Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 89

"So," he says, "who is it you were working for again?"

She carries nothing that could identify her as an agent of Cascadia LEC. Anything that could identify her to Brown could identify her to the quarry. Except, of course, the recognition phrase. Which Sanchez memorized with great irritation, having found it stupid.

Still, she recites it now: "Penelope and Marcia Catoun make of your wifehood no comparison; Hide ye your beauties, Isoude and Elaine-"

The next line of the poem is My lady cometh, that all this may disdain. But that's not the a.s.signed response. The a.s.signed response isn't Chaucer at all, but a twentieth century poet.

Brown just sits there in the night, his shirt a paler shadow against the deep darkness of foliage and forest behind him, and his breathing continues low and even. At last, he says gently, "Blue, blue windows behind the stars. Yellow moon on the rise. Ms. Aguilar."

"Sanchez." She swallows.

Sounds tell her he's disa.s.sembling the camp stove and folding it up by means of feel, experience, and whatever dim moonlight filters through the canopy. The metallic sounds cease, replaced by rustling.

He says, "You know what happens if we send Klopft up for CITES violations? A couple of years in jail, a fine that's pocket change for an organization that size. And a month later he pokes his head back up in Singapore or Belize."

"You have something else?"

Brown, again, in conspiratorial silence, pauses.

"Tell me."

He sighs. "We'll talk about it in the morning."

Sanchez hears Brown move, sees the shift of his silhouette as he stands. "Come on," he says. "We have to haul the food up where the bears can't get it."

He walks a few steps through the dark, and now she finds she can see-not well, not at all well, but clearly enough to navigate. If she pays attention to what her eyes are telling her about shape and movement, rather than trying to make out detail, she can follow Brown across his small bare campsite without stumbling over or into anything. That may be because there's nothing to stumble on, but it doesn't stop Sanchez from a feeling of accomplishment. It doesn't last long, as she's reduced to standing by awkwardly as Brown loads food back into a pack and clips it to a static line tossed over a tree branch some fifteen feet off the ground. "So what's to stop the hypothetical bear using that as a pinata?"

"Nothing," he answers. "But it won't be trying to climb into the tent, which is the point of the exercise. Speaking of which, I didn't see a tent in your gear."

"Too much weight," she says. "I have tarps."

Long ago and far away, Sanchez had answered phones for a living, and she knew the trick of smiling even when you wanted to strangle somebody, for the change it put in your voice. From his voice, she thinks now that he smiles. "Hardcore."

"I was hiking in," she says. "The didn't tell me to expect a long-term stay."

"Right," he says. "I'll help you rig something."

By the time Martha got herself clean and dressed-what Dr. Klopft called clothes were just pajamas-the food was on the table. Matt had divided it carefully in half, and set her half aside to wait for her while he ate his own.

The food was grilled cheese sandwiches, which Daddy used to make, and long thin sticks of something white and starchy, but golden and crispy on the outside, slightly gritty with what must be salt. A little dish of ketchup sat beside them.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Fries?" Matt said.

She'd heard of fries, but never tasted one before. She poked it into her mouth and chewed. Her stomach knotted up with nervousness, but she made herself swallow.

"It's kind of boring." She was going to eat it anyway, of course. You didn't waste food.

Especially food that didn't wiggle.

"Use the ketchup," Matt advised. "And drink your milk."

That was good, then. She still didn't trust Dr. Klopft about Daddy. But she and Matt got fed here, and Martha knew Matt would take care of her.

Maybe things would get better again soon.

Brown relents to the extent of using his lantern as they set her camp. He helps Sanchez spread the first tarp and rig a rain sheet from the second one-"It'll rain by morning, never fear"-then goes through her pack for food, which he secures in a second nearby tree. And somehow, Sanchez can't keep herself from talking to him. Especially when he asks, casually, "Why are you a cop? I mean, especially in this day and age, there are easier ways to earn a living."

"You're one too, and you're asking me?"

"I know my reasons."

He doesn't sound as if he thinks they're particularly good reasons, right now. Something about the wryness in his tone, as if what he's just said is a confidence rather than a blatant misdirection, makes her want to answer. That's why they call him the Confessor. She can identify the confiding tones even as she feels it working on her.

She says, "When you leave people to fend for themselves, the predators come out."

"Somebody's got to play the shepherd?"

"I don't think of people as sheep, mostly." Sanchez hunkers down to unlace her boots. "Well, maybe a few."

He laughs. "Sleep tight, Sanchez. I'll see you in the morning."

"Brown."

He hesitates. She plops her right boot off. "So what was a geneticist doing informing on an exotic animal smuggling ring?"

