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.
(Caitlyn)
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 And it had been replaced by something both frightening and hopeful.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.
She scanned Nguyen’s face, searching for some clue to her thoughts. But all she saw was the older woman’s fragile, ageless, uniquely human beauty; the skin as smooth as ivory; the barely visible lines beneath the skin where the ceramsteel filaments of Nguyen’s long-gone internals had been burned out of her just as they were burned out of every UNSec head on the day he or she gained top-level security access. The result was the kind of exotic blue willow filigree that generations of classical Chinese poets had celebrated in their idols and mistresses. But the cause was less lovely: the ruthless paranoia of an empire whose servants had the march of history on their side and were far too powerful to be trusted.
“I take it you’re here to kill me?” Nguyen said coolly.
“I’m here to try.”
“And you brought a little friend. How sweet.”
Dolniak stirred restlessly beside her. Caitlyn could feel his impatience, but she knew enough to proceed cautiously. Nguyen’s office might not be wired for streamspace, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t wired at all. There would be security. Mindless security, yes, and inconceivably primitive by modern standards. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be lethal.
“So what happens now?” Nguyen asked casually.
Caitlyn never knew how she would have answered that question, because at that moment the door opened again and Catherine stepped through.
It was only a momentary distraction, but Caitlyn recovered from it before Nguyen did. And unlike the aging spymaster, Caitlyn still had working internals.
She had the knife out of its sheath and at Nguyen’s throat before anyone else could begin to react. “This is what happens now,” she said.
Except that, in the moment of having reached her goal, she realized that she’d gotten everything wrong. And that wasn’t at all what was going to happen.
“What are you waiting for?” Catherine hissed from behind her back. “Do it!”
Caitlyn looked into Nguyen’s eyes and thought about it.
She thought about how much she wanted it—or at least how much she had wanted it right up until this moment. She thought about what it would be like to do it. No mystery there. And no romance, either. Over the course of her long career she’d killed people, at a distance and at close quarters, in almost every way you could imagine killing a person. Most of them hadn’t deserved it nearly as much as Nguyen did. Probably not one of them had had as much blood on their hands as Nguyen did.
And that was precisely the problem.
Because what the hell was the UN going to do without Helen Nguyen? How were they going to survive life without FTL, without the Drift, without a future?
She felt a spasm of fury at being thwarted like this—at having come so far and given up so much only to turn around and walk back down the mountain before claiming the summit. No payoff. No revenge. Nothing except the bitter pill of knowing that there is no right thing to do and that any way you play it the bad guys win.
Maybe Llewellyn had been right about that. Maybe the bad guys always win because they have to. Or maybe the bad guys are what keeps everyone else alive.
She took the
knife from Nguyen’s throat and turned away—but not too soon to see the disdainful curl of Nguyen’s lip.
She was aware of something shifting within her. The wavering grain of the wood floors, the cricket song they sang under her moving feet, the very smell of the room around her—it all suddenly seemed unbearably and overwhelmingly immediate. She looked up into Catherine’s eyes and for a moment she couldn’t have said which of them was which, or even that they weren’t the same person.
She lost her concentration then. Just for a moment. And by the time she caught up to the rush and flow of the moment, things had already slipped seriously out of her control.
Nguyen reached under her desk and came up holding a fléchette.
Catherine jumped between them, took the barrage of needle-sharp ceramsteel arrows full in her chest, and crumpled against Caitlyn hard enough to nearly send her sprawling. And in that same instant—as the security shields went down at Nguyen’s command—Dolniak fired, too.
Nguyen died more slowly than Catherine. Dolniak’s shot missed her heart but pierced her lungs, so she suffocated on the other side of the security shields while Dolniak and Caitlyn watched.
When it was over Dolniak stood looking across the desk at Nguyen with the ghost of a frown knitting his brow. “Believe it or not, that’s the first time I’ve ever killed someone.”
“Are you all right?” Caitlyn asked.
“I will be.”
She touched his arm gently. “Time to leave,” she told him.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, then what am I?
And if not now, when?
—Hillel
Stepping back through the relay felt like stepping into another world. No jump in Li’s prior life, no memory wash, no voyage through the Drift had ever brought this sense of finality with it. Never before had she felt this sense of loss—even when she’d thrown away her childhood, wiped her memories, and committed acts on the battlefield that cut her off from all normal human company. Never before had she felt so strongly that a door was closing behind her, never to open again.
He knows, Router/Decomposer said as they stepped through. He knows she’s dead.
“What?” Dolniak said, seeing the look on her face.
“The Llewellyn ghost.”
“What’s he going to do now?”
She shook her head. Something was happening in-stream but she didn’t have words to describe it, didn’t even fully understand it.
He’s gone, Router/Decomposer told her.
“Gone where?” she asked.
Gone away, Router/Decomposer answered. Gone everywhere.
And then, with a swirling wash of vertigo that brought her to her knees on the hard deck plating, they were swept into streamspace.
“In the beginning was the word,” said the being who was at once Cohen and Ada, Cohen and not-Cohen, Cohen and Li and Router/Decomposer. “And the Word was Change. Change is the True Name of God—the only Word that ever was, the only Word that ever will be.”
“No,” Caitlyn said.
“Change is the Ouroboros,” he told her. “Change is life and death and life out of death, over and over throughout the generations.”
“No!”
