1 #17
“Put those on,” I said. “Your name is David Grissom. You’ll keep that name until I tell you to drop it, and that’s a real person, so after you drop that name you’ll never use it again.
You’re a Service agent. Don’t talk if we’re questioned.
” I set out walking, and after a moment I heard his footsteps behind and then beside me.
I’d gone further beyond the rules than I’d ever imagined.
I wouldn’t have expected the exhilaration in this.
We walked in silence for a while, until I sensed that Kareem was calm.
“With the glasses,” I said, “your face looks like a blur of light on facial recognition systems. The faulty vehicle is helpful too.”
“But they’ll know I’m gone from the camp.”
“They’ll assume you’ve decided to leave society and become a ghost,” I said. “It’s uncommon, but not unheard-of. You weren’t a prisoner there.”
Walking regulates the central nervous system, and is occasionally useful in interrogations.
“I don’t know what will happen,” I said, “or if I’ll have another chance to speak with you.”
“Okay,” he said.
A day or two earlier, I’d purchased a holographic video camera. After a kilometre or so I fished it out of my pocket, clicked it on, and angled it toward him as we walked.
“I never thought Detective Grissom would be arrested,” I said. “He’s a good detective with an otherwise excellent record.”
Alberto shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to set an example.”
“What will happen to him?”
“He’s out of my hands now,” Alberto said.
The sun was at the horizon now, the desert sliding into a shadowed territory where distance was uncertain.
There was a light on the platform, just one, a beacon.
Sometimes on long walks I slip into something like a fugue state, where I start to believe that I’ve always been walking and will be walking forever.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before I spoke again.
“I know you’ve talked about this before,” I said. “Probably more often than you would’ve liked. But I need you to tell me what happened. How you arrived here.”
“Why?”
“I want to understand what happened to my friend,” I said. “Her name was Nico. She disappeared.”
He sighed. “I saw her. She was at my party.”
“Back up. Tell me about the place where the party was.”
“Los Angeles,” he said, “but a different Los Angeles. I don’t understand it.”
“What was that place like? Let’s just say it was a different city, for the sake of our sanity. Describe it to me.”
“Well,” he said, “it was full of refugees. There’d been a war.
Los Angeles wasn’t disputed territory, so people came into the city when the California Republic borders were being settled, because it was safer inside the city than outside the city.
And then there was a time when the fighting had ended, for the most part, just sporadic violence here and there, and then after a while the curfew was finally lifted. ”
“What did you do when the curfew was lifted?”
“I decided to throw a party,” Kareem said.
Thirty years later, in a shantytown in the burn zone on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Marlowe sat in a makeshift building and watched the long-ago recording: a holographic version of the man she’d always known as her father, dazed and dressed in ragged clothing, telling the story to Ibari as he walked toward the Los Angeles train.
Several hours later, she walked out of the burn zone and down to the beach.
Was her father alive or dead? Both. Vehicles had been driven on the sand, quite recently, the tire tracks fresh.
She walked south for a while, dazed from hours of conversation with the genetic double of the man who’d raised her, and swam around the burn zone fence.
On the other side, by the Santa Monica Pier, two men in grey approached her.
State agents, conducting random interrogations in the wake of a historic data breach.
Marlowe stood on the sand and submitted to their questions.
Had she done or seen anything unusual this evening?
Had she heard anyone talking about any breach of State secrets from Service headquarters, or expressing opinions on those secrets?
No, Marlowe said. She’d seen and heard nothing.
She’d spoken with no one. She’d just been out for a walk on the beach.
Samir had told her she’d someday recover from her marriage and she wanted to believe that, she thought that might be true, but she still carried such doubt.
She still didn’t believe herself, most of the time, and it seemed to her later that her doubt was what saved her that night, while she was being questioned on the sand.
Nothing at all out of the ordinary? the agents asked.
And she was so used to doubting herself, she was so accustomed to rewriting the experiences of her life, that it didn’t feel like lying when she said No, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing at all, just out for a walk on the beach, because how could she be sure that she’d seen what she remembered seeing?
The agents moved on to another target, and Marlowe continued walking down the shore.