“So would I.”
The screen began another replay. I canceled and it went dark. No point in watching it again. There was not a single doubt in my mind as to what had occurred. “Remi . . . I thank you, the Mandate thanks you . . .” I looked up at the shed’s single lonely window. I didn’t think Morgan was going to thank him.
I started toward the shed, muscles quivering, mind ablaze with that feeling you get only when a case is coming together. A warning notice flashed as I approached the next level. I kicked up and over, barely pausing to catch my balance as I landed.
The impis had gotten to him. There was no way around it; the footage was clear. Morgan was in full and witting contact with rogue entities and all that that implied. It was the break we’d been waiting for, the first sign of an active human/impi organization.
I needed immediate backup, every ship within a month’s radius. The hall’s higher-level activities would have to be frozen, to make sure it didn’t wander off. A lot of people would be coming to look the place over. They’d be studying this hall all the way down to the gluons for years to come. As for Morgan . . . I didn’t want to think about that part.
I paused at the door, almost breathless. With quick stabs I punched in the code. I charged inside before it was half-open. “Okay, ace—what did she pass to you?”
Morgan barely started. He gave me a mournful look then reached into his jacket pocket. He gazed down at the object in his hand and with a sigh tossed it to me.
It was a piece of scrim. I’d seen that even as he took it out. I hefted it. Some kind of metal, an alloy I couldn’t identify. The bust of a woman, head cocked to one side, a smile on her face, hair lifting away as if blown by an invisible breeze.
I raised my eyes to Morgan. “She went . . . You’re telling me the impi went after this for you.”
“No.” Morgan shook his head. “Alerted some others. They picked it up.”
I turned the statuette over in my hand. It’s hollow, I told myself. Imprinted on the molecular level with some message, some command . . .
I examined the face once again, the laughing eyes, the lips so lifelike they seemed about to speak, to give word to everything Morgan had left behind: light and warmth, air to breathe. He’d put a lot of work into the thing. It occurred to me, somewhat belatedly, that it was a portrait of someone he knew. Had once known. No wonder he wanted it back.
For a second or two my mind struggled against the evidence of simple kindness, desperate for a reason to raise the alarm after all. But it wasn’t hollow, and contained nothing, and it wouldn’t take me anywhere. I tossed it back to Morgan. “Nice piece.” I got out my handset. “Okay—does our little pal have a name?”
“Isis,” he said softly. I had to ask him to repeat it.
* * *
I left the door unlocked. The hall’s top level was only a few yards overhead. I kicked off for it, setting down amidst a jungle of antennas and cables and junk. That grand glowing tube of dirty-yellow muck towered above me. I eyed it with the weariness of years, seeing my own youth vanish over that bright curve, its roaring song fading relentlessly into gray. Some are meant for the sunlight and some for the shadowed places. It was pretty clear to me which portion was mine.
Morgan hadn’t told me much; whatever didn’t feel like betrayal. I’d lase it back to Charon, where they’d give it to some specialist to ponder. Maybe they’d find more in it than I had. I doubted it.
“Hey, mandy.” I turned to see Remi gazing at me through his helmet visor, ready, I suppose, to go on shift. It was a moment before I recalled the remote riding on my ear. I plucked it off and handed it back.
“All straighten out?”
“More or less. He’ll be ready to leave tomorrow. He wants you to run the catapult.”
“He ain’t stridin’ again?”
“Not like he has a lot to worry about.”
“Ahh . . . I gotcha.”
“Nice to have friends,” I said. He shook his head. “Can’t stand him myself. He chatters.”
I watched him leave. For a moment he was silhouetted against the tower, and I saw him as an impi might, a human figure outlined by light. Then he vanished, the way jacks do.
It wasn’t as dark as it had been. The shadows had lifted somewhat. I knew the names of one of the spirits, the right questions to ask, and the fact that the dragons might not be dragons after all. A pretty good day, all considered.
