Duplicate Effort Part 8

"Well?" Talia asked. Apparently he'd been studying them too long, and he'd been too quiet about it.

"I never expected to see them," he said because he didn't know how else to respond. He wasn't sure how he was feeling. His stomach was knotted, his heart was pounding, and he had to remind himself to breathe.

Beneath all that, he was furious at Rhonda for doing this to him. For denying him not one child, but six. He had told her before they married that he wanted a family. They'd planned on two children, but six would have been fine.

Or one.

"We could meet them," Talia said.

He glanced at her. Her face seemed different from theirs. He wanted to believe that it was the twenty-nine months' difference, or the baby fat, or the expression, but it was none of those things. Talia had become more than the sum of her features. She had become more than her looks, more than her creation, more than her inheritance. She was her own person and would be forever, at least to him. "You know we can't." He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. All of that conversation earlier, and Talia still suggested this? Hadn't she understood the stakes?

"I don't mean now," she said, a bit defensively. "I mean when you think it's safe. Like when they're twenty-one or something."

He blinked, turning away from his daughter-the only daughter he would probably ever be able to acknowledge-and took a moment to catch his breath.

"I'm not sure it would ever be wise to see them," he said. "We don't know-"

"We can't always be cautious," Talia said.

"Yes, we can," he said.

"But it's not fair to them," she said.

"To them?" he asked. "Do they really need to know what happened here on Armstrong? Aren't you saying it's not fair to you?"

That generous mouth, the one he hadn't really noticed before, thinned. She pressed her lips together, as if she wanted to yell at him, and then she finally rubbed her chin.

She had never used that gesture before. She had picked it up from him in just the past few months. "Maybe I am saying it's not fair to me," she said after a moment. "But what if they want to know where they came from?"

"That's not up to us," he said.

She made a disgusted noise. "Can't you at least humor me? Can't you say, 'Tal, we'll revisit this when you're twenty-one,' or something like that?"

Her comments suddenly made him calmer. She planned to stay with him. She wanted him to make plans for her twenty-first year. She expected them to stay together.

The very idea, expressed so casually, pleased him more than he could say. Until that moment, he wasn't sure whether Talia wanted to remain near him for the next six months, let alone the next eight years. "We can talk about it then," he said, hoping she would forget he said that. He had a hunch she wouldn't. It was too important to her.

"Promise?"

"I promise we'll talk about it," he said.

She sighed. Eight years had to seem like an eternity to her. Eight years ago, she had been five, and living with Rhonda, without the father who had "abandoned" them.

She squared her shoulders and faced the images before her. "Did I make a lot of mistakes?" "We can cover your tracks," he said. "I've already covered a lot."

"Good."

He looked at the images. He understood Talia's desire to meet these girls. He felt something similar. He'd downloaded information about their families and had to stop himself from reading with great interest.

All he knew was that Gita Havos's parents were the ones still working for Aleyd. Kahlila El Alamen's had quit to become some kind of artists.

Kahlila's parents lived on Earth-Talia had been going to see them when she had been stopped. Gita's lived in a small Aleyd-owned community on Mars.

"It's addicting, isn't it?" Talia asked him.

He made himself look away. With a touch of the finger, he made both images disappear. "It's all about the possibilities," he said.

She frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

"Right now, all five of the others are possibilities, to both of us. Different versions of the baby I lost. Different versions of yourself for you."

"I don't think of them as me," she said.

"I understand that," he said. "I phrased it wrong. They're living a 'what-if' for you. What if you hadn't been raised by your mother? What if you'd been adopted by one of these two families? Would you have turned out exactly like Gita and Kahlila? Or would you have been different yet again?"

"You think I'd've been the same?" The question was hesitant. He thought he heard fear in her voice. "No," he said. "I think we're the sum of our actions. Yours would have been different from theirs from the beginning."

"Because I'm younger," she said. "Because you're you."

She looked at him sideways. "We're exactly the same. The five of them and me. We're just-what did you say? Parts of the baby you lost."

