THE FEAR PRINCIPLE Read online

  He'd had opportunities over the past three years to regret his decision, but never to doubt the depth of talent and passion she brought to her job. She would go way out of bounds, was immune to direction if she didn't want to take it, had no sense of the politics of her work, but her success rate was the highest on the Planetoid.

  He ran his hand over her file, thinking.

  She'd never worked with an assassin before.

  She was on the Graff assignment.

  She was less experienced than the other Teachers he was considering.

  She was not suited for a high-profile case like Rilasco.

  But his hand wouldn't leave her file alone, so he opened it, and scanned the initial report for her current case, a con man brought in on his third charge of felony fraud and willful negligence leading to wrongful death.

  As he scanned, his face grew darker, his night-sky eyes narrowing.

  "Oh Christ, Jaguar," he said to the report. "You've changed the whole damn thing. Now what're you doing to Graff?"

  1

  He was running. something had happened to his cell bubble. A power outage, or short circuit, and he was running now, while he had the chance, the slick soles of his prisoner's shoes finding precarious purchase on the ancient marble floors of the courtroom.

  Running, and the courtroom crowd was jeering at him, pointing at him and laughing. They were laughing and he looked down, saw that his clothes were falling off him, becoming rags. He was running, almost naked, running from the guards, but his feet wouldn't go anymore.

  "Wait," he yelled at the swarm of people that gathered around him. "Wait. This is my old dream. I really did escape. I did."

  But they only continued to laugh, a circle of jeering faces growing tighter and tighter around him, as he, naked and alone, grew smaller and smaller, skin hanging in wrinkled folds around his bones.

  He woke with a start, his body jerking upright. His vision blurred, sharpened, clouded, and unclouded.

  The first thing he saw clearly was her eyes.

  Sea green, washed with tawny sun and glittering silicon crystals of burnished sand.

  The rest of her face came slowly into focus, with its smooth amber skin framed by silken walnut hair that seemed to have been dipped, here and there, in molten gold. She stood looking down at him, her eyes holding him still while he regained clarity.

  When he tried to stand she pushed him down again.

  "Going somewhere?" she asked, her voice husky and low.

  "I—" he said, "I'm—where?"

  "Toronto," she said, "city of. Canada." She sat down on the arm of the couch and reached toward the end table, picking up a pack of cigarettes. She pulled one out for herself and offered him the pack.

  "Smoke?"

  He shook his head, watched while she lit hers and sucked in smoke. She turned her sea eyes to him.

  "That's right," she said, in answer to his unasked question. "Smoking's illegal in the city zones, Canada and United States. So, figure it out."

  He tried to get his brain to work. He had been arrested, he knew that. That wasn't just the dream. It was real, this time. He was arrested, and convicted, and was being sentenced when something happened to his cell bubble, and he ran. Then—a large and annoying blank.

  He looked around, his gaze touching on the crucial points of the room. He could see the tops of other buildings out the window. He was up high, in the smallish living room of an apartment. Pretty well furnished. Nothing too new or fancy. Just a regulation telecommunicator rather than the newer, more expensive holophone. Security cameras in the corners, nice thick throw rugs over wood flooring—must be an older place to have wood floors. A desk with computer inset, a shelf full of disk books that he couldn't see the titles of, and a rocking chair. Very old bentwood, with a caned seat and back. A valuable antique, he thought.

  Then, on a small table near the rocking chair, a clay bowl filled with dried herbs, a red feather and a dark one resting next to it with a few small stones, and what looked like an animal skull.

  He prided himself on being able to size someone up by the contents of their rooms. Whoever this woman was, she was not rich. She was not inclined to be flashy. She had a sense of history. This much he could tell. But why was she allowed to smoke?

  He turned his gaze from her possessions to her. She was watching him watch her as she breathed out rings of smoke that sailed across the room over his head. Her shirt looked like silk—vintage, maybe—a deep red floaty thing over matching silk pants, also floaty. She wore one earring, the sign of artists, but he couldn't tell what kind. Anyway, artists weren't exempt from the smoking ban, though they'd lobbied hard for it.

  Older people, those over sixty-five with a history of the addiction, were allowed to continue. Looking at her, it was obvious this was not her disclaimer. So what else got you an exemption? Doctor's orders for those deemed chronically unstable biochemically, since it had been discovered that cigarettes regulated depressive episodes with remarkable efficiency.

  She could be crazy, he thought, but she didn't look depressed. What else? There was, of course, the exemption for law-enforcement officials who served in certain high-risk capacities, but she wouldn't be that. Would she?

  He narrowed his eyes at her, and the corners of her mouth twisted up into a smile.

  "That's right," she said. "I'm a cop."

  He pressed his arms into the side of the couch, prepared to propel himself up and out. She laughed.

  "Just checking," she said, "to see if you're awake."

  "Then you're ... not a cop?"

  "Actually, I am. I'm the cop who flipped the power grid so your bubble would crash and you could run."

  "You helped me escape?"

  She inclined her head graciously in acknowledgment, her hair falling like waves of silk around her shoulders.