"That's a good question. Ask me again in the morning."

When he vanishes into the tent, he leaves the lantern. She slips into her bag and clicks it off. The forest night folds down around her again, and for a few moments she finds its sounds soothing. But as she's drifting into sleep, a thought jerks her awake again, heart racing. Curled tight inside her bag, Sanchez shudders, because she's realized that there's another reason a body might be dismembered.

To hide that a portion of the dead person is missing.

Sanchez dozes lightly, when she sleeps at all, but judging by the low snores that drift through the tent wall, Brown isn't having that problem. Still, she lies curled up small, at least warm and possibly fooling herself a little.

At first light, the clamor of the birds makes further dissembling impossible. She slithers from her bag, finds her jeans-made in San Francisco again, now that shipping them from elsewhere has become prohibitively expensive-and pads across the small camp barefoot. It hurts less in daylight, when she can see where she's putting her feet. After she relieves herself-she finds Brown's latrine pit by the folding shovel stuck in the ground beside it-it's the work of mere moments to figure out Brown's knots and rigging system and lower the food. She roots in her own pack first, finding her small stove, oatmeal, and the cans of fuel. She's got stackable, collapsible pots, so the fact that her stove has only one burner doesn't keep her from making cereal and tea both at once. And that way she's not wasting heat.

There are even tiny boxes of shelf-stable milk to go on the cereal, and she sets out two. Looking at the spa.r.s.eness of Brown's camp, the milk makes her feel like a tenderfoot wallowing in luxury, but she had planned on being out less than a week and not bringing a tent left her with some extra weight allowance.

Besides, she likes milk on her oatmeal.

Apparently, Brown does too, because when the smell of cooking oatmeal calls him from his tent, he grunts approval rather than making any of the scathing comments she was dreading. Which makes her wonder, exactly, why it was that Robert Brown's good opinion should mean so much to her.

But he eats the oatmeal in trusting-and approving-silence, drinks the tea (black), and finishes off the last few ounces of milk in his package with obvious satisfaction. Having done so, he helps her clean up, and then dusts off his hands and finds his own boots by the flap of his tent. He isn't barefoot, but is scuffing around in camp shoes, so Sanchez takes it as a sign that she should kit up too.

"So that thing you were going to show me-" Her first words of the morning, while the leaf-mould moisture soaks through the seat of her jeans and her boot lace snaps in her hands.

He nods. He is even taller and leaner in the early-morning gloaming, his lined face betraying a sun-weathered seriousness that cracks wide apart when he smiles. "If you want to know what's really going on in there."

She knots the split ends of the lace together and ties it off. She should have used some of her weight allowance for spare laces. Well, you can't think of everything. "It's why I came."

She follows him down a narrow game trail, moving cautiously in the gray light. It is hard to be certain through the trees, but glimpses of sky between boughs tells her that the sun must be about to clear the horizon soon, because the silver-blue is streaked with rose and gold.

They didn't walk far. She starts to ask a question once, but he puts a finger to his lips before the second syllable, and the softness with which he walks soon has her sneaking on tiptoe too.

Finally, they reach a brushy brake that she realizes after a moment or two is a constructed blind. Brown gestures her to crouch down. She hunkers beside him. When he pulls out his binoculars, she's glad she'd thought to slip her spygla.s.s into her hip pocket.

She sets it to her eye and tries to follow the direction of his lenses. Up into the trees-is he looking at a bird?

She misses the nest the first two times her gla.s.s skips over it, but on the third one she catches movement. Something stirs inside a bundle of leaves. In the slanted light, Sanchez can see how the movement makes the bundle pulse like a beating heart. Strands of some silvery substance, like the mucilage of slugs, bind the leaves together.

"It's a nest?" she whispers.

Brown nods without lowering his binoculars. "Watch."

His voice is barely more than a breath, so Sanchez holds the rest of her questions and tries to quiet her breathing.

Something slips from the shelter of the leaf-bundle. Something mottled and green-brown, nearly the shade of the leaves, but this thing shines moist-slick and coils like a twisting tentacle. It is a tentacle, Sanchez realizes, zooming in her spygla.s.s for a better look.

She presses a b.u.t.ton to trigger the gla.s.s's internal digital camera as the second tentacle emerges. Now she sees the suckers on the underside of the think, questing sensory organs. Now, the bulbous head, emerging slowly from the leaf-shelter, the one visible enormous eye blinking softly. As it moves further from the leaves, out onto the green of the coniferous boughs that surround it, its color shifts from dappled to a deep, unrelieved pine green.

"Cripes," she whispers.

