“I’m not sure.”
“I don’t remember.” He bent his head and looked deep into her eyes. “But I’m back now. And isn’t that all that matters?”
She felt what she had always felt when he looked at her. His heat, his strength. The overwhelming presence that made him feel more real, more alive than anyone else she’d ever known. The vast, swirling, more-than-human complexity of him, all focused with obliterating power on her. It was like being trapped in the core of a sun. All you could do was burn.
She had no idea if this was love. She had no idea what it was. And when she wasn’t with him it frightened her into desperate resolutions, promises of better behavior in the future, and bargains with fate about how she was going to do things better next time. But when he was there all that fell away, and all she knew was that she wanted to burn.
He looked up for a moment, scanning the bridge over her head. Then, just as she was starting to think she might be able to breathe again, he looked back down at her.
“We need to talk,” he said. And then his hand was clasped around hers, tugging her away down the shot-scarred corridors and through the still-yawning airlock to the Christina and all the way back to her quarters.
Before the door was even closed behind them he had pushed her against the wall and was taking her clothes off.
“I thought we were going to talk!” Li protested.
“In a minute.”
But then he did stop. He held her by the shoulders and touched his forehead to her forehead and just stood there for a long moment, his eyes locked on hers.
“I thought I was never going to touch you again,” he said. “I thought I was never going to see you. It was worse than dying. I need you now. I can’t … I can’t explain it. I just do.” His eyes closed. “Please.”
For the briefest moment, less than a heartbeat, Li thought about Llewellyn. She wondered what he would have said to Avery—what he would have done on the bridge if Cohen hadn’t intervened. What chunk of his future life had Cohen stolen when he took that moment from him? And what else would Cohen take over the coming days and weeks?
But she couldn’t hold those doubts in her mind with any kind of clarity. They drifted across her consciousness every now and then only to evaporate in the brilliant heat of Cohen’s presence. With Cohen’s return, Llewellyn had vanished. He was a memory, without weight or substance, and the memory grew fainter every time Cohen spoke to her or looked at her. Llewellyn had become the ghost, and Cohen the living man.
She raised her arms and took Cohen’s head between her hands and drew him down into her kiss.
“So what are you going to do?” Catherine asked him later.
“About what?”
“I mean, when he … wakes up.” They’d never talked much about Cohen’s “faces.” It wasn’t a comfortable subject, for reasons Catherine had never wanted to look too closely at. Until now.
“Why do you care?” Was there an edge in his voice, or was she just being paranoid? “You never cared before.”
“This is different.”
“How?” No. It wasn’t just paranoia. It was there all right.
She gave Cohen a look, and he shrugged it off. The reaction was so intensely Cohen—tone, expression, gesture, everything. Catherine marveled that he could stamp his personality so completely on another man’s body. It made her rethink her ideas about his other shunts. She’d always experienced them as weak, vacant, lacking in precisely the something that Cohen filled them with when he was on shunt. But what did it mean that even a William Llewellyn could be wiped from his own body as cleanly as if he had never owned it?
“Well, for one thing, you’re not paying him.”
“No,” Cohen answered in his best sullen little boy’s voice. “I’m not paying him. Just saving his life. For which he’s been spectacularly ungrateful so far.”
“Well Jesus, Cohen, this is the man’s self we’re talking about, not a time-share condo.”
“So you agree with him.”
“I don’t agree with either of you. I just—”
“Look, can we drop this? It is what it is. We’re grown-ups, all three of us. We all understand it. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it. Not right now, anyway.”
“But later?”
“I don’t know.” He rolled over and got out of bed—again that surreal sense of Llewellyn’s body having been transformed and alienated, and made completely Cohen. “I’ll figure something out.”
At times Truth blazes so bright that we see it clear as day. But then nature and habit draw a veil over our minds, and we return again to darkness. We are like travelers who, in between each flash of lightning, still find themselves in the deepest black of night.
—Maimonides
(Caitlyn)
THE ADA
She stood on the bridge watching Catherine and Llewellyn leave, and she felt … nothing. She didn’t even feel surprise. She barely felt they had anything to do with her.
Catherine she simply thought of as Catherine—a name she had worn for almost three decades but that was now no closer to her than the countless other Xenogen constructs that peopled the half-remembered streets of her shantytown childhood. They had been clones of the body, as physically identical to her as twins but as distant from her life and identity and family as utter strangers. Catherine was something at once closer and immeasurably more distant: a clone of mind and memory who had chosen to become not just a stranger but possibly—if things went wrong in ways that they might well go wrong—an enemy.
And then there was the ghost …
She couldn’t think of him as Cohen. She had seen Cohen in him, just as Catherine had. But she had seen someone else, too. Someone she’d learned to watch for as she navigated the maze of ghosts and fragments on Avery’s ship.
And though she wanted to tell herself that it was simply a matter of the wrong fragment coming out on top, she knew it went deeper than that. None of the ghosts were really Cohen. And no reboot or remix or cleverly spliced combination of them ever would be. Cohen’s memories might still be alive. But the person who had made those memories matter to her was gone.
