Coda

An adventure on Jackson’s Whole — a singer, an agent, and a Deal

I. The Bar

The bar called Low Orbit hung on the twelfth level of the free port of Hal, between the docks for independent haulers and the office of a customs man who had not looked at a manifest in years, and it was exactly as respectable as the planet allowed: not at all, but with good acoustics.

Koda sang there six nights a week, under a contract between House Veyl and the owner in which she figured under the heading “equipment, audio.” She was twenty-six years old, not one of which belonged to her: the Coda series, unit seven, designed by the House’s geneticists for the luxury entertainment market — four and a half octaves of range, a doubled vocal apparatus, hearing from eight hertz to seventy kilohertz, and absolute audio recall, all of it packaged in a small dark-haired woman with a serial stamp behind her left ear and a buy-out contract whose final figure grew every year with “maintenance costs,” the way such figures grow on Jackson’s Whole: forever.

Her name had been chosen by the marketing department. Coda — the close of the musical piece, the final measures, the beautiful ending. “The client likes to think his evening ends with something exquisite,” the House steward had explained — the steward who accompanied her everywhere, counted her smiles, and entered them in the reports.

She sang whatever was ordered. And between the orders — and this was the only thing of her own in her entire inventory — she sang the songs she collected from the customers: spacers from forty worlds, leaving a verse of home on the bar the way one leaves a tip. Betan lullabies, Komarran dome ballads, one Barrayaran mountain lament that had once reduced a corner full of mercenaries to tears. Koda took them all into her perfect memory — a collection of other people’s skies, catalogued to the quarter-tone — and at night, in her cell on the House barge, she sang them in her head, soundlessly, because the walls had sensors, and the dreams of equipment were not subject to depreciation.

The man who would overturn her inventory appeared on a Tuesday and was distinguished by nothing — which was what she noticed. Middle height, middle age, the clothes of a middling broker, verbal signature “Verek, route consulting.” He always sat at the third table on the left, ordered one drink, listened to the whole program, and left. He did not stare. He did not order “something special” through the steward. He listened — really listened, with an attention she recognized unerringly, because she had been designed to measure it.

On the ninth evening, in the break, he left a glass of water on the bar for her — on Jackson’s Whole a safer gift than a diamond — and said quietly, without looking at her:

“The Barrayaran lament you close with. You take the second verse a quarter-tone lower than the original. On purpose?”

“On purpose,” said Koda. “The original is for a dead father. My version is for a living one. Lower hurts longer.” She took the water. “You are not a route consultant.”

“And you are not equipment,” said Verek. “I see we understood each other from the opening bars.”

II. The Deal

They talked in fragments, in the breaks, over the following two weeks — a sentence, two, under the noise of the bar, which to her hearing was not noise but clear water. He did not hurry, which told her a great deal: amateurs hurry, and clients hurry, and this man was neither.

“Here is the work,” he said at last, at the table in the dead corner of the cameras, which she had pointed out to him with a song (three beats of rest on a particular chord: he learned to read it in one evening). “In eleven days, four men will dine in this bar’s gallery. Brokers of a consortium that exports from this planet a certain commodity toward certain worlds — a commodity that has already killed children in a place I know. They will discuss routes, ships, and dates for the coming season. The gallery will be under a sound screen — one of the expensive ones, military. I cannot hear a thing.” He looked at her. “You can.”

“The screen cuts the whole spoken range.”

“It cuts from eighty hertz to twelve kilohertz.” Verek smiled for the first time, very slightly. “I checked your specifications, Koda of the Coda series. House Veyl advertises them in the catalog: eight hertz to seventy thousand. The voice passes through the screen in the harmonics — under and over the cut, torn, smeared, useless to every ear and every processor in this port. Except one. You will be singing all evening thirty meters from them — and you will hear everything the screen lets slip, and you will reassemble it, because reassembling sound is what you were built for. And then you will sing it to me. Word for word.”

Koda was silent a long time. Then she said the only thing worth saying on that planet:

“Price.”

“Extraction off-planet. A new identity — a real one, with a biography that survives checking, on Escobar or Komarr, your choice. Your contract with House Veyl can sue the walls.” A pause. “And before you ask: yes, I know what I am asking of you. If the House finds out, they will not fine you. They will scrap you. So I will say it in all its words, for the record between the two of us: the risk is yours, the profit is mine, and no new biography levels those scales all the way. If you refuse, I stand up and never again sit at the third table on the left.”

She looked at him through the pause that in music is called a general pause: the whole orchestra falls silent, and that is exactly why everyone listens.

