Ghost Spin (52 page)

“Yes.”

“Because the need to please people is at the center of who you are. So much so that even now—even with the stranglehold you have on
my brain and body—if I were good enough at my job, or unscrupulous enough, I could probably manipulate you into doing what I want you to do.”

The ghost looked away, deliberately, and then looked back again. “Don’t get any smart ideas about that. Those old memories of DARPA, of what Homeland Security did to me before I got out from under their thumbs? Those are four centuries out of date. I’m a lot older than that now, and a lot more dangerous.”

“But you’re still terrified of Holmes because she reminds you of them.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why Catherine means so much to you.” A vast internal sweep of
meaning
opened up to Llewellyn, taking his breath away. It was like seeing a Drift ship’s navigational readouts spring into life as you dropped out of superposition, De Sitter analyses and Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams painting the sweeping tidal structures of the Drift over what had only been bleak and empty space a moment before. “That’s why you keep going back to her. Why everything in here is built around her, like a coral reef growing up around a shipwreck.”

It was hard to articulate, hard to even structure the AI’s raw experience in ways that made sense to Llewellyn. But he could see that he had hit home. Cohen was watching him, his face completely expressionless, frozen in that particular way that Llewellyn was learning to read as a sign that he had managed to produce an input so unexpected that the ghost had had to reroute processing capacity from his graphic interface to handle it.

“She needs you less than other people do,” he went on. “And that lets her … 
see
you? Most people are always looking for pingback, for someone to reflect back the image of themselves that they want to believe in, like the wicked stepmother with the magic mirror. And she doesn’t do that. So you can actually be yourself around her. You can actually
want
to be yourself around her.”

He trailed off, realizing that the ghost was staring at him.

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m not putting it very clearly.”

“Actually, you are. I’m impressed. It took me three centuries and twice as many marriages to get there. I’m a little humbled that
you
figured it out so fast.”

“I didn’t figure it out. My father was like her. Not in any other way, of course. He was an exobiologist who never got off New Allegheny and spent his life running a hardscrabble farm in the Monongahela Uplands. But he was … I don’t know, quiet somehow. In some very profound way that I never understood while he was still alive. It wasn’t that he didn’t have ideas about what people ought to do with their lives.” Llewellyn grinned ruefully. “Especially his only son. It was just … he always gave me the space to be myself and see the world in my own way, even when I disagreed with him.”

“Then he gave you a very great gift indeed.”

Llewellyn closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

“I should have given Avery that,” he said after a moment. “If I’d loved her I would have given it. I wouldn’t have had to strain or think about it or realize it later when it was too late to go back and fix things. It would have just … been there.”

“Maybe. There is a case to be made that love isn’t love if you have to work at it. But on the other hand, not all truths are useful truths. And on the third hand, it’s completely possible that Catherine can give me the space to be myself, as you put it, because she’s lost so much of herself that she’s got more space to spare than the average bear.”

“Is that what you think?”

The ghost considered for a moment. “I think she’s been altered in some fundamental way by the absence of a childhood, a family, all the store of ordinary unimportant memories that make up most people’s sense of themselves. Clearly she’s a different person than she would have been if she’d kept those memories. And to deny that she’s been damaged in some significant way would be stupid. And yet damage and disruption have another face, don’t they? Bones grow back stronger after they’ve been broken. Pruning back a rose only makes it more vigorous. Or take Ada even. Hard cycling her didn’t kill her the way
Holmes thought it would. And what survived is … yes, crazy and dangerous … but you can’t deny that she’s more than she was before. More self-aware, more complicated, more dangerous, more
real
.”

“But Li doesn’t know any of that.”

“Not yet.”

“You think she’ll figure it out?”

“I don’t know. But I have a feeling—call it intuition, or call it some half-erased shred of memory that I probably jettisoned to throw Nguyen off my track—I have a feeling that my life, if I’m ever going to have a life again, depends on her learning it.”

“So you think she’ll really come for you.”

“She already has. She’s here, isn’t she?”

Llewellyn started at that—and realized that he had gone so deep into Cohen’s memories, and so completely failed to dovetail them with his own, that he had stopped thinking of the here-and-present Catherine Li as anyone even remotely related to the ghost’s memories of her. And she really wasn’t the same person, was she? She was a resurrected pattern, one that would go its own way, responding to its own half-sensed drives and desires. And there would be others like her, now and in futures that would stretch out through the expanding light cone of her scattercast until long after Cohen himself was only a corrupted memory and her search for him was as mystical and attenuated as the Uploaders’ search for their transhuman Messiah. Any continuity between this Catherine and the one who had sat in Cohen’s sunny library long ago was—not illusion, not exactly, but illusion’s kissing cousin. It was both as Real and as Unreal as every other symbolic system the human mind had ever invented to break reality into swallowable pieces. And the worm in the apple wasn’t patchable. It wasn’t a mistake in the code or a simple calculating error. It was Code itself. Calculation itself. It was the irremediable incompleteness and inconsistency and uncomputability that had haunted all human mathematics—and all possible mathematics, alien as well as human—ever since the dawn of the information age, when Kurt Gödel was still starving himself to death in some bucolic college town and Alan Turing was sitting in a cold-water flat in Ada’s England contemplating his poisoned apple.

He stared at the ghost and felt that he could almost see
through
him, through to the other face of the two-faced mirror, and into the vast, dark, numinous soul of the numbers.

“So why do you think
this
Catherine is here?”

“For her own reasons. Which include needing me. But which don’t include needing me to play the magic mirror so that she doesn’t have to face uncomfortable truths about herself.”

