But this time was worse. Because this time it wasn’t some hapless Periphery merchant marine lying in wait for them out in the dark beyond the ship’s hull. It was Astrid Avery, manning the bridge of a state-of-the-art ship of the line and backed by the full firepower of the UN Navy.
Another wrangle between Llewellyn and Doyle took place, with Sital serving in her habitual role as tiebreaker. The
Christina
retreated to a Drift entry point well beyond Boomerang’s sensor range and hung fire, eavesdropping on comm traffic and waiting for victims. There were no safe ports left for them now that Avery had made it to Boomerang, and they were slipping into the downward spiral of having to attack every time they needed air and food and water. The veterans in the crew knew what all pirates know: that this was the beginning of the end. A pirate ship without a safe home port is like a shark: If it stops swimming it suffocates. Without a safe home port they could never
relax, never retrench or refit. They couldn’t even retreat, because their very survival hung on a string of one attack after another after another.
The next weeks were ones Li would gladly have deleted from the span of her natural life—if this still was her natural life. With alarming speed they devolved into a cat-and-mouse game with Astrid Avery.
The
Christina
would attack—usually some defenseless merchant marine ship. They’d strip their prey of air, water, and equipment. And then they’d tuck their tail between their legs and run like hell. With every attack their very survival hung on a knife’s edge. With every attack Avery got there faster and the margin of safety got slimmer. And every time Avery took a chunk out of their hide, the mood on Llewellyn’s ship darkened and the rumors about spies and mutiny ran quicker around the lower decks.
Meanwhile, though Li remained more prisoner on the ship than crew member, Llewellyn seemed compelled to keep talking to her. Their conversations were cagy, uncomfortable, and often unsatisfying. And they were dangerous, too. Sital was more tightly wound than ever now that Avery was breathing down the backs of their necks, and every minute that Llewellyn spent with Li was a slap in Sital’s face.
But Llewellyn either didn’t see it—or didn’t want to see it.
“How much longer do you think she’s going to put up with this?” Li asked one night after Sital wordlessly delivered her to Llewellyn’s door for a late dinner.
“Who? Sital? Don’t worry about her. She’s just protective. She thinks you’re going to hurt me.”
“Oh? And what do you think?”
“I think she’s probably right.”
He smiled at that—sort of. He had two smiles, she was coming to realize. One was the sweet, gap-toothed little boy’s smile. The other one was a sort of automatic gesture of politeness: a cool, polite curve of the lips, carefully calibrated to satisfy social requirements while giving out as little real human warmth as possible. She thought of the two expressions as his real smile and his nominal smile. Or at least she hoped the first one was the real one. Who could tell?
He
probably didn’t even know anymore.
The man’s emotional remove was infuriating. You wanted to poke him with a stick sometimes just to see if he’d bite.
And yet there
was
someone in there. The man oozed charisma despite all his attempts to scrub away any trace of individuality. You could see people orienting to him whenever he walked into a room, like iron filings lining up with a magnetic field—often without even knowing it. And in his unguarded moments, Li caught tantalizing glimpses of the private man … the one in whom Cohen’s meme pods had found such fertile ground.
“You know she’s in love with you, don’t you?”
He just rolled his eyes. “Sital’s already been married and divorced once. Trust me, she knows better.”
Li raised an eyebrow. “You ever been married?”
“No. I’ve only ever been close twice. And that was by accident.”
She laughed. “Sounds like there’s a story there.”
“Not really. Just socially incompetent. The last woman I almost accidentally married accused me of having borderline Asperger’s syndrome.”
Li raised an eyebrow. “And was she right?”
“I hide it well. But under hard interrogation I suppose I’d have to admit to having alarmingly neat closets. And according to some critics, also a compulsion toward excessive ironing.”
“Oh? I assumed that was just your upright captain’s demeanor.” She stretched idly. “So why
did
you enlist? Just to get off a shitcan colonial planet like me? Or was there some nobler reason?”
He smiled a bitter, cynical, wounded smile. “What is it they always say in beauty pageants? I wanted to make a difference.”
