Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  (Caitlyn)

  The contact with NALA was almost laughably cloak-and-dagger. Not that it was exactly incompetent, Caitlyn told herself as she and Llewellyn were disgorged from the incline in the midst of the late afternoon day shift crowd. More like a small-town cop’s idea of the kind of security measures real spies would use.

  Which might have been why, when they reached the NALA safe house, she wasn’t entirely surprised to find Dolniak waiting for them.

  He looked at home, she thought. And not only because the safe house was an old prefab farmhouse that dated from the earliest days of the settlement and wouldn’t have been out of place in the Uplands. No, Dolniak had been here before. She could read his familiarity with the place in every movement. It was there in the comfortable, proprietary way he shuffled across the kitchen to pour coffee for the new arrivals. And it was there in the relaxed set of his shoulders—the attitude of a man who didn’t have to cast an eye around for the exits because he already knew them.

  The man sitting next to Dolniak on the NALA side of the table looked very far from at home, however. And she was a lot more surprised to see him than she was to see Dolniak.

  “Arkady,” she said, nodding. “I didn’t know the Syndicates would be here.”

  He gave her a look out of his martyr’s eyes that was about as far from Christian forgiveness as it was possible to get. “We thought it was wise.”

  “Fine,” she said. “No point in wasting time.”

  Quickly, she laid out the plan for them. Launch a surprise attack on the station systems at Monongahela High; use Avery’s security codes and the station-to-navy-yard link to neutralize the Navy; blow the field array.

  And then, in the silence that followed her pitch, she tried to read the two men’s reactions.

  Dolniak still looked sullen and angry, as if he were being dragged into something against his will. Arkady, on the other hand, was about as close to smiling as she’d seen him. He rocked his chair back onto two legs, hooked his thumbs into his pockets, and gave her a look that was pure Korchow. “Now that,” he said smugly, “is what I call burning your bridges behind you!”

  “Does that mean you’re in?”

  “No. But it means I’m willing to think about it.”

  And he did think about it, right there in front of them. Caitlyn could almost see him running the math in his head. And she knew he’d come up with the same numbers she’d come up with.

  The closest UN Trusteeship to New Allegheny was centuries distant. But Gilead—itself clinging to a wispy minor tributary of the Drift—was practically a neighbor at seventy years subluminal travel time.

  He would accept her deal. He might pretend reluctance, but in the end it would be acceptable to him. She knew it would be, because as soon as she had thought through the time and distance factor she had realized that—at least for the Syndicate taste for realpolitik—the simple option of blowing the relay must have been on the table from the very beginning.

  Whatever the Syndicates’ plans were for New Allegheny, blowing the relay only meant a delay of less than a century in getting started.

  And that still gave them a three-hundred-year head start on the competition.

  So that was taken care of. Arkady was on board. And that was the quarter where she’d expected the most resistance.

  Instead, to Caitlyn’s amazement and fury, it was Dolniak who dug in his heels. He launched one objection after the other, each one more beside the point than the last. It wouldn’t work. And even if it could work, it shouldn’t be done. It would plunge New Allegheny into a dark age. It would kill their steel industry—never mind that they could walk into the Navy shipyard as its owners and masters the minute the UN pulled out. It would leave them defenseless against the Novalis aliens—never mind that the odds were a billion to one that the UN would make it back to New Allegheny before the aliens ever showed up.

  So what the hell was going on here?

  “Can I talk to you?” she asked Dolniak.

  He stood up, his chair scraping across the peeling floor tiles in the sudden silence that followed her words. “Sure.”

  He led her out of the kitchen, down a dingy hall tiled with the same green-and-white linoleum, and out into a weedy yard full of abandoned, rain-sodden furniture.

  As soon as the door shut behind them she turned on him furiously. “What the hell was that about?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t ‘what’ me. Why the hell are you dragging your heels when I’ve just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card? Or do you want to end up as Syndicate broodstock?”

  “Korchow’s told you about his little plan for us?”

  “Enough.”

  “Touching, isn’t it? Pet-quality Syndicate constructs free to a good home and all that.”

  “Free isn’t exactly the word I’d use.”

  Dolniak just shrugged.

  “You know what it’s got to mean for your people in the long run. They’ll arrive as slaves and end up running the place. They’ve done it already on some of the neutral Periphery planets. And the only reason they haven’t done it in the UN as a whole is that the Ring has the money and muscle to steamroller them. New Allegheny, on the other hand, has nothing except steel and potatoes. So why are you going along with it?”

  “Because maybe I don’t believe we’ll live down to Syndicate expectations.”

  Caitlyn rolled her eyes.

  “No, really. Maybe I think we can turn the tables on them. Anyway, it’s not much of a choice, is it? Die now for certain, or take the offer of a chance to fight again another day.” He shrugged. “Anyway, if we do what the Syndicates expect of us, then we aren’t fit to rule ourselves. That I really do believe.”

  “You make it sound theoretical.”

  “Not really. But I can’t abide the kind of make-believe fairy-dust nonsense that passes for patriotism. I’m not going to pretend we’re fighting for freedom or liberty or the sacred bonds of humanity. We’re fighting for survival just like everyone else. We don’t have some special claim to deserve it. No one does. You’ve got to earn it.”

  “And yet you’re willing to carry the Syndicates’ water.”

  He shrugged, looking nettled. “Is that worse than carrying the UN’s water?”

  “I don’t get it, Dolniak. Do I need to connect the dots for you? We’re offering you seventy years free of outside interference before the first Syndicate ship gets here. And if you play it right, you’ve got a whole goddamn navy thrown into the bargain, complete with shipyards and steel mills to keep it afloat ad infinitum. Think of what you can do with that! Think of what it would mean to face them as a strong, independent colony rather than low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking!”

  Caitlyn stepped back and peered up into Dolniak’s face. It wasn’t easy to read his expression given their height difference. But she saw enough to know that her suspicions were right.

  “That’s not what this is about, is it?” she asked him. “This is about me. Us.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course it is. You lied to me once. Why wouldn’t you lie to me again?”

  “I’m not lying to you—”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Katie. I think you are lying to me. I think you plan to get something else out of this whole deal, and you’re not leveling with us about it. And that makes me just a little bit suspicious of your newfound altruism.”

  “I’m being straight with you.”

  He shook his head doggedly. “No, you’re not. I can see it in your face every time you talk about blowing the relay. You’re in this for something else. And I can’t really see putting people’s lives in your hands until I know what it is. I don’t think that’s so unreasonable. Do you?”

  She laughed softly. “When did you get to know me so well? Okay, so I do have other plans. But they won’t keep me from doing what I promised.”

  “I’d like to be the judge of that, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re best
staying out of it,” she warned him—but he just looked away over the rain-slicked rooftops.

  She hesitated, and then she jumped. She didn’t see another choice. And she wasn’t sure she could lie to him convincingly enough to make him swallow anything but the truth.

  “The person who killed Cohen is on the other side of the relay.”

  His eyes widened in surprise, but he kept his mouth shut.

  “I plan to pay them a visit before the relay goes down.”

  “And how do you plan to get back afterward?”

  “I don’t think that will be an issue, actually.”

  He stared at her. “You care enough about this to die over it?”

  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.”

  (Caitlyn)

  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.”

  (Catherine)

  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

  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 t
hink 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.

  In the Datatrap

  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.