I looked over my shoulder toward home. The stars glared back, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, decide which was which. After a moment I gave up and went to tell Witcove how it was going to be.
From the corner of My Eye
Alexander Glass
Here’s a brilliant and evocative look at a future Earth split between the world of humans and the shadowy, elusive world of A.I.s, and of one man caught precariously between both . . .
New writer Alexander Glass has appeared frequently in Interzone, as well as in The Third Alternative, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in London, England.
* * *
I turned to look, but she was gone.
At once, I rose to my feet, tossed a few corroded Dirham-Pesetas on to the table, and set off in the direction I thought she had gone. My coffee was left behind, untouched—I had been just about to wet my beard—beside my doubled-up copy of the El Puente Gazette. Hassan would probably be offended, the more so as I had left him a colossal tip, but I told myself I would explain it to him later. I doubted that he would understand. I was not sure I understood myself.
It was not lust, nothing so innocent. Lust can turn a man’s head, but would hardly have sent me running through the crowds as the evening shadows arched their backs lazily across El Puente’s central street. It rarely sends me scuttling between cars and camels, tourists and thieves, motorbikes and merchants and mystics, with Spain somewhere behind me and Morocco somewhere ahead. I could not even remember the woman’s face. But there had been something about her, something that the rest of the evening crowd on El Puente ignored or simply did not see; and it is my business to see things that other people do not, even if I am not sure myself what those things might be.
I found that my hand had leapt up to my throat, though the cowrie shell I had once worn there was long gone. Kirsten’s shell. Perhaps the woman reminded me of her. I can no longer remember. If so, I was not aware of it at the time.
I activated my Ghostbane, though, to be safe.
A battered Volkswagen van crawled past, leaving me dancing from one foot to the other in undignified impatience. I reached out and touched its side with my first two fingers: some of the cars on the road were themselves augmentations, though this one seemed solid enough. When it was finally gone, I saw a figure seated ahead of me, on the edge of a fountain. A stout figure in a suit of tweed, stroking a comically large moustache and smoking an absurdly small cigarillo. It was the Englishman, Harris. The cloth of his suit was certainly a Virtua augmentation, and I suspected the moustache was also, as it had a habit of making little motions and gestures to give emphasis to his words. The cigarillo was real, though: I could smell its reek from five paces. As usual, I could not be sure whether Harris was laughing at me, but I thought he might be of some use. Like me, he often saw things that other people did not.
“Montoya,” he called, his voice muffled by moustache and cigarillo. “I’m afraid you’re going the wrong way. Spain’s behind you. With practice, you know, you can work it out from the position of the sun.”
He gestured to his left, to the west: behind the ramshackle buildings of El Puente, the sun was plunging into the sea, wreathed in a halo of pink and orange clouds like a handful of silken scarves. Augmented, of course: the Spanish and Moroccan governments paid jointly for the local Virtua sunsets, as a matter of pride.
“I know which way Spain is,” I said. “I’m looking for a woman.”
“Really?” he asked, lightly. “I may be able to help you. Of course, it depends what kind of a wo
man you’re looking for.” He looked away, and became suddenly very concerned with a caged bird, colored scarlet and sapphire, in the doorway of a nearby shop.
I stared at him. “A woman no one else seemed to notice,” I said deliberately, “but who caught my eye at once.”
“Yes, yes, all right.” He seemed irritated, perhaps because he had hoped to hide the fact that he had seen her. “Medside. Stairwell fifty. But it isn’t what you think. Not a Ghost. Not a job for the blind man.”
“I’ll see about that.”
“Yes, Montoya, I think you will.”
Harris tossed the cigarillo deliberately into the fountain, as if the taste of it had suddenly turned bitter. It rolled into the basin and lay there, smoldering. Of course, the stone of the basin was real enough, but the falling water was only an augmentation. The sound of it came from a trio of speakers in the fountain’s base: old-fashioned, designed before Virtua went auditory. The water was beautiful, but could not douse a flame.