“Do you know the most Jacksonian thing about you, broker?” she said at last. “That you told me the truth about the scales. Here, only people who actually intend to pay do that.” She extended her hand across the table, openly, in front of every camera except the dead one: the gesture of a singer to an admirer, innocent as a glass of water. “The Deal is the Deal.”

“The Deal is the Deal,” said Captain Mirko Zarov, ImpSec, galactic operations, seven years under other names on other planets, and shook the hand of the woman who had just become his most important asset and — though he did not know it yet — his most expensive debt.

III. The Performance

On the evening of the eleventh day, the gallery of Low Orbit was reserved under a false name, guarded by six men in identical jackets, and wrapped in a sound screen whose field Koda felt from the stage as pressure in her sinuses — a military model, expensive, in perfect order.

She sang for four hours. She sang the standard program, then the requests, then — “by popular demand,” which was her own request, placed through an intermediary — the long cycle of dome ballads, the ones with the drawn-out quiet passages in which the bar hushed and her hearing was left almost alone with the harmonics weeping out from under the screen’s edge: torn syllables below eighty hertz, ghost consonants above twelve thousand, tremors of the table carrying bass through the floor. No ear and no processor in the port could have assembled speech out of that.

Koda assembled it. Measure by measure, between her own phrases, with both her memories — the audio one taking in the raw material, and the musical one sorting it by rhythm and timbre into four distinct voices — while she sang about domes she had never seen, before an audience that did not suspect that a concert for one listener was running in the room.

She delivered it to him the following night, in the dead corner, by the method she herself proposed and which struck Zarov dumb for seconds: she sang it to him. The entire conversation, the four brokers, word for word, voice by voice — she imitated the timbres with her doubled vocal apparatus, so that who said what would not be lost — forty minutes of routes, ship names, dates, docks, percentages. Zarov recorded it on a device the size of a button and twice stopped writing, because his hand was falling behind the significance.

“Marisa-Vega, freighter, Escobaran registry under lease,” he repeated at the end, soundlessly. “Departs in a month, goods in the false bottom of the refrigeration hold, destination Komarr. Koda. Do you know what you have just given me?”

“I know what you have given me,” she said. “A way out. When?”

“Thursday. Dock eleven-lower, the independent hauler Stella Maris, a cabin in the name of Vela Kree. Twenty-two hundred.” He looked at her, and for the first time since their acquaintance began, something in his middling face was not middling. “Thursday, Koda. Three days. Change nothing in your schedule. Sing as you always do.”

“I always sing as I always do,” said Koda. “That is why I am alive so far.”

IV. The Failure

On Thursday at twenty-two hundred, at dock eleven-lower, Captain Mirko Zarov stood by the cargo lock of the Stella Maris with two tickets, two identities, and a schedule that was coming apart by the minute.

Koda did not come.

At twenty-two thirty his contact in the port — a paid dispatcher with a flexible conscience — confirmed the bad news in three sentences: that afternoon, the House Veyl barge had raised its security status; a unit of the Coda series had been pulled from the Low Orbit program “for technical reasons”; and a courier with an escort had left the consortium’s office for the barge. The arithmetic was simple, and Zarov did it in two seconds: the consortium’s counterintelligence had raked through the evening of the meeting — cameras, rosters, staff — and had asked the only question that mattered: who in that room could have heard through the screen? The answer stood in House Veyl’s advertising catalog, its range printed with pride: eight hertz — seventy kilohertz.

They had not tracked her. They had computed her.

The protocol for such a case Zarov knew by heart, because he had trained others in it himself: the asset is blown, the information is on you, the mission is the information. You extract yourself. The Stella Maris departed in forty minutes; the data in the button on his collar was worth more than everything ImpSec had pulled out of this sector in a decade; and one singer, the property of a third-rank House of the second line, was — by every manual, by every calculation, by the cold arithmetic of the trade — an acceptable loss.

Zarov stood by the lock for ninety seconds. Then he said aloud, alone, to the dock — the words that later went into his report verbatim, because he refused to rephrase them:

“The risk was hers. The profit was mine. On this planet, a deal like that is called theft.” He took the button with the recording off his collar, sealed it in an express capsule, and consigned it to the Stella Maris, bound for the Komarran station: the mission departed without him. “And Barrayar does not steal from people who have sung it the truth. The Deal is the Deal — on both sides of the table.”

Then he turned and walked back toward the levels — a man with a middling face, without backup, without an extraction window, and with fourteen hours, if he was lucky, before House Veyl finished with the “technical reasons.”

V. The Return

The plan Zarov assembled by dawn rested on the three things Jackson’s Whole respected unconditionally: another man’s fear, another man’s greed, and impeccable documents.

