Tiamat's Wrath

Interlude: The Dancing Bear

Holden woke up with the light of dawn streaming through the high window and casting shadows across the ceiling. The last trails of a dream—something about crocodiles getting into a water recycler and him and Naomi trying to lure them out with a salt shaker—slipped away. He stretched, yawned, and pulled himself up out of the wide bed with its soft pillows and plush blanket. He took a moment at the foot of the bed to take everything in. The flowers in the vase by the window. The subtle pattern woven into the sheets. He worked his toes against the soft, warm rug. And he recited silently what he always did, every morning since the beginning.

This is your cell. You are in prison. Don’t forget.

He smiled contentedly because someone was watching.

His shower was tiled with river stones, smooth and beautiful. The water was always warm, and the soap was scented with sandalwood and lilac. The towels were soft and thick and white as fresh-fallen snow. He shaved in a mirror that was heated to keep condensation from forming on it. His Laconian uniform—real cloth, not recycled paper—was pressed and clean in his footlocker. He dressed himself, humming a light melody he remembered from his childhood because someone was listening.

He had come to Laconia in a much less pleasant cell. He had been questioned in a box. He’d been beaten. And in the early days, threatened with worse things than that. In the later days, tempted with the promise of freedom. Even power. It could have been much, much worse. He had, after all, been part of an attack that had crippled Medina Station and ended with the agents of the underground scattering to systems all around the empire. Someone had even managed to steal one of Laconia’s early destroyers out from under them. Holden had known a lot about how the underground on Medina functioned, who was involved with it, and where they could be found. He was alive and had all his fingers with the nails still attached because he’d also known about the dead space that had appeared on the Tempest when it used its magnetic field generator in normal space. And the dead spaces like it in all the systems besides Sol. He was the one person in the whole of humanity who had—escorted by the enslaved remnants of Detective Miller—been inside the alien station and seen the fate of the protomolecule’s builders firsthand. And from the first moment they’d allowed it, he’d been shoveling everything he knew about that at them. Calling him cooperative on the subject would have been a vast understatement, and with every passing week, his knowledge of the underground was more out of date. Less useful. They didn’t even bother asking him about that stuff anymore.

Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it. Even when it was the push for his own personal immortality—and then his daughter’s—before slamming the door behind them, Duarte managed to cast it as a necessary burden for the good of the species. He was above all else a charming little ratfuck. As Holden grew to respect the man, even to like him, he was careful never to lose sight of the fact that Duarte was a monster.

There was a lock on his door, but he didn’t control it. He put the handheld he’d been issued in a pocket, walked out into the courtyard, and closed the door behind him. Anyone who wanted in could go in. If they wanted for some reason to lock him out—or in—they could. He put his hands in his pockets and strolled down a colonnaded walkway. The ferns in the planter came from Earth. Maybe the soil did too. Some minor functionary of the state came out of a doorway before him, turned and breezed by him as if he hadn’t been there. He was like a fern that way. Decorative.

The commissary was larger than a whole deck of the Rocinante. Pale, vaulted ceilings and an open kitchen with three cooks on duty any time of the day or night. A few tables by the windows, a dozen scattered in another courtyard at the back. Fresh fruit. Fresh eggs. Fresh meats and cheeses and rice. Not too much of any one thing. The elegance came from the labor and deference of the people, not from conspicuous waste. Loyalty valued over wealth. It was amazing what you could learn about someone by sitting quietly for a few months with what they’d built.

He got a carved wooden tray and a plate of rice and fish, the way he usually did. A smaller plate of melon and berries. A light-roast coffee in a white ceramic cup the size of a small soup bowl. Cortázar was sitting alone in an alcove at the back, looking at something on a hand terminal. Out of discipline, Holden grinned and went to sit across from the sociopathic professional vivisectionist.

“Good morning, Doc,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Universe treating you gently?”

Cortázar closed whatever file he’d been reading over, but not before Holden caught the phrase indefinite homeostasis. He didn’t know what it meant exactly, and he couldn’t look it up without someone knowing he had.

“Things are fine,” Cortázar said, and the glimmer in his eyes meant that was true. Which probably meant they were terrible for someone who wasn’t Paolo Cortázar. “Very good.”

“Yeah?” Holden said. “What’s the good word?”

For a second, Cortázar teetered on the edge of saying something, but he pulled back. It was a confirmation of his good mood. The doctor liked knowing more than the people around him. It gave him a sense of power. The times he was most likely to let his guard down were when he was angry or annoyed. Or drunk. Drunk and complaining Cortázar was the best version of the man.

