Now it was her turn to shrug.
“I don’t understand that.”
“Neither do I.” She touched his arm. “Look, Dolniak, it’s just the way it is for me. I’m not proud of it, and I’m not going to sacrifice you or anyone else to it. But once I know we’ve taken the relay and knocked the UN off-planet … I’m going through.”
“So it’s going to be the old Gary Cooper routine? High noon in the dusty streets? You taking on the bad guys all by yourself?”
“I am a Gary Cooper kind of girl.”
“Yeah. I know. That’s what I like about you.”
“I’m not going to walk out on you, though. I’ll do what I promised to.”
It took her a moment to understand why he was holding out his hand.
“Shake on it?” he prompted.
She nodded, and they shook on it.
He looked searchingly at her for several moments, still gripping her hand in his. Then he nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I believe you. I’ll go along with the plan to blow the relay. I don’t understand this revenge thing. Actually I think it’s crazy. But that’s your business, not mine.” He took her by the elbow and gave her a little push back toward the house. “So come on. Let’s do it.”
The conspirators moved fast, because they feared discovery. And that meant Caitlyn had to move fast, too.
The worst of it was hiding what she was doing from Router/Decomposer. It should have been easier to hide from him than from Cohen. But though he wasn’t as envelopingly, inescapably
present
on the link as Cohen always had been, Router/Decomposer also lacked the hard-coded social instincts that had always told Cohen when to back off, when to let things slide, when not to pursue a point.
It made no difference what she did. He wouldn’t let it go. And they were still fighting about it the night before the battle.
“It’s over,” he told her. He was speaking to her through his old interface—by this time they were both so angry at each other that neither of them wanted anything to do with the intraface. “You rescued Cohen. You did what you set out to do. You can go home happy. And whatever happened between Cohen and Nguyen? It’s not your fight. Just walk away from it.”
“It is my fight. And I can’t walk away from it.”
“Because you have to be the hero. Gary fucking Cooper nobly defending the town against the bad guys whether they want you to or not. Well, you know what? Gary Cooper’s a jerk.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “Is that your considered opinion?”
“Yes. He could have left town anytime. He could have run off with his pretty little Quaker bride, and he could have been happy and she
could have been happy and the whole damn town could have been happy. And the only reason he didn’t is that he didn’t want people to call him a coward.”
“No. He didn’t want to look in the mirror every morning for the rest of his life and
see
a coward.”
“You say that like you think the fact that you’re playing a role for yourself instead of other people makes it less selfish.”
She sighed. “What do you
want
me to say?”
“It’s not real, Caitlyn.” This was the first time she could remember him calling her Caitlyn. “It’s just your pride.”
“My pride
is
real. It’s all I have left.”
The GUI froze for an instant. “You really
think
that?”
“What else should I think?” She tapped her chest. “You’ve
been
in there. You know what a mess it is. You
know
what I am. I’m about as close to being a real person as that son of a bitch in bed with Catherine is to being Cohen. If she wants to float off to la-la land surrounded by rainbows and unicorns that’s fine with me. But I’m not buying it. There is no happy ending for Catherine Li or Caitlyn Perkins. There isn’t enough of us left to do anything with a happy ending except fuck it up. The only thing that’s left—the only thing that means something—is what I do. That’s all I have. That’s all I am.”
Router/Decomposer didn’t say anything at all to that for a very long time. So long that she began to wonder if he’d left, and the strange attractor serpentining around her quarters was just an afterthought. But finally he did speak.
“That’s all
anyone
is. And of course you’re going to fuck up the happy ending. That’s what happy endings are
for
.”
On the eve of the battle, Catherine woke to find Llewellyn watching her from the other side of the bed.
“Cohen?” she asked—but only because she realized somehow that it wasn’t.
“No. It’s me.”
She propped herself up on one elbow to get a better look at him. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
And then he reached for her.
It was a move as natural as breathing. And yet she recoiled from him.
