“How’s your Deep Blue-Kasparov sim going?” she asked from behind the sports page as he sat down across from her.
“Oh, I finished with that ages ago. The whole match was a hoax, it turns out.”
The sports page dropped. “Really?”
That was Li for you: always seduced by the faintest whiff of crime. Could you find a more perfect example of the old truism about cops and robbers being two sides of the same coin? Or, in her case, soldiers and mercenaries.
“Really,” Cohen assured her, doing his best to sound smug. “I’m going to write an article about it for Physical Review Letters.”
“And how do you figure they pulled off the fake?”
“Easy. There was a little man inside Garry Kasparov.”
She groaned and went back to her paper.
Cohen poured himself a glass of what passed for orange juice these days and hunted for the marmalade. “Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”
“Yes it was.”
Cohen shook out his napkin (Li’s napkin still lay folded on the table, naturally; why use a napkin when you have a sleeve?) and began investigating the viennoiserie situation.
Grim. Decidedly grim.
“I ought to look up some of my old friends in the Legion while we’re here,” he said. “Maybe they know where to get a decent croissant in this town.”
“What do you want a croissant for? You’re in the Middle East. And you know that thing people are always saying about when in Rome do as the Romans do.”
Cohen had been staring dubiously at the so-called toast, and he expanded his circle of doubt to encompass Li. “The people who are always saying that aren’t French,” he told her. “And if they are, then I can assure you they’re not talking about breakfast.”
Outside, the sunlight flickered across the hoods of passing cars, throwing bright spears of shadow into the room through the still-half-shuttered windows. Cohen froze, distracted by the rhythmic play of light and shadow. What was it that it reminded him of…
By the time he realized Roland was going into a seizure, it was too late to pull him out of it.
“Wake up, Cohen. Come on, wake up. Cohen? Roland!”
Li had him rolled over on his side (Roland’s side, a skittish subsystem nattered at him), and she was hanging on to his hands with a strength that reminded him abruptly of the difference between her ceramsteel-reinforced, half-machine reflexes and Roland’s fragile flesh and bone.
“I forgot my drasticodracostochastic control measures,” he muttered woozily.
“It’s not funny!” Li snapped.
Nor was it. As far as Cohen could tell the packet compression needed to push data downstream from his Ring-based systems to Earth had interfered with the shunt software’s ability to match his data pulses to Roland’s neural firing rhythms. Essentially he’d given him a spintronic version of photoinduced epilepsy. And that was bad. Bad for Roland’s little beating heart. Bad for his finely honed brain too if Cohen couldn’t downclock reliably.
“I’m putting you to bed,” Li said. “No arguments. No questions. And then you’re going to check out and give Roland a proper rest. Twenty-four hours off so he can sleep and have a chance to clear the circuitry.”
“And leave you alone down here?”
“I think I can hold down the hotel room on my own.”
Cohen remembered the sight of Ash’s head bent over Li’s, and felt a sudden rush of jealousy. He was careful to hide it from Li—and equally careful to hide his discreet inquiries about Ash. He buried both of those incriminating processes with a massive “nice” command and pipelined their outputs into a low-traffic subdirectory with instructions to his routing meta-agent to move the files automatically should Li ever happen to access the subdirectory.
Instead of executing the command, router/decomposer sent an un-characteristically snide message floating across the lowest layer of Cohen’s internal traffic:
‹You’ve got me shuttling things around so fast I don’t even know where to find them. And anyway, how do you expect her to trust you when you’re playing a thousand and one moving files with her?›
‹Did I ask for your advice on my sex life?› Cohen snapped.
He regretted it immediately. Patience might be running thin, but squashing intrasystem feedback was a textbook-perfect recipe for losing good associates.
He sent an apology rippling through the local system. The routing meta sent back something suspiciously like a shrug.
Li blinked and shook her head slightly.
She’d caught on to the edge of something there. But it wasn’t the routing meta. So what, then? He catenated the several hundred mostly routine processes he happened to be running at the moment, but saw nothing when he passed them in review that could explain that little shiver he’d felt in her.
Perhaps it really had been nothing; sometimes all it took was an accidental glimpse at the traffic on the other side of the firewall he kept between her and his core systems.
“You scare me sometimes,” she said.
It was a lie. A lie by omission, anyway. He’d sensed the first wordless thought that those words replaced: You scare me. No sometimes about it.
Cohen hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll give Roland a chance to catch up on his beauty rest. You know where to find me if you need me.”
He paused to set the various trap commands that would alert him if the hotel’s formidable security systems were breached. He thought about setting a hash log on Li’s own internals to see if she went anywhere while he was gone, but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk of her catching him at it. Then he released his various selves into streamspace, abandoning Roland’s exhausted body to the sleep it so desperately needed.
THE FEMALE GOLEM
They said about Rabbi ben Gabirol, that he created a woman, and she waited on him. When he was denounced to the authorities, he showed them that she wasn’t a perfect creature, and [then] he returned her to her original form, to the pieces and hinges of wood, out of which she was built up. And similar rumors are numerous in the mouths of everyone, especially in the land of Ashkenaz.