The documents he made himself, with the field kit: the credentials of an operative of the consortium, from the department that on this planet everyone called by the same name — Collections. The fear and the greed were supplied by the very haul from the gallery: in the forty minutes of recording, between the routes and the dates, the four brokers had devoted two minutes to a topic that had seemed at the time a side bonus and now became the entire plan. House Veyl owed them from the previous season; the consortium intended not to renew the barge’s contract and — a quotation, sung to him by Koda with an impeccably rendered contemptuous timbre — “to let Veyl sing for himself, like his products.”

Baron Veyl did not know this. Baron Veyl believed that by presenting the consortium with the head of the leak — publicly, instructively, with ceremony — he would win the contract back.

Zarov presented himself on the House Veyl barge at eleven in the morning, consortium time, with the credentials, with the gait of a man whose time costs other people fingers, and with a sentence rehearsed before the mirror of a rented room in the small hours:

“Collections. I am here for the unit, before you spoil it. The interrogation is ours — the leak ran through our operation, the damage is ours, the order of the questions is ours. The Baron may be glad we are not counting him into the damage. For now.”

They led him inward with that mixture of servility and hatred with which one serves a powerful creditor, and along the corridors of the barge — plush, gilt, and sensors — Zarov walked with the even pulse of a man who has nothing left to lose except everything, and counted the turns toward the stage on the lower deck where, in the escorting steward’s words, “the Baron was just concluding the formalities.”

The formalities turned out to be theater — on Jackson’s Whole, punishment without an audience was wasted expense. On the barge’s small stage, before some fifty of the staff drawn up for edification, stood Baron Veyl — large, face-painted, with the voice of a man savoring the acoustics — and beside him, on her knees, her hands in soft medical restraints, Koda: pale, with a split lip, and with eyes that found Zarov at the back of the hall and did not widen by a millimeter, because she had been designed to govern her expression and because — he understood it in that same second — she had already decided he had come in his role, to be finished by him rather than by the House, and she did not give him away even then.

That half-second Zarov remembered for the rest of his life.

“…and since the voice is the instrument of the betrayal,” the Baron was declaiming to the ranks, “the House will begin with the instrument. The surgeon is ready. Watch, all of you, and remember: a unit that sings for strangers—”

“The unit is confiscated,” said Zarov from the back of the hall, loudly, in the timbre of a collector of receivables, and started down the aisle, brandishing the credentials like an axe. “Read the warrant, Baron, line three: ‘pending conclusion of the investigation, all carriers of the leaked information are to be surrendered to the consortium undamaged.’ Un-dam-aged. Her voice is material evidence — in it is the record of everything she heard and of everyone she passed it to. Spoil it, and you spoil our investigation, and then the damage, Baron, is recalculated. With your House in the expenses column.”

The hall went still. Baron Veyl stared at the warrant, and Zarov could see, working behind the face paint, the only two real gods of the planet: fear of the consortium, and hope for the contract.

“I will call for confirmation,” said the Baron.

“Call,” said Zarov, who knew that at this hour there was no one in the consortium’s office but a night operator, because he had chosen the hour himself. “You have the department’s number. And I have a schedule. The unit, the restraints off, and her file — at the dock in ten minutes, or I leave and report refusal of cooperation. You know what follows that phrase.”

The ten minutes Zarov lived through with a pulse that declined to be counted. The Baron called. The night operator — sleepy, underpaid, and trained solely never to assume responsibility — pronounced word for word the sentence on which Zarov had bet everything: “I can neither confirm nor deny a Collections operation; inquire during business hours.”

On Jackson’s Whole, that was the most credible sentence in the universe. No self-respecting Collections department ever confirmed anything.

“Take her,” said Baron Veyl. “And tell the consortium that House Veyl cooperates. Fully. Always.”

VI. The Wake

The reckoning caught them at the dock, exactly as Zarov expected: the barges of the Houses cooperate always — right up until they check a second time.

They were three hundred meters from the rented skimmer when his credentials died in the system — someone at the consortium had woken early — and the dock portals began closing one by one, while up on the gallery the identical jackets of the House came drumming. Zarov cut the restraints from her wrists on the move, with the cutter from his belt buckle.

“Plan?” asked Koda. Her voice, split lip notwithstanding, was perfectly governed: four and a half octaves of discipline.

“The plan ran out back there. From here it’s improvisation.” He nodded at the closing cargo portal, beyond which the skimmer waited. “The portal is on a sonic lock — the old models, resonance code. I don’t have the code.”

“I have it,” said Koda. “I have listened to it open six nights a week for four years.” She took the breath she took before the difficult arias, and sang the lock its own code: seven tones in a frequency order inaccessible to a human throat and written into hers by catalog. The portal, trained to trust sound, opened with dignity.

