Ghost Spin (60 page)

This wasn’t the older Hy, ravaged by illness, that Hyacinthe had known. It was the young man Cinda had met and fallen in love with a quarter of a century before Hyacinthe was even born. It was all there. The wiry greyhound’s body coiled in the chair as if only an act of will were keeping him earthbound. The black hair and olive skin, the beaky nose, the stubborn set to his jaw. And the curious, searching, formidably intelligent eyes—was he not the son of seven generations of rabbis and university professors?—set in a face that had that interesting lived-in
look most Frenchmen seemed to magically acquire by about the age of nineteen.

Not handsome exactly. No one would ever have called him handsome. But … intriguing. Especially if your tastes tended toward high-strung intellectuals.

“You must miss him a lot,” Hy said. God, even the voice was perfect. Beyond perfect. It wasn’t like talking to Hy. It was talking to him.

“Miss who?” she asked, even though she already knew.

“I miss him, too,” Cohen said instead of answering her question. “But we don’t have to miss him. I could be him. For both of us.”

The figure across the table from her faded and shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t Hy Cohen anymore. Now it was a boy with golden eyes and hair the color of raw honey. This was the “face” Cohen had worn most of the time during their years together. And no matter how many times Li told herself that it wasn’t Cohen, she couldn’t make her heart believe otherwise. And she couldn’t stop the flood of memory and emotion that washed over her at the sight of the familiar body.

“Don’t.”

“Why not? It’s what you want. If you didn’t want it, I wouldn’t be doing it. If you didn’t want it, I wouldn’t want to do it.”

“Don’t,” she whispered again.

It was the only word she could think of. What was she supposed to say? That the idea of resurrecting a ghost and making it pretend to be Cohen was sick? (But she’d thought of it herself, hadn’t she? And long before the ghost suggested it.) That she didn’t want a fake? (But hadn’t there been nights when she’d thought fake would be plenty good enough once the lights were out?) That it would be a betrayal of Cohen’s memory? (Cohen would have been the first to laugh at that idea.)

In the end she said the one thing she really knew was true, and which wasn’t noble at all or anything close to it:

“I can’t look at that face. I don’t want to remember him. It hurts too much.”

“I just want to make you happy,” he said, still speaking with the ghost’s voice.

“Do I look happy to you?”

“You just need to let go of the past and—”

“Do I look happy?”

He turned a brilliant liquid gaze upon her. “What a beast I’ve been to you, Catherine! Won’t you let me make it up to you?”

“You don’t need to make anything up to me,” she said awkwardly. She felt a flush rise up her face. She knew this was just another scene in the passion play. And yet …

“I don’t know why I say ‘I,’ ” the reboot went on, in a lower, softer, infinitely more dangerous voice. “After all, I’m an entirely different person, aren’t I? Not that you’d notice. What do you owe Cohen that you’re willing to go through so much on the slightest chance of finding anything? Why doesn’t it even occur to you that I …” He broke off feelingly. He looked at her. He looked away. “I love you. And it breaks my heart that I’m not enough for you.”

“Oh God,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. I really am. I—”

And then she looked into his eyes and saw it. Way back there behind the meltingly sincere hurt-puppy look there was something else, something entirely different. He was playing with her. Playing with her like a fox with a hen.

She couldn’t hold it against him. It was done without malice. It was what he was made to do. And whatever peculiar quality Cohen had possessed—whatever unanticipated, coincidental quirk had made him able to talk about love and actually mean it—she couldn’t hold its absence against the ghost.

“Good try,” she said, struggling for an even tone and making it—more or less. “But I’m not playing today.”

“How can you be so cold? And you accuse me of—”

“Just drop it. You know perfectly well you don’t mean a word of it.”

“Oh I suppose not,” he said petulantly. “But do you always have to take everything so seriously? You didn’t used to be so totally lacking in joie de vivre. I can remember a few times when you were more than happy to ‘seize the budding rose of May.’ ”

“Yes,” Li said sourly. “And there’s a lot you don’t remember, either. So let’s stick to the job at hand, okay?”

The ghost vanished and was replaced by the little boy, Hyacinthe.

“I’m sorry,” Cohen said in a very small and frightened version of his Hyacinthe voice. “Don’t be angry. Please. I can’t bear it.”

“I’m not angry. I’m just not playing this game.”

He peered anxiously at her. An illusion, she knew; behind the external layers the affective-loop program would be collecting emotive inputs from her on vectors that ranged from pulse rate to body temperature to blood flow distribution—and had nothing at all to do with his “eyes” or even sight as humans knew it. But the little boy across the table from her radiated worry and uncertainty and a desperate need for reassurance.

“I just want to make you happy,” he told her.

“I know you do,” she said. She didn’t know if this was genuine or not, but either way it was easier to go along with it. “And I … I appreciate it. I’m just not ready to be happy yet.”

She knew what would happen now, both from experience and because she had checked every line of the emotive loop code. Cohen would cast around until he found an appropriate peace offering: some little symbolic thing he could do or tell her that would make her happy and reestablish a friendly footing and put a little distance between him and the memory of her displeasure.

What he came up with was a complete surprise, however. It was neither a token nor purely symbolic. And if it was true, it could change everything.

“I bet I can tell you something you don’t know,” he told her.

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

“Avery’s shipboard AI is built on an affective loop. That’s why it’s mad, don’t you see? They tried to slave an affective-loop-based AI—a true Emergent—to a semi-sentient.”

“But why?” She was almost too horrified to speak.

“To control it. But they only managed to drive it mad.”

“Does Holmes know about this?”

“Of course she does. Who do you think made the ship crazy in the first place?”

THE DATATRAP

“So how did you get here?” Catherine asked Router/​Decomposer when everyone had scattered to take care of the business of securing the habitat.