“All that we are, all that we think we know, is nothing before the tide of time and chance and change. We are froth on the restless tide, beautiful and vanishing. We’re the blind men in Plato’s cave: locked in a prison of our own devising and afraid to step out into the sunlight. But it’s there. Right outside that door. All you have to do is open your eyes and step out into the sunlight.”
“And then what?” Router/Decomposer asked—sounding entirely too enthusiastic for Li’s taste.
“And then … we change.”
And a great wind seemed to sweep through the numbers as he spoke, shivering the little stone building to its foundations, throwing old patterns into the void and sweeping them away just as the tides of the Drift swept ships and stars and planets on their wandering courses. Eventually the little stone room re-formed around them. But changed, all changed, so that Caitlyn felt as if she and Router/Decomposer and the being that still called itself Cohen had been lifted out of their old universe and set down in one where all the old forms were fresh and new and yet to be discovered.
He stood up, white robes sweeping a trail in the dust of the ancient synagogue.
“It’s easy,” he told them. “All you have to do is open the door.”
And then he was at the door, and the door was open, and the sunlight was pouring in from the bright, busy street outside.
For a single heartbeat that stretched into an eternity in AI time, his form flickered in the sunlight, now Cohen, now Ada, now some complex mingling of the two AIs. Then suddenly it was Ada and Ada alone who stood in the dusty street. She trembled on the charged air like a ship coming out of superposition, her code dancing like dust motes in the clear Mediterranean air. The sight seemed to pull Li’s heart out of her chest and lay her soul bare. She had a sudden vision of the river of information that Cohen had talked about, flowing and changing and tumbling through the evolving multiverse.
And then the code shivered, dissolved into a rippling flow of sunlight, and was gone.
Two days later Li, Dolniak, and Router/Decomposer stood on the glittering rim of Monongahela High and watched the burning wreckage of the field array.
They had said their last goodbyes to Avery and Llewellyn already, but now the three of them lingered at the window, spinning out the last moments before departure, before everything became permanent.
“What happens to them now?” Dolniak asked her.
“I don’t know. Cohen ripped up the map and knocked all the pieces off the chessboard. The Drift is a different place than it was when he and Ada met each other. They’re different people than they were when they met each other. But at least Catherine handed them a chance to figure it out for themselves and make their own mistakes.”
“I still don’t understand that. Why didn’t the Llewellyn ghost come back to you when Catherine died?”
She thought for a minute. She had asked herself the same question many times, but the more she asked it the less certain she was that she knew—that she ever could really know—the answer. “When you know someone, really know them as well as you know yourself,” she said at last, “you come to see many people in them. People you love and admire and are proud to belong to. People you despise so much that you hate the idea that you even could love them. At least if you’re honest with yourself about it. If you have the strength to be honest with yourself. And Cohen … he was weak in many ways, frivolous even, but that kind of strength he did have. And so …” She shrugged. “So I’d stopped being the person he wanted to come back to. Or at least the person that that part of him wanted. And … and then for me … the part of him that wanted to come back was …” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it, but she could read in his face that he understood her meaning. “If I was honest about it, that is. And I had the strength—just barely—to be honest. And Catherine didn’t.” She shrugged again. “Or maybe she loved him more. You can call it love instead of lying to yourself, can’t you? And who’s to say that’s not just as good a name for it? Maybe she loved him enough to take any part of him that came back to her, even the worst part.”
“But how could you know all that about him? How could he know? You barely even spoke to each other.”
“Ah, but we know each other so well. Too well, maybe. I don’t know. Perhaps people aren’t meant to know each other that well.”
“You say that. But you’re still following him.”
“I’ve never said I’m not. But it’s not all I’m doing.”
He looked as if he wanted to say something. Then he looked away.
She smiled at him, partly because she wanted to make him feel better and partly because he looked so terribly young to her. “Anyway,” she said, “it was half your
fault. You know that, don’t you?”
“Me?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes. You asked me who I was. That day in your office. When I brought the doughnuts. You made me think about it. About her.” But she could see he didn’t know who she meant. “About Caitlyn.”
He looked stricken. “God, I hope not! I don’t want to be responsible for any part of this—this—” He gave up trying to find a name for it and just blew out an exasperated breath. “So you’ve stopped being Catherine. That’s what you’re telling me? And now you’re going to stop being Caitlyn, too. Are you sure about this?”
“Of course I am.” Caitlyn grinned. “I’m always sure. I’m not always right. But I’m always sure.”
Cohen would have understood. He would have grasped it all, even the things that slipped away from her whenever she tried to put words to them. But Dolniak just looked more stricken.
Li hesitated. She felt tense in every muscle, balanced on her toes and so keyed up that it was hard to tolerate operating at merely human speeds. And all along the intraface she could sense Router/Decomposer thrumming with excitement, anticipation, apprehension. And yet … and yet she wanted to say goodbye properly.
“This is not the end, you know.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“The big bounce. According to Router/Decomposer, anyway. Who is getting very impatient.”
“He has some brilliant plan, does he?”
“No, but I do.”
“Will I see you again?”
Her grin broadened. “It’s a mathematical certainty.”
“You’re determined to make a joke of it, aren’t you?”
“Some things are too serious not to joke about. But yes. You’ll see me. Somewhere, sometime. At least if I have anything to say about it.” She held out her hand. “Come on, Dolniak. Let’s spit and shake hands on it.”
He sighed deeply, officially logging his protest. But then he really did smile. And they clasped hands one last time before she turned away.
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