“Oh,” Li said. “You’re one of
those
.”
“Not anymore!”
They drank to that, then nursed their beers for a moment in silence.
“I take it you never were?” Llewellyn asked eventually. “There never was a save-the-world version of Catherine Li? Not even in the prehistory before the joint memories with Cohen start?”
Li snorted.
“Well, I confess I feel very inferior. But what can one do? It’s probably
a result of my sheltered rural upbringing. In my defense, however, it only took a decade in the Navy to get over it.”
They sat over their beers in silence for a few moments. It should have been an uncomfortable silence, but it wasn’t. Llewellyn might not trust her—indeed, he’d made it quite clear all along that he didn’t—but he had Cohen’s memories. Some vital part of him
was
Cohen. And that meant that he was the closest thing to a friend Li had left in the universe. And, in spite of all his attempts to deny it, she was the same thing to him.
“Cohen on the other hand,” Llewellyn said, picking up where the conversation had left off a few moments ago, “was a hopeless world saver.”
Li didn’t like the
was
but she forced herself to ignore it. “Is that what he was doing when he got killed?”
“Don’t you know?”
They looked at each other for a moment, each realizing that the other was after exactly the same information.
Llewellyn laughed uncomfortably. “I really thought you knew. I don’t remember anything after he shipped out to New Allegheny.”
“Nothing about ALEF even?”
Llewellyn looked blank for a few heartbeats, as if he was searching for a memory and not finding it where he expected it to be. Then he shook his head. “No. I know there was something going on with ALEF. And then I keep getting all these snippets that read like a math book … Cantor and Leibniz … Infinities upon infinities …” A curious look came over Llewellyn’s face and his voice took on a singsong quality. “A tree made of numbers that grows down out of infinity and back up again.”
He shook his head, snapping out of the mild fugue state he’d slipped into. “I don’t know. I can’t make any sense of those memories. And I asked Ike about it, too, and
he
didn’t have a clue, either.”
“Because it’s raw feed,” Li explained, recognizing a feeling she’d long been familiar with. “You’re remembering stuff that happened when he was interfacing with other Emergents, at his native clocking speeds. Or more likely internal traffic between different autonomous agents within
Cohen himself. You’ve got the data, but you don’t have the bandwidth to process it. Your mind can’t grasp that, so you internalize it as memory loss.”
“Is
that
what that is?” he asked curiously. “That tip-of-the-tongue feeling?”
She nodded.
“And what about the fevers? Did you get those, too?”
Li’s breath caught in her chest. “Are you running fevers?”
Llewellyn didn’t answer.
“You’re playing with fire. You could die. Do you understand that?”
Silence.
“Come on, William! I’m not going to settle for the silent treatment. This is too important.”
“I know what you want,” Llewellyn said finally. His voice was tight, with anxiety or anger, she couldn’t tell which. “Don’t think I don’t know. And don’t think I don’t feel for you. I do. I can even see that you have a … a sort of moral claim on your side.” He gestured impatiently. “Why skate around the reality? I have no claim at all. I don’t have a leg to stand on here. But I have this ship, and this crew. And the only thing keeping them—and me—alive is Cohen.”
“Whatever’s left of him.” Li gave Llewellyn a long, hard look. “What
is
left of him?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, I need it more than you do.”
“Please,” Li pleaded. “Please let me jack you in. Not just for my sake. For your own safety.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have that luxury.”
“I mean it, Llewellyn. If he’s actually alive—if there’s any active code running on your implants, he’ll eat you alive.”
Llewellyn smiled. “Oh,” he said with a cool, understated self-confidence that Li would have found so attractive if the circumstances weren’t so infuriatingly impossible, “I don’t think he’ll find me so easily digestible.”
There was something perverse about Llewellyn, she decided. Something not exactly broken, but … unhinged. He was like an engine with
a broken cam shaft. You got a sense of explosive power grinding away against internal sources of friction and creating fatal damage to the mechanism instead of forward motion.