* * *
Business had been slow, the past few weeks. There was the usual lull before the next round of fiestas, when the Ghosts would try to sneak through. They would generate from the first night onward, among the crowds and costumes, the noise, the special augmentations laid on by the Alcalde, who took a particular pride in showing off El Puente’s capacity for virtual effects. The increased dataflow meant that the monitors might not notice the localized surge of a Ghost emerging.
At the same time, new hunters had arrived, and there was competition to catch what Ghosts there were. I still made enough to get by, enough to be careless of the coins I had flung on to the table at Hassan’s café, but not usually enough to feed my one peculiar vice.
Telling myself that this was the reason for my sense of urgency, I ran like a madman to Medside and along the edge of El Puente to stairwell fifty; and there I saw her. She had kicked open a door marked “No Entry,” climbed over the edge and down the stairwell itself, and was sitting on a hexagonal platform some way down, looking out over the waves.
After only a moment’s hesitation, I climbed down to join her. She nodded to me, seemingly unsurprised by my presence, but said nothing. She gave no sign that she knew I had been following her.
I found myself tracing her gaze across the water. The sea was flooded with red-gold light from the setting sun, but the structure of El Puente itself stood between us and the sunset. Looking east, we saw the shadow of the bridge, black slabs of darkness from its pillars lying cold upon the water, the webwork of girders like cracks in the dying light. Further away, the brilliant blue of the sea faded into a hazy blackness, matching the darkening curve of the sky. Smiling, I wondered who had thought to program an augmentation from this vantage point. It was unusual for anyone to climb down over the edge of El Puente. Perhaps it had been the Alcalde himself, proud perfectionist that he was, deciding to show off to the ships passing beneath the bridge, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Then I realized it was not an augmentation at all. This was real light on real water, cut by real shadows, under a real sky. I was obscurely disappointed. I had been admiring the skill of some nameless Virtua programmer, but now had nothing to admire except the mindless workings of nature.
There was something wrong, too, about the girl. She looked out of place. Her outfit was too simple: blue jeans, white shirt, shoes the color of dust, unless they were simply dusty. I could hear her movements, her breathing. I could smell a soft perfume, and a trace of soap and sweat beneath it. The scent was oddly familiar.
She did remind me of Kirsten, but she was not Kirsten. Of course not: how could she have been? Perhaps that was the only reason for my sense of wrongness; but I still felt there was something else.
The girl twisted around to stare up at me, narrowing her eyes. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? A hunter.”
I nodded.
She looked away, then looked back, frowning. “I know your face. You’re Montoya. The one they call the blind man.”
I nodded again. “I didn’t realize I was famous.”
“Only to other hunters, and to Ghosts . . .” She did not say which she was, or whether she was either one or the other. Instead she went on: “Fame isn’t a good thing, for a hunter.”
“That depends. Sometimes a reputation can bring in work.”
“Or frighten it away.”
“That, too.”
“So have you made up your mind about me?”
I shook my head. “You’re too good to be a Ghost; and Virtua can’t do scent—or break open doors. But I can’t get any readings from you. No augmentation, no data flow. Maybe you have a secure loop to generate your augmentations, but I can’t see why you’d need it. I can’t read a credit line, or a tag number. Not even a name.”
“My name is Anila.” She smiled, a mocking smile. “Do I look too ordinary? Not enough decoration? Maybe my secure loop is to generate a face, instead of clothes and ornaments. To cover up a scar, a botched job of rhinoplasty. Who knows?”
“No, I don’t believe it. It’s my business to know an augmentation when I see one, and I don’t see one.”
“That’s right. You don’t.” She hesitated, not knowing how to ask the question she wanted to ask. I waited. I already knew what it would be. At last she said: “Were you really blind?”