"None of you are the child I lost," he said. "She was very different. She probably talked at a different age, and found different things interesting. She spent most of her time interacting with me. None of you had met me. Your interactions with me are very different than they would have been if I had raised you."

"But Mom was there for me."

"Your mom was," he said. "But not for Emmeline. She barely knew your mother."

"That's just environmental."

"Maybe," Flint said. "One thing I know for certain. All six of you do not share Emmeline's consciousness. You don't even share each other's. You have different thoughts, different desires, and different interests. By definition that makes you different people. You didn't even know the others existed until the Recovery Man told you, right?"

"How could I?" she asked.

"Some twins describe the feeling of being 'connected' to each other. They know what the other is feeling even if they're several kilometers apart. Did you ever have that feeling?"

Talia shook her head. "Maybe because we're clones," she said bitterly.

"Maybe," he agreed. "But not because you're inferior. But because you had no knowledge of each other. Identical twins share a womb. They spend nine months together even if they're adopted out to different families. The twins know on a subconscious level that there's another person out there, a person they were once close to. You weren't close to the other five. You never met them, not even before you could remember. I don't think they have any knowledge of you, either. Or of each other."

She brightened at that. "You think that's true? Or are you trying to make me feel better?" He sighed and ran a hand through his curls, the curls all of his daughters-all six of them-had in one degree or another.

"One thing I can promise you," he said. "I will never lie just to make you feel better. I might have to in order to protect you, but I won't do it casually. I will always do my best to tell you the truth." "Even if it hurts?" she asked. That needy tone was in her voice again. Rhonda hadn't told Talia any hurtful truths. Rhonda had left that to her lawyers and her adversaries and her ex-husband.

And Talia was bright enough to know that.

"Even if it hurts," he said. "It's better to get it out of the way than it is to protect your feelings." "Why?" she asked.

He sighed. "Because it might grow into something bigger. And the bigger a lie gets, the more hurtful it becomes."

"That's for sure." Talia looked at the now-empty screens. "You think they have any idea they're adopted?"

"Maybe one or two of them know," he said. "I wouldn't think all of them do." "You think they ever wonder about their real family?" "Yeah," he said. "I do." "I'm going to keep wondering about them," she said almost defiantly. He put a hand on hers. "Me, too," he said softly. "Me, too."

11.

Nyquist pushed open the door of Bowles's rented studio. The techs had finished with the main room. He wasn't sure what he expected them to find, but he'd had them go over the place anyway. Since the Hunting Club had denied him his crime scene evidence, he'd take evidence from other places like this studio, and see what he could come up with.

He fully expected to come up with nothing. Bowles had died in the Hunting Club's fake forest and she might not even have been the main target. The other man-still unidentified-might have been the focus of the killer, and Bowles might have been in the wrong place.

Nyquist couldn't work on the other man until the identification was complete.

So he was going to focus on Bowles.

The studio looked exactly like it was supposed to-a small, rented s.p.a.ce that somehow had to mimic the big production places like InterDome.

Most of InterDome's techniques could be done on handhelds and on personal links, but some of them were difficult to reproduce-especially in holoproduction.

He had worked enough cases-and done enough interviews-to learn that much.

The door to the building opened directly into the studio. A production desk, which reminded him of nothing more than the c.o.c.kpit of a s.p.a.ce yacht, sat in the middle of the room. Nearly empty shelves stood behind the desk, and in front of it, a window that opened into an empty room. That room had sound dampeners on the wall, ceiling, and floor, and a door to the left.

He'd seen rooms like it before: They were used for holoproduction. Only more sophisticated places didn't have visible sound dampeners on the walls. They had clear screens that could be made to show any image at any time-a way of presenting a holoreporter as if she were standing in Wells City on Mars when she was actually here, reporting "live."

A small bathroom opened off the studio. He went in, and was surprised to find another door. That opened into a dark s.p.a.ce. He requested a light, and nothing came on, so he fumbled against the wall. Still nothing.

He went back into the studio and looked at the production desk. On one corner were the environmental controls. They were labeled for the three other rooms, including the back, which was marked as VIEWING Room.