He’d made sure of that, by bullet and by slow poison. She’d come to accept that as she’d combed through Nguyen’s files again and again, searching for any sign that he had faked his death. He hadn’t. And he hadn’t faked that other, stranger death, either, the one he called the shattering. He had broken himself so that no one, not even Li, could put him back together.
And if she’d had any doubt about it before, it had been burned away by the bleak, sick, soul-sickening horror she’d felt as she watched him kill Holmes in cold blood—and then stand on the bridge and speak those words, the words she’d come halfway across the known universe to hear, to trick Catherine into believing that he was a dead man come back to life again.
“Oh, Christ!” she said, jerking out of the bleak downward spiral of her thoughts.
What had she been thinking? Nguyen was somewhere on board the Ada doing God only knew what. And in the chaos of the battle, she’d forgotten about her.
She turned to Avery, who was still staring after Llewellyn and Catherine. “Where is she?”
“Gone,” Avery said. “She left last night.”
It took hours to figure out exactly where Nguyen had gone. Avery clammed up after that first, startling confession. And then it was a matter of working her way up the pirate chain of command, trying to talk to Llewellyn (unavailable) or Catherine (the same). In the end what saved her was that Router/Decomposer turned out to be at least temporarily in control of both ships.
And Router/Decomposer, it turned out, was more than ready to listen to her.
“She went to Alba,” he told her after he’d thought about the problem for mere moments in human time.
Caitlyn shook her head, unable to grasp what he was saying.
“She used a one-time relay. I saw the transport data cache. But … there’s too much data in there
. I can’t assimilate it all. And I didn’t understand what that file was—or that it was important—until you asked me about it.”
“A one-time relay,” Caitlyn repeated. She’d never heard of such a thing.
“I’d never heard of them, either, but they exist. As soon as you know what to look for, you can see their operational records all over the place. In most of UN space UNSec can hide it pretty effectively because there’s so much other FTL traffic. But in the Drift they stick out like a sore thumb.”
“Jesus,” Caitlyn said. “What the hell else did you find in there? Unicorns?”
“No, no. The technology’s quite real. Simple actually. Just very, very expensive. And UNSec has kept a tight hold on it for obvious reasons.”
“So Nguyen just … where was this thing? In her quarters?”
Router/Decomposer laughed. “No, they’re huge. On both ends. Not at all the sort of thing you can throw into your overnight bag. At a guess I’d say it’s probably stashed in the rear starboard cargo hold.”
It didn’t look like much when she finally found it. Just a man-high box with a door in one side. And the door wasn’t even locked. Caitlyn opened it, stuck her head inside, and saw only the inside of the box, which was mostly taken up by fairly normal-looking data stacks and circuitry.
“That’s just because she burned the bridge behind her.”
“Is it an Einstein-Rosen bridge then?”
“From what I can see of the literature—it’s all classified, and some of it is highest classification, human-only access—it seems more like a kind of Misner universe.”
“The spinning ones, right?”
“Usually. But really any universe where current conditions have shifted away from chronologic protection toward allowance of time travel. Whatever. What matters is that it’s a multiply connected point.”
Caitlyn dredged up another Alice memory and trotted it out for Router/Decomposer’s inspection: Alice, dressed in her eternal white dress with its everlasting bow, kneeling on the mantelpiece, her kitten and yarn forgotten behind her and her face intent with childish concentration, and plunging her hand through the mirror as calmly as if she were dipping it into water.
“Right,” Router/Decomposer said with what she recognized from long familiarity as his closest approximation of laughter. “I guess Lewis Carroll did think of it first … And wouldn’t it be just like Cohen to point that out?”
“Do you think he was trying to tell us something?”
“Well, I doubt he was trying to tell us about this! How would he even have known about it?”
“Because.” She spoke slowly, still thinking through the tenuous train of logic herself. “Because he’s here, in the Datatrap. He’s using the Datatrap the same way you did. To kind of … float … all possible conflicting versions of him, in superposition.”
“In the Clockless Nowever,” Router/Decomposer said in a wondering voice.
“Are you spouting Uploader theology at me now?” Li scoffed.
“No, you don’t understand. It’s not … A lot of what Uploaders say actually comes from half-understood things they’ve read about AIs or heard AIs say. It’s sort of … the closest formulation the human brain can accommodate to native AI language and concepts. And the Clockless Nowever … it’s what time does inside a datatrap.”
(Caitlyn)
In the end, it turned out that the Llewellyn ghost did have plans for her after all. And what those plans boiled down to was interrogating Avery.
“You want to know what Nguyen was doing out here? I’ll try. But I already have Router/Decomposer working on that, and frankly I think we’ll get farther that way—”
“Forget Nguyen. All that’s over. She’s irrelevant.”
“How can you say that when Cohen—”
“Cohen?” the ghost said mockingly. “I am Cohen.”
“You know better than that.” Caitlyn was speaking low and fast, the words tumbling out as if they wanted to make their getaway before she realized what a dangerous mistake she was making. “You might have fooled her, but I know better.”
“Careful,” the ghost said. “I might start to think you’re jealous.”
They stared at each other tensely, neither one willing to take the next step.
