The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed

Author:Cameron Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

12

immediate touch

She materialized again. “Already bought the ticket. What do you need?”

“I won’t say I need anything. I seem to get attacked when I use that word. What I want is to know everything there is to know about whales by noon tomorrow. Biology, history, poetry, folklore, you name it.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I also want every scrap of information you can dig up on Voskresenye. Go over the interview with a fine-tooth comb and do a search on every word he used, apart from ‘and’ and ‘if.’ Anything you can dig up on Derzhavin, on the Andersons, especially on Catharine Anderson—I know most of it’s probably on the chip you gave me, but I need to be sure.”

“Sounds like a long night. Should I order in pasta or something?”

“I’m sick and tired of makarony,” I said. “What are you in the mood for—dim sum or Ethiopian?”

She shrugged. “Up to you. I’ll be eating train food, remember?”

“Oh, right,” I said sheepishly. “In that case, which of those two will make you the least envious if I eat it in front of you?”

She smiled. “I’ve never been much for African food. Ironically.”

“Ironically,” I echoed. “Ethiopian it is.” I was about to touch the videophone when she said, “Let me do it.” I shrugged assent; her eyes unfocused for a second. “Done.”

“That fast? OK, let’s start with—”

The doorbell rang. My house, unlike my car, does not have weapons hidden in its every crevice, so my first thought was of kitchen knives and cast-iron skillets; my second, of escape routes.

“Don’t panic,” Keishi said. “It’s just your food.”

I went to the door and looked through the peephole, cringing a little as I did. It was rumored that the Weavers would use infrared to watch you approach the door, and then, as you squinted to see who it was, fire a bullet through the glass into your eye. The fear was irrational, I knew; they usually gave the Postcops a chance at you first, and the Postcops would consider such a tactic impolite. But the thought made me uncomfortably aware of the shape of my eyes in my head, and their softness. Somehow you think of eyes as being as shallow as almonds, but of course they’re not; they go back deep, and press against the brain’s gray labyrinths. The feeling persisted as I opened the door on the bored and impatient delivery boy, and made me reluctant to allow his retinal scan.

“I can’t give you your food without a scan, tovarishch. Regulations.” He balanced the stack of boxes on his shoulder, obviously prepared to wait.

I submitted my eye to be lasered, and paid all in green out of sheer irritation. “Is that all, or do you want a blood test?”

“So take it up with management.”

I slammed the door in his face. Punk. “Keishi, do I want to know how you did that?”

“I just found the nearest unit and switched addresses.”

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you it’s wrong to steal?”

“So who stole?” she said. “You paid for it, didn’t you?”

“I guess that’s true,” I admitted.

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