, when there was a council. You’ll excuse us, sirs. I want to talk to my friend. Wait outside. See we get privacy.”

The others withdrew, and they were alone in the dim light of a fading bulb. He did not want to be alone with this man. But curiosity kept him seated, more than the fear of Coledy’s gun outside, a curiosity with the foreknowledge of pain in it, like worrying at a wound.

“Josh?” Gabriel/Jessad said. “We’re partners, aren’t we?”

It might be a trick, might be truth. He shook his head helplessly. “Mindwipe. My memory — ”

Gabriel’s face contracted in seeming pain, and he reached out and caught him by the arm. “Josh… you came in, didn’t you? You tried to make the pickup. Hammer got me out when it went wrong. But you didn’t know that, did you? You took Kite in and they got you. Mindwipe… Josh, where are the others? Where are the rest of us, Kitha and -

He shook his head, cold inside, void. “Dead. I can’t remember clearly. It’s gone.” He was close to being sick for a moment, freed his hand and rested his mouth against it, leaning on the table, trying to subdue the reactions.

“I saw you,” Gabriel said, “in the corridor. I didn’t believe it. But I started asking questions. Ngo won’t tell whom you’re with… but it’s someone else they’re after, isn’t it? You’ve got friends here. A friend. Haven’t you? It’s not one of us… it’s someone else. Isn’t it?”

He could not think. Old friendships and new warred with each other. His belly was knotted up with contradictions. Fear for Pell… they had put that into him. And killing stations… was Gabriel’s function. Gabriel was here, as he had been at Mariner -

Elene and Estelle. Estelle had died at Mariner.

“Isn’t it?”

He jerked, blinked at Gabriel.

“I need you,” Gabriel hissed. “Your help. Your skills…”

“I was nothing,” he said. The suspicion that he was lied to grew stronger still. The man knew him and claimed things that were not so, were never so. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We were a team, Josh.”

“I was an armscomper, on the probe ship…”

“The undertapes.” Gabriel seized his wrist, shook at him violently. “You’re Joshua Talley, special services. Deep-taught for that. You came out of the labs on Cyteen…”

“I had a mother, a father. I lived on Cyteen with my aunt. Her name was — ”

“Out of the labs, Josh. They trained you on all levels. Gave you false tapes, a fiction, a fake… something to lie on the surface, lies you could tell and convince them if you had to. And it’s surfaced, hasn’t it? It’s covered everything.”

“I had a family. I loved them — ”

“You’re my partner, Josh. We came out of the same program. We were built for the same job. You’re my backup. We’ve worked together, station after station, recon and operations.”

He tore free of Gabriel’s grip, blinked, blinded by a wash of tears. It began to shred, irretrievable, the farm, the sunny landscape, childhood -

“We’re lab-born,” Gabriel continued. “Both of us. Anything else… any other memory… they put it into us on tape and they can put something else in the next time. Cyteen was real; I’m real… until they change the tapes. Until I become something else. They’ve messed with your mind. Josh. They’ve buried the only thing that’s real. You gave them the lie and it washed right into your memory. But the truth’s there. You know comp. You’ve survived here. And you know this station.”

He sat still, his lips pressed against the back of his hand, tears rolling down his face, but he was not crying. He was numb, and the tears kept coming. “What do you want me to do?”

“What can you do? Who are your contacts? It’s not among the Mazianni, is it?”

“No.”

“Who?”

He sat unmoving for a moment. The tears stopped, the well of them dried up somewhere inside. All his memory seemed white, station detention and some far distant place confounded in his memory, white cells, and uniformed attendants, and he knew finally that he had been happy enough in detention because it was home, the universal institution, alike on either side of the lines of politics and war. Home. “Suppose I work it my way,” he said. “Suppose I talk to my contact, all right? I might be able to get some help. It’ll cost you.”

“How, cost?”

He leaned back in the chair, nodded toward the outside of the booth, where Coledy and Kressich waited. “You have pull of your own, don’t you? Suppose I contribute my share. What have you got? Suppose I could get you most anything on this station… and I don’t have the muscle to handle it.”

“I’ve got that,” Gabriel said.

“I’ve got the other. Only there’s one thing I want that I can’t carry off without force. A shuttle. A run to Downbelow when it comes off.”

Gabriel sat silent a moment. “You’ve got that kind of access?”

“I told you I had a friend. And I want off.”

“You and I might take that option.”

“And this friend of mine.”

“The one you’re working the market with?”

“Speculate what you want. I get you whatever accesses you need. You make plans to get us a way off this station.”

Gabriel nodded slowly.

“I’ve got to get back,” Josh said. “Start it moving. There’s not much time.”

“Shuttles dock in red sector now.”

“I can get you there. I can get you anywhere you want. What we need is force enough to take it when we do get there.”

“While the Mazianni are busy?”

“While they’re busy. There are ways.” He stared a moment at Gabriel. “You’re going to blow this place. When?”

Gabriel seemed to weigh answering at all. “I’m not suicide-prone. I want a way off as badly as anyone here, and there’s not a chance that Hammer can get to us this time. A shuttle, a capsule, anything that stands a chance of staying in orbit long enough…”

“All right,” Josh said. “You know where to find me.”

“Is there a shuttle docked there now?”

“I’ll check into it,” he said, and rose, felt his way past the shadowy arch and out into the noise of the outside, where Coledy and his man and Kressich rose from a nearby table in some apprehension; but Gabriel had come out behind him. They let him pass. He wove his way among the tables, past heads which stayed bowed over drinks and dinners, shoulders which stayed turned.

Outside air hit him like a wall of cold and light. He drew a breath, tried to clear his head, while the floor kept developing lattices of shadow, flashes of here and there, truth and untruth.

Cyteen was a lie. He was. Part of him functioned like the automaton he reckoned himself bred to be… he acknowledged instincts he had never trusted, not knowing why he had them — drew another breath, trying to think, while his body navigated its way across the corridor and sought cover.

Only when he had gotten back to his cold dinner on the back table in Ngo’s, when he sat in that familiar place with his back to the corner and the reality of Pell