Ghost Spin (17 page)

“Pleasant, well-adjusted fellow?”

“Totally fucking batshit.”

The ghost’s lovely head was buried in its hands now, and its fragile shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter. “Oh, God, please! Don’t tell me this stuff! I’m not strong enough to take it!”

Finally Llewellyn laughed, too. It was all just so completely ridiculous.

Eventually the ghost recovered. It took a sip of its drink, ice cubes tinkling softly against crystal and harmonizing subtly with the chiming of the dainty gold bells on its delicate ankle bracelet.

“And then what happened?” it asked in a voice that was both the voice of the immeasurably ancient ghost and of the lovely young woman with the tanned and flawless ankles.

“Then what happened?” Llewellyn echoed. “Then all Hell broke loose.”

If the theory of Eternal Inflation is correct, then there is an eternal blizzard of universes, in which our bubble is a single snowflake, an infinitesimal capsule of eternal potential, crystallized into unique patterns of matter and energy, which has set off from eternal inflation on its journey to realize itself in a universe.

—Joel R. Primack

She died.

She died, and her datastream blossomed out across the galaxy like fluff blowing from a blown dandelion. A million billion bits of information streamed out across the universe, catching the gravitational tides, skipping and hopping through the quantum foam, traveling, traveling, always traveling, in an eternal journey that would end when either the data or the universe stopped moving.

In places, the stream of data encountered eddies or barriers that temporarily diverted or stopped it.

The military AIs on Alba intercepted, decrypted, and cataloged it, sending out a flurry of classified notifications to various intelligence agencies that followed the interplanetary movements of suspicious individuals. Then they stored Li’s datastream for potential retrieval in case of need and—insofar as AIs ever forget anything—they forgot about her.

The Worldmind of the former UN Trusteeship called Compson’s World noted Li’s passing and folded her data into the internal multiverse, where it gave all of its beloved dead the ambiguous gift of eternal life.

Several times the datastream was swallowed by black holes. Once it was caught in an alien datatrap—a vast deep space structure in whose mazelike interstices the very speed of light was slowed to a trickle, its encoded information preserved for eternity like paleolithic flies in amber.

In one branching of the multiverse the Syndicates resurrected her and executed her for war crimes. In another one she got off on a technicality. And in still others, she escaped, or died in prison or was torn apart by angry mobs before they could even drag her in front of a jury.

And in many, infinitely many branchings her pattern was resurrected by those who felt that this particular datastream might be of use to them.

Darkness, cold, and pain.

She came to in a bare room, sitting on a chair to which she was strapped at wrist and ankle. She felt fine physically, but something about the smell of the room told her she wasn’t going to be feeling fine for long.

There was a scarred tankwood table, its fractal patterns not quite managing to mimic the subtle grain lines of real hardwood. On the other side of the table there was an empty chair.

The echo of footsteps swelled in the hall outside. The sound was familiar—not just from other prisons and other interrogation rooms, but in this particular incarnation. She realized she must have been here for a while, passing in and out of consciousness, remembering and forgetting.

She had a feeling that all the other footsteps she’d heard echo down this hall had passed her by. These ones didn’t. They stopped at her door. She heard the jangle of keys as someone flicked through a key chain—Sweet Mother of God, they really were in the outback, weren’t they?—and then the scrape of metal against metal.

The door opened. A uniformed guard and a tall man in civvies were silhouetted in the warm wash of almost Earthlike daylight from beyond the door. The guard waved the visitor through, closed the door, and locked it behind him.

“Is it really you?” he asked when the guard’s footsteps had faded away again.

His face was hidden in the shadows beyond the weak circle of electric light. But she could see that it was a man, tall and rangy and soldier-like. This could be either very good news or the worst of all; her best
friends from that half-remembered past life were all soldiers, but so were her worst enemies.

He sat down across from her. She held her breath as his face entered the circle of lamplight, but she didn’t know him. And she wasn’t sure whether that relieved or frightened her.

He had a colonial’s face, harsh with a lifetime of exposure to solar radiation and terraforming by-products, and post-human in myriad little ways that—if Li weren’t so crippled by jump fade—would have told her what planet, what generation ship, what genetic bottleneck his genome had squeezed its way through during the frantic flight from Earth.

But all she could read in his face right now was that he hated her.

No doubt he had his reasons. And if she could remember what she’d done here, she might well agree with him.

“Is it really you?” he asked again.

“I guess that depends on who you think I am, doesn’t it?”

“Oh yeah. It’s you.” He looked like he wanted to spit.

“You want to tell me who you are?”

He looked into her face, incredulous at first and then insulted. “You don’t even remember who I am?”

“Don’t take it personally. I don’t remember my own parents.”

“Of course you don’t. No one who knew what family was could do what you did here.”

Something that wasn’t quite pity flickered in his eyes. Compared to whatever that was, hatred felt nice and clean and manageable.

“You want to tell me where here is?” she asked, mostly to wipe that disturbing look off his face. “And what I’m supposed to have done?”

She cringed at the little wriggle of denial that was implicit in the “supposed to have.” She hated that she’d said it even before the words were out of her mouth. It took away her last shred of dignity and made her no better than the people who’d sat at their comfortable Ring-side desks and sent her here.

It also infuriated her captor.

“You’ll remember by the time we’re done with you,” he said in a harsh whisper of mingled loathing and fury. “Don’t worry. You’ll remember them all.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “I hate to see someone go to so much effort for nothing. And it’s pretty hollow revenge to kill someone for war crimes they don’t even remember committing.”