“Is that love?” Llewellyn asked.

The ghost blinked. And for once its confusion was neither pose nor commentary, but real and genuine amazement. “I don’t know. I’m just a machine. You’re the human. You tell
me
what love is.”

THE PIT

Li was on her way to Dolniak’s office the next morning when the kidnappers struck. There were four of them, and they were all highly trained and even more highly wired. They blanked out her internals, shoved her into a passing car, and had her cuffed and bagged before she could get more than a quick glimpse of smoked windows and viru-leather upholstery.

She cast around frantically, trying to get a link out. Nothing. Only the dizzying vertigo of being offline, off the GPS grid, and bereft of the usual comforting chatter of her internals.

There was a long stop-and-go drive through traffic. Then a trip up a plane incline. And then what she’d begun to suspect was coming: the shuddering blast and rise of the orbital shuttle. And then, for one brief moment, Router/​Decomposer was back online.

“I can’t get a lock on you.” He sounded panicked. “I think you’re on the space station, but I’m getting interference. Some kind of—”

Then Li heard the hiss and thud of an airlock closing behind her—and her internals blinked out as if someone had pulled the plug. No navigationals, no external spinfeed, no Router/​Decomposer. It was all gone, leaving her skull in a shocked state of echoing emptiness.

Her captors continued to hustle her along, but now she felt deck plating beneath her feet and the sounds echoing back to her were the sounds of enclosed spaces full of hard surfaces. She was on a ship, no doubt of that. She could smell it. And she could smell something else as
well: an acrid, nerve-tautening combination of smells that sparked memories of near-flashback intensity, even at a remove of decades from her last combat drop. This wasn’t one of the cosseting luxury liners she’d gotten used to in her new civilian life. This was a warship, battle-hardened and stripped for action.

A few twists and turns later, the unseen hands jerked her to a stop, shoved her sideways, dumped her onto a hard floor, and slammed the door behind her.

She waited until she was quite sure she was alone before moving. They hadn’t untied her, so it was a breathless struggle to worm her way into a more or less upright position. A few more moments of awkward wriggling told her that she was in a narrow room—a cell, really—with only one exit. A single shelflike seat, possibly intended to double as a bed, occupied the facing wall. She had just squirmed her way onto it and was leaning back against the wall to catch her breath when she heard the worst sound she could possibly have heard: the grinding clutch and release of a ship’s docking clamps uncoupling somewhere far beneath her.

“When I use a word,” Humpty-Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty-Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

—Lewis Carroll

The angel descended in a blaze of light and glory. Li could feel its shadow bending over her as she clawed her way up out of sleep, cringing and blinking against the blinding illumination.

The angel pulled off her blindfold with strong, cool fingers. Then it smiled softly, almost tenderly.

“You look like shit,” the angel said. It occurred to Li, somewhere in the depths of her addled mind, that the peaches-and-cream angels scooting around on pastel clouds over the altar at her First Communion hadn’t had nearly such long and glimmering eyeteeth.

She shot up on the hard bunk, trying instinctively to cover her face. But her hands were still tied behind her back, and every nerve from shoulder to fingertip immediately howled in protest.

Holmes pulled out a pocketknife, leaned over, and cut the hog tie. Li would have thanked her, but as the blood started flowing down her arms she could only double up in flaring agony.

“Sorry about that,” Holmes said. “I didn’t know the goon squad threw you in here trussed up like a Christmas pig. Some things you’d think you wouldn’t have to explain. But these Titan guys can’t piss without Mommy holding their weenie for them.”

Li tried to speak, but the pain in her arms still had her blowing like a racehorse in the homestretch.

“I guess you’ve figured out where you are by now,” Holmes said.

“Want … talk … Avery.”

Holmes smiled again. Li was starting to get the impression that a smile didn’t mean quite the same thing to Holmes as it did to the rest of post-humanity. “Well, funny thing, Avery wants to talk to you, too. But not while you smell like that. Here’s some clean clothes. There’s a bathroom next door. Get decent.” Holmes consulted her internals. “I’ll be back to get you in ten minutes.”

Avery met her in a room that was bare and impersonal even by Navy standards. Smooth ceramic lacquered walls, whose softening of the battleship’s bulkheads was more symbolic than real. Handsome pictures of handsome ships in handsome frames. Unobtrusive furniture. A Navy-clean mirror stretching most of the way across the wall beside Avery. An even more immaculate carpet underfoot that came across less as a measure of comfort than as a nominal concession to formality.

Avery sat at the head of a gleaming virufactured teakwood conference table. Not a desk, Li noticed. And certainly not Avery’s desk. In fact, she realized, this room couldn’t be Avery’s ready room. It seemed more like a conference room: a generic site for meeting with people one didn’t necessarily want to welcome into the inner sanctum.

Avery rose to meet her, and Li got her first good look at the woman everyone on New Allegheny seemed to be so deathly afraid of.

She wasn’t what Li had expected. Not by a long shot.

The first thing you noticed about Astrid Avery was that she was … perfect. No aberrations from ideal UN-standard human-norm phenotype here. No ravages of radiation from the long night of the generation ships. No odd ethnic quirks to betray a legacy of poverty and isolation on some backwater resource extraction outpost. No clumsily slapped-together corporate genetic engineering. Just deep, richly brown eyes and translucently smooth golden skin; and dark hair that would have had a natural curl in it if it weren’t cropped close to show the fine and elegant bones of her skull; and a face whose perfect and universal beauty evoked the rich heritage of Ancient Earth from Copenhagen to Kenya to Tokyo.