It’s frustrating. It’s also immensely worrying because there’s more at risk here than simple personal danger—whether from the experimenters or the other victims. I have a faint inkling of the pain and suffering Curious Yellow caused the first time it got out, and of the terrible struggle it took to chop up the worm’s Chord-type network and sterilize every single assembler. It ruptured what was once an integrated interstellar civilization, smashing it into a mess of diamond-shard polities. How did we stop it . . . ?
Footsteps. It’s Fiore, looking curiously self-satisfied as he heads toward the library doors.
“Finished, Father?” I call.
“Yes, that is all for today.” He inclines his head toward me, a gesture that’s evidently intended to be gracious but that comes over as a pompous bob. Then his eyebrows furrow in a frown. “Ah yes, Reeve. You were involved in the business last night, I believe?”
My left hand tightens on the knife handle inside my bag. “Yes.” I stare him down. “Do you know what Mick was doing to Cass?”
“I know that”—something seems to occur to him, and he changes direction in midsentence—“it is a most serious thing indeed to interfere in the holy relation between husband and wife. But in some circumstances it may be justifiable.” He stares at me owlishly. “She was pregnant, you know.”
“And?”
He must think my expression is one of puzzlement, because he explains, “If you hadn’t intervened, she might have lost the child.” He glances at his watch. “Now, you must excuse me—I have an appointment. Good day.” And he’s off through the door again like a shot, leaving me watching him from behind, mouth agape with disbelief.
Why is Fiore concerned with the health of a fetus, but not about its mother being assaulted, repeatedly raped, held prisoner for weeks, maimed in such a way that she may never walk again? Why? He’s got all the human empathy of a zombie. What’s wrong with him? And why did he suddenly change his tune? I’d swear he was about to denounce what we did last night, but then he moderated his line. Fear of what the Bishop might say if he incited another near riot over the way we rescued Cass, or something else?
They want us to have lots of children. But why is that important to them? Is it something to do with Curious Yellow?
I grind my teeth until Fiore is out of sight, then I hop down from my stool, hang up the CLOSED sign, and head for the lock-up. The secret basement downstairs is as I left it except for the assembler, which is chugging to itself and gurgling as it loads feedstock or coolant or something through pipes in the floor. I guess Fiore’s set it running some kind of long batch job. But checking up on it isn’t why I’m down here right now—I’m here to retrieve the video cartridge from the camcorder I left running on the equipment shelf.
The camcorder is a small metal box with a lens on one side and a screen covering the other. I don’t know what’s going on inside it. It certainly isn’t an original dark ages artifact—I’ve seen pictures of them in the library books—but it does the same job. Along with all the other tech artifacts in this polity, some set designer probably slaved over it for hours trying to figure out how to give it the right functionality without adding too much. They got it wrong, but not too wrong. The original machines used things called “tapes” or “disks,” but this one just writes everything it sees onto a memory diamond the size of a sand grain that’s good for a gigasec of events.
I go sit down on the sofa to play with the ’corder. Putting my bag down next to me, I poke at the display until I’ve zapped back an hour or three. Then I fast-forward through darkness until the light comes on and Fiore comes in. At triple normal speed I watch as he goes over to the bookshelves and leafs through a couple of folders. I pause and zoom in to see what he was reading: POLICY ON SEXCRIME, followed by a glance at FAMILIAL STABILITY INDEX, whatever that is. Next, he trots over to the A-gate and chatters to it, gesturing at the terminal. I don’t see any sign of biometric authentication, no retinal scan or anything, but he may have used a password. The gate cylinder rotates around its long axis, and he steps inside. Fast-forward and about a kilosecond later he steps out again, blinking. So he’s just backed himself up, has he?
Back at the control terminal Fiore issues some more commands, and the gate begins chugging to itself. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, it’s still doing that—just some kind of long synthesis job. He heads for the staircase and—
Shit! I whip round and reach for my bag. The A-gate cylinder is opening.
Knife in left hand, bag in right hand. Everything is crystal clear. Fiore suspected. He backed himself up, then set an ambush, and I’ve blown it. The cylinder turns and the interior cracks into view. White light, a smell of violets and some kind of weird volatile organics, a bit of steam. There’s someone/something in there, moving.
I dart forward, bag raised, knife ready to block. They’re sitting up, head turning. I’ll only get one chance to do this. Heart pounding, I upend the empty shoulder bag over the head, lank black hair—fat jowls wobbling indignantly hands coming up—and I shove the knife blade up against his throat and yell, “Freeze!”
The duplicate Fiore freezes.
“This is a knife. If you move or make a sound or try to dislodge the bag over your head, I will cut your throat. If you understand, say yes.”
His voice is muffled, but sounds almost amused. “What if I say no?”