Of course. She used it to watch what she had completed. He shoved his hands in his pocket. Most studios were smaller s.p.a.ces in large media conglomerates.

The studios themselves were often smaller than this, but better appointed, and crammed with listeners, engineers, and supervisors.

This one felt lonely.

He wondered whether Bowles had noticed that or she had liked the solitude. He knew that some investigative reporters worked alone, even at places like InterDome, because they didn't want to be scooped.

There had to be preventive equipment here, too, although-he was surprised to note-his links (even the unimportant ones) remained on.

He sat in the overstuffed chair and felt it mold to his body. A luxury in a place that didn't seem to have any. He whirled the chair around and studied those empty shelves.

What had she planned to put on them?

Or had she planned to put nothing on them?

They weren't built in. They had been moved here, and they were an unusual feature.

He got up and walked to them, and that's when he saw a single jewel case holding a tiny chip. The case was marked THE FIRST-COMPLETE, and he finally knew what he was looking at. She had planned to use the shelves to keep track of every story she had done here. Which seemed more pretentious than it should have, even for Ki Bowles.

A single jewel case could hold a hundred chips, and the jewel case pretty much disappeared against the wall of the shelf. She could have put tens of thousands of stories here and not taken up more than two shelves.

It was a waste of s.p.a.ce, and in a place like this, that seemed out of character. He grabbed one of the shelves and started to muscle it aside.

To his surprise, it slid on its own track, moving toward the wall. The other shelf did the same, blocking the door.

He didn't care that he was trapped in here. What pleased him was the screen behind the shelves. The screen with its touch-control features and the large keypad beneath.

The production desk might have been the center of recording for the studio, but this was the mixing board, the storage unit, and the place where Bowles did her thinking.

He could tell that just from the diagrams that opened without his even asking. The diagram flowed, like a two-dimensional genealogy chart.

He squinted at it. The labels were small, but he could read them.

She had diagrammed a conglomerate, with all its corporate holdings. Each holding had subcorporations as well, and what appeared to be several small businesses.

She hadn't written names anywhere, just the type of business: corporation, subcorporation, affiliated business. She had made arrows that ran from a corporation to an affiliated business of another corporation. Some of those arrows then went back up to the conglomerate.

He didn't understand those arrows at all. Nor could he tell just from the diagram which conglomerate she was ill.u.s.trating. He supposed that information would be in her files somewhere, along with the reasons she had for doing this. He tapped the dedicated link on his thumb to tell the techs to come back into the studio. But the link was blocked. He searched for his internal links and found all of them blocked as well.

He couldn't access anything except the emergency links. He felt a momentary irritation. Then he stepped back to see if all of his links worked near the production desk.

They didn't.

When he had moved the shelves, revealing Bowles's true workstation, he had activated the link blocker. In spite of himself, he smiled.

That was just plain brilliant.

He stepped forward again and pulled the shelves toward each other. They slid easily and then clicked as they locked into place.

Then he heard the white noise as his links reconnected. He tapped the dedicated link on his thumb again, and this time, one of the techs answered.

"I need the team back in here," he said. "You won't believe what I found."

He signed off, grabbed the chip from the top shelf, and opened the viewing room. While the techs worked the new area, he would watch Bowles's last production-and see whether anything in it had gotten her killed.

12.

Maxine Van Alen sat behind her desk, folders scattered in front of her. The company she was suing had so much money they could waste it on expensive paper bindings for their annual reports. And, in case anyone missed the we're-wealthier-than-the-rest-of-you-idiots message, the files were labeled in gold leaf.

She wore a pair of jeweled half-gla.s.ses frames halfway down her nose. A matching jeweled chain kept the frames around her neck when she didn't want to wear them. Her earrings and rings also matched.

Otherwise she was wearing all black today, from the thin silk tunic that ran over a pair of matching pants to her black hair and black fingernails. She'd debated making her eye color black today as well, but she opted for bright blue instead, matching the sapphires in the jeweled chain.