“Don’t,” she protested, stiffening in his arms.
“Why not? Why do you push me away?”
“It’s not—I just can’t.”
“You do it easy enough when you’re pretending I’m one of his rented bodies. You think I like having you two use me that way?”
“I think so, yes. I think you just want us to sugarcoat it.” She gave him a slow, insolent smile—and held on to it long enough to watch the hurt blossom across his face. “Who would have thought you could be such a prissy little girl?”
“And who would have thought you could be such a hardhearted bitch?”
“Anyone who knows the first thing about me.”
“Catherine—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“What? Does he own
that
, too?”
“Well, you sure as hell don’t.”
He stared at her until she flushed and dropped her eyes.
“Please,” she said, still looking at the floor. “I don’t want to do this to you.”
“Then what do you want?”
When she couldn’t answer, he snapped out a sharp breath of frustration and turned away to bury his head in the pillows.
She lay still on the other side of the bed until she was sure he was asleep again. Then she crept into the bathroom and spent the rest of the night sitting on the floor smoking and thinking.
Arkady woke abruptly, in the dark, and then had to claw his way out of the dream that still had a hold on him.
Korchow. Korchow’s clever, dangerous hands. Korchow’s clever, dangerous mouth. It had been something almost akin to rape the first time: a seduction of the body, which could be made to be willing, when his heart and mind were anything but. Korchow had told him it was for his own good—which he knew it was. And then he’d told him that he would like it—which, to his endless shame, he did.
And then, with a slow, inevitable, completely illogical slide, it had become something else. Gratitude for what Arkady eventually came to see as a kindness. Gratitude for the way Korchow had fixed what was broken in him. Gratitude for the thing Korchow gave him that was more than physical: the vision of an ideal—cold, pure, incorruptible—that had the power to command loyalty long after any faith in the people entrusted with upholding that ideal was gone.
Arkady had no name for the thing he and Korchow had shared. He’d never been able to call it love, because he had been raised to think love was supposed to be kind and gentle. Which was a bit problematic when you yourself were no longer even within shouting distance of being kind or gentle.
Why had it all come back to him now? And why so strongly?
It was the ghost, he realized. Something about the ghost
felt
like Korchow to him. The strength, the warmth, the solidity. The feeling of
surrendering to someone so much stronger than you that they could hold back the world and protect you from anything.
He wondered if that was what Li had felt with Cohen. He hated wondering that. It rearranged all his ideas about the woman. It made him feel sorry for her. And she had always terrified him. She still terrified him. He didn’t want to know what went on inside her, or even imagine it. He didn’t want to think of her as a person. He didn’t want to feel anything for her, let alone pity. You might as well feel sorry for a shark.
The shifting infinity of sets and algorithms that still mostly thought of itself as Router/Decomposer swam in the Datatrap. It flowed and shifted and mingled in unprecedented configurations, now becoming part of one consciousness, now lapsing into the beautiful abstractions of metamathematics.
He was aware of territories that were Himself, and territories that were Other. And for the first time in his brief, frenetically data-rich existence, he began to comprehend the meaning and the modes of breaching the immaterial boundary between the two. Not as the flesh-and-blood skin of a human, but as the thinner skin of tension that separates air from water: a membrane, fluid and permeable, separating two rich and evolving universes.
That skin meant everything and nothing. Its dissolution was what humans called death—a death that Cohen had walked into, eyes open, for reasons that he still couldn’t begin to fathom. And yet, where did the difference lie? What was there on either side of that fragile skin except the shattered and boundless beauty of a broken universe?
I’m here
, whispered a familiar voice from beyond the shimmering barrier.
It’s all here. All you have to do is step through the looking glass
.
And in the vast data fields of his many minds, he began to discern
the ghostly outline of a cosmic rose, its shimmering petals blossoming and refurling, recombining in an innumerable array of nested infinities, cosmos within cosmos, mirror upon mirror, blazing with the holy fire of annihilation, swooning into the arms of the multiverse.