—RABBI JOSEPH SHELOMO DEL MEDIGO, MAZREF LE-HOKHMAH (1865)
Li snapped into wakefulness. A minute and a half before her internals were set to wake her. She opened her eyes and lay in absolute stillness, savoring the wired wide-awake feeling that always came to her before a mission.
But there was no mission today. No last-minute fixes to see to. No orders to follow, good or bad. That life was over. All she was following today was a name, whispered into her ear as she stepped into Didi’s armored car.
She hadn’t decided what to do about that name.
Or whether to tell Cohen about it.
It can’t hurt to talk, she told herself in the last dark corner of her mind that she’d managed to shelter from Cohen’s devouring presence. I’ll just see what she wants. And then I can tell him about it. What harm can that do?
She eased out of bed, though she knew her caution was pointless; Roland was sleeping the sleep of the dead, his body worn down by the relentless assault of Cohen’s presence. Still, there was something corpselike about the faces when Cohen had used them hard. And he was using Roland very hard indeed on this trip.
Outside, the city was mean and yellow with the khamsin. Cohen had said the winds had gotten worse when their seasons shifted. Li figured that had to be true; no people in their right minds would have settled here with this banshee spitting at them.
A quick dogtrot took her up King David Street and cutting over toward the neighborhood that showed up on the Legion maps as Mea Shearim. She passed the sign at the quarter’s entrance, which she vaguely remembered Cohen pointing out to her a few days ago. It was written in Hebrew and English, but not UN-standard Spanish, which was odd, she thought, if they wanted the tourists to understand it:
REQUEST AND WARNING TO WOMEN VISITING OUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOT TO APPEAR IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN SHORT GARMENTS (NOT COVERING THE KNEE) IN
SHORT-SLEEVED CLOTHING (NOT COVERING THE ARM). THE TORAH OBLIGATES TO DRESS IN MODEST ATTIRE THAT COVERS THE ENTIRE BODY
—Residents of the Neighborhood
No problem there, Li joked to herself. The accused pleads guilty to the charge of being a golem instead of a woman.
Cohen claimed that the ultraorthodox neighborhoods had shifted—the hidden life of cities, he’d called it—and that the sign was maintained more for historic than for enforcement purposes. But it was awfully well maintained, Li thought. And she’d seen enough of the version of human history maintained Ring-side to know that people mostly maintained the pieces of history they agreed with.
She twitched her shirt cuffs over her wrists—Cohen, in one of his usual old-maidly excesses of caution had made her order a bunch of new shirts with particularly long sleeves before they left—and checked that her jacket collar was covering her neck reasonably well. Then she straightened her back and stepped out a little more soldierly…just in case anyone in those narrow little alleys happened to be looking her way and thinking about anything.
She felt she was seeing a new Jerusalem—and not the one she’d sung about in church when she was a kid, either.
Before, Jerusalem had always been mediated for her by Cohen. Now, alone, it took on a new and vaguely menacing aspect. The narrow streets seemed airless and claustrophobic. The men passed her by with averted eyes as if she were an abomination, and the few women on the street were so thoroughly wrapped up against the rain and cold that they hardly seemed human, let alone female.
All the conversations she overheard seemed to be arguments, and the one time she caught a sentence of English it came from an irate young woman who stood in a street-level window shouting, “What am I, a professor?” in answer to an unseen questioner.
Even the graffiti raged apocalyptically. A lurid poster informed all passersby that
It is forbidden to participate in the abominable elections
and followed up with a helpful swastika in case anyone missed the point. A second poster proclaimed
Death to the Zionist Hitlerites
Someone (a Zionist Hitlerite? There couldn’t actually be such a thing, even on Earth, could there?) had tried to tear that poster down, but, defeated by the apparent superiority of anti-Zionist Hitlerite glue technology, had settled for defacing it with the words
BARUCH THE APOSTATE MAY HIS NAME AND MEMORY BE BLOTTED FROM THE BOOK OF LIFE!
The more Li saw of Jerusalem, the more convinced she became that the people who thought Earth needed to be protected from the Ring had it all completely ass backwards. It was the rest of the universe that needed to be protected. And it needed to be protected from the maniacs that passed for human beings inside the Embargo line.
To her relief the neighborhood seemed to be getting less crazy as she got closer to the address Ash had given her. She passed a coffee shop called the Up/Spin. A streamspace access point? She’d been offstream since she left the King David; after all, you never knew who was watching. But now she reached out cautiously and felt the familiar comfort of the uplink.
‹Oh. There you are.›
Shit.
‹What are you doing, router/decomposer? Following me?›
‹No! No! I’m not here! He told me not to tell you I was here!›
Li froze in midstride, and an evening shopper slammed into her from behind and passed by, cursing her.
You’re not that incompetent, she started to say. And then she stopped herself.
Of course he wasn’t that incompetent. He was acting on instructions. Instructions that he was following to the letter…and completely violating in spirit. She looked back at the affective fuzzy set that had accompanied his confession. Sure enough, it was an almost vaudevillian parody of dismay, embarrassment, self-recrimination. And it was definitely canned; the syntax was far too polished not to have been prepared in advance.