Brown nudges her, but it's too late. The octopus-the arboreal octopus- flashes in pores of dark red against the green, like bloodstone. And then it's gone, vanishing not back into the nest but through boughs, moving away, invisible in moments although Sanchez can track its progress for a few seconds longer by the sway as it moves from branch to branch. But then it must slow, become more cautious, because its progress becomes both invisible and inaudible.

She waits thirty more seconds before she lets her breath out and says, "What was that?"

Brown lowers his binoculars. "Pacific tree octopus," he says.

"Those are a joke. They don't exist."

He points up with one long finger, the nail bed strikingly pale in the gloom beneath the trees. "I know."

Dr. Klopft came back in as Martha was pushing the last ketchup around her plate with a French fry. It turned out they weren't any good when they got cold, and she wondered why it was that n.o.body had told her so. She was also full-really full-for the first time since she and Matt had eaten up all the supplies Daddy had left behind when he vanished. It was almost an unpleasant feeling, like her body had forgotten what to do with that much food.

She put the French fry down when the door opened, and looked around for something to wipe her fingers on. The napkin on her lap (Daddy had always been very insistent about manners) had slipped down to the floor, so she dropped to her knees and grabbed it. When she got back up again, Matt was standing to block her from the doctor.

She wiped her hands and put one on his arm, pushing herself between him and the table until she was standing behind him.

"Hey," Dr. Klopft said. "Did you kids get enough to eat?"

Matt nodded. Martha squeezed his arm for moral support.

Dr. Klopft glanced around and put one hand on a chair-box. He dragged it over and hunkered down it, beside the table-box they had been eating at, even though it was too small.

"Please," he said. "Sit."

It made Martha feel very grown up to be talked to that way. She sat back in her chair, pushing away the cold-fry plate, and in a minute Matt did also. Apparently, it was her job to talk to Klopft, because Matt just bit his lip in that stubborn way that meant he wasn't going to say anything, and his face crinkled up beside the eyes.

"Dr. Klopft," she said, trying to sound respectful, "can you please take us to Daddy Corey now?"

Klopft heaved a big sigh, which Martha thought meant he was tried and frustrated. He steepled his fingers in front of him and said, "Martha, I know this is scary. But I'd like to help you. Can you tell me where your Daddy went?"

She felt a sinking heaviness in her belly. He was supposed to know where Daddy was. If he didn't know, how were they ever going to find him?

"I don't know," she said.

"Do you know how long ago he vanished? When was the last time you saw him?"

She thought about it, but the days blurred together. Weeks and weeks. She shook her head.

Matt said, "Three weeks."

Martha looked at him. Was that all? She looked back at Dr. Klopft in time to see his face do something funny.

"That was the last time we saw him too," he said. "You see, your daddy works for me. And we're very worried about him. Now, I'm not angry with him or you, and I won't be angry. I just want to help you find him."

Grownups didn't usually say they wouldn't be angry unless they were actually secretly angry and trying not to show it. At least, that was true about Daddy. And it was true about the people in videos. But Dr. Klopft said works, not worked. So even if Dr. Klopft was mad, he wasn't going to fire Daddy.

"Okay," Matt said, having apparently reached the same conclusions that Martha had.

But Martha said, "Why did you tie us up?"

Dr. Klopft smiled. "That was a mistake. Officer Callandar and Officer Alison were worried that you would try to get away, and if you hid in the woods you could get hurt or chased by an animal before they could find you. They shouldn't have done it, and I punished them. It won't happen again."

"We live in the woods," Matt said, stubbornly proud. "We wouldn't get eaten by an animal."

Dr. Klopft smiled. "Yes, you're obviously both very smart and knowledgeable children. Now I need you to use those smarts and that knowledge to help me. So think very carefully, please. About the last time you saw your father."

Martha closed her eyes to think better. It wasn't hard to pull up the memory: it was still there, crisp and perfect, just like all her other memories. It shone in her head as if she could reach out and touch it.

She wanted to. She wanted to run into the memory and hug Daddy. But if she tried she knew her arms would go right through him.

Matt was remembering too. She didn't open her eyes to look, but she could tell by his voice. He said, "Dad said he had somebody to meet. And that he'd be home in a couple of hours."

"A couple of hours? You're sure?"

"He was always very-very punctual." Matt p.r.o.nounced the long word carefully. "He was always where he said he would be."

"Except for that time," Martha said. "He didn't come back."

Dr. Klopft was frowning. "But he was fine when he left you. He didn't seem worried?"

"No," Matt said.

But Martha knew better. She'd seen something while Matt was outside.

She said, "He took his gun."