“So why bother with Avery at all then?” Caitlyn asked, beating a tactical retreat for the moment.
“Because we still need her help,” he said. “You need to talk to her. Bring her around.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“Because.” He smiled. She decided that she didn’t like the way Cohen’s smile looked on Llewellyn’s face. “She doesn’t like me. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Then have Llewellyn talk to her.”
The smile turned into a smirk. “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be convenient at the moment.”
There was something provocative in the way he talked to her. He spoke as if he were looking for a fight. Or as if he were daring her to challenge him. She wondered if he talked this way to Catherine. She doubted it.
“You don’t trust me,” she said wonderingly. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. Some habits died hard, she supposed.
“Should I?”
She looked up at him. At the long-jawed, wolfish face. At the gray eyes sharp as a knife’s edge. At the cold, calculating, utterly inhuman intelligence behind the eyes.
“You shouldn’t go around in a body like that,” she told him. “It makes you look as dangerous as you are. People might stop trusting you.”
They didn’t call it an interrogation. It was all very polite and kid-glove. They even, at one point—God bless the Navy and its arcane etiquette—had tea. But that didn’t change the ugly reality of the situation.
It went on for days, Caitlyn playing one end against the other, trying to get Avery’s consent and glean some useful information at the same time, and always acutely aware of the possibility that the Llewellyn ghost was on the monitor.
She finally hit paydirt deep into the tail end of an all-night session with Avery. The taste of stale coffee filling up her mouth. The strange machine hum of a ship full of sleepers filling up her ears. Exhaustion dulling her reflexes.
Avery muttered something incomprehensible.
“What?” Caitlyn rubbed her gritty eyes and rolled her shoulders in a hopeless effort to get the kinks out of her exhausted muscles.
“I said I don’t know. How many times can I say it?”
Caitlyn sighed. “I’m sorry. I—what was I asking you about?”
“Why Nguyen worked so hard to get Llewellyn convicted of piracy.”
“Oh. Really? I would have thought the answer was obvious.”
“Yes.” Avery’s chin jutted defiantly. “Because he was guilty as hell.”
“Except he wasn’t, was he? He didn’t turn pirate until after the trial, did he? So basically you turned him pirate. You handed him to Nguyen in a neat little package, all tied up with ribbon and tinsel. You put a price on his head. You turned him into a wanted man. You killed him.”
“No!”
“All right. Then you tell me what happened. And why. Because I’d really like to know why the fuck I’m putting my life on the line out here. And I think it all goes back to what happened on this ship, between you and Llewellyn and Ada.”
Avery flinched at that—the same instinctive flinch Li had seen almost every time she said the ship’s name. A pretty strange way for a captain to feel about her own ship. And Li was betting that flinch—and the bad blood that lay behind it—was at the bottom of the mystery.
“Okay, Astrid. Why don’t you just tell me about the Ada’s original mission? Walk me through it as you remember it. I just want to understand what happened.”
“There was no mission,” Avery snapped. “There was no secret. You’re looking in the wrong place, and you don’t understand anything!”
An idea blossomed in her mind. “Then it was Ada.”
The skin around A
very’s lips went white in a dead giveaway.
“That’s it, isn’t it? Ada went sentient. Holmes made Llewellyn wipe her. And Nguyen masterminded the cover-up. But why? Why was it so important to discredit him? Why have a public trial that risked exposure? Why suborn witnesses? Why invent this ridiculous piracy story?”
To her amazement, Avery laughed. And it wasn’t a pleasant laugh. It was horrible, like some out-of-the-grave echo of Holmes’s not-at-all-funny chuckle.
“That’s exactly what I asked myself,” Avery said. “I asked myself that for weeks, months, almost a year. And then Ada went sentient again, and I was back in the middle of the same argument with Holmes again. Only this time it wasn’t an argument. This time it was just Holmes giving me orders.”
“And you obeyed her?” Caitlyn couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t square it with her sense of Avery as a basically honest and decent person.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You mean why did I help Nguyen commit … well, I was going to call it a crime against humanity. How pathetic is that, that four centuries after the first sentient AI was invented we don’t even have a name for what we’ve been doing to them all this time?”
Caitlyn felt a cold shiver of revulsion work its way through her gut. She knew what was coming and she didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to know it.
“You don’t understand,” Avery told her. “You don’t understand me, and you don’t understand the situation. Of course I knew what Holmes had done to Ada. And of course I knew that Ada wasn’t the first AI who’d had her hardware cycled. But none of that changes the cold equations.”
“Which are what exactly?”
“Survival. Survival in a war where the one who wins really does take home all the marbles.”
“But how?” Caitlyn protested. “Ada’s one AI, one ship. You don’t win or lose a war on one ship.”
“No. You win or lose a war on all your ships.”
Router/Decomposer, ghosting on her internals in order to sit in on the interrogation, was the first to understand the full implication of Avery’s words. Caitlyn felt the realization hit him. And then she felt a sort of shudder on the other end of the intraface—an instinctive recoil, as if by the mere fact of being flesh and blood she were somehow tainted by the crime.
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