  "Why?"

  "I thought you were kind of cute, and I know how to without getting caught, so I went ahead."

  "That's bullshit," he said.

  She smiled back and took a deep drag off her cigarette. "Bullshit," she murmured. "Don't you ever wonder how something as solid and inevitable as bullshit became a metaphor for a deliberate illusion?"

  He pushed himself to sitting up, swung his legs down, and planted them firmly on the floor. As he did so a sharp stabbing pain ran across his eyes, forcing him to lower his head into his hands. She waited while he groaned at length.

  "You took a spill," she said. "When I grabbed you."

  Flashes of events went on and off in his mind. Memory began to return. But he didn't remember taking a spill. As he remembered, someone grabbed him, he swung, and whoever it was responded in kind, knocking the back of his head into the side of a brick building.

  "You hit me," he said, taking his hands from his face and glaring at her.

  "You missed me," she said. "Good swing, though." She tamped her cigarette out in a clay ashtray painted in pictographs of wildcats and snakes, then said apologetically, "I thought I was about to lose you, and I went through a lot of trouble to get you, so I took the necessary measures."

  "What the hell," he hissed, "is going on here. Who are you, and what do you want with me?"

  "I'm Jaguar Addams," she said, running a finger along his shoulder, "and you're my prisoner now."

  He snorted derisively, brought up a hand, and rubbed the back of his neck, shrugging her off in the process. This was not a fun game, even if the player was cute.

  "You named after the Explorer series?" he asked.

  Lots of children bore the burden of names such as Onyx and Zarathustra, after one or another of the probes that had been sent out to establish Planetoid colonies in the years of the Serials. Adrian had always thought it ironic that it took the Killing Times to resurrect the dying space program, but he had to admit that NASA worked fast once kicked back into life. There had been eight probes sent out in the first run. This was the first time he'd heard of someone named after the Jaguar probe.

  "Actually," she
said, "I wasn't named after the Explorers. I was born before they went out. Not after the old British car, either. Or the football team."

  "Then what?" he asked when he saw she was unwilling to say more on her own.

  She shrugged. "The big cats. They're extinct, too. Except in zoos. I guess you could say I'm the only wild one left. Would you like a cup of tea? I have some fine herbals. Could help your headache."

  "I don't want tea," he said, pushing himself forward and staring at her hard. Whatever her game was, he wanted to have some say in the rules. "I want you to tell me why you helped me escape, and why I'm in Toronto, and what you plan on doing with me next."

  She leaned back against the edge of the couch, crossed her left leg over her right, and swung it back and forth. "Naughty boy," she said. "How rude of you to question the hospitality of your hostess, and we've only so recently been introduced. Have you never read your Lalê Davidson regarding the rules governing behavior between hostess and guest? You should particularly refer to Chapter Seven, in the Etiquette of Crime."

  "Thank you for helping me escape," he said with mock courtesy. "Will that do?"

  "Not at all. Actually, in almost every tradition except the New Serakones, I own you. Your life is mine. If it pleases me to offer you something, I offer. You then accept gratefully. I've offered you tea. What do you say?"

  He stared at her dumbly. Maybe she wasn't a cop. Maybe she was one of the crazies after all. She let some minutes pass in silence, then she slid gracefully off the arm of the couch and went over to him, stood in front of him, and lifted his chin with the long fingers of her right hand.

  "I'm a cop," she said, as if answering his thoughts. The tone of her voice was less playful, more intense, though what emotion the intensity implied was beyond his reckoning. "I'm a cop on extended leave. Ever hear of the crazy clause?"

  He shook his head.

  "If you're a cop, and your superiors think your job is driving" you crazy, then you get extended leave. Compassionate leave, they call it. You get full pay for the first year, and then they cut it down, little by little, until you have nothing except whatever pension you've managed to accumulate. Every month you get tested to see if you're done being crazy for the time being. In fact, I have to go in in the morning, when they'll pass any number of sensors over my tortured neural pathways, ask any number of discourteous questions, and then fret over any number of statistical surveys to see if I'm fit for service yet."

  She paused, then jerked his chin up higher. "When you look at me, what do you see? Take your time," she added. "Impetuosity can mar judgment unless it's based on a sound intuitive system. People who've just escaped the Planetoids rarely have that." She let go of his chin and dropped to the floor, where she sat looking placidly up at him.

  "What do you see?" she asked again.

  He stared at her hard, trying to penetrate her focused gaze with his own. At first, he thought he had done it, but as the minutes passed he realized that her eyes would let you in only to swallow you whole. They were a great green sea, salty and deep, filled with complicated eddies and whirlpools that would drag you down and down to a place where the water weighed in tons above your head, pressing you into an endless suffocating sand.

  "You're incredibly beautiful," he said, surprising himself.

  She threw her head back and laughed.

  "At least," she said, "you're learning how to compliment the hostess."

  He took in a good lungful of air, shook off the feeling of slow confusion, and leaned back on the couch.

  She stood up and stretched, putting a hand against her lower back. "You think that was a workout. I've been dragging your deadweight body around all morning. You're not a little man, I'll say that for you."

