011 — The Best Interest

For eighty minutes, Ro and Zee pounded the pavement of Main Street, beneath a ploughed, cleared sky, discussing possibilities. Ro did much of the talking, much of the speculation; Zee curtailed worries and brought sense to Ro's receptivity. Reaching the point where her feet began to ache in the arch, she forcefully turned to Zee, just to get it over with.

'You want to stay.'

From her it was a sharp, guileful statement. Zee was at a loss, unsure if she harboured resentment towards his inclination to stay, or if she was merely beguiled by the ease of his decision.

'You do want to stay.'

Now her hesitation came into play.

'Are you mad? We—we can't stay.'

They were on a side street, heading again for the campus, and passed through a patch of sunshine under an emerald canopy of fat catalpa leaves. A pleat of fabric at his elbow was grabbed as Ro pulled him aside. A cyclist he hadn't seen swept by them. A rustle of wind brought a weak leaf from the catalpa tree, and it fell lazily into Zee's palm. He clasped his hand around it, then spun it back and forth by the stem, between utilitarian phalanges.

'We have every option in the world available to us, Ro,' Zee said, knowing that he was defending his belief, however staunchly, against an obdurate Ro Rowen. 'The NSA has not tracked us since passing through Iowa—nine weeks ago. And, more than likely, Dr Selig is dead. And here we have found one person in the world who knew him as he was—and one person in the world who is in contact with the last living—if you'll forgive the word when applied to a machine—friend that Selig gathered into his confidence. Am I mad? Perhaps. Until the NSA shows itself, or until Selig is somehow revived from the realm of Tartarus, then I will go on being mad.'

Ro stayed silent for a moment, listening to their steps on the concrete, rather in awe of Zee's conviction. Then, with a wince of speculation, looked up at him. 'Tartarus?'

He almost laughed. In camaraderie, he set an arm around her shoulders, and found pleasure that she didn't pull away. 'The farthest area of Hades, in Greek mythology. You don't really think it's madness to stay here, do you?'

She found no immediate answer. Instead, she waited until they reached the Audi. 'What if it's all a trick?'

He answered with the engine purring. 'What if it is? What would we lose?'

Ro snorted and buckled her safety belt. 'You don't really want me to list things out, I assume.'

'Ro. Well, think of it this way: If it is a trap—what would Dr Smart and Andrea Donoso gain from it? There's no reward for them if we're captured. And if I'm accurately reading Dr Smart's unsaid allusions, then neither he nor Andrea has had much to do with the NSA lately, and this disaffection is appreciated.'

'I'd believe that for Dr Smart. He'd seem the type to want to get as far away from the Department of Defence as possible. But Andrea Donoso? I don't know, Zee. If she's continuing the work Selig started—how do you know she isn't getting her funding from the NSA?'

'We don't know, Ro, whether she is or isn't. You can ask her that when she contacts us.'

'I suppose she could be getting some private funding, if the NSA's not interested in pursuing bio-mechanical, self-regenerating synthoids.' In the attempt to make it sound like she actually believed this, Ro wondered if it were closer to the truth. 'I don't understand how the NSA would continue funding for something like that. I mean, they lost all of that work. All of the prototypes, anyway—not to mention the security of having it done on a place like Knossos. If Andrea Donoso really is continuing with Selig's work, I hope she's doing it somewhere very secret. I'd hate for Brother's Day to attack again.'

'They won't. Part of your speculation must be true. The NSA knows what Donoso is doing. Remember: I've read it in her personnel file. But as to the funding—I would have to access the NSA databases to find out that information. And if any part of the NSA computer systems is difficult to access, it's the files dealing with the allocation of finances. If we're going to stay here, no risks will be taken to compromise our location.'

'Good. And, anyway, you can probably find out from Donoso herself. If, you know, we do stay here and aren't immediately captured.'

They'd returned to the motel just as they came full-circle with their conversation. Zee sat in the driver's seat of the car for a minute, thoughtful, and threw a glance at the envelope on Ro's lap. The path of his mind was easy for Ro to calculate.

'Are you going to install this thing before we go to Dr Smart's for dinner?'

He shook his head in the negative, resisting the urge to comment on Ro's acceptance of Dr Smart's invitation. 'No, I won't. Something may go wrong, and I could be without a hologram for several hours.'

'Yeah, I wouldn't want to show up at the good doctor's house with you in your skivvies.' She left the package in Zee's hands and dived into her room, as if afraid of some verbal retaliation on his part.

