The door opens behind me, and lets the sunlight in. At least that’s exactly how it feels, her physical presence a radiant warmth against my back where I’m nearest to her. She moves closer, peering over my shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Looking at architectural sketches.” I hand her the datapad. “Eloise sent me the estimates to remodel Tom O’Bedlam’s. I nearly dropped all my leaves when I saw what Thomas has planned. He wants to turn it into a disco! At first I thought no way – but I reconsidered. Times are changing. Dalgherdia City isn’t going to be the same, so maybe it’s just as well. And it’s closer to his turf than mine, isn’t it? But I still want to keep my hand in the game, so I’m opening a new club here, on Dolparessa.”
I show her. “I thought I would put it here, in the capital. It’s going to be much more upscale. I’m calling it Everybody Goes to Tommy’s.”
Tara flicks through the plans, but she’s only half-interested. There’s something on her mind, but I’ll let her warm her way up to it. “Driscoll can hold court there. The so-unfashionable-it’s-fashionable trend is starting to wear thin.”
“Everything wears thin with Driscoll. In under five minutes. Maybe he’ll hang around longer if I let him put in a gallery. I have the space; it’s going to be a pretty big place. I’m even putting in a casino with an NBAI franchise. You know, I was thinking of using Panic-AIs for the croupiers.”
“Is Ross okay with that?” Tara’s genuinely concerned. She’s always concerned about Ross – and never quite about the right things. Still, I know he’s happy that she thinks of him.
“He’s amused. She has the perfect disposition to run gaming tables – once we put the non-violence limiters in. It really is poetic justice, like Constantine said.”
“I have to admit, that was a stroke of genius on Owen’s part.”
“It makes sense. Since they were doing incremental saves, CenGov had to have a backup. There’s no telling how many more copies they would make. We’d be fighting General Panic forever. The best thing we could do was to release the AI into the public domain. A free AI? It will be everywhere. Ruins any possibility of using it as a military strategist.”
She’s still circling around the topic. She’s not as tough as she thinks she is, and she’s been through a lot lately. Actually, she’s been through a lot in general. I wish – I wish I could just hold her, and protect her, that we could spend the nights dancing away at the club, with only a break for champagne, or for me to sing a set of ancient love songs. I wish – but that isn’t what I and I wishes, is it? Tara’s destiny above her pleasure. I understand exactly why Dermot did what he did.
“If you open a casino,” she says wistfully, “maybe I’ll finally start seeing more of Wynne. It’s funny that I don’t. He doesn’t seem to be the shy type.”
“I get the feeling that he doesn’t want to push his luck,” I say lightly. It’s an unspoken question, and I can’t answer. Wynne has done nothing wrong – the point of his existence is that he does everything right. So why doesn’t he get more face time?
Tara wanders over to the window. It’s almost sunset, and it brushes her hair with red-gold light. Right now, I wish I was Driscoll, and could paint her like that, so lovely and touched with melancholy.
I will, says Driscoll.
I wait. I know when to push and not to push, when to get serious, and when to make a joke. I was made to be the perfect friend to her. I’m not sure I was ever intended to be her lover. So here’s what “God” does to me – makes me a hopeless romantic with an overactive libido. But I’m not allowed to pine away like Evan, or throw her over my shoulder, like Ari. I have to sit and smile sympathetically while my heart breaks and the rest of me is boiled in oil. The closest I can come is some old torch song, crooned at midnight in the synthetic-smoky haze of a dimly lit bar. And I can’t even write my own songs, like Jack. I have to reveal the truth of my heart by using someone else’s lyrics. It’s a cheat, like a stripper wearing a body-stocking.
Is it any wonder that I play the fool? And wasn’t it enough keep me on the rack, suspended between my longing and my duty – did I and I have to make a second one? Thomas is supposed to be exactly like me. And do you know what Thomas means? It means “twin.” But my name is Thomas, too. Are we actually supposed to believe that Goliath wasn’t part of the plan from the start?
Maybe Lorcan is right about I and I. Maybe for humans to not know the god that created them – if such a being exists – is a blessing in disguise.
Finally, Tara says, “Hey, Tommy, tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do.”
I know exactly what she means, all the things that she’s not saying. I’m not her best friend for nothing.
“You know I never got a chance to testify,” I say. “I know damn well why. Ailann knew I had it sussed.”
“That would seem a good reason to let you testify. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Here’s what I figured out – we got almost no response from I and I at all. Which means that the Big Guy wasn’t sweating it. Now before you get mad – I think that maybe the point was He knew we needed do our best in order to pass muster. If we thought success was preordained, then we’d get overconfident and screw it up. Because there’s no sure bet, only probabilities.”
“That makes sense. But it doesn’t really explain his behavior about the Caliban incident.”
“If he could still see your image 1456 years into the future, how likely was it going to be that you would die in the next three minutes?”
“But he was manipulating the situation again. He was manipulating Charles…”
“He does that. That’s kinda what gods do.” And that’s all I’ll say, because she’s right. I wish I had more faith. Maybe I should talk to the archbishop.
She wanders back, sits across the table from me. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Well, she didn’t exactly ask it. “Kiddo, are you sorry that you beat up Callum?”
“What?”
“Really.”
“Well…no.”
“But you’re sorry that you hit Ari. Ari shrugged that punch off in ten seconds, but you broke Callum’s rib. And yet you’re sorry for what you did to Ari.”
“Ari was worse. I broke Callum’s rib, but I broke Ari. And Callum needs to be broken before he can be fixed.”
I can’t help but smile. “You know exactly what to do,” I say, resting my elbows on the table, and leaning across to her, my face in my hands. “You just have to trust yourself like we trust you.” Dermot loved her enough to let go of her, and I and I trusted her enough to let her go, even though all of our lives were in the balance.
Do I trust her? Yeah, more than I trust myself.
She cocks her head at me and smiles. “You could at least get a lady a drink,” she says, unbuttoning her blouse.