“When?” Dancer asks.
“After Quicksilver’s birthday.”
“Sadly, I know the date.” His lips make a tight line beneath his beard. “That explains a few…irregularities. So you and Darrow would have found out after Venus…” Sevro just watches, so I nod. “And he still went to Mercury.”
“Apex asshole, right?” Sevro chimes.
“Please stop,” I say.
Dancer doesn’t let it go either. “Going back to his men is one of the only good and true things he’s done in the last year, Sevro. Which is more than I can say for you.” Dancer glares and looks down the hall to the sitting room. His eyes linger on the hearth where Deanna knits. It broke my heart, but not my expectations, that some Reds saw my boy as a perversion. Dancer never did, no matter what he thinks of me. He would sit with Pax on his knee by the fire, smoking his pipe as my boy slept. Did it right up to the age where he’d be the one to fall asleep, and Pax would put the pipe out for him, and tuck a blanket under his grizzled chin. Dancer is thinking of the passage of time. How many years ago that was, and wondering where they all went. I know because the same thought monopolizes so many of my own hours.
“So. Tell me. How badly are you compromised?” he asks.
“I’m not the one who is compromised,” I say. He frowns as I pull the datadrop from my pocket. “I’ve long suspected that the Syndicate Queen was working for or in conjunction with another party—possibly one within our government. Thanks to Theodora, and a new method of interrogation, I’ve uncovered evidence.”
“You know who she is?” he asks warily.
“No. Unfortunately, she doesn’t even trust her Dukes with that information. But…there have been revelations.”
“Show him,” Sevro says.
I tell the datadrop to play. Sevro scoots forward so he’s within the three-dimensional perimeter of the holo. Memories are imperfect. They bleed into each other. We skitter through fragments of his life. The Duke is at the beach one moment, bending to pick something up. Then he is riding in a shuttle, speaking to his Queen; her face is obscured with a mask that writhes with what looks like locusts. It was too much to hope for a perfect look at her face, but I’ll get one soon enough. We have her location. But first we will make sure our own house is in order.
Finally, a hotel suite expands around us, faded where the Duke of Hands’ peripheral vision ends. The ceiling is the clearest, carved with cupids and forest creatures. Candles float, beneath the ceiling, dripping down wax. Heavy breathing comes from the memory. The sound of sheets clenched as the breath quickens to agonizing climax. Then a perspective distortion that makes the cupids grow larger than the closer candles. Spasmodic psychedelic light pixelates the cupids above, dissolving their bodies. They drift for what must b
e a minute, before racing back together. Focus pulses out, then in. Breath eases out, and a man’s head rises upward, laying kisses on the Duke’s chest until Dancer’s face fills the memory as he closes his eyes to kiss the Duke on the mouth.
“It seems reveries are imperfect,” I say. “Auditory recall is extremely flawed. So are actions. They reflect latent guilt and sometimes alter to seem more heroic. Faces, on the other hand, are almost never forgotten. The colors are often different depending upon the time extract, the mood more magnetic or colder. A brain is not a hardrive. The spaces between—that jump you noticed—are…Well, I guess no one has ever called them anything before. Let’s name them fissures. The fissures are the time between the memories we retain. I’ve not had long to make a reconnaissance. Some span minutes, some weeks. Most reveries are laced with fissures. I only found this one because it was entirely intact. He cherished this memory, it seems. Unfortunately, a hologram is a poor means of communicating the memory; prime fidelity occurs from sympathetic shadowing.” I tap my head. “Literally experiencing it. I assure you, it is quite strange.”
“How?” Dancer asks, his face flushed a deep crimson. His outsized miner hands are squeezing the edge of the table. The wood is starting to splinter as he stares at the reverie.
“I have technology that maybe one, probably two others are familiar with, though not to my degree of sophistication, I don’t think. But they’re on Mercury.”
“I meant how is that any of your bloodydamn business,” he growls, looking at me like he’s about to lunge forward and rip out my jugular. Sevro slips closer to my side, as surprised as I am by his venomous reaction. “You think you can blackmail me with this for my vote? Ruin me? Drag me in front of the branders like some poetic horror? I don’t care if my people spit on me. If they say I should be gelded. If you rob away the only thing that matters to me. Slag you.”
Even Sevro is rocked on his heels by the anger in Dancer’s eyes.
I made a mistake.
The moment the video started to play, Dancer thought this was a shakedown. He’s kept this secret his entire life, because the only people left in mankind to look at homosexuality as an aberration just happen to be his own. While the one that embraces fluidity is the one he’s warred against for most of his life. The one that sculpted his culture as they saw fit.
Mine.
He thought I was threatening to expose his inner life.
Knowing he thought me that cruel is a jarring blow. Sevro is there to pick up the slack. “You really ain’t got a clue,” he mutters. “It ain’t about that, boyo.”
Dancer looks ready to kill. “Then. What. Is. It. About?”
“Just that the man you were…you know…playing hide the viper with is third in the line to the throne of the Syndicate. That’s all, I swear.”
Dancer goes sheet white. Anger vaporized in a snap of the fingers, replaced by sheer bafflement. His mouth opens and closes. “What?”
“The Syndicate…black coats, prostitution, child slavery, narcotics, hired murder, kidnapping…you know the lot. Sort of the worst people on the moon.”
“That…” He looks at the datadrop. “…was the Duke of Hands?” He sits motionless. “Shit.” He rocks his head back. “Shiiiiiit.”
Sevro and I exchange a glance.