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 br
ibery.
“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.”