And yet he seemed to be perversely, willfully, knowingly keeping his foot on the accelerator. You could feel somehow that he would turn down all offers of rescue and ignore even the most obvious warning signs. He would never walk away from this place. There was something—pride, loyalty, stubbornness?—that ran deeper than the sarcasm and self-disgust and made it impossible.
He shifted in his chair, stretching his legs until the joints popped. “Let’s talk about something else, shall we? For instance, why am I suddenly going around insulting people? I used to tolerate fools very graciously. It was one of my strong suits as a civil servant. And now I’m plagued on a daily basis by the irresistible impulse to mock and ridicule people who waste my time. Can it be that your late and lamented husband is responsible?”
Li snorted. “I can guarantee it.”
“So how can someone who’s four centuries old be so completely immature?”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“Actually,” Llewellyn admitted, “I have the vague impression of you complaining about it on a regular basis. But I don’t think he took it very seriously.”
“No, I don’t suppose he would have.” She felt herself grinning. “You wouldn’t believe the things he used to get up to. Of course,
he
believed he was being totally reasonable every time.” She cast a suspicious glance across the table. “Or did he?
You’ve
got the memories. You tell me.”
“Well,” Llewellyn said teasingly, “I suppose the answer would depend on which events you’re referring to.”
She gave him a hard look across the table. “Are you flirting with me?”
He returned her stare with a look of wide-eyed innocence. “I don’t know. Should I be?”
“What are we doing here with these little dinner talks? Half the time
you seem like you’re trying to live up to your self-appointed role as the terror of the Drift, and the rest of the time you’re practically playing footsie with me under the table.”
“I certainly am not,” he said mildly.
“Oh really?”
“Well, how am I supposed to speak to you? Half the time I look at you and see a stranger, and the other half … well, it’s not a matter of seeing so much as feeling. It’s as if something else is bleeding in along with the memories.”
“You downloaded a sentient AI into your internals,” Li pointed out. “Surely you must have expected—”
“No, I didn’t. That’s the funny thing. I don’t suppose I ever really thought about it.” He cocked his close-shorn head, looking suddenly intrigued and curious. “Do you think it’s merely a matter of having accumulated a sort of critical mass of memories? Maybe the old saying is wrong. Maybe it’s not contempt that familiarity breeds, but love.”
“Very poetic,” Li mocked.
“I don’t mean it to be. I’m serious. I don’t see it as having anything to do with us personally. It seems more like a simple matter of input/output algorithms. I mean, perhaps I’d feel this way about anyone if there was enough shared data between us.”
Li thought of her cool, crisp, machine-clean feelings about Router/Decomposer. And of the creeping horror of having UNSec’s semi-sentients foraging through her mind and memories on the few occasions when she’d been unlucky enough to encounter them in a professional capacity.
“No,” she said. “Haven’t you ever had a semi-sentient in your mind during a battle?”
“Oddly enough, no.” His mouth quirked in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “There’s a reason they call me lucky.”
“Well, it’s not pleasant. Not when it’s forced on you. And even when it isn’t … well, it depends what the memories are. And who the people are. You wouldn’t feel at all the same way if there weren’t something between you and Cohen. Some commonality, some connection.”
“Mmm.”
“You sound disappointed by that.”
“Not disappointed, just tired. In my line of work, feeling connected to people is … a complicating factor. And I’ve learned to avoid complicating factors.” He shrugged. “I don’t have the emotional stamina for it anymore.”
Li snorted. “You sound like a man who needs to find a new line of work.”
“You have no idea,” he murmured.
But he wasn’t looking at her. The cool, wary eyes were scanning the invisible horizon again, and the mind behind them had already drifted away into that inner solitude that she had sensed in the man from the first moment she laid eyes on him.
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m sorry? Doing what?”
“Zoning out. Going away. Is it that people bore you? Or is it that you’re afraid of them?”
He grinned ruefully. “Sometimes both at the same time.”
Li took another swig of her beer. Llewellyn reached for his—and then stopped in mid-gesture. A blank, uncertain look crept over his face, and his eyes seemed to darken and cloud over.
“Llewellyn? Look at me. Are you running a fever now?”
“Never mind. It’s not important. I shouldn’t have asked.”