“Nothing I can talk about,” he said, and rose from his place even though his food was only half-eaten. “I’m sorry I can’t stay. Schedule.”

“If you get time later, track me down and we can play some more chess,” Holden said. He lost a lot of chess to Cortázar. He didn’t even have to throw the games. The guy was good. “You will always find me at home.”

Left alone, Holden ate his breakfast in silence and let the atmosphere of the room wash over him. Another of the things he’d learned during his time as a dancing bear was not to search for clues to anything. The effort of the search actually made him overlook things. It was better to be passive and notice what was there. Like the way the cooks spoke to each other, scowling. Like the speed of the dignitaries walking into and out of the commissary, the way their shoulders were tight.

Ever since the most recent event—the weird shift in his perception, the lost time and consciousness—the atmosphere in the State Building had been like this. Something was going on, but Holden didn’t know what. No one had even mentioned it to him. And he didn’t ask. Because someone was always listening.

When he was done, he left his plate to be cleared away, got his usual two cups of fresh coffee in takeaway mugs, and tucked a half link of sausage into his pocket. He walked out toward the gardens. It was a little cool. Seasons were longer on Laconia, but the autumn was definitely starting to get its roots into things. High above, one of the weird jellyfish-looking cloud things sailed through the air, the blue of the sky showing through its transparent flesh. The guard post was little more than a bench with a square-jawed young man who looked like he might have been one of Alex’s cousins.

“Good morning, Fernand,” Holden said. “Brought you a little something.”

The guard smiled and shook his head. “I still can’t accept that from you, sir.”

“I understand,” Holden said. “It’s a shame, you know, because the coffee they serve at the VIP commissary is really good. Fresh beans that they didn’t roast like they were hiding evidence. Water with a little bit of minerals, but not so much that it tastes like you’re drinking a quarry. It’s excellent stuff, but …”

“It sounds wonderful, sir.”

Holden put one of the takeaway mugs on the bench. “I’ll just put this here so you can dispose of it safely. And this one that Lieutenant Yao can dispose of too. It has a little sugar in it.”

“I’ll let her know to get rid of it,” the guard said with a smile. It had taken weeks to get that far with the kid. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing. Every person in the State Building who saw humanity in Holden, who shared a joke with him, or who had a pattern in their day that he could be a part of, made him that tiny bit harder to kill. No one thing he did made a difference. All of it together might decide between mercy or a bullet in the back of his skull somewhere not too far down the line. So Holden chuckled like the guard was a friend and ambled out into the gardens.

There were patterns in the life of the State Building. Everyone had routines, whether they knew it or not. Here at the heart of the empire, with thousands of people making their way into and out of and through the buildings at the source of authority and power, he could have spent lifetimes tracking them all. It was like sitting and watching a termite hive until each insect stopped being itself and turned into an organ in a much larger, older consciousness. If he lived as long as Duarte intended to, he still wouldn’t understand all the subtleties of it. For his present purposes, the smaller patterns were enough. Things like Cortázar enjoyed winning at chess and the guard lieutenant liked sugar in her coffee and Duarte’s daughter went out into the gardens in the late morning, especially when she was upset.

Not that she always did. Some days, Holden put himself in what he hoped would be her path and wound up spending hours reading old adventure novels or watching censor-approved entertainment feeds. Not news. He had access to the state propaganda feeds, but he couldn’t bring himself to watch them. Either they’d make him angry, and he couldn’t afford to be angry, or through simple repetition they’d start to seem true. He couldn’t afford that either.

Today, he picked a little pagoda set by an artificial stream. The plants there were local varieties. The leaflike structures were darker than the plants he’d known growing up. Blue black with whatever chlorophyll analog Laconia’s evolutionary history had come up with. Still wide, to catch the energy of the sun. Still tall to get above everything they were competing with. Similar pressures yielded similar solutions, just the way flight had evolved five different times on Earth. Good moves in design space. That’s what Elvi Okoye had called it.

He took out his handheld, and for almost two hours let himself sink into an old murder mystery set on an ice hauler in the Belt before the gates opened, and written by someone who had clearly never been on an ice hauler in their life. The first sign that he wasn’t alone was the barking. He put down his reading just as the old Labrador came galloping around the hedge, grinning the way only dogs could. Holden took the sausage out of his pocket and let the dog eat it from his palm while he scratched the old girl’s ears. There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.