“I fell in with a bunch of very hospitable Uploaders who let me parasitize their ship’s router/​decomposer. Cramped, but manageable.” His strange attractor expanded in an amusing parody of a luxurious stretch. “And this place is nice and roomy.”

“Haunted houses always are,” Li said grimly.

“It’s not haunted. It’s … occupied.”

“By who?”

“Well, that’s complicated. I’m not really sure, actually. And I think I might need you to help me find out.”

But he wouldn’t say any more about that when she pressed him, except that he was “putting something together to put in front of her.” And she’d known him long enough to know that he wouldn’t be drawn out until he was good and ready.

“What about the Datatrap itself?” she asked him. She recounted Korchow’s strange tale and his guess at the structure’s origins.

“I don’t know about alien,” Router/​Decomposer said. “The Drift itself is complicated. It certainly doesn’t look like Syndicate tech. But it could have been built by humans. And light cones go all wonky in the Drift, so trying to argue whether it’s from a parallel universe or our own future light cone is just a recipe for sucking yourself down your
own mathematical navel. Not that I have anything against that. Actually I’m currently collating the ships’ logs of the entire UN Fleet with whatever I can pull out of the Datatrap’s logs in order to try to construct a sort of tidal map of the movement of populations within the Drift. From what I’ve been able to gather so far, there seem to have been multiple waves of arrival and departure as populations in the Drift ebbed and flowed. One could imagine constructing an ethnology of the Drift, a sort of mathematical model of the birth and death of civilizations.”

“I’m sure
one
could,” she said in affectionate amusement.

“But you’re right of course. There are slightly more urgent matters at hand at the moment.”

“Do you think whoever built this is going to come back?” Li wanted to know.

“Not anytime soon.”

“Not even now that we’re here?”

“I don’t see why they should care, really. I mean, do you rearrange your whole life—or even cross the street—to crush a fly?”

“No … but little boys cross schoolyards to pull their wings off.”

Router/​Decomposer gave her his equivalent of a pitying look. “I have to assume that whoever built this place is a long way past the stage of pulling flies’ wings off for amusement. And if they aren’t … well, there isn’t much we’re going to be able to do about it, or anywhere we’re going to be able to get away from them, is there?”

“So … what?” Li was incredulous. “Just don’t worry about it?”

“All I’m saying is that your time would be better spent worrying about people like Helen Nguyen, who’s a lot closer to hand, and who does pull flies’ wings off for fun. And whom we might be able to use the Datatrap to stop.”

“You think that’s what whoever brought Ada here was after?”

“Yes.”

“And who was that?”

“I don’t want to say until I’ve ruled out a few possible alternatives.”

“You think there’s a Cohen fragment in there with her.”

“Like I said, I don’t want to say yet.”

By the time Li had had her talk with Router/​Decomposer, most of the crew was back on board the
Christina
celebrating.

In the first flush of victory, it seemed that all was forgiven. The crew returned to Llewellyn, their doubts forgotten. Or at least forgotten long enough to get roaring drunk together while Router/​Decomposer minded the shop and mopped up what was left of the station AI.

By the time Llewellyn came knocking on her door, Li had had a long, heartfelt reunion with Router/​Decomposer and had a lot of news to pass on.

“He says the wild AI outbreak on New Allegheny is completely out of control. It’s jumped quarantine, it’s floating all over the Drift and getting passed from ship’s crew to ship’s crew. Containment’s a pipe dream.”

Llewellyn scratched at his neck, and then jerked his hand back when he saw Li eying the rash.

“Router/​Decomposer hitched a ride here on the last Navy supply ship to come through,” she continued, “about three weeks ago. But the wild AI outbreak hitched the same ride. And when the Datatrap’s crew tried to do a hard reboot to clear their systems, it did … well, what we just cleaned up.”

“So why did he say it was Ada who killed them?”

“Because apparently that’s what the wild AI outbreak—or part of it anyway—is calling itself. No one really understands that part, not even Router/​Decomposer. Can you make any sense of it?”

But Llewellyn either couldn’t or wouldn’t.

“And you trust this Router/​Decomposer person?” he asked her.

“If I can’t trust him I might as well just curl up and die. I mean that. Literally.”

“Then I trust him, too,” he told her. “So let’s leave the details for tomorrow. Right now I just want to get too drunk to worry about it.”

Li and Llewellyn were very, very drunk indeed by the time they staggered back to Li’s quarters.

“I’m going to regret this in the morning,” Llewellyn said, so casually that she thought he was talking about having drunk too much. “But I really don’t care right now.”

And then he hooked an arm around her waist, jerked her across the narrow space that separated them, and fell to kissing her.

She was swept up in an awful wave of guilt, desire, and confusion. One part of her was whispering that sleeping with Llewellyn was the best thing she could possibly do to help Cohen. But another part was feeling his hands on her skin and realizing that she wanted this, quite apart from Cohen—that she had been wanting it for so long that her subconscious had already mustered a pathetic little company of excuses, starting with a list of Cohen’s past betrayals that should have been long ago forgiven and forgotten.

“You’re feeling guilty,” he said. His hands stopped moving across her skin, but he still held her pressed against the length of his body.

Li ducked her face into his chest to avoid his stare. “Of course I am.”

“I don’t see why. He’s dead. And he wasn’t a very good husband even when he was alive. But if you want to play the grieving widow, I’ll go back to my room and sleep alone. I won’t be happy about it, but I’ll do it. And no hard feelings, either.”

“No hard feelings, but you’ll think I’m stupid.”

“No, I won’t.” His voice was barely a whisper now. “I wish anyone had ever loved me the way you love him.”

And then, pathetically, she was crying. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why I even started out on this. And you know what the most ridiculous part of it is? I was thinking about leaving him.”