  "I try to keep fit," he said.

  She nodded. "Mm," she said, "I know you do. Because keeping fit means that when the old dreams of running and shrinking start, you can remember they're just phantasms. Just ghouls from your childhood panting after you. Nothing of substance, as long as you're substantial."

  She grinned at his wide-eyed shock.

  "Oh, I know all about you, Adrian Graff. You're a con man of the first degree, convicted of selling illegal drugs as medicine to a bunch of losers dying of ImmunoSerum Disorder, or ISD as it's called in the fast-food world. Convicted, and sentenced to the Planetoids. Unlike you and most of the rest of the apathetic public, I know what goes on at the Planetoids and how little chance you stood of ever coming back. I also know that you're very good at making money, and I'm a cop approaching the end of her first year of compassionate leave. In short, I need money, and you know how to make it, so I want you to make some for me. End of speech. Any questions?"

  He contemplated her face, which seemed calm and in charge of itself. She wasn't desperate. And the idea made a lot of sense to him. In fact, he had to give her credit for using what she knew best to make a living. She might be crazy, but it would suit him just fine to play along with her at least until he got his bearings and figured out what to do next.

  "How much money do you want?" he asked.

  "A lot. Enough to keep me in cigarettes for the rest of my life."

  "Keep smoking them, that won't be very long."

  "Yes, Mother. Then please just give me half a million, and I won't bother you ever again. I promise, cross my heart and hope to swallow a sword."

  Half a million. He could have just handed her the money and been on his way, if the state hadn't confiscated all his accounts. He could do it in a few weeks in New York, or L.A., or even Denver. People were willing to pay a lot for very little when hope was the commodity. But here? He didn't know Toronto. Hadn't ever even visited the damn city. Didn't have any sense of its character or know the streets or the people or the problems, and in his line you had to know all this in depth, as if they were part of your genetic code.

  And even if he had the money, he saw no reason to hand it over to her. He thought fast, sifting through the pros and cons of the situation. Getting to know a new city, a whole new world in which to ply his trade, and she seemed savvy enough to guide him. Certainly playing games with her was better than the alternative he'd been facing just a few hours before.

  But half a million? He shook his head.

  "Oh, okay then," she said, pouting a little, "make it two hundred and fifty thousand, and we'll call it even. Not a bad price to pay for your life, is it?"

  "It'll take time," he said. "I have to get to know the city."

  "I can help you with that," she said. "In fact, I have a few leads for you right off the bat. I didn't go into this blind, after all."

  "No. You don't seem that type. But..."

  "But what?"

  "How do I know you'll let me go when you've got what you want?" he asked. "And why shouldn't I just skip out now?"

  "Two good questions. I knew you weren't as stupid as everyone said you were."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence. What're the answers?"

  "About me letting you go when you're done—you don't know, dearest. You won't know until it happens, or doesn't. In fact, why don't you assume that I'd just as soon kill you as ... well, you know."

  He shifted again, thinking maybe he should try the door, and as the thought crossed his mind he felt a tingle running up the inside of his legs. He raised his eyes to her.

  "That's right," she said. "That's the answer to question number two. There's an implant in your leg. You can't get very far without it hurting like hell, and if you keep trying, you'll just fall down and lie on the ground until I come get you. Right now it's set for a very short range. Later, if it seems okay, I'll give you a longer leash. Trust me, baby?"

  "About as far as you trust me," he said.

  "Good. That's good. Then we understand each other. But you know, there are benefits to your tenure with me." She slipped her silk blouse over her head, let it slide to the floor.

  "At least," she said as she let her hand drop into his lap, "I like to play with my food."

 
"So," he said, "I see."

  The pressure of her body against his pushed him prone onto the couch. The scent of something fresh and wild, like the rampaging mint that ranged the unkempt lawns of old suburbia, reached him, pulling him into an ocean of no known depth. He let all effort leave him while she swarmed up him as if she were the last crashing wave of an incoming tide.

  The banks of computer screens buzzed, hummed, and spoke in soothingly neutered tones under the artificial sunlight that bathed the subbasement of the building. Each screen was in use, and Alex had to wait his turn behind two other people who also wanted access to the Teachers' files.

  He leaned against a wall that was painted a color everyone referred to as therapy green, a color that supposedly was both calming and fortifying to the psyche. Alex sniffed the air to see if they were still piping in the herbal concoction someone had decided was the exact right combination of stimulation and relaxation so that the people stuffed in here working all day wouldn't go mad and kill each other.

  When he first heard about the aromatic infusion, he'd questioned a Board Governor, who blinked at him as if he was questioning the pope and said, "Of course it's effective. It was tested on postal workers."

  Alex leaned, and tried not to tap his feet impatiently as he waited. He hadn't chosen a Teacher for Clare and pressure was on him for a decision. He wanted to check through the files of Teachers not under his supervision to see if he could borrow one. The general files would be incomplete, of course, but he could learn enough to narrow down the field, and then he could consult with the appropriate Supervisor on availability and advisability.