He laughed. It was an edgy laugh, verging alarmingly toward hysteria. “You’re a real goddamn prize. You don’t even need to remember us to know you deserve it. How many other planets did they turn you loose on?”

“Not that many. FTL’s expensive. It’s cheaper to use local talent.”

He leaned forward to get a stare at her. The light raked across his face, picking out a network of fine scars that ran from hairline to collar. They weren’t very noticeable. They’d healed long ago. But getting them must have hurt like hell. They looked like they could have been traced with a hot knifepoint. Li decided not to think about that.

“Resurrecting you was expensive, too,” he told her, a look of profound, almost religious contentment smoothing the years and the pain from his scarred features. “Really expensive. But seeing you die like a dog in your own vomit would have been worth it at ten times the price.”

Maris Trusteeship. A glorified mining colony. The decaying orbital station had smelled like old sneakers and reeked of the kind of deferred maintenance that meant imminent life seal failure. Li couldn’t get dirtside fast enough. And now she was knocking on a stranger’s door in the middle of the night, with nothing more to guide her than a private dick listing in the phone book cross-referenced to a vague reference in one of Cohen’s outdated address books.

It stank worse than the orbital station, but she had no choice. She needed help, and she needed it fast. And Maris was one of the Lost Colonies, a remote Periphery world only recently rediscovered. Its original settlers’ European-descended phenotype was still relatively unmixed with the UN’s diverse population. The black hair and Han bone structure of Li’s Xenogen geneset were just too damned conspicuous on Maris for her to do her own footwork instead of hiring it out to a local.

She knocked, huddling in close to the door to keep the rain from running down the back of her neck inside her coat.

The woman who answered was a surprise. Dark, thin, intelligent,
almost certainly Jewish. Hair cut boyishly short. No makeup. Wellmade clothes worn with the disheveled elegance that Li associated with high-voltage Italian intellectuals.

“Yes?” the woman asked in a low, husky, cultured voice.

Li stared.

This was all wrong, she told herself. The woman was wrong. The place was wrong. Wrong for each other, at least. No one who looked and talked like this woman lived in the Trusteeships for any innocent reason.

And that wasn’t all that was wrong, either. Suddenly she knew exactly why this woman’s name had turned up in Cohen’s files. The reason was there in Li’s own visceral attraction to the woman—an attraction that had nothing to do with Li’s usually trashy taste in women and everything to do with all the years she’d spent knocking around in Cohen’s mind and libido.

There had been something between Cohen and this woman. And women like her didn’t have casual flings. So whatever it was, it had meant something. At least to one of them.

“Sorry,” Li said, backing out into the rain. “Wrong address.”

The woman watched her halfway down the path to the sidewalk in silence. When she spoke her voice carried, low and clear, even though she didn’t raise it a decibel.

“The name’s Caroline, isn’t it? Or Kathleen? No, I remember now. Catherine. Why don’t you come back inside and tell me what you came for.”

The woman’s name was Anatia, and reading between the lines of a conversation that presupposed a shared history with Cohen she had no memory of, Li guessed she worked for the Trusteeship administration. There would be some ugliness behind that; Li had done part of her first Peacekeeper tour on Maris during the UN’s brutal suppression of the local independence movement. It had been declared necessary for the protection of democracy and the prevention of terrorism (in other words, the UN couldn’t afford to let the only reliable source of highgrade silicon slip through its hands). The troops had been instructed to act accordingly, and they had. With appalling enthusiasm in a few cases
Li could remember. They’d kept the silicon safe for democracy—and made a lot of new Interfaither converts. And twenty years down the road Li was pretty sure that well-heeled UN administrators still considered an assignment to Maris to be about one circle up from the center of Dante’s Inferno.

And so they talked, Li and the woman called Anatia. Anatia offered tea. Li accepted. And the talk flowed on, skirling and eddying around the unspoken rocks of Anatia’s shared history with Cohen.

Li was just beginning to feel comfortable enough to think about admitting her ignorance and asking for help when the first pang of agony spasmed through her body. She clutched at her chest with one hand. The other hand—the one that held the now-empty teacup—went completely numb. She watched, in bemused slow motion, as the cup slipped from her twitching fingers and shattered on the narrow strip of floor between carpet and sofa.

And all the while the woman who had called herself Anatia leaned against the back of the sofa, arms crossed over her chest, watching. She kept watching when Li hit the floor writhing. She kept watching when Li stopped writhing. And as Li’s vision tunneled and skewed and began to fade, she walked across the room, setting one foot precisely in front of the other. She stopped just in front of Li and stood looking down at her. Her elegant face was smooth-browed and serene.

“I’d tell you why I’m doing this,” she said as Li lost consciousness, “but you don’t remember, and you probably wouldn’t care if you did. So why bother? Let’s just say we’re even.”

And then she drew back one slender, loafer-clad foot and kicked Li in the teeth.

Cold. Silence. Underwater light and a sense of distant movement and human events going on without her on the other side of a cool blue abyss of glass and water.

Then she surfaced abruptly. Too abruptly. She was thrashing in a viral tank, wired to the gills and choking on ice-blue regen fluid. Obviously a difficult resurrection. And despite their professionalism, the techs handling the procedure looked spooked and jumpy.

Or maybe something else had them looking that way. They were Peacekeepers—she could read it in their body language, in the familiarity of the shared jargon and standard operating procedures. But they weren’t in uniform. And they weren’t happy about it.

She began to understand why when their boss arrived.

“Korchow!” she gasped, her lungs still burning under the intimate assault of von Neumanns and viral agents.