Zee stared at the holographic emitter once he was back in the room. It winked at him from the corner of the bed, in the way inanimate objects mock. Legs folded beneath him, Zee picked it up in his hands and turned it about, internally measuring its attributes to the unit locked inside a dorsal cavity. The new emitter was a fraction of an inch smaller, but the system of total concealment significantly more powerful. Zee let his data cord into the serial port of the unit, and connected to its independent core processor. Quickly but expertly, he rendered the image of a hand. It came from the top of the new emitter, the tiny, thin slices of metal that Ro had thought of as a fan then rotated and bent to manipulate light into colour. The hand started as translucent, without the typical flare of teal and green that Zee's hologram was so prone to flashing whenever he changed. None of that was in this new unit—it had a flawless transition, an absolute morphing ability. When the hand turned solid, Zee gaped at it in amazement. Then, using his unattached palm, reached for the fingers and gathered them between his own. He didn't know why he was surprised to find it 95 solid. Dr Smart had said it was stronger than Zee's current model—but fifteen percent stronger Zee hadn't anticipated.

The hand vanished, being sucked back into the rotating and bending metal slips. The data cord returned to his wrist. Zee lay on the bed, head supported by a conveniently placed pillow. For a while, he fished through the files he'd acquired from disembodied Knossos computers, wondering if there was any use to this exercise. He'd gone through them over the last two days, while anticipating Dr Smart's return, and had found little in the way of usefulness.

It occurred to Zee then, when he flung open his eyes, that Dr Smart had almost answered the question Zee had meant to ask him.

The question of whether or not Dr Selig ever knew that his especial Infiltration Unit turned out to be the hero of legend so long desired by a little boy, grown into a man, from a small Ohio town.

A splash of daylight came across his form. He angled his head to the door and saw Ro there, in a cute A-line dress of baby blue, and a sheer floral shirt over it, with her favourite tan sandals on her feet.

'I'm ready to go,' she said. 'What have you been doing? Just sitting here?' The holographic emitter, conspicuous and galling, was on the bed next to Zee. 'Playing with your new toy?'

'I was—a little.' He made no effort to get to his feet, and rested his hands against his stomach, staring flatly into the ceiling.

'Dinner, Zee. Six-thirty. Did you forget in the big excitement of doing nothing for the last two hours?'

He hadn't realised two hours had already passed. Rarely did he pay attention to the internal clock on his display, most of the time it was off completely. He rolled from the mattress and smoothed out the wrinkles he'd made in the coverlet. The sandals made Ro a little taller than normal height, thanks to a thick two-inch heel. She smirked at him, hand on a hip, and shook her head.

'What?' he asked.

'I just thought you'd—change your clothes. In a manner of speaking.'

Nothing was wrong with his wardrobe. He tried to point this out to Ro. 'It's the same clothes I always have on—'

'Yeah,' she emphatically agreed. 'Yeah—the same clothes you always have on.'

Silence declared his bewilderment. Ro elucidated.

'Look, Zee, I haven't made up my mind about this yet. I don't know if it's really in our best interest to stay until we hear from Andrea. But if we do—and I'm not saying we will—but if we do stay here, you're going to have to hide who you are from these people, from this town. Which means you're going to have to change your wardrobe about as often as I do, if you want these people to think you're something other than a hobo. See the point?'

'I do.' And, without further ado, Ro blinked against the aquamarine glare, then opened them on a couture Zee. She liked his everyday wardrobe, of lavender shirt and coal-grey trousers, with or without the long violet-blue coat, but she enjoyed variety.

'Everything match?' The sides of the khaki trousers were held out at his thighs, and he observed his RGB-rendering skills. He'd hate not to match, to find that he'd accidentally put on bright pink socks when he'd meant them to be beige.

'Splendidly. Gosh, I didn't even have to help you pick that outfit.'

'It's okay, then? I don't think we've ever been to a—a dinner party. Is that the right term?'

'Sounds about right. And no, I don't think we have.'

She stepped to him to make a couple final arrangements of his appearance. The sleeves of his Oxford shirt, in a buttercup colour, were buttoned tightly at his wrists. She undid the buttons and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows, giving him a casual air. It was a dinner party, after all, not a business meeting. Then she tousled the front forelocks, in the trend of men those days to wear their hair as messy and as gravity-defying as possible. The shoulder seams were straightened and smoothed, and she made sure all the buttons down the front were in the right holes. He stepped back and away abruptly.

'What?' Ro speculated on why he'd suddenly walked away from her. 'Did I tickle you or something?'

'No—no.' He headed for the door and opened it. 'I just think we'd better go. After you.'

Unsure what she'd done, but unable to press the issue, Ro paraded out the door, passing him. On instinct, to test the waters, she held out her hand and brushed them to the place where ribs would be, then twiddled her fingers at his navel. He recoiled immediately, jumping about three inches back. Ro didn't stop to ask him why. In a way, she was beginning to understand. It wasn't because he'd grown ticklish overnight. It was she that repulsed him. Her touch was poison.