“Then I cut your throat.” I move the knife slightly.
“Yes,” he says hurriedly.
“That’s good.” I adjust my grip. “Now let me tell you something. You are thinking you have a working netlink and you can call for help. You’re wrong, because netlinks work via spread spectrum, and you’re wearing a Faraday cage over your head, and although it’s open at the bottom you’re standing in a cellar. The signal’s attenuated. Do you understand?”
Pause. “There’s nobody there!” He sounds slightly panicky. Clever fellow.
“I’m glad you said that because if you hadn’t, I’d have cut your throat,” I tell him. “Like I said earlier, if you try and lose the bag, I’ll kill you immediately.”
He’s shaking. Oh, I shouldn’t be enjoying this, but I am. For everything you’ve done to us I ought to kill you a hundred times over. What have I turned into? I’m almost shaking with the intensity of—it’s like hunger, the yearning. “Listen to these instructions. I will shortly tell you to stand up. When I do so, I want you to slowly rise, keeping your arms by your sides. If at any point you can’t feel the knife, you’d better freeze, because if you keep moving, I’ll kill you. When you’re on your feet, you will step fifty centimeters forward, then slowly move your hands behind your back. You will then lace your fingers together. Now, slowly, stand up.”
Fiore, to give him his due, has a cool enough head to do exactly as I tell him with no hesitation and no hysterics. Or maybe he just knows exactly what he can expect if he doesn’t obey. He can’t be under any illusions about how hated he is, can he?
“Forward one pace, then hands behind back,” I say. He steps forward. I have to stretch to keep the knife around his neck, but I reach down with my free hand and follow his right arm round. Now is the moment of danger—if he were to kick straight back while blocking with his left shoulder he could hurt me badly and probably get away. But I’m betting Fiore knows very little indeed about serious one-on-one physical mayhem, and the bag over his head should keep him disoriented long enough for me to do this. I step to one side, reach into my pocket with my right hand until I find what I’m after, then squeeze the contents of the tube over his hands and fingers. Cyanoacrylate glue—the librarian’s field-expedient handcuffs. “Don’t move your hands,” I tell him.
“What is it—” He stops. Of course he can’t help moving his hands and the stuff flows into small cracks. It’s less viscous than water but it polymerizes in seconds. I move the knife round to the side of his neck and examine my handiwork. He might be able to get his hands apart if he’s willing to leave skin behind, but he won’t be able
to take me by surprise while he’s doing it.
“Okay, we’re now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I’ll tell you when to stop—easy, easy, stop!”
I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He’s breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he’ll realize that I can’t let him live, then he’ll be uncontrollable. I’ve got maybe twenty seconds—
“When my husband says * * * I can’t hear him,” I say conversationally. “What does that mean?”
“It means you’re infected with Curious Yellow.” He sounds oddly placid.
“You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here,” I tell him. “That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?”
“Yes,” he says tersely.
“It’s immune to the strain I’m infected with, isn’t it?” I ask.
I can feel his muscles tensing. “Yes,” he says reluctantly.
“And Yourdon didn’t insist it was locked to your netlinks?” I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.
He doesn’t give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I know I’m right, but I also know I’ve got about three seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of relief—he’s anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that’s okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he’s preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.
See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don’t enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn’t occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I’m—
I blank again.
THE civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It’s probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still running, out beyond the liberated light cone, in the eternal darkness and cold—just as there may be outposts of free posthumanity who dropped off the net when the Republic of Is disintegrated. Redaction, the deletion of memory, is Curious Yellow’s deadliest weapon—some of those polities might have been deliberately forgotten, their proximal T-gate endpoints dropped into stars and the memories of their existence erased from everyone who used an infected A-gate. The true horror of Curious Yellow is that we have no way of knowing how much we have lost. Entire genocidal wars could have been wiped from our memories as if they never happened. Perhaps this explains the worm’s peculiar vendetta against practicing historians and archaeologists. It, or its creator, is afraid we will remember something . . .
I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There’s very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what’s going on. It’s not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard Grateful for Duration is a small death in its own right—time enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn’t been targeted for liquidation because of my career, they’re still lost to me. That sort of experience tends to make one bitter. Bitter enough to give up on humanity as a bad job, bitter enough to experiment with other, more sinister, identities.
About my body: I mass approximately two tons and stand three meters high at the shoulder. My nervous system is nonbiological—I’m running as a real-time sim with sensory engagement through my panzer’s pain nerves. (The long-term dangers of complete migration into virtch are well understood, but avoidable to some extent by maintaining a somatotype and staying anchored in the real world. Besides which, there’s an emergency to deal with.) If I have to, I can accelerate my mind to ten times normal speed. My skin is an exotic armor, pebbled with monocrystalline diamonds held in a shock-absorbent quantum dot matrix that can be fast-tuned to match the color of any background from radio frequencies through to soft X-rays. For fingernails I have retractable diamond claws, and for fists—clench and point—I have blasters. I don’t eat, or breathe, or shit, but take power from a coil wrapped around an endless stream of plasma gated from the photosphere of a secret star.