I sat down beside her, cross-legged, took a breath, let it out. The taste of salt was on my lips. The sound of the sea filled the time it took me to find an answer. “Yes, for a time. There was an . . . accident. They had to repair my optic nerve. I had to have new bio-implants grown. Then they had to make sure that was working before they could reconnect my visual cortex to Virtua. They cut the auditory connection, too, until I was fixed. There was no alternative but to live with it.”
“So you sharpened your other senses. Gustatory, olfactory, tactile. And now you can catch a Ghost, because they don’t sound right, and they have no smell.”
“Some of them don’t even look right. And anyone can tell a Ghost by grabbing hold of their arm: if there’s nothing there, you’ve caught your Ghost. You don’t need a blind man for that.” I shrugged.
“But it isn’t just sharpening your senses. Your perception changes. You learn to create a new model of the world, minus its visual element. A mental map, but more than that, a . . . a virtual copy of what is out there, beyond your body. Everything your senses tell you, everything you touch or taste, every echo in the air, adds something to the map. I still have that map in my head. And when the map doesn’t fit what I see, then I’ve usually seen a Ghost.”
“Not this time.”
“No, not this time. You’re almost the opposite of a Ghost, aren’t you? They’re only virtual; you’re only real.”
She laughed. Then she got to her feet, and touched my arm. Proving she was real, solid; perhaps telling me that this was enough. Her point made, she moved toward the stairwell. She had one parting shot to make, though.
“Tell me, Señor Montoya: you’re the blind man. Have you ever seen the Invisibles?”
Then she was climbing, her laughter falling like the droplets in the fountain, and had vanished before I could ask her what she meant.
After she had gone, I sat alone awhile, as the shadow of El Puente lengthened over the Mediterranean, and the gold of the sunset turned to blood, and then to blackness. From below, I fancied I could hear the slow hum of the Ghostmakers, the Virtua generators, at the bottom of the sea. I waited until the last drop of real, unaugmented light had drained away. Then I climbed back up to the bridge to explain things to Hassan.
* * *
He had left his son in charge of the café, and hidden himself away in the back. I elbowed my way unceremoniously to the bar, and the boy nodded me through, raising a coffee cup to me ironically as I ducked beneath the little whitewashed arch that led to Hassan’s private rooms.
I expected to find him with Leila, of course; but I was surprised to find him asleep, snoring gently and almost melodiously upon a heap of cushions,
his hands clasped over his stomach. For some reason, Leila was still there, still manifest, sitting cross-legged on the rug, her small honey-brown hands open in front of her. Glancing up at me as I entered, she raised a finger to her lips, and, for an instant, I saw the outline of her mouth beneath her flimsy green half-veil.
Whoever had programmed her had done a remarkable job.
“He is sleeping,” she said, unnecessarily, and then, a little defensively: “I like to be there when he wakes. What would he think of me otherwise? What kind of wife would I be?”
There was nothing I could say. Embarrassed, I rubbed at the back of my head, feeling the tiny irregularity in the skull where the Virtua bio-implants had gone in.
Leila said: “You do not like this. You think it is wrong.”
I raised my palms to her. “It’s no business of mine.”
“No. But still you think it is wrong. You think he should let me go—switch me off.”
“Really, I don’t have an opinion.” I met her eyes. “If I were Hassan, and I lost someone like you, maybe I’d do the same. But I am only myself, and my loss was of a different kind. So I’ll reserve my judgment.”
“What have you lost, Señor Montoya? You used to wear a shell at your throat,” she observed. “Is it that you have lost?”
“Go to Hell.”
“I have. Yet I am here. In this way,” she murmured, “he has not really lost me.”
I shook my head. “Somewhere deep down, he knows he has. You’re his dream. He might dream about you until he dies. Or he might wake up.
“I remember Leila,” I went on. “You look like her. You sound like her. You have the accent, and the mannerisms, and the memories. You’d probably pass a luring test more easily than I could. But you’re not Leila, not really.”
She turned away, so that I would not see an augmented tear. “I am myself. Like you, Montoya, I am only myself. I do not hide what I am.”
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