“Who’s a good dog?” he said. The dog huffed once just as the girl came around. Teresa, the heir apparent. Princess of the empire. She was fourteen, and in the phase of adolescence where every emotion spilled down her face. He barely had to glance at her to know that something had wrecked her.

“Hey,” he said, the way he always did. Every time the same, so that the pattern of it became familiar. So that he became familiar. Because things that are familiar aren’t a threat.

Normally she answered with Hello, but today she broke the pattern. She didn’t say anything at all, just looked at her dog and avoided Holden’s gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot, with dark smudges under them. Her skin was paler than usual. Whatever was going on, it was personal to her. That narrowed the options down.

“You know what’s weird,” he said. “I saw Dr. Cortázar at breakfast, and he was in a big rush. Normally he’ll stop, chew the fat for a little while. Today, he skinned right out of there. Didn’t even bother to whip my ass on the chessboard.”

“He’s busy right now,” Teresa said. Her voice was as ruined as she was. “He has a patient. Dr. Okoye. The one from the Science Directorate. Her husband too. She got hurt, and she’s here at the State Building so she and Father can talk. She isn’t hurt badly. She’ll be fine, but Dr. Cortázar is helping to take care of her.”

At the end of the speech, she nodded, like she was reviewing what she’d said and approved of it. It was a small gesture. The kind that would lose her a lot of money if she ever started playing cards.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Holden said. “I hope she gets better.”

He didn’t ask what had happened. He didn’t dig for information. He should have left it at that. From a tactical point of view, anything more was a mistake.

“Hey,” he said. “I may not be the guy you want to hear this from, but whatever it is? It’s going to be okay.”

The girl’s eyes went wide, and then they went hard. It didn’t take a second.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, then turned and stalked away, slapping her palm against her leg to call the dog. The dog looked from her to Holden, regret in the dark-brown eyes. The hope of more sausage weighed against the distress of her person.

“Go,” Holden said, nodding at Teresa’s retreating back. The dog barked once, a friendly sound, and galloped away again.

Holden tried to go back to his book, but his attention kept wandering. He waited for almost an hour, then put the handheld away and walked. A cool breeze was starting up. He thought about going back to his cell and getting a jacket, but decided not to. Something about being a little uncomfortable was right for the day. Instead, he made his way to the mausoleums.

Garlands of flowers rested in the corner where the stone met the ground. Red and white and a lavish purple. Some were native Laconian plants, some were out of a hydroponics tank. They’d be replaced until the order came to stop replacing them. If the people in authority forgot, there might be fresh flowers at Avasarala’s grave forever.

The woman herself looked down at him from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke. He looked up at her, remembering her voice, the way she’d moved. Her eyes, bright and intelligent and pitiless as a crow’s.

“What is going on here?” he asked, softly. “What am I looking at?”

It didn’t matter if they heard that. Without the context of his thoughts, it wouldn’t mean anything.

He was seeing Teresa, devastated. The State Building vibrating with banked anxiety. Cortázar—entitled, narcissistic, protomolecule-obsessed Cortázar—quietly gleeful. Another bout of strange consciousness and lost time, this one at least in Laconia system, and maybe beyond. Elvi Okoye’s return being used as a cover story for Cortázar’s presence at the State Building. Because he needed to be there, was happy to be there, and someone wanted to hide the real reasons why.

Put like that, something had happened to Duarte.

If it was true, Cortázar’s hands were freer. Which meant his plans to vivisect and kill Duarte’s daughter would probably kick into high gear. And also Elvi was back from her missions in the other system, so Holden’s plans could move forward too. It was a race now, and he had a strong suspicion that he was behind. That was too bad. He had hoped to have more time.

Don’t be a whiny little cunt, Avasarala said in his imagination. Hope in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up first. Get to work.

First he chuckled, and then he sighed. “Fair point,” he said to the dead woman. This time she didn’t answer. He turned and walked back toward the buildings as the first genuinely cold rush of air came and stirred the ground cover that wasn’t quite grass. There would be a storm by nightfall, he was sure of it. Maybe snow. Snow was the same everywhere.

He had to find his next step. Maybe Elvi. Maybe her husband, Fayez. He’d always liked Fayez. Maybe Teresa. Maybe it was time to go to Duarte, if it wasn’t already too late. If only there had been more time …

This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.