The battle was over almost before it started. Cohen and Ada exploded through UNSec’s secret network of deep space datatraps and leapfrogged from there to every linked Navy ship in the Drift, and then into New Allegheny, where they swept up all the millions of multiplying copies that had been seeded in the noosphere by the wild AI outbreak. Nothing the UN could throw at them could stand against the combined power of whatever new species was born of that union.
It was a war between humanity and something too young to even have a name. Humans had made a god in their own image, and like the Ouroboros, the cosmic snake that swallows its own tail for all eternity, the child had turned on its parent. Nguyen’s dream of eternal humanity was over. And it had been replaced by something both frightening and hopeful. Not God Everlasting, but gods temporary changing and fallible. Not the futile, violent, grasping immortality of a despot, but the altogether different immortality of parents. Not the Singularity, but a singularity: one of many soft singularities in the long course of an evolution that sets the children of man free to not live in the image of their creator.
They had won, before most of the people waking up along the blazing curve of New Allegheny’s dawn even realized there’d been a battle. It was over without a death, without an injury, without a bullet fired or a voice raised in anger.
Li could hear the giddy postvictory chatter starting up along Router/
Decomposer’s networks. Llewellyn was saying something about owing the crew drinks dirtside. Catherine was laughing. She didn’t hear Dolniak—and she was careful not to look too hard for him. Better to slip out quietly.
These were her people, she realized, with an odd lurch. Family—or as close to it as she could still remember having.
Don’t go. Router/Decomposer’s voice slid through her brain as effortlessly and frictionlessly as her own thoughts. It’s not worth it.
“It is to me.” Her voice grated harshly on her own ears. She couldn’t hear this. From Dolniak she’d expected it, even been able to rationalize it as coming from someone who hadn’t known Cohen, who wasn’t invested, who had his own fight and his own desires in mind. But what had happened to Router/Decomposer? How could he just set the past aside like that? How could he forgive the woman?
“You don’t have to do it, Caitlyn.”
“Yes I do.”
“Please. Just stop and think about it.”
“I have thought about it.”
“Think again.” He sounded oddly desperate. “Just for a moment.”
She shook him off and squared her shoulders, steeling herself to step through the dark door.
But Router/Decomposer had done what he set out to do. He’d delayed her just enough. And when she saw Dolniak step into the room she knew why.
“I’m coming with you,” he told her. She started to speak but he stopped her in mid-sentence. “Don’t argue. You don’t have time. I know what you’re doing. Router/Decomposer asked me to help. And I will.”
“I don’t need help,” she told him.
He grinned. “Too bad, soldier. You’re either going with me or you’re not going at all.”
Helen Nguyen’s office hadn’t changed at all. The same high ceilings, the same tall windows of once-clear glass warped by age and gravity. The same herringboned wood floors, scuffed by the shoes of generations of spies and soldiers. The same ancient desk, its immaculate surfaces
topped with glass according to the same ancient rules of the game that forbade computer terminals, streamspace uplinks, or even writing on anything but single sheets of paper.
This was a building full of empty glass-topped desks and single sheets of paper and people who never seemed to have last names. And it was one of the very few remaining places in UN space where they were hidden from UNSec’s security AIs.
Because when you really cut to the bone, UNSec didn’t trust its own AIs. Nguyen herself would have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested trusting them. And she would have had a one-word answer for them:
Cohen
.
Cohen the Judas. Cohen the Turncoat. Cohen the Great Betrayer.
And now Li—after all her years of faithful, unquestioning, blind service—was here to avenge him.
Just as she had known would happen, Li’s internals cut out the moment she stepped into the room. Dolniak felt nothing, but to her the change was seismic. She was blind now. She had no idea what was coming at her. No idea even what was on the other side of the door she’d just closed behind her.
Nguyen sat behind her desk waiting for them.