As a callout sign I adopt the name liddellhart. The other Cats don’t know what this signifies. Maybe that explains why over the bloody course of four hundred megs and sixteen engagements I end up being promoted to template-senior sergeant and replicated a hundredfold. Unlike Loral and some of the others, I don’t freeze up when there’s a problem. I don’t experience shock and dissociation when I realize we’ve just decapitated twelve thousand civilians and shoved their heads into a tactical assembler that is silently failing to back them up. I do what’s necessary. I don’t hesitate when it’s necessary to sacrifice six of me in a suicide attack to buy time for the rest of the intrusion team to withdraw. I don’t feel anything much except for icy hatred, and while I appreciate in the abstract that I’m sick, I’m not willing to ask for medical attention that might impair my ability to fight. Nor do our shadowy directors, who are watching over us all, see fit to override me.
For the first gigasec, we pursue the war by traditional methods. We find half-forgotten T-gates leading into polities under the control of Curious Yellow. We go through, shoot up the assemblers they’re using as immigration firewalls, establish a toehold, fight our way in, install sanitized A-gates of our own, and forcibly run the civilian population through them to remove the Curious Yellow taint from their heads. The ones who survive usually thank us afterward.
At first it’s relatively easy, but later we find we are attacking polities where the defenses are heavier, and later still Curious Yellow starts programming the civilians to fight bitterly and without quarter. I’ve seen naked children, shaking in the grip of an existential breakdown, walking toward panzers with Vorpal blades clutched inexpertly in both hands. And I’ve seen worse things than that. The idea of Curious Yellow, of surrender to a higher cause, seems to appeal to a certain small subset of humanity. These people manipulate the worm, customizing its payload to establish quisling dictatorships in its shadow, and the horrors these gauleiters invent in its service are far worse than the crude but direct tactics the original worm used.
Quite late on in the campaign I realize this and, in a fitful flashback to my earlier self, I begin to spend some of my spare time thinking about the implications. My study of the psychology of collaboration becomes one of the most heavily accessed stacks in the Cats’ internal knowledge base. So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise when I receive a summons to headquarters, combined with orders to converge my deltas and revert to orthohuman skin before transit.
At first I’m apprehensive. I’ve grown used to being an armored battalion, spending most of my seconds between action in icy orbit around a convenient failed star or exoplanet. Breathing and eating and sleepingand emoting are worrying, senseless handicaps. I recognize that they are of interest in comprehending the enemy motivational framework, and allowances must be made for them among the people we liberate, but why should I subject myself to the frailties of flesh? But eventually I realize that it’s not about me. I need to be able to work with the headquarters staff.
So I reconverge my various selves, erasing my identity from the kilotons of heavy metal that have until so recently been my limbs, and I report to the nearest field command node for up-processing.
WHEN I come to, I find I’m leaning over the A-gate control panel. In my left hand I’m clutching a dripping knife so tightly that my fingers are close to cramping. There’s blood halfway across the room, forming an obscene lake.
If I got it right, he won’t have had time to use his netlink. He’ll have been in acute physical agony as his head came out of the bag, then he’ll have blacked out because of blood loss. Unconsciousness within ten seconds: It’s more than he deserved.
But now I’ve got a huge problem, namely a hundred and ten kilos of dead meat lying in about ten liters of gore in the middle of a grass carpet that’s already dying. Is this incriminating or what? Oh, and my sweater and skirt and sensible shoes are covered in blood. This does not look good.
I laugh, and it comes out as a hysterical giggle with more than a little madness in it. This is bad, I think. But there’s got to be something—
For a moment I flash back to the time with the malfunctioning A-gate, the pools of fluid and lumps of deanimated meat. That helps stabilize me, in a way: It makes it clear what I have to do. I pick up Fiore’s arm and give it an experimental tug. His sallow flesh ripples, and when I put my back into it, he jerks free of the carpet and skids a few centimeters toward me. I grunt and tug again, but it’s not easy to move him so I pause for a bit and look around. There’s some kind of cabling on one of the tool shelves, so I go over and grab a couple of meters of wire, twine it around his torso under the arms, and use it to pull him toward the A-gate. Finally, I get him into position, back inside the gate chamber. It’s hard to keep him inside—one leg keeps flopping out—but eventually I figure out that I can hold him in if I use the rest of the cable to truss him up.
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