They ran. Behind them the first stunner shrieked; Koda, without stopping, turned once over her shoulder toward the pursuers and sang something else — a short, terrible, two-voiced sound in the infra-low register that turned Zarov’s stomach from thirty meters to the side, while the three identical jackets of the front rank folded to their knees with their hands over their ears. She never sang any such thing again in her life, and when he asked her later what it had been, she answered only: “The option marketing doesn’t put in the catalog. I was built for entertainment, Captain. On this planet the word is broad.”

The skimmer tore free of the dock under stunner fire, harmless at that distance, and climbed toward the orbital station of House Fell, where, by a berth bought the previous night with the last of the operational funds, an Escobaran passenger liner was waiting. There remained the final arithmetic: House Veyl’s fast cutter, lifted from the barge, closing the distance by the minute, due to overtake them forty minutes short of the station.

“Will he fire?” asked Koda.

“At an unflagged skimmer — yes. At Fell’s dock — never: Veyl owes Fell fuel credits for three seasons. We only need forty minutes we don’t have.” Zarov looked at the console, then at her, and took out the backup transmitter. “Unless we give him a reason to stop on his own. Koda. Those two minutes of the recording — about Veyl and the contract the consortium doesn’t mean to renew. Do you remember them?”

“I remember everything. That is my catalog defect.”

“Sing them. On an open frequency, at the cutter, with the timbres. Word for word.”

And Koda, unit seven of the Coda series, standing in a stolen skimmer between two fires, sang to her former owner — in the impeccably rendered voices of the four brokers — exactly what the consortium intended to do with House Veyl next season, and how the senior of the four laughed when he said “let him sing for himself, like his products.”

The cutter coasted another thousand kilometers on momentum. Then it lay to in a drift — motionless, eloquent, like a man who has sat down in the middle of the street to reconsider his life — and did not resume the pursuit. Baron Veyl had received goods more valuable than one runaway: the truth about his own creditor, forty minutes before it was too late to use it. On Jackson’s Whole, that counted as a bill paid.

“The Deal is the Deal,” said Zarov to the drifting dot on the screen, and turned the skimmer toward Fell’s dock, where, patient and inevitable as a sunrise, the Escobaran liner shone.

VII. Volna

Three months later, in a small club on the Komarran station Klein — thirty tables, live music, an audience of dockers, students, and two people from ImpSec in civilian clothes, present on entirely personal business — a new singer came out onto the stage, and the room, hearing her for the first time, went quiet by the third bar in the way rooms go quiet once in a generation.

Her documents, impeccable and already twice tested, read: Volna Kree, born on Escobar, freelance. The name she had chosen herself, from a Barrayaran word heard in a mercenary’s lament: volna — free. The serial stamp behind her left ear was gone; in its place was a thin scar, which the surgeon had offered to erase completely and which she had asked him to leave. “I carried it for twenty-six years,” she had said. “Let it remember me now, instead of me remembering it.”

The recording from the gallery of Low Orbit had meanwhile done its work: the Marisa-Vega was detained at Komarran customs on a tip with no sender, the consortium’s channel burned from the false bottom to the top, and in a provincial town on Barrayar that Volna Kree had never heard of, a lieutenant of the district guard read the digest and said to his sergeant: “Well, look at that. They got to the ship.”

Captain Mirko Zarov received for the operation, in the following order: a reprimand in his personal file for “unauthorized return to a compromised zone,” sealed the next day under classification; a medal in the safe, of the kind that is not worn; and one remark from Lieutenant Colonel Venek, delivered without witnesses: “The manual says the asset is an acceptable loss, Captain. The manual, however, is written by people, and afterward it is read by people, and the second lot always know which sentences are shameful. Dismissed. And — Zarov? You were right to go back.”

Now he sat at the table by the wall, in civilian clothes, with his middling face, and listened to the woman on the stage singing her collection of other people’s skies — Betan lullabies, dome ballads, the mountain lament with the second verse a quarter-tone low — until at last, before the final song, she said into the microphone, looking somewhere above the audience, in a voice into which four and a half octaves fit inside one simple sentence:

“The last one is for a route consultant. Who came back for his equipment, because he had given his word. The song is old, Barrayaran, and it is called… actually, it doesn’t matter what it is called. What matters is that I sing it out loud now.”

And she sang — freely, at full voice, with no sensors in the walls and no steward counting her smiles — while at the back of the room an agent with a middling face listened with an attention she recognized unerringly even from the stage, because she had been designed to measure it, and had then chosen, freely, to treasure it.

A coda, in the end, is only the final measures of the piece. Then comes the silence, the room draws breath — and the next song begins, the one no marketing department ever approved, and which for exactly that reason, alone among all of them, is worth singing.