‹Why don’t you go home before you get yourself into bigger trouble than you already have,› she told him.
‹I need to make sure you’re safe, and…›
‹Well, don’t worry. It’ll be the last time you need to spy on me. I’m going to have a little talk with our mutual friend when he climbs out of his pod tonight.›
‹Even though I personally loathe shunting, I have to tell you I find the bodysnatcher jokes demeaning. So where are you going? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.›
Li snorted, and was amused to see several nearby pedestrians dive sideways in an attempt to avoid the crazy woman. Talk about hicksville. ‹You actually expect me to believe that?›
‹Check my code if you don’t believe me.›
She checked. Unbelievable. He had more cutouts than a chain of paper dolls. He was squirreling all kinds of data away that Cohen had no idea about. Including data that Li had thought she was successfully hiding under her own steam.
‹Why are you doing this?› she asked warily.
‹I’m interested in you. Not like Cohen is. In a more theoretical way. I want to see what you turn into.›
‹Right now I’m afraid I’m turning into a bad person.›
He appeared to pause and consider this. The pause was faked, of course; designed to make the exchange feel natural at organic processing speeds. But it was the thought that counted. ‹You’re falling into the identity myth. That’s the problem with nonfunctional nomenclature. Names encourage people to harbor the illusion that there’s identity beyond interface. That you can be good or bad apart from the effect of your actions on the world.›
‹Good intentions have to count for something,› Li protested.
‹Good intentions are just a fairy tale humans tell themselves so they can sleep at night.›
‹But some actions have unpredictable effects.›
‹What do you expect? Life is an intervention in a complex adaptive system.›
‹So you’re saying you can’t know whether you’re a good or bad person?›
‹Not once you exceed the CAS’s Lyapunov time. At that point you have to wait until you can take a final measurement of the end state of the entire universe.› A note of impatience slipped into his affective sets. ‹What do you want from me, a physics lesson?›
It was half an hour shy of sunset, but the elevator in Ash’s building had already been switched over to its Sabbath rhythm. It would travel up and down its appointed route, one floor at a time, stopping long enough for even the slowest of the orthodox to board without breaking the Sabbath by operating a mechanical device.
When Li arrived, the light claimed that the car was on the sixth floor. After watching it sit there for a good minute and a half, she got tired of waiting, located the stairwell behind a door that looked like it led to a broom closet, and climbed five flights. She didn’t lose her breath, she was pleased to note, but behind the smooth push of the wires she could feel her almost middle-aged joints complaining under the relentless assault of Earth’s gravity.
“What?” she asked before Ash had even fully opened the door to her impatient knocking. “What’s so private and important you have to drag me halfway across the city to tell me about it?”
“Say hello to Auntie Li,” Ash crooned.
The child on Ash’s hip looked to be a little over a year old. Li guessed uncertainly that it was a boy; she hadn’t seen many babies in her life, and she’d been only minimally interested in the ones she’d seen.
“Yours?” she asked.
Ash smiled and gave a little shrug that looked like she’d practiced it in front of the mirror a hell of a lot more than once.
Li followed the mother and child into a living room full of just the kind of sleekly forbidding glass and steel surfaces Li would have expected to find in Ash’s home. The stark white and chrome of the decor made an incongruous backdrop to the trail of bright plush and plastic toys strewn across the carpet, into the tiled kitchen beyond the dining area, and across every flat surface the furniture offered.
“Sorry.” Ash pulled a wry face. “Can
’t keep up with the little guy these days.”
She bent, the child still over her hip, to pluck a red-and-purple squishy cube off the one relatively free chair so Li could sit down. As her shirt rode up with the movement, Li saw the faint silver fishtails of stretch marks riding her hips like notches on a gun barrel.
“So why am I here?” Li asked.
Instead of answering, Ash crouched down between the vat leather couch and a lethal-looking glass coffee table and carefully settled the baby on a beach towel already spread out for that purpose. This took several minutes and involved the kinds of noises Li had last heard from Cohen’s Italian greyhound puppies.
Eventually, however, Ash finished stalling, settled herself on the sofa facing Li. “I have a message for you from an old friend.”
Oh shit.
Ash smiled.
Li didn’t.
Silence arrived.
Li, who had outgrown the urge to make nicey-nice long before her first day of interrogation training, let it stay.
For one thing it gave her a chance to reexamine the impressively contradictory woman sitting in front of her. Gone were the high heels and the high-tech now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t suits. Ash was still carefully made-up—and Li never could quite bring herself to trust a woman who wore makeup—but she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and thick wool socks, and her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was more beautiful like this, Li decided. Certainly she was more approachable. But there was something slippery about her: a hard, unnatural self-assurance that repelled every attempt to access the person inside the beautiful package.
Basically, there was no there there. Unless you counted the toddler and the stretch marks. And that was the kind of “there” that could only make any sane person duck for cover.
“You haven’t asked who the old friend is,” Ash prompted. “Is that because you don’t want to know, or because you already do know?”
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